Self, Culture, and Others in Womanist Practical Theology

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10.1057/9780230118027 - Self, Culture, and Others in Womanist Practical Theology, Phillis Isabella Sheppard

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-20

“How Long this Road”: Race, Religion, and the Legacy of C. Eric Lincoln Edited by Alton B. Pollard, III and Love Henry Whelchel, Jr. African American Humanist Principles: Living and Thinking Like the Children of Nimrod By Anthony B. Pinn White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity By James W. Perkinson The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God By Sylvester Johnson Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic Edited by Anthony B. Pinn and Dwight N. Hopkins Transformative Pastoral Leadership in the Black Church By Jeffery L. Tribble, Sr. Shamanism, Racism, and Hip Hop Culture: Essays on White Supremacy and Black Subversion By James W. Perkinson Women, Ethics, and Inequality in U.S. Healthcare: “To Count Among the Living” By Aana Marie Vigen Black Theology in Transatlantic Dialogue: Inside Looking Out, Outside Looking In By Anthony G. Reddie Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil By Emilie M. Townes Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice through Reparations and Sovereignty By Jennifer Harvey The Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Desmond Mpilo Tutu By Johnny B. Hill Conceptions of God, Freedom, and Ethics in African American and Jewish Theology By Kurt Buhring


Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice Series Editors Dwight N. Hopkins and Linda E. Thomas Published by Palgrave Macmillan

Black Theology and Pedagogy By Noel Leo Erskine The Origins of Black Humanism in America: Reverend Ethelred Brown and the Unitarian Church By Juan M. Floyd-Thomas


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Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World By James A. Noel

Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum America By Renee K. Harrison Ethical Complications of Lynching: Ida B. Wells’s Interrogation of American Terror By Angela D. Sims Representations of Homosexuality: Black Liberation Theology and Cultural Criticism By Roger A. Sneed The Tragic Vision of African American Religion By Matthew V. Johnson Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies Edited by Bernadette J. Brooten with the editorial assistance of Jacqueline L. Hazelton Gifts of Virtue, Alice Walker, and Womanist Ethics By Melanie Harris Racism and the Image of God By Karen Teel Self, Culture, and Others in Womanist Practical Theology By Phillis Isabella Sheppard Women’s Spirituality and Education in the Black Church By Yolanda Y. Smith (forthcoming)


Bible Witness in Black Churches By Garth Kasimu Baker-Fletcher


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Phillis Isabella Sheppard


Self, Culture, and Others in Womanist Practical Theology


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SELF, CULTURE, AND OTHERS IN WOMANIST PRACTICAL THEOLOGY

Copyright © Phillis Isabella Sheppard, 2011. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10288–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sheppard, Phillis Isabella, 1958– Self, culture, and others in womanist practical theology / Phillis Isabella Sheppard. p. cm.—(Black religion/womanist thought/social justice) ISBN 978–0–230–10288–0 (alk. paper) 1. Womanist theology. 2. Black theology. 3. Feminist theology. 4. Theology, Practical. I. Title. BT83.9.S54 2011 230.082—dc22

2010035418

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.


All rights reserved.


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Series Editors’ Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

1

1

Black As You See Me Part I

Living Blackness: Womanist Perspectives on Black Women’s Experience

2

Black Women’s Experience of Religion, Race, and Gender

23

3

The Current Shape of Womanist Practical Theology

41

4

Suffering and Pain, Longing and Love: The Embedded Psychology in Womanist Perspectives

61

Part II Psychoanalysis and Black Experience: Critique, Appropriation, and Application 5

6 7

8

Black Psychoanalysis and Black Feminist Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: Resources toward a Critical Appropriation of Psychoanalysis

81

Black Women and Self Psychology: Toward a Usable Dialogue

111

Black Embodiment and Religious Experience after Trauma: A Womanist Self Psychological Perspective on Mourning the Loss of Cultural Selfobjects

127

A Dark Body of Goodness Created in the Image of God: Navigating Sexuality, Race, and Gender, Alone and Together

143


Contents


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Contents Part III

9 10

Womanist Practical Theology

Black and Beautiful: Reading the “Song of Songs”

173

Final Thoughts

187

Notes

197

Author Index

219

Subject Index

221


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Is it possible to be black, beautiful, woman, and a human being at the commencement of the twenty-first century? Such a question, though prima facie provocative, undergirds a profound psychoanalytical doctrine of theological anthropology in the contemporary postmodern world. For instance, the backdrop of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment shifted categories of the West in contrast to the worldview of its future (nineteenth-century) African colonies. “I think therefore I am” (Descartes’ seventeenth-century epistemological turn to the self) and “what is Enlightenment?” (Kant’s eighteenth-century piercing querying essay) mark reification of new forms of hierarchy with life and death and psychological-aesthetic implications for women of African descent. Though such new Western thought categories and questioning unleashed unparalleled progressive patterns of worldviews and freedoms, the European Enlightenment reflection of the modern impulse disallowed room for Africa’s embracing of the intriguing subtleties of the everyday grace and trials of the African woman. Now, normative human ontology resided in reason, Greek phenotype, and male status. All three cut against the grain of nature’s and creation’s gift of the black beautiful woman. The primordial case in point: the August 1619 violent and forced arrival of twenty Africans to Jamestown, Virginia colony (British and Anglican), marked the symbolic and literal beginning of African Americans, black Americans, Africans in the diaspora, or Americans of African descent. More specifically, it revealed the new creation of a human category called black American women. Why? Because three of the twenty enslaved Africans on the Dutch Man-of-War ship, which stole these enslaved humans to the British citizens of Jamestown, were African women. In that sense, each black American woman today heralds from the genealogical tradition of those three women. At that




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time, space, and place, the African American woman was formed. And there the seeds of today’s womanist theology can be possibly traced, if not in bloodline then at least in imagination. Yet, enslavement into Jamestown tells one part. These women were Africans who brought a rich worldview and practice of getting things done for themselves, their families, ancestors, and larger communities. Integrated psyches, sophisticated knowledge and experiences of handling wealth, organizing institutions, educating generations, adjudicating disputes, dispensing medicine, and engineering the construction of societies flowed through the energy in their bodies. These African sojourners were snatched from homelands where parents groomed their children to be proactive thinkers toward practically owning and building communities. Though hailing from a background where their families owned resources, these three African women crossed the seas as the enslaved and were bartered/sold as private property in modern fashion of emerging capitalism, and they entered a European colony already stamped with preconceived notions of racial pigmentation asymmetry. Yes, it is true that Western Europe’s solidification of world racial hierarchy realizes itself in the nineteenth-century “science of man” with its cranial, forehead, nose, foot, buttocks, lips, and other body measurements. Here too, Darwin’s survival-of-the-fittest-guesses were grafted into social Darwinism. Here in the nineteenth century, even the political left submitted to the modern progress of history when Marxism claimed that, in the origin of the species, private property, and the state, as well as in the inevitable human progress to socialism, Africa, among all of the world’s peoples, had no history. And let us not forget that modern creation of the term “race” was married intricately to the Christian God. Particularly, the overwhelming rationale, or at least the cultural context, for the seventeenth-century explorations, eighteenth-century philosophies, and nineteenth-century colonization projects was Christian adherence to the biblical warrant. In a word, the declassification of blackness as subhuman (the curse of Ham) and woman as subservient (be submissive in church) came from Jesus Christ. Against such long and complex formations and reformations, Phillis Sheppard has offered us a gift. She puts forth one basic claim: beauty, blackness, and womanhood are the liberating and sustaining gifts from God. Womanism, among other profound and pioneering efforts, asserts that, through it all, black-woman-beautiful remains. She survives and has a quality of life for herself, her family, her church,


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ix

and her community. And now that the number one woman in the United States is black, we can also add, for her nation. Yet, survival and quality of life accompanies freedom and liberation, especially in the linking of sexuality with black and beautiful. Indeed, Sheppard presents a novel thought and way of being in the world. She coins the black-woman-beautiful phrase of a womanist practical theology of the psychological and the cultural. We call her thinking a gift because this theology takes care of black woman’s particularity and has arms big enough to embrace all. Isn’t that what the womanist tradition has been saying for some time? Perhaps that is why womanists have been some of the leaders arguing for a holistic theology. In the race-gender-class-sexuality-ecosensitive experience of womanists, we encompass all of humankind. Sheppard has, indeed, continued our tradition, which is a good news for theological anthropology. Phillis Sheppard’s theological theory and psychoanalytic practical compassion fall within the best part of this tradition. In fact, it represents one definite dimension of the black religion/womanist thought/social justice series’ pioneering conceptual work and boundary-pushing effort. This series will publish both authored and edited manuscripts that have depth, breadth, and theoretical edge and will address both academic and nonspecialist audiences. It will produce works engaging any dimension of black religion or womanist thought as they pertain to social justice. Womanist thought is a new approach in the study of African American women’s perspectives. The series will include a variety of African American religious expressions. By this we mean traditions such as Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Humanism, African diasporic practices, religion and gender, religion and black gays/lesbians, ecological justice issues, African American religiosity and its relation to African religions, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, new black religious movements (for example, Daddy Grace, Father Divine, or the Nation of Islam), or religious dimensions in African American “secular” experiences (such as the spiritual aspects of aesthetic efforts like the Harlem Renaissance and literary giants such as James Baldwin, or the religious fervor of the Black Consciousness movement, or the religion of compassion in the black women’s club movement).



