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by Medria Connolly and Bryan Nichols

February 2020

“I open at the close.”[i] Harry Potter fans will recognize this quotation as the script written on the Snitch that contained the Resurrection Stone. While the Resurrection Stone allowed Harry to choose life or death, at a more psychological level it represented a transformation of self through a greater understanding of the emotional complexities underlying his life experiences. The stone symbolized a dredging up, or resurrection if you will, of a felt sense of reality and gave it structure and meaning.

The International Conference Memories of Loss, Dreams of Solidarity created a similar aperture for us. As psychologists we apply various theories of mental processes to understand human behavior. Like Harry’s use of the Resurrection Stone, we attempt to make visible, or resurrect, intrapsychic, interpersonal, and intergroup dynamics that drive behavior in ways that are felt by and/or dissociated from us to make sense of our experiences. The conference expanded our understanding of these complexities into the body politic.

Mihaela Mihai opened the door for us through her article “When the State Says ‘Sorry’: State Apologies as Exemplary Political Judgements,” a paper we cite in our work on reparations in the U.S. and which we refer to often.[ii] Little did we know that this would lead us into the project she is currently running on complicity with systemic violence.

Memory studies is a new field for us. The overlay of this disciplinary rubric has given us insight into the mechanics of historical memory formation and the victim/perpetrator binary on a national and international scale.

We find this academic framework particularly interesting when applied to U.S. history and the legacy of chattel slavery. Plantation tours in the U.S. are a good example of the vagaries of memory. White tourists, who more often than not are the ones signing up for these tours, actually get angry when the reality of slave life is mentioned as a part of the tour. Introducing the brutality of slave life that built and maintained plantation life disrupts the fantasy or political memory held largely by whites, namely that slave owners were benevolent and the enslaved were grateful. But “memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”[iii] Hence the need for studying memory.

Fortunately, as many of the conference presentations demonstrated, art can be used quite effectively as a medium to disrupt the dominant discourse and foster a more inclusive, reality-based political memory – and this is something we are also interested in as part of our political project in the U.S. The Whitney Plantation tour in New Orleans, Louisiana serves as just such an antidote. The Whitney Plantation Museum, with its 40 life-sized terracotta statues of enslaved children created by Woodrow Nash depicts the lives of 350 people who were held in bondage for over 100 years. Similarly, the National Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, as highlighted in Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson’s presentation on “Counter-Remembering Terrorism,” captures in stark relief a shameful practice that a sanitized version of U.S. history seeks to disavow.

Our marginality presented challenges in that it oftentimes required a bridging of the “not known” with the “known”. While this did engender some anxiety about being out of our depth, that was not our predominant experience. The following is a smattering of what resonated through the conference and out to the margins.                

• Similar dynamics between perpetrators and victims around the globe put U.S. race relation problems in perspective.
• Art projects designed to counter “othering” in different communities – e.g. the murals of Brett Cook in Delaware, Ohio – give an interesting comparative view on how art can work politically.
• “Interregnum” – was a totally foreign concept, as were the classifications of political regimes of memory that Hans Lauge Hansen outlined for the audience. Intrigued, we read more and realized that agonistic memory aligns with the work of Jessica Benjamin on recognition theory, intersubjectivity and what she refers to as “the third,” “a quality of mental space that allows one to connect to the other’s mind while accepting her separateness and difference.”[iv]       
• Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s keynote was informative and deeply moving. She raised the question of what it means to be South African today, thirty years after the transition from apartheid to black self-governance. The answer is complicated. So much has changed, but too much has remained the same. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was such a powerful first step in recognizing the value of witnessing to ameliorate some of the aftereffects of a traumatized black population. “If we can’t witness, we can’t feel.” Unfortunately, a majority of white South Africans avoid witnessing precisely because they do not want to feel anything about their complicity in one of the world’s most brutal regimes. The concept of Ubuntu, “I am because we are,” eludes them. Apparently, reparative humanism is not as compelling as the fear of retribution. It does not seem possible to get beyond the “doer/done to” binary without some type of redistribution of resources. Despair is rampant. “These are the things that sit with us.”[v] How does the country move forward? As African Americans we are painfully aware of the deleterious effects of living in a country that is “unrepaired and unrepentant.”[vi] We are currently witnessing the unraveling of our democracy which we attribute to our unwillingness to come to terms with the reality of who we have been and who we are as a nation.
• Emily Beausoleil’s work on deep listening by dominant groups (settlers) in New Zealand, white “meta-blindness,” “insensitivity to insensitivities,” “challenging the right to certainty,” “interpersonal jujitsu”¾ resonated with the challenges we face ourselves as practitioners and activists.
• “Crying, Denying, Lying,” the title of Melissa Steyn’ paper, offered a humorous, on-point description of white South African defense mechanisms. Unfortunately, as she pointed out, white South Africans take the description literally as they present themselves as victims to the world, even to the extent of imagining that they now have it worse than black South Africans ever did.
• The discussion over “Sorry Day” in Australia – to our African American ears it sounded so ridiculous it was laughable, as we loudly demonstrated. Though as reparations advocates, we whole heartedly advocate apology as a necessary component of a nation’s attempt to atone for a history of state violence toward and oppression of its citizens, we struggle to contain a contemptuous reaction to the offering of an apology as the sole and celebrated response to crimes against humanity. True remorse is reflected not only in sincere statements of regret, but also in commitments that the offense will never again happen and some effort to compensate victims for the devastating historical and contemporary loses they suffer.

