Inhabiting Implication in Racial Oppression and in Relational Psychoanalysis

What does it feel like to encounter ourselves and one another as implicated subjects, both in our everyday lives and in the context of our work as clinicians, and how does this matter?

With contributions from a diverse group of relational psychoanalytic thinkers, this book reads Michael Rothberg’s concept of the implicated subject―the notion that we are continuously implicated in injustices even when not perpetrators―as calling us to elaborate what it feels like to inhabit such subjectivities in relation to others both similarly and differently situated. Implication and anti-Black racism are central to many chapters, with attention given to the unique vulnerability of racial minority immigrants, to Native American genocide, and to the implication of ordinary Israelis in the oppression of Palestinians. The book makes the case that the therapist’s ongoing openness to learning of our own implication in enactments is central to a relational sensibility and to a progressive psychoanalysis.

As a contribution to the necessary and long-overdue conversation within the psychoanalytic field about racism, social injustice, and ways to move toward a just society, this book will be essential for all relational psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay (she/her) is a founding board member and the co-director of the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia and is on the faculty of the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center in New York. Her work has appeared in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, and Psychoanalytic Perspectives.

David Mark is co-director of the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia. With Jeffrey Faude, he is the author of Psychotherapy of Cocaine Addiction: Entering the Interpersonal World of the Cocaine Addict (1997). Other works of his have appeared in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and Psychoanalytic Perspectives.