Dwight N. Hopkins, University of Chicago Divinity School Linda E. Thomas, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago


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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-20 10.1057/9780230118027 - Self, Culture, and Others in Womanist Practical Theology, Phillis Isabella Sheppard

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There are many friends and colleagues who were instrumental in the completion of this book. First, I must thank North Park Theological Seminary (and the Board of Directors) for my faculty development grants and two semester sabbaticals of 2005 and 2009. In addition, I have had the good fortune to have two very incredibly supportive deans, first, Dr. Stephen Graham and, currently, Dr. Linda Cannell. My colleagues at North Park Theological Seminary have each, in her or his own way, offered encouragement, challenge, and support. I would especially like to acknowledge Paul Koptak, associate dean of faculty and friend extraordinaire, who read several chapters in their early and late stages of development. Paul also created several opportunities for me to present my ideas related to the “Song of Songs” and womanist practical theology. I especially appreciate the opportunity to include my work, earlier versions of chapter 8, in the Covenant Quarterly Journal. He gave generously of his time to engage in multiple conversations throughout the various stages of the project. Mary Chase-Ziolek read several chapters and was quick to celebrate every stage of accomplishment. I also thank my colleagues Phillip J. Anderson and Richard Carlson for their humor and the occasional reality check. Juan Reed befriended me almost twenty years ago, and our friendship is now deep, beautiful, and true. His comments on various parts of the book have been incredibly helpful and insightful. I especially thank him for the opportunities to present various parts of the book to the adult education program at Saint Martin’s Episcopal Church in Chicago, Good Ground Spirituality Institute, and for providing a place where spirituality, justice, and psychoanalysis can be in conversation without obliterating each other. Thanks for the sushi dinners too! A number of senior practical and pastoral theologians have journeyed with me on this path. In particular, I owe many many thanks to


Acknowledgments


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Acknowledgments

Bonnie Miller-McLemore who has been a mentor, friend, and ready reader for years. Her questions and prodding comments have made me a bolder, braver scholar. I especially thank her for finding the time and resources to have me come to Vanderbilt in the fall of 2008 to present my work. Her kindness and integrity are rare gifts. Linda Thomas offered immediate and enthusiastic support for this project just when I needed it. I thank her and her coeditor of the series, Dwight Hopkins, along with the staff at Palgrave Macmillan, many times over. The Chicago Pastoral Theology Faculty group, especially Homer Ashby, Lee Butler, Jim Poling, and Lallene Rector, offered incisive feedback at various times. I especially thank Lee Butler who listened, argued with me, and encouraged me during the various stages of this process. He also pulled me back from the brink during periods of frustration. His sage advice has served me well on multiple occasions. Thank you, brother. I would be remiss if I did not thank A.J. (Han) van den Blink who taught me so much about listening and courage very early in my graduate work. I owe him a belated thank you and wish him peace and all good things. Many thanks to Veronica Abney for sharing her dissertation research on Black Psychoanalysts, where she gathers the voices of the elders and newcomers of this field so that we might remember that black and psychoanalysis has been, and can continue to be, a resource for the wholeness of black folks. The women who allowed me into their lives to hear their stories are really the most generous and courageous of people; they wanted to make a difference, and they have. I am grateful for the steady presence of Ileana Garcia-Soto, my teaching assistant for three years, who made it possible for me to do my writing along with teaching, and whose commitment to justice and feminist analysis made her an invaluable conversation partner. Jo Ann Deasy has been a friend, a steady dialogue partner, and a source of humor and wisdom as a co-traveler at North Park. I have learned from several self psychological psychoanalysts here in Chicago, most especially Mark J. Gehrie, Constance Goldberg, Arnold Goldberg, and Lallene Rector, as well as my former colleagues at the Center for Religion and Psychotherapy of Chicago. I am grateful for the opportunity I had to present chapter 1 at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. I presented chapter 3 at the Association of Practical Theology 2010 Biennial Meeting. The feedback and receptiveness of colleagues there, especially Dale Andrews, Jeffrey Tribble, and Jim Poling, were incredibly gratifying. The presence of co-panelists Shelly


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Rambo, who offered a thoughtful and generous response, and Jo Ann Deasy and Nancy Pineda-Madrid were inspiring. I thank Brenda Ficklin Anderson for a long and true friendship and for the hospitality that she and Richard offered at just the right time in October, 2009. Deborah Tate has heard about this book forever: you are “good people.” To the whole family, especially Theresa Sheppard Alexander, Patricia R. Sheppard, Leah Trotter, and Phillip W. Sheppard, thank you for your love and support. Leah, who is wise beyond her years, has been an invaluable conversation partner; she read chapter 8 and directed my attention to the documentary Black/Women: Conversations with Lesbians of African Descent. Many thanks. Margaret is the one whose love sets my day right and saturates our life with joy. I owe a life of gratitude to her! Thanks to the children of my heart, Mikayla, Ian, and Evan, for tolerating books, articles, and computer in the dining room because I needed even more space. They are all precious people to me. Finally, I remember E. Winona Sheppard who mothered me with the best that she could give, and also Hubert Austin Sheppard: they continue to remind me that the past matters.


Acknowledgments


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Black As You See Me

When in 1983 Delores Williams asked her question “How (or can) Feminism be ‘colorized’ so that it also speaks the black women’s tongue, so that it tells the very truth of the black woman’s historical existence in North America?,”1 she brought to the foreground black women’s experience as the starting point for engaging in black women’s theological conversations. Experience, of course, is now well established as an epistemological category in black, feminist, and practical theologies. Bonnie Miller-McLemore noted that one of the ramifications of feminist theory on practical theology was that “understanding lived subjective experience becomes an important means of mapping the making and unmaking of culture in a variety of fields in religious studies.”2 And yet, well after Williams penned her words, pastoral theologian Carroll Watkins Ali recalled in the same publication as Miller-McLemore that during her seminary education the “literature of introductory courses in pastoral care revealed that the accepted literature in the field omitted issues of race, gender and class. Therefore, irrelevancy of this literature was obvious when I considered my social location, the unmet needs of the vast majority of African Americans, and my own needs.”3 Charles Taylor challenged the discipline by stating that “the main resource that the Black experience can bring to pastoral theology is the experience of a tradition which is outside of the male Euro-American liberal protestant ghetto—yet has ties to it.”4 It was not the valuing of experience, even of women’s experience, that made Williams’ pronouncement a radical shift in feminist theological studies, but rather the fact that she made black women’s experience the privileged position for theology of, by, and about black women. She forced an analysis of the differences womanists and feminists bring to the table when theorizing “experience”: “We cannot


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a familial-social ideological political system in which [white men and white women] by force, direct pressure or through ritual tradition, law and language customs, etiquette, education and division of labor determine what part [black women] shall or shall not play, and in which the [black female] is everywhere subsumed under the [white female] and white male.6

She eventually moved from a black feminist perspective to one based on Alice Walker’s description of a womanist. Walker’s notion of womanist was developed in her writing over the course of several years, beginning in 1979 with her short story “Coming Apart,”7 about the transformation of a black couple after the woman discovers her husband using pornography. When she persists in asking him why he reads it, why he needs it, and over the course of several months reveals to him that she feels hurt and degraded by his use of it, he stops bringing his magazines home but in resentment accuses her of being a feminist. The wife thinks, “I have never considered myself a feminist, though I am a Womanist. A Womanist is a feminist only more common.”8 In this beginning piece, Walker privileges both “common folk”—black women living regular ordinary lives—and an approach that moves between the intrapsychic and the social domains: “the wife” and “the husband” are in New York and are bombarded by images of female prostitutes and life-size dolls, and “the wife” is immovable. “Her face suffering and wondering. . . . Four large plastic dolls . . . one poised for anal inspection; . . . and a Black woman dressed entirely in leopard skin, complete with a tail . . . For her this is the stuff of nightmares because the dolls are smiling. She will see them for the rest of her life. For him the sight is also shocking, but arouses a prurient curiosity.”9 The wife is determined to help—or rather to make—her husband understand her experience. Walker achieves this by providing a social analysis of pornography and the exploitation of black women, and black men’s participation in it. She intersperses with her analysis the work of Audre Lorde and other black feminists. The husband “looks at her with resentment. He realizes he can never have her again sexually, the way he has had her . . . as though her body belonged to someone else. He feels oppressed by her incipient struggle, and feels


suppose that feminist/womanist connection in pioneering is smooth and free of tension.”5 She made clear the reality of these tensions in redefining Adrienne Rich’s definition of patriarchy by beginning with the experiences of black women. Patriarchy, she said, was


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her struggle to change the pleasure he has enjoyed is a violation of his rights.”10 Later he is sick that he has “bought [into] some if not all of the advertisements about women, black and white. And further, inevitably . . . about himself.”11 During this period the husband and wife are apart for a time: “to clear their heads. To search out damage. To heal.”12 They involve themselves in self-awareness, regret, mourning, and understanding the way in which social contexts are deeply embedded in the psyche and the experiences of the body. And with this awareness comes suffering in the service of transformation. Walker’s next, and most quoted, definition of womanism is from her volume In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, where she describes a womanist as being “a feminist or feminist of color. Being grown-up. In charge. Serious. A woman who loves other women, sexually or non-sexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility and women’s strength. Sometimes loves individual men. Committed to the survival of and wholeness of a whole people. Not a separatist except periodically for health. And finally, Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.”13 The ethicist Katie Cannon has described womanism as “an endeavor to identify African American women’s moral agency,”14 and she says that a womanist theological ethic places black women at the center and “is a critique of all human domination in light of black women’s experience, a faith praxis that unmasks whatever threatens the well-being of black women.”15 Theologian Shawn Copeland adds: “It seems to me that [a] Womanist perspective can contribute to the reshaping and expansion of black theology. The term Womanist gives voice to African American women. . . . ”16 These voices rightly joined the voices already naming the inextricable link between gender and race—a link that could no longer be ignored and that has transformed how we hear and respond to black women’s experience. In one of her most recent publications, and very late in her professional life, Margaret Morgan Lawrence, the first black person to receive psychoanalytic training in the United States, wrote: “Love, Spirit, or Soul that permits humanization of the other, a recognition of our common humanity, commits us all, I believe, to a concern for justice and peace for all people. It is a commitment which we may share with those with whom we work.”17 I have never met Lawrence, but I welcome her desire to bring into dialogue black and gendered experience and psychoanalysis. She grew up in Mississippi in a family of privilege in the black community, protected, as far as she knew, from the brutalities of Southern racism. As the daughter of a respected Episcopalian minister, living in a family determined to hold racism at bay, Lawrence matured