At the end of the conference experience we find ourselves so excited about the knowledge we have been exposed to and the connections we have made. One of the gifts of operating at the margin is the thrill of being intellectually challenged by new ideas and ways of knowing. And so, in the words of the inscription on Harry Potter’s Snitch, we are indeed much more “open at the close” and grateful for the opportunity to learn.   

Contributors

Dr. Medria Connolly is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Santa Monica, California.  She has been in practice for more than 30 years working with adolescents, adults and couples.  In addition to her private practice, Dr. Connolly worked for many years as a consultant to a Los Angeles-based treatment program for adolescents in the juvenile justice system and in a high school-based health clinic in Watts.  Her long-time work in these community settings, plus frequent contemporary encounters with implicit bias in professional groups, contributed to her recognition that individual, family and small group interventions are too limited in scope to alter the structural inequities confronting historically victimized groups, especially African Americans. This recognition led to the embrace of a prospective national intervention, i.e. reparations, to address the underlying psychosocial challenges and promote racial healing. She considers these challenges, more often than not, to be an embodiment of the injustices encoded in U.S. history.
Dr. Connolly received her PhD from Columbia University, an MS in Social Work from San Diego State University, and a BS from SUNY College Buffalo.  In addition to her clinical training, Dr. Connolly also trained in the Tavistock model of group relations work which focuses on the study of authority, the dynamics of social systems, and the overt and covert processes that occur in groups. Using this model as her theoretical orientation, Dr. Connolly also works as an organizational consultant to facilitate leadership, team building, communication and collaboration within diverse groups.

Dr. Bryan Nichols is a Los Angeles based Clinical Psychologist with a practice focusing on teens, families, adults & couples. He was also a long time consultant with a Community Based Organization where he was the Supervising Psychologist for an L. A. City gang prevention and intervention program. His work in both his practice and the community has led to the recent development of societal, “macro level” ideas about how to remediate persistent issues of bias that infect and undermine interracial relationships and the multi-disciplinary collaborations required to effectively implement community based psycho-educational interventions. Dr. Nichols received his Doctorate from UCLA after completing his undergraduate studies at Howard University. His early professional experiences included being a Trainer, and Trainer of Trainers in for the “Effective Black Parenting Program”, and conducting numerous trainings in the “Dealing with Anger Program” designed for African-American youths.                         

Bibliography

Benjamin, J. (2007) “Intersubjectivity, Thirdness, and Mutual Recognition”, talk given to the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, CA.

Faulkner, W. (1932) Light in August. New York. Random House.

Gobodo-Madikizela, P., Bubenzer, F., & Oelofsen, M. (2019). These are the things that sit with us. Aukland Park, South Africa: Fanele, an imprint of Jacana Media (PTY) Ltd.

Mihai, M. (2013). When the state says “sorry”: State apologies as exemplary political judgements. The Journal of Political Philosophy: 21(2), pp.200-220.

Nichols, B. (2018). Get Out: A study of interracial dynamics in an unrepaired and unrepentant America - A modern day racial horror. Psychoanalytic Review, 105 (2).

Rowling, J.K. (2007). Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. New York. Arthur A. Levine Books. An Imprint of Scholastic Inc.

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[i] J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, (New York, Arthur A. Levine Books, 2007), p. 134.

[ii] Mihaela Mihai, “When the State Says ‘Sorry’: State Apologies as Exemplary Political Judgements,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 21, no. 2 (2013): 200-220.

[iii] William Faulkner, Light in August, (New York, Random House, 1932), p. 111

[iv] Jessica Benjamin, “Intersubjectivity, Thirdness, and Mutual Recognition,” talk given to the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, CA, 2007.

[v] Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Bubenzer, F., & Oelofsen, M, These Are the Things That Sit with Us, (Aukland Park, South Africa: Fanele, 2017.)

[vi] Bryan Nichols, “Get Out: A Study of Interracial Dynamics in an Unrepaired and Unrepentant America – A Modern Day Racial Horror,” Psychoanalytic Review 105, no. 2018.