NCSPP is aware that historically psychoanalysis has either excluded or pathologized groups outside of the dominant population in terms of age, race, ethnicity, nationality, language, gender, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, disability, and size. As an organization, we are committed to bringing awareness to matters of anti-oppression, inequity, inequality, diversity, and inclusion as they pertain to our educational offerings, our theoretical orientation, our community, and the broader world we all inhabit.

Presenters Response:

Dissociative disorders, like all disorders, are part of and created by their larger social context; several important aspects of this that directly impact dissociative multiplicity include ongoing and continuous traumatization and dissociation of cultural aspects of identity, including those associated with gender and sexuality, between self-states.

Although many dissociative patients may find themselves either chronically in retraumatizing or unsafe situations or experience chronic fear or uncertainty over whether they (or parts of self) have escaped original abusers, BIPOC patients will have to live with the certainty that they will never escape from chronic traumatization in the form of structural racism. This reality of chronic entrapment will interact with other forms of inescapable trauma in these patients’ histories and particularly with the existence of experiences such as alters not oriented to the present (i.e. who still believe they live in the past when the original gross trauma occurred). In order for these experiences to be fully processed, the reality of the ongoing trauma has to be fully acknowledged as a reality, rather than an unrealistic fear, and be an ongoing part of the therapy conversation, including the ways in which it may retrigger parts holding gross trauma.

Through extreme trauma, multiple aspects of cultural identity, which might otherwise have been permitted to coexist internally as two or more aspects of a multidimensional but unified cultural self may split. For example, in an individual brought up in a bicultural home under situations of extreme traumatic stress, confusing, challenging, or conflicting cultural messages (both from within and without the home) may lead to such a split. This might include messages such as those that disconfirm or devalue one’s racial or cultural identity, or experiences which link cultural identities of privilege or lack thereof (‘part of me is white and privileged, part of me is Black and is not’) with experiences of powerlessness, extreme violence, or terror without solution. This might lead to a dissociation of cultural experience in the form of alters which identify as the Black woman, the Black genderqueer individual, the white woman, the Black man, and so on, in order to cope in an environment in which messages about racial and cultural identity are difficult, if not impossible, to integrate. Similar experiences may occur with a wide variety of culturally-constructed experience, such as gender, sexuality, and so on. The therapist needs then to be sensitively attuned to the cultural meaning of the alters’ identities and of the larger social context associated with those identities that may make co-consciousness and integration more frightening, including possible fears of loss of positive aspects of cultural identity associated with integration, and make this an active part of the therapeutic dialogue.

Dajani, K. (2018). Cultural Dislocation and Ego Functions: Some Considerations in the Analysis of Bi‐cultural Patients. International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 15:1, 1-13, https://doi.org/10.1002/aps.1562

Christopher Bonovitz Psy.D. (2009) Mixed Race and the Negotiation of Racialized Selves: Developing the Capacity for Internal Conflict, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19:4, 426-441, DOI: 10.1080/10481880903088021