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perhaps in greater awareness of her privilege than of the horrors of black-white relations at the time. She was accepted into the Columbia Medical School in 1936, after completing undergraduate studies at Cornell—but only after she had suffered the injustice of being rejected by Cornell Medical School because a black male student, admitted in a previous year, had not performed well. She was one of ten women who graduated from Columbia in 1940. After completing medical school, Lawrence went on to become a psychiatrist and the first African American trained in psychoanalysis in the United States, as well as the first black female pediatrician to be certified by the American Board of Pediatrics,18 in addition to earning a certificate from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. She authored two books, The Mental Health Team in the Schools and Young Inner City Families, and numerous articles. She was a founding board member of the Harlem Family Institute, a clinic providing low- cost psychoanalytic treatment as well as training to clinicians with a post-master’s degree.19 Although her life exemplifies the hopes, pride, and convictions of a southern black family and community, it also reveals the psychic and cultural legacy of racism. As documented in Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer, the biography of Lawrence by her daughter, Sara LawrenceLightfoot, the stain of racism penetrated far beneath the surface of self, family, and all shapes of relationships in Lawrence’s life. As a young doctor in residence, Lawrence had worked at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Speaking to her daughter fifty years later, having now lived through the northern version of Jim Crowism— academic segregation, underemployment, senseless obstacles placed in her path, and, regardless of northern myths of racial acceptance, the thorough ugliness of racism—Lawrence briefly relives the selfconsciousness imposed by racism. She examines her hands. “If only I had on my white coat . . . I could put them in my pockets . . . Here I am, black as you see me . . . Here are my hands, exposed . . . ” What was it that lingered in her memory with such strength as to reawaken half a century later these feelings of difference, selfconsciousness, and exposure? After a life of professional and personal success, having made enormous contributions to the field of mental health, this sense of difference remained an old and lasting mnemonic of her consciousness of her black self and the frequent hostility she encountered to her blackness and gender. In laying herself open to her scholar daughter, demonstrating an acute capacity for introspection and a willingness to plumb the depths of her own experience, Lawrence offered valuable lessons of love and integrity for all of us.


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Lawrence’s life is beautiful in its stark revelation of the complexity of black experience, forcing those of us who witness it into dreaded territory. Her older brother, called Candy-man, died before she was born. “My brother died about two years before I was born; but I always seemed to know that the beautiful boy whose almost life-sized picture graced the living room was my major competitor for my mother’s affections.”20 He had been the adored, almost white-looking child with light honey-colored skin. The picture of him that occupied a position of prominence in the living room also did so in her psychoanalysis. Lawrence had dreams of dying beneath this picture—beneath this picture of her almost white-looking brother. And how could she not have dreamt of dying beneath the weight of such a representation of beauty and desirability—such blond hair and white skin? Brilliant and gifted, Margaret Lawrence lived under an oppressive pressure of being “almost white.” How had her parents’ unfinished mourning become intertwined in her psyche with the near-universal preference for whiteness or at least light-skinned blackness? How does the war between color apartheid and self-esteem take up residence in one’s psyche? How is it sustained personally, interpersonally, and culturally? Lawrence suffered under the spoken and unspoken individual, familial, and cultural meanings of her brother Candy-man—meanings that all coalesced around the elevated status of whiteness. Lawrence, however, does not collapse under this weight. For her faithful commitment to peace and pacifism, she received in 2003 the Sayre Award from the Episcopal Peace Fellowship, an organization in which she had held membership since 1943. She did not collapse, and instead grew personally, professionally, and spiritually. She took seriously the religion and faith that was handed down to her, as we see by the way she ends her article, “The Roots of Love and Commitment in Childhood,” with a quotation from Camille Warbrough’s book, Cornrows: “There is a spirit that lives inside of you. It keeps growing. It never dies. Sometimes, when you’re hurt and ready to give up, it barely flickers. But it keeps growing. It never dies . . . ”21 The questions evoked by her life are relevant for many of us: What keeps the spirit alive and growing? How did the love of black family and black community counter the debilitating effects of painful family dynamics and life in the Jim Crow South? How did it shape her personal and professional desire—her desire to be a wife and parent, and a physician, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst in Harlem, serving African American families? How are we to understand the lasting internal effects—and the persistence—of racism? How does the experience of


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being black and woman in the United States shape and form us for a lifetime? This book grapples with these kinds of questions in order that a way might be cleared for a womanist practical theology that takes seriously the psychological and the cultural. Womanist theology, with its commitment to social and cultural analysis and to a theological theme emerging out of the experiences of black women, is poised for the development of such a practical theology. As feminists and black practical theologians have pointed out, for womanists this is a delicate task because, in the final analysis, we cannot “find the root of [black] women’s oppression [solely] embedded in their psyche.”22 However, without a deep engagement with psychoanalytic theory, womanist theology cannot fully account for the complexities of black women’s experience—the kinds of experiences that precede celebration, love, sorrow, rage, or grief, the kinds of experiences that Lawrence’s life reveals, and the kinds of experiences that many of us have survived. Social analysis and cultural critique are crucial for womanist approaches, but, without a psychoanalytic perspective, they alone cannot offer a robust practical theology.

Particularity and Womanist Perspectives Since its inauguration in the work of theologians Delores Williams, Katie Cannon, Renita Weems, and Jacquelyn Grant, as well as literary critics Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi and Clenora Hudson Weems in the 1980s, womanist theology and thought has, first of all, challenged the dualisms fueled and sustained by racism, sexism, classism, and, to a growing degree, heterosexism; and it has maintained an epistemological standpoint grounded in the experiences and perspectives of black women. As the theological anthropologist Linda Thomas writes, “Womanist theology takes seriously the importance of understanding the ‘languages’ of black women,” emphasizing that “there are a variety of discourses deployed by African American women based on their social location within the black community.”23 This epistemological grounding is essential. Particularity—who we are and where we stand in relation to each other, along with the effects that social structures have on our lives and on the communities around us—informs us and is a source of knowledge. This commitment to particularity, Patricia Hill Collins reminds us, “demonstrates African American women’s emerging power as agents of knowledge.”24 Emilie Townes holds that it is the only starting place


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from which to enter dialogue with others: “I am interested in exploring the depths of African American life—female and male,” she writes. “For it is in exploring these depths, in taking seriously my particularity—not as a form of essentialism, but as epistemology—where I can meet and greet others for we are intricately and intimately interwoven in our postmodern culture.”25 Central to this epistemology is the recognition that black women’s lives cannot be engaged independently of the converging realities of color, gender, and racial categorization. 26 In her edited volume, A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, Townes brings together womanist theorists to offer fourteen powerful essays confronting social sin and its impact on black women’s lives. Though these essays do not specifically refer to psychoanalytic theory to examine black women’s experience, they are nonetheless noteworthy for their potential to direct us toward a psychoanalytic turn. For example, M. Shawn Copeland, in “Wading through Many Sorrows: Toward a Theology of Suffering in Womanist Perspective,” declares that “suffering always means pain, disruption, separation, and incompleteness. It can render us powerless and mute, push us to the borders of hopelessness and despair. Suffering can maim, wither or cripple the heart” and “suffering is the disturbance of our inner tranquility” caused by physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual forces that we grasp as jeopardizing our lives, our very existence.27 Copeland turns to the slave narratives written by black women to address black women’s experience of suffering. This choice of slave narrative is important to her: most well-known slave narratives are those written by men, yet “male slave narrators often render Black women invisible . . . [T]hey are depicted as the pitiable subjects of brutal treatment or benign nurturers who help the fugitive in his quest for freedom.”28 “Black women slave narratives offer a stiff antidote to these cultural stereotypes”29 because these women, as the literary critic Hazel Carby reminds us, “document their sufferings and brutal treatment but in the context that is also the story of the resistance to that brutality.”30 Copeland then develops “resources for Womanist resistance” consisting of memory that “gave the slaves access to naming, placing, recovery, and the reconstruction of identity, culture and self.”31 These resources of resistance shape aspects of the womanist theology of suffering, which involves the following: (1) “it grows in the dark soil of African-American religious tradition, is intimate with African American women’s culture, and it holds itself accountable to black women’s self-understandings, self judgments and self-evaluation; (2) it repels every tendency toward spiritualization of evil and suffering,


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of pain and oppression; and (3) it remembers and retells the lives and sufferings of those who came through (survived) and those who have gone to glory. This remembering honors the sufferings of the ancestors, known and unknown, and it evokes growth and change.”32 By bringing suffering to the foreground and defining it in terms of its impact on “inner tranquility” and its power to “maim, wither, and cripple the heart,” along with her outline for a theology of suffering’s emphasis on remembering and retelling, Copeland has positioned womanist epistemology to specifically include the intrapsychic domain.

