Psychoanalysis’s Cultural Dissociation Meets Ethnic Minorities: Reply to Commentary by Kimberlyn Leary

Dr. Leary highlighted variance within ethnic culture in her commentary, but I wished she had spoken instead about cultural trauma. My paper was about trauma-based dissociative process: Some immigrant women attempt to bury their ethnic cultural experiences deeply into their psychic shadows, as elements of their culture’s values and practices constitute aspects of the very nature of their trauma. Leary’s notion of race as an adaptive challenge brings to attention the importance of making explicit racial “loyalties, values, and habits” in clinical situations. I argue strongly that psychoanalysis has dissociated its cultural identity, making its encounters with ethnic minorities that much more problematic. I ask on the behalf of ethnic minority patients (and ethnic minority mental health practitioners and graduate students), What could be gained if psychoanalysis could reveal and own its cultural identity?     

The lure of hypocrisy

Why are we susceptible to hypocrisy? Four preconditions for falling prey to hypocrisy are delineated. The reasons for our complex attitude to hypocrisy, both condoning and condemning it, are also explored. Hypocrisy is the false claim to virtue. It always refers to consciously intended deception by a person in a position of trust. Making use of literary examples, the investigation starts with the delineation of three readily apparent preconditions for falling prey to hypocrisy. Idealization of the hypocrite is seen as a defense against a dread of uncertainty on the part of the person who succumbs to hypocrisy. The addition of a third precondition, the force of powerful desire, completes the introduction. A selective review of historical and philosophical studies of hypocrisy over the past twenty-five hundred years situates the problem of the susceptibility to hypocrisy. Application of psychoanalytic formulations and clinical data, principally from the study of patients whose psychoanalysts committed ethical violations, produces a fourth precondition for succumbing to hypocrisy: transference, with a regression from mature trust to a condition of unmodified basic trust.     

Habitual Prospective Memory and Aging: Remembering Intentions and Forgetting Actions

Routine or habitual prospective memory tasks (e.g., taking medication) have the potential for creating confusions regarding whether or not an action has already been performed. We developed a laboratory paradigm for examining the kinds of processes thought to be operating in these kinds of tasks. Younger and older participants were asked to perform an action once and only once on each of 11 trials. The results showed that age and divided attention contributed to both omission and repetition errors. This new paradigm reveals memory failures in a habitual prospective memory task, and the results demonstrate that older adults are particularly susceptible to these memory problems.     

Juggling Multiple Roles and the Act of Resistance

This article addresses some ways mothers cope with the multiple stresses associated with their dual roles as workers and primary family caregivers. During the often stressful family life-cycle when adolescent children are individuating, a mother's active resistance can call attention to her need for support and validation of her efforts. While both parents are in the process of negotiating the intricate balance between letting go and forming new collaborative relationships with their soon to be adult children, heavy responsibilities associated with the maternal role can be especially challenging. In addition to gender-sensitive family interventions, mutual support groups for women who parent can help explore ways to effectively respond to cross-generational conflicts and problem solving.