IN THE GRAY ZONE
Working through othering at APsA
BY HIMANSHU AGRAWAL
Illustration by Austin Hughes
Everywhere in pre-1947 India, signs hung that read, “No Indians or Dogs allowed.”
Even though the caste system predates the British Raj, the long shadow that this sign cast was part of the legacy I was born into. Our English “masters” used to call us “darkies,” and over hundreds of years of internalized trauma, we Indians started identifying with our aggressors. “You better make a lot of money when you grow up,” I remember being told by well-in- tentioned relatives. “No beautiful girl will marry you for your looks.” By “my looks,” of course they meant my dark com- plexion. By “beautiful girl,” they meant fair-skinned. Needless to say, this domination by a minority of fair-skinned Indians seemed far from fair to the rest of us.
The United Kingdom. What a strange name for a country that once thrived on dividing and conquering humanity! Between the ages of six and nine, I lived there, in London, where several lovely things happened to me. I developed a British accent, which gave me some protection against my darkieness when I returned to India. I was introduced to this man called Jesus, who was a very nice person and did really cool stuff for people who were not empowered enough to do so for themselves. He felt mine, not an “other.” I also really liked my headmaster. He wore a black suit with a slick, stylish, horizontal white col- lar. Back then, I had no idea what the words “Catholic Priest” meant. They were all mine, and I was theirs: Mrs. Whitaker, who let me orate my silly stories to the entire classroom; Ike from Pakistan, whom I beat in a spelling test once; the cafeteria lady who smuggled me extra Scotch eggs; and Zoe with the short blonde hair—we used to rub against light poles side by side, having discovered the greatest pleasure of latency which she called “the feelies.”
Life was simpler before I was an “otherer.” I did not feel shame or hate or fear when random Londoners would yell in our faces, “Go back home, Paki!” All I remember feeling was genuine confusion: “How can a White man, the smartest being on earth, not know the difference between India and Pakistan? And why did this man not like my friend Ike?”
I HAVE A COMPLEX relationship with the United States of America. After forty-five years of enduring colorist attacks in India (and the interim experiencing racist attacks in the United Kingdom), and after working tirelessly for fourteen years to earn citizenship in this land of opportunity, I am still made to feel at times that I am far from home. You see, like most English-speaking people in the world, I speak and write in what is called “the Queen’s English,” which differs significantly from American English in its spelling, grammar, and syntax. When I submit a manuscript to an American journal, reviewers regularly comment on how I am “clearly not a native English speaker.” Of course, by English they mean American English. During psychoanalytic training, I have received similar feedback about my writing. One time, my classmate gently snatched my write-up from me and started correcting the page with their pen. It felt humiliating, and my response was simply to comply: “Thank you, ma’am. May I have some more?”
Over the last year, I have had the pleasure of editing my first book, a collection of thirty-eight contributions, from psychoanalytic candidates from twenty-nine countries, covering all six inhabitable continents. It confirmed for me that most of us from across the world follow English syntax and grammar the way I was taught. As chance would have it, the first letter I received was from a candidate from USA. My first revision for that letter consisted of 128 edits—128 ways in which their American English was faulty. My friend Charles Baekeland, who was coeditor at that time, helped me realize that through my heavy-handed critique I was enjoying the same sadistic pleasure that I accused journal reviewers of imbibing in. In other words, now that I was on the other side, I was identifying with the aggressor. Enraged with my experiences of being othered, I was making the same mistake I accused the US journals of making. To boot, I was entirely missing the forest for the trees—it was a delightful, useful essay and introduced an innovative concept. With these insights, I returned to the task of editing. The second, and final version, offered four edits.
At the 2022 Oscars, Will Smith felt the need to defend his wife’s honor, walked up to host Chris Rock, and slapped him. I remember my initial reaction when I witnessed it live on television: yeah, seems about right. It was only after taking in the ensuing uproar on the APsA listserv that I examined my initial reaction, which now seemed callous, primitive, barbaric even. Memories emerged from repressed eras, innumerable moments from New Delhi, where every morning commoners leave their home dressed in full invisible battle gear and enter the battleground called New Delhi traffic. There is a joke where I come from: if you get into a fender bender, how do you tell which driver was in the right? Answer: the driver who threw the first slap. Funny? It sure was growing up, but it no longer is. This is because now I have privilege. I am in a White world, married to a White wife, living with White in-laws, presenting at one of the Whitest conferences in the world. By White, of course, I do not mean the color of one’s skin. Unless you have a rare dermatological condition, there is no such thing as white skin. Most of us here are pink. The rest of us are different shades of brown. For my purposes here, please know that when I say White, what I really mean is privilege. Power. I have come to believe that White is synonymous with powerFULLness, and Black is synonymous with powerLESSness. I have also come to realize that very few of us actually have the capacity to live in what I would call “the gray zone.” As individuals in pursuit of the ever-evolving idea we call “a psychoanalytic identity,” I believe each one of us here has potential to find—and live in—this gray zone. Compared to others, we are more likely to inspire, and expire, in the gray.