Psychoanalysis and Womanist Pastoral Perspectives A brief perusal of the womanist literature for the most part reveals a gaping hole when it comes to the appropriation of psychoanalytic perspectives. One need not speculate too long to suggest that this avoidance and/or rejection has to be considered in light of the tainted history of the relationship between the earliest psychoanalytic forays into the psychoanalysis of gender, culture, and race, as well as the (mis)use of psychology to perpetuate stereotypes of African Americans, women, and the poor. Those who reject psychoanalytic theory do so primarily because the theories and clinical practices were developed based on the experiences of white middle-class patients, they retain the legacy of sexism in theory and practice, and are rooted in racist and ethnocentric assumptions. In other words, a distorted and ethnocentric view of culture and a male gender bias have from the outset been deeply embedded in psychological theories. These biases and uncritical assumptions surely account for most of womanist theology and black practical theologians avoiding psychoanalytical reference points.33 Carroll Watkins Ali ultimately rejects the psychoanalytic model and instead seeks to integrate a black psychology and systems approach. The history of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as it relates to African Americans is littered with examples of racism and sexism that ultimately render African Americans invisible, irrelevant, or pathological—which “is racial oppression.”34 So Watkins-Ali argues that while “psychological theories based on a dominant culture”35 “can contribute to the construction of an African American pastoral theology, we must acknowledge their inadequacies . . . The determinism of traditional psychology has not factored in the issues of race, gender, or class . . . [and] the emphasis on an individualistic approach limits its effectiveness for the


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critical psychological needs of the African American community;”36 ultimately, she too abandons the psychodynamic perspective and in so doing, to my mind, loses something important. We must listen to the interior of a person not only to transform distorted self-images but also to transform distorted theories that perpetuate them. This is especially so when we assume that the content of the inner life comprises an interaction between self and culture and also between familiar and individual meaning- making processes. And this is why we must move beyond models that rely primarily on educational or pedagogical “therapy” in which one learns about the impact of racism. Such models define the meaning of the exchange between self and society rather than creating the space for it to emerge as black women’s reflection on their own lives. Yet there are some womanists who do not reject psychoanalytic theory; among them are Caroline McCrary, 37 Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Elizabeth Walker,38 and Phillis Sheppard.39 These four womanist practical theologians have been psychodynamically trained and have clinical practices. McCrary, in a very sophisticated article, uses W.R.D. Fairbairn’s object relations theory—in particular his concepts of internalization and mourning internal objects—along with BantuRwandaise philosophy and Howard Thurman’s theology of community first to articulate a community of object relations’ perspective on interdependence, and then to apply it toward an understanding of black women and sexual abuse and the need for interdependence. I am very sympathetic to McCrary’s work and find the symmetry between our interests and our theological commitments to responding to the needs of African American women who have experienced violence and abuse compelling and useful.40 Particularly useful is her discussion of the need to mourn negative objects41 that have been internalized and to explore the resistance to such mourning. However, though she creates a model for pastoral counseling with African American women, she does not develop the womanist aspects of her work or address the cultural need for mourning—meaning the need for the community to mourn the violence done to African American women and the ramifications of it in the community. Admittedly, her paper is primarily concerned with the pastoral counseling context rather than with identifying an overarching practical theology. The questions that excite me are related to what happens to the categories she adopts from Fairbairn and Thurman once placed in dialogue with African American women’s experience. Does the engagement with black women’s experience in any way critique or change the psychological theories? Does object relations theory bring


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something to the theology that is new and necessary? Is Thurman critiquing a deficit in Fairbairn’s work or do these ideas run on parallel tracks and intentionally not interrogate each other? And, finally, what are the implications of McCrary’s work for how we understand the task of practical theology? Elizabeth Walker appropriates a self psychology, in a correlational model that appropriates Tillich’s theology of process of grace, for the articulation of a model for pastoral counseling with African American women. Walker’s focus is on the damaged self-esteem of women who have a destructive self split originating from the internalization of flawed images and early relationships.42 Finally, by not engaging Kohut’s concepts of selfobject and cultural selfobject, Walker has missed an opportunity to make her connection between culture and self. My work resonates with these scholars’ work and I think they raise crucial questions and contribute to any womanist discussion aimed at engaging the internal and external experiences making up aspects of black women’s lives. Womanist theologians would also benefit from examining how black feminist theorists beyond the boundaries of womanist theology make use of psychoanalytic theories. Specifically, for example, Claudia Tate, a black literary critic, uses psychoanalytic theory but also recognizes that doing so makes her “suspect” to some, “because I refer to psychoanalysis to advance my investigation . . . some will no doubt claim I’m having my ‘roll in the hay’ with Freud and company. Such a charge would insinuate the misgivings that many African Americans have about the relevance of psychoanalysis to black liberation, thus the general absence of psychoanalytic models in black intellectual discourse.”43 Both Tate and womanists privilege black women’s literature as a source for analysis. Womanist Stacey Floyd-Thomas recognizes that to some degree “black feminist literary criticism and Womanist ethicists’ analyses of literary texts are analogous in as much as they both seek to correct damaging . . . stereotypes of black women . . . yet . . . they are divergent in both their methodological means and theoretical ends.”44 A difference that separates them, she posits, is that literary criticism is not the end point for womanists. Womanists turn to the text to hear within them the “the strong tradition of charting the crux of black women’s spirituality—their persistent questioning of theodicy, their spiritual strivings, and their radically immanent concepts of the divine.”45 I think FloydThomas’ perspective is a necessary reminder about the ultimate purposes of womanist analyses, but I also think she imposes too narrow an aim on literary criticism. Tate calls for a “racially contextualized model of psychoanalysis” to “help us to analyze black textuality. . . . Such a


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model . . . can advance our understandings of racialized behavior in other social settings as well,”46 for she believes that “psychoanalysis can help us to not only analyze black textuality but also effectively explain important aspects of the deep psychological foundations of the destructive attitudes and behaviors of racism.”47 Tate’s position is that race “remains a salient source of the fantasies and allegiances that shape our ways of reading all types of social experiences”48 and requires more than a critical social analysis. bell hooks expressed her longing for a dialogue between psychoanalysis and black experience. Her Yearnings: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics stated it clearly: “I would like to see the production of a body of work on psychoanalysis and black experience. In my own life, I have been helped by reading the work of Alice Miller (though I think she has elements of mother blame). Her work in particular and other work that attempts to understand how the experience of trauma shapes personality and actions from childhood into adult life seem an important contribution for black people not sufficiently explored. We also need more black men and women entering the field of psychoanalysis.”49 We cannot—must not—adopt psychoanalytic theories without a womanist critical reading and black women’s experience in an interrogating engagement. Yet, if we begin to appropriate the intrapsychic in womanist analysis, we will more fully represent the great complexity of black women’s relationships to their varied environments, as well as establish a basis for articulating the relationship between self and culture within their psychoanalytic theories. These features are essential for womanist practical theology. Self psychology posits that mirroring is necessary for the formation of a cohesive, positive sense of self. “Observation has taught us,” writes psychoanalyst Esther Menaker, “that cultures and subcultures have profound effects on the social institutions through which personality is formed. Culture is the medium in which the self grows.” So what happens to this development of self when culture—a source for mirroring—offers a distorted and exploited reflection of the self? What happens when one’s body is exploited and violated by those who should provide this necessary mirroring? To answer the question of what might be the relationship between self-development and culture, Western society has generally focused on the mother-child dyad, or the family system—nuclear and extended. We have yet to understand how broader cultural dynamics inform who we become or how we understand ourselves. For example, consider the issue of gender from a self psychological perspective. Heinz Kohut in


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his later conceptualization of self psychology pointed usefully to the ways in which cultural experiences serve psychological functions for individuals and cultural groups, suggesting that cultural figures serve to facilitate group cohesion and to “point the way toward vital change” in the wider culture.50 His perspective on culture and its relationship to self suggest a growing difficulty he had with the typical modernistic assumptions, such as the distinct separation of self and other, of classical psychoanalysis.51 But Kohut did not consider the cultural context in which black women develop, and this is not overly surprising given his treatment of gender. Lallene Rector points out that “Kohut did not systematically address questions of how the self acquires a sense of gender identity,”52 as he focused primarily on the empathic environ as the facilitator for gendered identity and failed to fully recognize that the empathic matrix was socially located and, as Joan Lang noted, “there seems to be an underlying assumption, detectable in Kohut’s writings, that obvious biological truths provide sufficient explanation for the ‘natural’ unfolding of sex and gender.”53 This narrow focus on the “natural” fails to note that “society assigns significance to gender in terms of social expectations and opportunities.”54 Susann Pangerl acknowledges that self psychology “weathers the feminist critique of psychoanalysis,” yet she posits that it needs to be “in collaboration with intersubjectivity theory”55 to fully represent the “complex and lifelong significance of female relationships.” Sheppard insists that56 self psychology can be appropriated to better understand gendered experience, but in so doing self psychology must receive a critical reading and raise the importance of, and the lack of, a culturally empathic responsive sociocultural environ.57 Gender, sexuality, and race—aspects of “self” that are frequently embattled—do not proceed along a smooth path of development regardless of social location, and certainly do not do so for African Americans. If we take black women’s experience into account, it would make us consider the place of color and gender as selfobject and cultural selfobject experiences in the U.S. context. How might we understand idealization, the cultural devaluing of black women, and the cultural mirroring of distorted images of black women? Self must be addressed in terms of its relationship to inner experience and cultural context. The complex social contexts, particularly of family and community in which black women’s lives and development take place, require that we also take into account in pastoral, clinical, and theological theory and practice, alongside the mirroring that projects a distorted reflection, the sites of black life that provide opportunities for mirroring that counter these distortions.


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In particular, psychoanalysis can help us recognize that much of what occurs in and between people, as well as in cultural experience more broadly, is not immediately apparent. Just as an individual has unconscious processes, so too there are cultural processes, of which we are unconscious. Similarly, just as people sometimes behave in ways that are incongruous with how they understand or publicly claim themselves to be, so too there are aspects of cultural processes that are disavowed by significant parts of society. The deep inability of some to apprehend the prevalence of colorism, racism, homophobia, sexism, and other forms of violence as negative mechanisms of socialization and control are examples of such disavowal. And the effects of these processes are destructive for all entangled in them. Furthermore, once activated, these dynamics affect not only our perceptions of ourselves and others but also how we embody these perceptions interpersonally and how we experience our own black bodies. This makes it imperative that we bring a psychoanalytic lens to womanist practical theology and our theology of embodiment.

