Acknowledging areas in which psychoanalysis is collaborating with white oppressive structures, we might begin to listen to these marginalised experiences and to incorporate them into psychoanalytic thinking. Abi Canepa-Anson’s paper, ‘The Gap between the Scream and the Silence: Exploring the Problems of Racism and of Colour Blindness inPsychotherapy Training’, shines a light precisely at the point of this unseen oppression, inviting us to listen to that ‘very loud silence’ within our profession. In particular, she elaborates on the micro-aggression, colour blindness and systemic racism that perpetuates in training organisations. Unveiling the white screen and writing from her own experience – as a past trainee, as a teacher in trainings, as a black woman, and as a researcher, she uncovers the schizoparanoid splits at the core of racism, reminding therapists and readers that delving into feelings of shame and anger, and the ‘realisation of complicity’, are vital in order to ‘step beyond the colonial practices of which psychoanalysis is also a part’.
Stepping back to capture the wider post-human perspective, Eric Harper and Matt J. Lee are listening to another silent scream. Their paper, ‘Psychoanalysis in the Time of the Last Breath’, analyses the repeated words ‘I can’t breathe’ – the final words of Eric Garner in 2015, repeated five years later in the killing of George Floyd – as ‘moments of suffocation’ that depict the scream of our time. Moving between theories including those of Fanon, Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, and Bion, the authors link racism to the ecological crisis and Covid plague, through the question of breath – or loss of breath in the era we live in. ‘The convergence of capitalist, colonial and patriarchal oppression’, they write, has produced ‘a plague, a plague of language and value’, generating the ‘chokehold on the earth’ and the brutalisation of ‘the wretched of the Earth’. The image of the last breath is explored in a Deulezian rhizomatic movement between theories, searching new perspectives in psychoanalysis that might challenge the existing architecture of closed circles, and allow us to think beyond borders and diagnostic categories – and to be affected by the scream of our time.