Blair Thank you! I’m also glad the MIP blog exists!

Thank you Roberto!

Julie thank you for your very touching and thoughtful words of support and encouragement as colleague and friend. I echo the power of psychoanalysis and the direct enhancement it brings to the clinical work we do as psychoanalyst with our patients. There truly is no greater agony than baring an untold story inside,

-Zora Neal Hurston

Thank you Rossanna for your very thoughtful and thought-provoking response to my essay. I admire your use of familial and religious context that crystalizes the traumas associated with gender & sexual binaries, and the influence that being familial othered has on meaning making. The agony of self-containing anxious impulses associated with the threat of being alone, cut off, can be a powerful motivation to the role of gendered enactments inspired by the wish to remain connected. However, it often paradoxically puts in motion emotional isolation that is too often forced to bear in silence. Like you, I daresay that sometimes being the outsider is where your true strength lies.

Thank you Steve for the kind words of support and encouragement. I agree with your thoughts of racism and homophobia’s paralyzing effect to the mind. The very interpersonal experience can and often does motivate fight, flight, or freeze reactions, that filtered through privilege, tends to become social, cultural, institutional, and political, fodder to propagate the pernicious stereotype of the angry Black male and female. An anger that is then forced to be internalize and severely impacts the process of human meaning making.

Thank you Vanessa for your kind words and support. I echo your call for a non-hierarchical and more egalitarian collegial atmosphere, that mirrors the interpersonal analytic experience of much more simply human than otherwise. I am honored to be teaching along-side of you and the other esteem faculty members of the One Year Program.

Thank you, Chaim, for your very reflective and thoughtful response to my essay. I am particularly drawn to your metaphor on the less flexible unbending tree. It really highlights what I see as the paradox of, socially and culturally imposed use of self “protective” “thick skin” that forces a split off experience of the self, reinforced by the threat of swift social / cultural retribution. The analytic dyad that can bend more flexibly like the palm tree can emerge as an attuned relational space where exploration is encouraged and the strength of integration and personal agency is possible.

I am also, sadly aware of the medical research you mentioned pertaining to Black patients and the pernicious, sometimes fatal, medical outcomes that arise due to their cries of physical pain going unheard by doctors. I share your concerns, as debunked medical science of this nature has been exposed as a recreation of the trauma of slavery, that socially and culturally promotes racism and mass assault the Black conscious on a daily basis. Again, in the absence of an attuned relational home that encourages curious exploration un-verbalized trauma can remain enclosed in the body, cut off from the strength of integration and unification.