Black Women’s Embodiment and Womanist Thought In Black women’s embodiment, the psychological and social converge in provocative ways is deeply rooted in black women’s lives. Though our culture admires and sells tans—to whites—blacks are portrayed in a myriad of negative associations. Darkness and blackness are associated with what is criminal, promiscuous, sub-intellectual, uneducated, lazy, evil, and unmotivated. Black women in particular are singled out as problematic conduits of these “cultural” or “racial” traits. We spend so much energy and money counteracting these malignant stereotypes that it is a wonder we have any energy left for creative living at all. Until the past two or three decades, the majority of academic works that addressed embodied experience have theorized a white male, and on those few occasions when the focus was the female, the realities of her life were disavowed. Elizabeth Grosz begins her book on the body with the claim, “the body has remained a conceptual blind spot in both mainstream Western philosophical thought and contemporary feminist theory. Feminism has uncritically adopted many philosophical assumptions regarding the role of the body in social, political, cultural, psychical and sexual life and can be regarded as complicit in the misogyny that characterizes Western reason.”58 She renders discourse


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of embodied gender and color or race invisible by their abstractness. If taken to its logical conclusion, her argument would lead us to suggest that these same feminists who have uncritically turned a blind eye to black female embodied experience are complicit in the disavowal of black women’s experiences. And the fact that Susan Rubin Suleiman’s edited volume, The Female Body in Western Culture,59 could contain twenty-three essays without a single one seriously considering black female embodiment in Western culture reiterates the concealment and ignoring of the black female body. Black women’s embodiment is therefore a central thread throughout this book. There can be no womanist practical theology in which embodiment is not integral to the epistemological positions we take. Embodiment is integral to how we understand ourselves and the milieus in which we live. I am reminded here of Audre Lorde’s comment on body and color in her family: “My light-skinned mother kept me alive within an environment where my life was not a high priority. She never talked about color. . . . Somewhere I knew it was a lie that nobody noticed color. Me, darker than my two sisters. My father darkest of all. . . . Did dark mean bad?”60 Lorde’s reflection on her own embodiment includes sexuality and remembering: “I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of times it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.”61 But Lorde and other black women are not just receptacles for what is projected; indeed her call to break the entrapment of silence can be recognized throughout womanist and feminist thought today. And we are resilient. “I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.”62 Lorde’s reflections on her black embodied self return to the discussion those elements of black female embodiment that are often left out: color, gender, and black lesbian identity and their connection to the psychic content and the social cultural context in which one resides. Womanist sociologist Cheryl Townsend Gilkes’s reflections likewise affirm this connection between the psychic and the social, and the necessity of linking a psychoanalytic perspective to black experiences of embodiment in a womanist critical analysis of self and culture: “My own experiences as a dark, plump, African American woman inform my reading of [Alice] Walker’s call to love food and roundness. Her call also challenges me to examine the inner scripts of my childhood and see the sources of my own conflicted inner visions.”63 This same experience is heard in Maya Angelou’s poignant evocations of her often conflicted inner ruminations over the lovability of her black body: “wouldn’t they be surprised when one day I woke


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out of my black ugly dream, and my real hair, which was long and blond, would take the place of the kinky mass that Momma wouldn’t let me straighten? Because I was really white and because a cruel fairy stepmother . . . turned me into a Negro girl, with nappy black hair.”64 Sentiments such as Lorde’s not only expose the impact of society but also suggest that early relationships, in this case maternal, are operative. Her mother will not let her straighten her hair and she fantasies that some magical negative maternal figure has turned her into a Negro girl with nappy hair. We cannot ignore the exposure of her internal relationship between herself and her mother. Theories abound regarding the importance of relationships with early caregivers for the formation of the self or identity and, in the cases of black self-development, the messages they convey about black femaleness. Even so, the complexity of black embodiment is not just a psychological result of motherdaughter or other familial dynamics. A critical womanist perspective understands these formative relationships more broadly, frequently drawing on black cultural productions such as literature, music, and performance for its ethical and theological constructions and to expose their continuing legacy for black and white Americans. Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye provides a powerful example, revealing the lingering impact of this inheritance and the forms of resistance to it. In this complex novel, Morrison offers a subtle and remarkable portrayal of the psychological response to the intergenerational longing for and denunciation of black self-love. Claudia, the child narrator, slowly takes us into her process of resistance. She is given a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed doll to love and mother: Remove the cold stupid eye . . . take off the head . . . crack the back against the brass bed rail . . . I did not know why I destroyed those dolls . . . I destroyed white baby dolls. But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls.

Claudia desperately wanted to retrieve her black female body—her self. However, if she could not retrieve her own body, neither would she passively accept the white alternative model with which she is presented. But I think there is more going on here in Claudia’s rejection. In refusing the doll, Claudia is resisting her despair over feeling unlovable—but she is also subversive: she will not participate in a ritual that so clearly reflects the relationship of some black mothers to white children under their care. Claudia recalls a painful scene with


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Mrs. Breedlove in the kitchen of her employer: patient, loving, and kind to one child—her white charge—Mrs. Breedlove is exhausted, intolerant, and mean to her own, Pecola. Claudia resists this relational paradigm of black mother to child. But the cards are stacked. Claudia resists but she does not escape. The best she can do is adjust and leave us a counter legacy. Claudia and Mrs. Breedlove’s daughter Pecola raise the intrapsychic aspect of black females’ experience, an aspect that demands far greater consideration by womanist theology. In particular, while significant attention has been given to Pecola’s desire for the bluest eyes, little has been said of Claudia’s dismemberment of the white doll and how she resists being incorporated into the culturally sanctioned group of lovers of Shirley Temple. We have not yet fully addressed the question of what this story tells us about being black and female in this culture. What happens to someone such as Claudia, who must “remove the cold stupid eye . . . take off the head . . . crack the back . . . ”? And what does it mean that this same Claudia transfers this destructive impulse to little white girls? Emilie Townes’ work on the “cultural construction of evil” lays out an ethical imperative for us to wrestle with the hard truth here. Citing Toni Morrison, she notes that slave narratives avoided the exposure of slaves’ interior selves “because the writers shaped their narratives to be acceptable,”65 and “in shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it, they were silent about many things.”66 The time has come for the unacceptable narrative to be heard. We have to wrestle with this for ourselves and for the Claudias of the world. Claudia tells us that she engages in this sadistic practice and does not know why. She is left with the horror and sees no easy way out. “The terror and shame of her ‘disinterested violence,’ ” Morrison tells us, led her to seek refuge for her shame. The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred to fraudulent love. It was a small step to Shirley Temple.67

Claudia is aware of the change as “adjustment without improvement.” But she wants us to see something more than the cultural imperative for little black girls to love blond-haired dolls as the motive behind Shirley Temple worship. Claudia demands that we interrogate this “love,” a love that is the by-product of her attempt to save and love her black female self. In the absence of familial, communal, or social affirmation of black beauty, she chooses survival, and in this case survival


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means complying and joining the “I love Shirley Temple” club. But Claudia knows, and wants us to know, that her “change” is merely “adjustment.” It is only skin deep. What do you do when, like Claudia, you long for “someone to want the black baby to live—just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls,” and Shirley Temples?

Womanist Theology and the Cultural Distortion of the Image of Black Women Womanists must wrestle with the reality that for some the wounds of silence and hurt not only mark them but also come to define who they believe themselves to be and who they believe others to be. This makes silence an ethical and psychological concern. In her discussion of the cultural production of evil, Emilie Townes writes: “so black women can, if we must, begin with the wounds, those scars, in Eula’s word, that are our mothers’, daughters’, sisters’ thick and hard so no one can ever pass through to hurt us again the folds of those old wounds, that in some cases maimed us with lies, secrets and silences we are told about other women that are told about ourselves these wounds mark us but they need not define us.”68 If Townes is correct, black women cannot consider silence a liberative option. Delores Williams speaks of this distortion of the image of black women as defilement. To defile is to treat that which is sacred as if it were base, to deem it as less than it is. Williams offers a womanist perspective on defilement, calling it “the social sin of American patriarchy.”69 She argues that the “defilement of Black women’s bodies and the resulting attack upon their spirits and self- esteem” constitute the “gravest kind of social sin.”70 In other words, the “atrocious actions against another person that constitute defilement”71 have their impact on the surface and in the interior. Moreover, defilement imposes limits on relations both with others and with the self. Therefore, understanding defilement cannot proceed just in terms of action directed at someone, but must also encompass the affect it has on how the target of defilement comes to view herself or himself. Defilement reverses the position of the creator and the created—to name and to create order out of chaos.72 Finally, defilement corrupts the spirit and community of both: those from which it emanates and upon which it is heaped. Yet Williams is equally concerned with the individual expression of sin. She proposes that an individual sustains defilement when she participates in the perpetuation and proliferation of negative and demeaning


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images of black woman through silence or by adopting the devalued representation of black womanhood. Individual sin is also entailed in embodying negative and dehumanizing views of black women through “violence, exploited labor,”73 as well as the sexual exploitation of black women, which is common in pornography and related cultural productions. At each level, defilement effects us individually, in terms of experiencing “attacks upon [our] spirits and self- esteem; socially, as a social sin heaped upon and between persons, and spiritually, by willfully deforming one’s knowledge of being created in the image of the divine.”74 A major contribution of Williams’ work is that of placing the social and the intrapsychic in dialogue within womanist theology. Overcoming defilement implies reconciliation with God’s original proclamation, and it calls for embodied practices that continually announce the goodness of all creation; it names sin as that which individually and socially blocks the way of transformation75 of the individual and society. The psychological and the theological meet in womanist work at this point of transformation. Reconciliation and transformation have no room for dualistic splitting. Instead of deeming embodiment, blackness, femaleness, and sexuality as negative, and whiteness, mind, maleness, and intellect as positive, Kelly Brown Douglas urges us to bring the two together, she insists that womanists must “advocate a sexual discourse,”76 for “the radicality of God’s love . . . means God loves our very bodies . . . In order to respect the bodies and lives of others, we must first respect and love our own bodies and lives.”77 Womanist theology, psychoanalytic theory, and culture woven together create a stronger framework for listening to and responding to the lived experience of African American women than either can provide individually.

