Katia Houghton’s paper, ‘Mixed (up) Other: Filling in the Blanks of my Mixed Ethnic Heritage’, is a reminder that in order for suffering to be heard, a different kind of listening should grow, in which human communication comes before the layers of theoretical knowledge, and that this venture is first and foremost a personal one. Turning the probing nozzle and psychoanalytic gaze inwards, Houghton moves through spaces of blurred boundaries beyond black and white, exploring both her white privilege and her ‘mixed(up)ness’ as a mixed-race person who can pass as white. This ‘archaeological self-excavation’ journeys through moments in time, memories from her life as well as the lives of her family, searching not only for what has been but also for what has been missing. Recognising this intergenerational lacuna – a missing language, repeated immigrations, ‘a sense of not belonging’, the paper reveals a ‘transgenerational Nachträglichkeit, a transgenerational working through’.
Alongside these wonderful theoretical and clinical articles, Sitegeist issue 16 contains more: an artistic piece by Penelope Allsobrook creating a ‘Triptych on Time’ as a movement between languages and cultures through art and time; a triadic discussion by Ruth Kara- Ivanov Kaniel, Rabbi Tali Artman and myself following Kara’s book Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis (2022); and three book reviews: Ana Minozzo reads Joanna Ryan’s Class and Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality (2017); Penelope Allsobrook shares her thoughts on Patricia Gherovici and Christopher Christian’s Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious’ (2019), and Duncan Harris reflects on Diary of a Fallen Psychoanalyst: The Work Books of Masud Khan 1967–1972 (2022).