The next part of this essay, when I was first preparing it as a presentation for an APsA conference, was supposed to be this: “I am speaking now directly to the candidates and the early graduates here. Our seniors have failed us in showing what it is like to think in the gray. Let us aspire to do better than them.” However, the same night that I wrote that part, I had a dream. I was presenting my final write-up to three Caucasian women analysts who comprised the progression committee at my dreamt-up institute. The women listened, then they passed their verdict: one pass and two fails. One of the women enumerated all the flaws in my write-up and presentation, including “medical stiffness.” At that point in the dream, I started yelling back at them, counter-accusing them of being discriminatory towards physicians who wished to be psychoan- alysts, of being rigid in their ways, of being out of touch with contemporary realities, and so forth. Their expressions went from disappointment to horror. I stormed out of the room, and on the way out I saw the same look of shock on the face of a fellow candidate who had, for some reason, been sitting in the same room the entire time. Only after I noticed his genuine horror at how I had behaved did something click inside me. I turned back, and with sunken shoulders I apologized to the three women. I shared my insights with them as they were emerging. I told them that over the years I had gotten cocksure and had learned to try and get by with charm instead of hard work. I was realizing what a poor job I had done with my write-up—scribbled, disorganized, incomplete. I told them I could also now see that I had been unable to answer any of their questions about my case and had generally made a fool of myself during the entire presentation. And despite all this, I had actually expected them to approve me. When they didn’t, and when they called me out on my sense of entitlement, it was too severe a narcissistic injury for me to bear, and I realized that what I initially thought was an act of righteous outrage was in fact a regressed tantrum. I told them they deserved to be treated better and left the room vowing I would do better next time. “Listen more, attack less,” as Dr. Beverly Stoute lovingly chided me recently.
Waking up the next morning and looking again at what I had written about our seniors failing us, I realized that had I actually included those remarks in my presentation, I would have used my privilege to enact an othering. I would be acting out my ageism, “the final frontier in discrimination,” as my friend Dr. Chad Allen once said. He was othered, and he left our institute. I miss him.
But I do have a soapbox speech today, and here it is.
I speak now directly to the folks who feel that they are tired of hearing about racism and othering, that there are many other interesting topics to talk about on the APsA listserv, during didactics, and on conference panels. I couldn’t agree with you more. In fact, I am tired of hearing about racism and othering.
“Over the last 121 years, APsA has worked through all sorts
of othering ... Can we think of one instance when the working through
has not been messy?”
It is exhausting. Indeed, there are so many topics that could be presented on that would be far more interesting. So what? What would you have APsA do? Play a fiddle while it is on fire? Make no mistake: APsA is on fire! It has been on fire before, and it has taken drastic measures, including the threat of lawsuits, to quench that fire. It is on fire again. Here is what I recently read on my neighborhood listserv: “Goddammit! I got woken up at 2 a.m. by the obnoxious sound of a medical helicopter evacuating someone, and I haven’t been able to sleep since then.” He added, “And you know what’s even worse? Being evacuated in that helicopter.” I am not sure if that man was a psychoanalyst. However, in that moment, he was showing far better self-analytic functioning than many of us have displayed on the member listserv.
The roof is shaking. Casualties are falling, some are being airlifted, some are staying, others are complaining. We are allowed to complain, of course, to feel. However, we are the American Psychoanalytic Association. Instead of repeating, let us remember to be curious while we complain. To try and practice radical openness, as Dr. Anton Hart calls it. My teacher Dr. Deborah Boughton once described an enactment that had derailed her during a previous lecture by saying, “I can’t always control what I say or do. But I always have some control over what I do next.” Let’s humble ourselves and take lessons from the best of us who surround us.
When Bertha Pappenheim told Sigmund Freud to shut up because he was interfering with her free associations, did he start a long listserv post, a diatribe saying, “You are wrong and let me tell you why”? Did he declare her to be conflict averse? Or accuse her of being the “tone police”? No. He said, “Hmmm ... I think you might be right. Please go on.” Okay, maybe not the “please” part, but he humbled himself and listened. Surely, we do not have egos larger than Father Freud! If he can do it, so can we! And if we still can’t do it, let’s stop cherry-picking Dr. Freud’s recommendations to psychoanalysts; let’s heed his recommendation and return for another bout of psychoanalysis.
Othering and minoritization are the new glass ceilings we have reached, together, at APsA. Over the last 121 years, APsA has worked through all sorts of othering: Jews vs. non-Jews; Americans vs. Europeans; physicians vs. nonphysicians; women vs. men; binary vs. nonbinary; Anna vs. Melanie; cis vs. trans; Sigmund Freud vs. (insert dozens of names here); candidates vs. graduates; associate members vs. lifetime members; Kramer vs. Kramer; classical vs. ego psychology vs. object relations vs. self-psychology vs. relationists vs. Lacanians vs. Jungians vs. CBT vs. DBT—the list goes on and on. Can we think of one instance when the working through has not been messy?
Now, recently, we have given this phenomenon a name, “othering,” and have started talking about othering vs. not othering. By doing so, it feels like we have moved up from discussing content to discussing process. It feels like an evolution of sorts. Evolution can be messy. As an organization, as a family of sorts, perhaps survival will require inspiring, and expiring, in the gray.
I have had no dreams about this soap box speech so far. Maybe I will have one tonight. Or perhaps you will. We will both have to see. In the meanwhile, perhaps you will consider my invitation and join me, as I take some deep breaths in the gray.
This essay was adapted from a presentation at the June 2023 virtual APsA conference.
Himanshu Agrawal is an advanced candidate at the Minnesota Psychoanalytic Institute. He serves as the president of APsA’s Candidates’ Council. He lives in Milwaukee, where he is an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at Medical College of Wisconsin.
Published in issue 58.1, Spring 2024.