Book Structure The book employs a womanist/feminist model of theological reflection that is also the hallmark of practical theology. The “point of entry”78 for this work is experience and particularity—black women’s lived experience. In a womanist model of practical theology, we look for the “overlapping links between experiences” of black women rather than a preoccupation with the individual experience. Teresa de Lauretis’ reflection on the non-static nature of experience is helpful here: “experience signifies that complex of habits resulting from . . . the interaction of inner and outer worlds and the continuous engagement of a subject with social reality . . . for each person then, experience is


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an on-going construction, not a fixed point of departure . . . ”79 Thus, experience takes shape and form in a dynamic interchange, and this is a reality of, and by, which practical theologians must be conscious and compelled. Bonnie Miller-McLemore defines practical theology as “doing theology concerned with the embodiment of religious belief in the day to day lives of individuals and communities”80 that is “guided by the desire to make a difference in the world.”81 Thus, the book is organized to move the reader through a three-part cyclical process involving (1) theological reflection on black women’s experience, (2) theoretical analysis of psychoanalytic theory and womanist theology, and (3) a critical appropriation and application of the womanist practical theology developed. In this practical theology model, experience is the starting and ending place of theologizing. We see it in Joe Holland’s and Peter Henriott’s Social Analysis: Linking Faith and Justice,82 Bonnie Miller McLemore’s and Brita Gill-Austern’s edited volume Feminist and Womanist Pastoral Theology,83 and more recent womanist models, especially of Katie Cannon’s “Metalogues and Dialogues: Teaching the Womanist Idea,”84 Stephanie Mitchem’s Introducing Womanist Theology,85 as well as Stacey Floyd-Thomas’s Mining the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics.86 The voices of black women reporting their experiences of religion and spirituality are the primary source for my reflections on living blackness. I also draw on black scholarship on psychoanalytic theory and my own clinical practice, as well as womanist theology, literature, and literary criticism, to explore the implications of the psychoanalytic turn for categories of practical theology involving community, liturgy, prayer, psychology of religion and spirituality, and practices of care. Part I (chapters 2 through 4) is entitled “Living Blackness: Womanist Perspectives on Black Women’s Experience.” In advancing a theological reflection on living blackness, chapter 2 draws heavily on the words of black women I have interviewed. This reference to others’ voices is an epistemological constant throughout the book. Chapter 3 offers an overview of current womanist practical theology, and chapter 4 examines how womanist theology represents and understands psychic experience. Part II (chapters 5 through 8) moves to “Psychoanalysis and Black Experience: Critique, Appropriation, and Application.” Chapter 5 considers the use of psychoanalytic theory in black scholarship, including clinical practice and literary criticism. This chapter also addresses the debates surrounding the appropriation of psychoanalysis for understanding black experience. Chapter 6 presents a womanist


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critique and a revised appropriation of psychoanalytic self psychology for the development of a psychoanalytically informed practical theology. Chapters 7 and 8 return to black women’s experience: chapter 7 in the form of a clinical vignette and discussion, and chapter 8, with womanists’ narratives of embodiment and analysis, and with discussion of two interviewees’ detailed experiences of embodiment, with the aim of widening the womanist epistemological lens to discuss an embodiment that includes sexuality. Part III (chapters 9 and 10) turns explicitly to “Womanist Practical Theology.” Chapter 9 offers a rereading of a small part of the “Song of Songs” (1: 5–6), and chapter 10 addresses the implications of the psychoanalytic turn, for womanists, of practical theology involving community, liturgy, prayer, psychology of religion and spirituality, and practices of care. The psychoanalytic turn of Between Self, Culture, and Others: A Womanist Practical Theology of Self, Culture and Others allows us not only to examine practices of care in relation to black women but also to extend psychoanalytic insight to communal forms of care. Throughout, the guiding concern for this project is to articulate a practical theology capable of shaping practices worthy of consideration by black women. Like the playwright Lorraine Hansberry and like the Claudias of the world, black women long for a reflection that reclaims the direct biblical declarations of black creation. The first is from Genesis: “and God created them male and female and it was good”; the second from the “Song of Songs”: “I am black and beautiful.” Hansberry lends words to the shape of this longing: sometimes in this country maybe just walking down a south side street . . . or maybe suddenly up in a Harlem window—Beauty . . . stark and full. Africa, simply Africa. These thighs and arms and flying winged cheekbones, these hallowed eyes—without negation or apology. A classical people demand a classical art.87

This book is one response to Hansberry’s desire for a vision of blackness “without negation or apology.” In it we will plumb the depths of blackness and womanness. It is my “down payment” on a future in which we all can move closer to being whole and become contributors to the transformation of the places in which we live, love, work, and worship.


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Living Blackness: Womanist Perspectives on Black Women’s Experience


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In the early stages of womanist theology, taking black women’s experience as the basis for theological, sociological, or other research was new and devalued. In many respects it is still devalued, but the terms of assessment have shifted. Now detractors wonder if womanist theology is dead or irrelevant or already incorporated into “feminist theology.” Yet womanist practical theologians themselves recognize that black women’s experiences must remain at the center of the theologizing we do. We are tethered to the diversity of black women’s lives in examining black women’s experience of religion and spirituality. The way into their stories is by giving black women’s voices a new and indepth hearing and by facing both the obvious and the concealed that is revealed.

Litany of Black Women’s Voices: ALL: I am black and Beautiful. DJ: I was told not to question the Bible. So I didn’t. JB: You know it’s not to say that she doesn’t believe in God, I think she does. JJ: I have more reverence for the Church . . . KC: Growing up, we were drilled that we had no worth beyond our virginity. ALL: I am black and Beautiful. CK: My mother’s lack of experience with fatness forced me to navigate the treacherous waters of American body culture without the compasses and maps. DJ: I lost my faith in the Church when I was a teenager.


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Womanist Practical Theology JB: But she’s got some really, really, warped ideas about religion and God. She still believes but she is brainwashed—that it is the blacks’ destiny to suffer. SB: When I got this call to ministry, I thought maybe I should be a pastor’s wife . . . RN: “I didn’t realize that I was a lesbian until I was about sixteen or seventeen. RN: At one point it was just too much. I attempted suicide. JJ: I developed an interest in other religions. I started exploring. I went to different churches and a synagogue. SS:1 I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon. SB: My mother is light skinned. She was part Indian with very long hair. JJ: I got more into religion. It became the stable feature of my life. (Another laugh): I became a little religious child. RN: I was always the aggressive one in the bar. The reason was because at this time if you were considered the “fem” you couldn’t ask anyone to dance; you had to wait. SB: But that is one of the scriptures that said to me that God is calling me as a woman and as a black woman. ALL: I am black and beautiful.

The litany of voices shown above is from the women we will encounter throughout the book. In sharing their stories and their experiences of being black women, they reveal what we need to know before we begin to theorize. Womanist practical theologians themselves recognize that black women’s experiences must remain at the center of the theologizing we do. Linda Thomas’ observation that womanists’ epistemological sources are, more often than not, text-based 2 is an apt and necessary critique. Moreover, everyday black women often already know that their perspective is important and needed. Elsa Barkley Brown, an African American historian, reports: “Students and scholars sometimes question how much value we should give to African American women’s personal accounts of their lives. My mother taught me the arrogance of such a question . . . ”3 These are black women speaking for themselves of their experiences. This chapter draws on the voices of two individual women and womanist scholars reporting on their religious and spiritual experiences as a way of tracing the interconnections between psychological and social experience, and it identifies some of the theological implications for womanist practical theology. The women interviewed in the book are women whose religious lives predominantly emerged


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within personal or family experiences in the black church. Some remain highly invested in religion, though not necessarily organized religion, and others refer to themselves as spiritual. Spiritual is generally used to convey an attitude or worldview toward life and the cosmos and is contrasted with religion as an institutional, such as church or denominational, experience. Their family roots were poor to working class, and their current economic circumstances ranged from working class to middle class. At the time of the interviews, each was employed, at least part-time. These and other black women whom I have had interviewed, counseled, or simply with whom I have conversed, reveal similar attitudes and experiences.

Women’s Day in the Church Imagine a mid- to large-sized African American church in which the senior pastor, a man, has expressed incredible support for women in ordained ministry leadership. The pastoral leadership includes several women. In addition to the women on pastoral staff preaching on a regular basis, special programs always include womanist theologians and womanist-identified preachers. The church, which has a welldeveloped adult education program, offers classes in liberation theology, black theology, and womanist theology, among others. Gender, sexism, racism, and homophobia are issues frequently discussed and included in sermons. Nonetheless, I was taken aback on a visit to this church for a special women’s day celebration when I found every prayer calling on “Father God.” Early in the service, one of the hymns included the line “wash me and make me whiter than snow.” Every time the refrain began, I felt sickened by the apparent split between celebrating the gift of black women and the liturgical language that blatantly compromised this aim. However, when I asked two women, both of them long-term members and seminary students, what they thought about these features of the service, one said, “Well, this is just the way it is at ‘All Are Welcome Church.’ I never thought about it really. We are so into black worship and black pride. Truthfully, it never crossed my mind.” The second woman said, “You know I had not “noticed” the male language or the line “make me whiter than snow,” and she laughed. “It seems the black part is most important. We live in such a racist world. Yeah. That’s what I think about it. But womanist theology is read in adult education. We talk about it. Lots of womanist theologians have


Black Women’s Experience of Religion


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been here to speak and preach so we’re very well educated when it comes to the literature.” She then proceeded to recount stories of the pastor’s treatment of women that she found inappropriate in terms of boundaries, control, and relying on highly sexualized relationships, but concluded, “Well, he’s my pastor and he can preach!” This woman is well-read in womanist theology. She has left this church to serve on the pastoral staff at what she calls a “similar church. It’s very similar because we are focused on black empowerment, and obviously there are women on the staff. In terms of womanist theology, it’s—you know, more implicit. I mean some of us are womanists and read the theology and some are just learning about it more recently. Of course just like All Are Welcome Church, the congregation is mostly women, perhaps even more so. Women do all the work here and have lots to say about decisions but the senior pastor has the last word.” I asked how she would characterize the worship at the new church, and she said, “Oh, it’s a typical service in the music and everything. It’s filled with male God language. But womanism is more embodied in women’s leadership on pastoral staff. The senior pastor is a man—of course—but I don’t think anyone notices the worship language as male. I think we expect it.” The most difficult service for me was at a medium-sized black church where the male pastor pranced up and down the aisle wearing a calf-length black silk jacket that whirled around him as he preached a sermon laden with explicitly sexist language and negative commentary on black women and their preoccupation with “self,” “makeup,” “looking for a man,” “eating too much,” and “running around too much.” These comments constituted the sermon. I was shocked and offended that both women and men laughed at his depiction of women. Indeed, it was the women who laughed the loudest and longest. There were women in the congregation who were in leadership on a nonpaid basis. They did the work of the church, and while the denomination ordained women, there had not been a woman preacher during the pastor’s eight-year tenure. There were women in the congregation attending a local seminary but they did not feel called to the pastorate or preaching—which is no surprise, given what they heard regularly about women from the pulpit. Black women such as these are forced to grapple with the reality of overlapping oppressions on a daily basis. We cannot stop being women while we attend to racism as if it is a separate category, and sexism is not a “white” issue. Sexism in black communities is expressed in the


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continued struggle that denies black women full leadership in many black churches; it is apparent in the way black women’s bodies are used to devalue black beauty, black family, and black intellect. In research examining pornography, and advertisement, it is seen that women’s bodies are used to sell, and used to sell in demeaning ways. We have to ask ourselves what is being sold when sexism/heterosexism is practiced with abandon. The above vignettes reveal the split messages that black women in the church hear. What is it that apparently makes such assumptions about the rightness and dominance of male liturgical language and male leadership acceptable to black women, even to those who identify with and are familiar with womanist theology? How is it that they do not notice the way in which gender and racial discourse is operative in liturgical music and prayer? Or if they do notice, how can they seem to ignore it? These women are not unusual, nor do they predominantly experience their churches negatively. So then why do they keep going to church? I am convinced that they go to church because their basic needs are being met in the context of community, in relationship with pastoral authority and liturgical experience. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes has suggested that a primary good of black religious experience is mental health, in that black religious experience provides a “regular setting for group therapy, and an objective mediator between the perceptions of experience of black people and the messages of the wider social system.”4 Mary B. McRae et al. similarly apply a social process perspective: “Black churches are viewed as social and formal organizations that are functioning systems . . . ”5 though not monolithic; in other words, black churches embody their social functions depending on a variety of factors such as size, location, and economic situations. McRae draws on group therapy theory to suggest that a church’s therapeutic value is manifested in its efficacy to foster group cohesion through the widening of the experience of family (by the use of terms such as mother of the church, brother, sister) and through establishing boundaries. The therapeutic function is also fostered via “supportive factors of hope, acceptance, universality, and altruism”. 6 Church is indeed an important site for forming women’s identities. Something good is happening for them because of their experience in their largely conservative faith communities, as Deidre Turner notes in her ethnographic research. Turner notes the split whereby black women tolerate the male-based power hierarchy of




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participants understood themselves to be equal to men and capable of wielding the power of influence, at the same time there is contentment with or tolerance for the current male dominant structure of their church. . . . While providing women a voice, even the development of womanist theology did not change the hierarchical structure of the black church or inhibit men’s assumption of their intellectual and physical superiority over women . . . Jacquelyn Grant believes that black male leadership in churches celebrates women as the “backbone” of the church in order to keep them in the “background.”7 The hegemonic domain of power’s significance lies in its ability to shape consciousness via the manipulation of ideas, images, symbols, and ideologies . . . By celebrating the supportive roles played by women, the effect for some may be backhanded encouragement to remain faithful in their current positions. Moving away from them would be seen as abandoning one’s post.8

Must black women leave their critical analytical skills outside the church in order to satisfy their needs for belonging? Turner, appropriately enough, locates the hegemonic domain and hierarchical power assumptions in men—but they are also evident in women. The women and men who sang “make me whiter than snow” and laughed at sexist jokes do so in service of the benefits, of which Turner writes. The ideas, symbols, and ideologies are part and parcel of the benefits and of the symbolic. Womanist theology cannot effect change in the assumptive views without addressing the psychology of the attachment that women and men individually and collectively have to those views. I contend that black women’s fear is not so much that they will “abandon their post,” but rather that any assertion to the contrary will constitute an abandonment of the self and will risk alienating them from the group. Other womanist theologians such as Marcia Riggs, Daphne Wiggins, and Delores S. Williams have already addressed these concerns. I am simply pushing us to recognize their psychological aspects.


black church leadership because of the benefits of participating in this environment:

Vignette: Dorothy’s Pastor: I Used to Admire Him Dorothy is a twenty-eight-year-old single black woman who grew up in a large midwestern city primarily with her mother. She had little to say about her father who lives in the south and has seldom made contact with her. Her mother was seventeen when she was impregnated,


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and her family was disappointed, angry, and ashamed of her. They sent her to live with an aunt in the north soon after learning of her pregnancy. Dorothy is her only child. Dorothy was an enthusiastic interviewee who expressed pleasure at the idea that her interview would be used to “help other black women.” Dorothy began with a laugh, which turned out to be a frequent response to painful memories and affects. I was told not to question the Bible. So I didn’t. I lost my faith in the Church when I was a teenager. I went to this Baptist church since I was little but when I was 14, my pastor tried to approach me. He used to pick me up for Sunday school and Church and helped with my scholarship for school. I mean I was really into the church. I read my Bible and prayed. Church helped me. I couldn’t believe it (when pastor made sexual advances). He watched me grow up. I used to really admire him. I rejected him and then he started putting me down from the pulpit. He would talk about me from the pulpit. But I told him, “Your whole teaching is wrong. You should focus on giving hope. Not putting people down.” My aunt went there and she just loved him. There was no way she could believe he would do something like that.

Socioeconomics, Mental Health, and the Church: Long-Term Implications Several factors affected Dorothy’s religious experience and mental health. She had grown up in a family that episodically was seriously lacking in appropriate care and support or interest in her “spiritual life,” or in other areas of her life. Her mother was a teen mom ill prepared to parent, and was out of the family home early. Soon after Dorothy was born, she was working full time. Her mother was struggling to pay rent and to meet basic economic needs. The church became a family community. When her pastor, a man she admired and trusted, began to make sexual advances, Dorothy was able to intervene on her own behalf even though her family ignored his inappropriate behavior. Dorothy’s assertiveness, her self-assertion, however, cost her. She lost the emotional support of the pastor and, ultimately, the church community. Her aunt who had protected her from her mother said, “He is the word of God.” The disappointment and loss of community took its toll on her self- esteem and contributed to a long-term diminishment of her interior resources for dealing with




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I was really down during this time. My self- esteem was really low. Well, for one thing, nobody believed people about the pastor. But the other thing, he was the most influential person in my life spiritually and religiously. Not my family because my mom—well, her behavior and she didn’t go to church back then or if she did she wouldn’t stay for the whole service. Back then, she was just abusive to me. She was young when she had me at seventeen. Her family sent her up here to the north to have me. Yeah, she was abusive. I had to get away and I finally left home and went to live with my aunt. Now, you cannot keep my mom out of church. It’s her place for socialization. It’s not about religion for her. I didn’t go to church just to socialize. I went for help. I was really depressed back then. I think that’s part of the reason I dropped out of college. I’m twenty- eight and just finishing my bachelor’s degree. I have one course left to complete, and I will get my Masters degree. I think those hard times have helped me in working with the patients at the hospital. I understand these kids.

Throughout her interview, Dorothy mentioned how impressed she was with the pastor, and that he has been the most influential person in her spiritual life. In many ways, her attachment to the pastor prior to his sexual advances has remained intact. It almost seemed that she had managed to split the pastor into two people. The first person is the fatherly figure who brought her to church and helped her study. The second person is the one who made explicit sexual advances, and her disappointment and anger is reserved for him. Clearly he was a needed psychological and spiritual resource for her in the absence of her father and the abuse suffered by her mother. I can only speculate, but it seems he was aware of his importance to her and even her need for the care he provided. Clearly he was less aware of his “need” of her admiration. When she rejected his sexual advances, he used the pulpit to attack her. And he had little regard for her loss of faith and the loss of her faith community. Dorothy’s response is to consciously reject him and any commitment to an organized religious institution. Rejecting religion allows her to protect herself from betrayal by spiritual leaders. Yet her longing for a pastor to admire and trust remains. That longing is a gendered longing—for a male pastor. There is no doubt that such a longing echoes her familial dynamics of having an estranged relationship with both her father and her mother. Thus the pastor’s role in her life had complex meaning.


stress. When this combined with being isolated from her family, it led to long-term depression.


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Dorothy’s situation is not so different from that of the women in the preceding vignettes. Each woman expresses a need for the male pastors and the faith communities, of which they are a part. Yet we can see that Dorothy’s adolescent religious and spiritual experiences, whether gratifying or disappointing, still exert influence over her life. This is particularly apparent in her lack of God language. As an adolescent, Dorothy was “into the Bible” and “prayed a lot.” These resources receded into the background after her pastor betrayed her, but they do not disappear altogether. This may mean that religion can become an active force in her life again, but such a resurgence will likely require an experience that is able to counteract her adolescent experiences.

Juanita: Still a Catholic but into My Spiritual Self Juanita is a forty-two-year-old African American married woman who grew up in a large working-class family. She has ten living siblings and one deceased brother; the family struggled to make ends meet. Education was very important to her family and her “parents made many sacrifices” so that they could go to college and “move up the ladder.” She grew up in a midwestern city in the south and is the middle daughter and the third- oldest of her living siblings. Her parents married as teenagers. Her mother was from Tennessee and her father was from Kentucky, and they had to go to Mississippi to get married and have their parents sign the license for them. At a young age Juanita learned of the intersection of racism, poverty, and the inadequacies and injustices of the healthcare system. She had a brother who died of polio when he was still a toddler, an event that haunts the family still today: It’s kind of a sad situation. He could have been saved, but he was black and at the time my parents were—well, my father was married to his job. My mother had him in Tennessee. It’s obvious that he was not well. Even though the doctor was a nice person, he worked within a racist system so, well, if that meant black patients died. I think my mother and father probably realized that he could have been saved.



Juanita brought to our conversation a sense of humor and a real immediacy of affect. When she recalled an event, she would fluctuate between tenses, and the tenor of her voice would change. She would become excited, sad, or angry, as if the past permeated the present.


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She had an affective openness and availability that made managing and respecting the time agreement an important factor during our conversations. Her family’s religious affiliations included Protestant denominations such as United Methodism, African Methodist Episcopal, a sanctified church, and finally Roman Catholicism. She was in grade school when the family converted to Catholicism. The decision to become Catholic was somewhat related to the educational opportunities and the possibility for upward mobility. Juanita reported on several occasions that her father was “dissatisfied with the public school system. He felt we could have been challenged more. He thought they were not really trying to educate us.” He hoped that a Catholic education would be a means for upward mobility for his children, and this is what Catholic schools in poor and working- class communities had provided for some time. My mother was in the choir at the AME church and I think my father was not as involved in the Protestant church as he was once we converted. Cause he, my father looks like James Earl Jones and I mean he looks just like him and sounds like him. So if people hear his voice—so resonant and booming, of course, you know these Catholic people you know they’re always reaching for people and asking them to volunteer for stuff. So the first thing they asked him to do was to read. So I think that was the first thing he did. So that was what he was doing and then my mother was not really involved with the choir in the Catholic Church. It was totally different because, I mean, when I went to mass at the Catholic Church for the first time, mass was sitting and standing, sitting and standing. And everything was still in Latin. And there weren’t that many black Catholics around. My father’s mother and father were very religious in the church sense. My paternal grandmother was the church organist and my paternal grandfather was very involved in the church. Now, my mother’s father was very religious and her mother used to be religious. The thing was, my grandfather, my mother’s father moved out and left and there were thirteen kids in the house. And he was religious. So my mother’s mother, you know, I think the church things sort of wearied her. She kind of thought there was no way no real God would let a man walk out on his wife and thirteen kids.


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You know it’s not to say that she doesn’t believe in God, I think she does. But she’s got some really, really, warped ideas about religion and God. She still believes but she is brainwashed—that it is the blacks’ destiny to suffer cause we are black and that God generally smiles on white people and not black people and that we are black because we


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did something wrong and this is punishment of our lives. And maybe if we get it right this time we might be rewarded and come back as a white person. I mean it’s really sad listening to her talk, especially when you realize this is a woman who is an avid reader; she’s a news junkie. Well, the older she gets I’ve noticed she’s been watching TV more and reading less. It is just sad to hear her talk about being black with her idea of God.

St. Rita’s Aspirancy Juanita’s religious experience was profoundly affected by the Catholic educational system. It was also a site for one the most painful experiences related to race and culture. Race, religion, and gender converged throughout Juanita’s life, but it was particularly an event during her freshman year of high school that profoundly affected her. After attending Little Flower Catholic school for grammar and middle school, Juanita decided she wanted to attend the “Sisters of St. Ritas” aspirancy high school. The aspirancy was a boarding school for adolescent girls who think they may join the Catholic community of sisters. This aspirancy was located in a rural midwestern town that was “99 percent white” and far different from the diversity Juanita had previously experienced. The idea that the setting and cultural milieu might be quite a different experience for her seems not to have been a conscious factor in her considerations. This was partly because she had an older sister who had attended this school and thrived. Juanita’s experience was entirely different. Her story follows.

Adolescent Culture Shock on the Way to the Convent and Back So we went to the catechism and then we were baptized and I think that I was baptized and made my First Communion at the same time, I’m not sure. So that’s what I did and then went to Little Flower for grammar school and tried to go to St. Rita Catholic high school but . . . well, they asked me to leave.



I went to St. Rita and it was a culture shock. I was a freshman in high school. My sister had graduated from there and knew the sisters and they just thought she was just a wonderful person and she always wanted to be a nun. Actually later on she said she probably just wanted to wear a habit. Because we had this theater in our grammar school . . . I


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But it was a culture shock for me coming from a predominantly black neighborhood. I would say 99.9 percent of the people in my neighborhood were black. I do remember some Asians and occasionally some white kids in the school but they were obviously grossly outnumbered by blacks. So I went to St. Rita’s where my sister was the first black person in the aspirancy and it didn’t seem to faze her. You know, we noticed that she kind of talked funny when she came back home for the summer but usually by July or August she was herself again.

Her sister’s return to herself seemed to coalesce around her not “sounding white” and not being too religious and nunlike. Juanita’s experience of her sister’s transformation into a pre-nun and back stimulated both a disdain and envy, and this contributed, I think, to her misguided decision to go to the aspirancy. Well, I was there from probably August through the first semester, which would be like Christmas. It was just too much of a culture shock. The people were nice and everything but I guess the things that made it hard was even though it was a boarding school environment, we actually went to a co- ed school in town. So from 7:30 until 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon we were able to interact in a co- ed situation, and then suddenly at 4:00 our lives changed and I hated that. It was so stupid and plus here I was 14 years old and my mother had all these little mini-skirts that she got for me. But we had to wear uniforms—black bottoms, white tops. And the nuns were like “You can’t wear this.” I said why not? “ ’Cause they’re too short and people might get the wrong idea.” I . . . couldn’t imagine why anybody would get the wrong idea about me. So anyway, this nun took what had to be the heaviest itchiest wool in the world and made these skirts for me. So what I would do was I would get on the school bus with that wool skirt on and by the time I got to school, I would just ball it up and put it under my seat and figured when I got back home I would just put it back on. I guess I didn’t think that through for the sisters also taught at the school and somebody would see me and go back and tell. So that was the kind of stuff that didn’t fit well.


don’t know what the day was called but one day out of the year we would dress up, certain kids would dress up like nuns and priests. I wanted to do that too.

The sisters asked me to leave the aspirancy at the end of the semester. Actually Sister Angeline, who was just mean, told me. I think what happened was initially, you know how people just rub each other the wrong way. And I don’t think I ever . . . maybe that was the first situation I was ever in where someone really disliked me and that was very different for


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So we (a friend she met in the aspirancy) did stuff . . . to her. She punished me once. We lived in a three-story building and she said, “I want you to strip all these floors and the stairs and mop and wax them.” She said, “Oh you can do it and you’d better be finished by such and such time or you’re not going to eat or whatever.” So I got the mop wet and then I did things like put water on the floor, strategically, to make it look like I was working. And I had seen this case of Pledge furniture polish. So I just took this Pledge and I used the whole case and put Pledge all over the floor. People were slipping and sliding like mad. She said, “You did that on purpose and could have killed one of the older nuns.” Even the janitor felt sorry for me. He tried to do the job for me. But Sister Angeline said, “you better not get caught talking to her.” Little things like that made me mad. It was actually a very nice school. I didn’t realize until after the fact that people gave me special treatment because I was black. I guess if I had, maybe I would have taken advantage of it in a more positive way. . . . I think the kids had been read the riot act, that they were not to be mean, and that they were to be nice. So it was that kind of thing. I was taking home economics class and I noticed that I was always given the best sewing machine, even if I didn’t, like, come the earliest—that kind of thing. I was never really good in some of those sports because there were things you wouldn’t do in the city; archery—oh please. So they always took care to make sure that I didn’t break my thumb. They were always watching. I always felt like whatever I was doing I was getting private lessons or private attention. I was in band and not really practicing. You know, kind of like—“Well, you can do better,” where with the other kids they would yell at them and tell them, “You’re kicked out of band” and all of this other kind of stuff. I don’t know. I just felt that they really, the community really bent over backwards to make us feel at home. I considered myself to be getting away from my parents. Oh no, it never even occurred to me (to become a nun). I think my father knew it. He didn’t really care. You know, nobody ever pressured me. Even there, within the aspirancy, with the exception of a regular clear schedule and a few other things, there was no real pressure. Actually to my adult recollection, it was pretty normal but to a fourteen-year-old it was a drag.


me ‘cause I was always an honor student and people liked me. That was just very hard to deal with. Not to mention that, you know, I was away from home and had started my period and all this other kind of stuff and it was like I thought she could have been a nicer person.

Juanita’s struggle to negotiate her adolescent development, sexuality, her need for self- expression, combined with the loss of a familiar black cultural context that could have supported her and offered her


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parameters for this developmental phase, proved too much for her. It also proved too much for the nuns who had a template of what a black aspirant should be, which was based on Juanita’s sister. During the interview, it was clear that Juanita was deeply pained by her experience and that she still struggled with feelings of anger and sadness related to her sense of having lost some opportunity. The nature of the loss was not clear to her partly because during her experience she both felt she was treated as being special and that she was misunderstood. School was therefore both a “nice place” and a “drag.” She wanted to acquire what her sister had acquired—a sense of belonging and being admired. She was living in a rural white community, and in a white religious community, where she was being educated and socialized to be like a white aspirant (and eventually a sister). She mostly felt the drag of it all.

Working On My Spiritual Self Sometimes I identify myself as a Catholic, but that’s not to say that the Vatican’s idea of Catholic is what I mean. I think I like the universal definition of catholic. People have accused me of being a cafeteria Catholic. Well, that’s fine. I don’t see anything wrong with that. If I feel that there is something in the Baptist church or in a sanctified setting that speaks more to me, good; go wherever you feel it is giving you something. But it’s not like I would become a member of one of those places. You might have a particular desire on a particular Sunday. In my current state of mind, I can’t see myself ever being a member of any church unless maybe if I had kids. I probably would do it for them. Just to have some structure in their lives so that they can have one religion or one church. Even if it turns out that it becomes a point of departure for them. I think organized religion is good in the sense that it helps provide stability. So I did describe myself as a Catholic, but when it comes to being religious, I think that religion and church can be too far apart. I know, for me personally, I have not found a church that I would attend on a weekly basis. There is just too much of the politics, too much nonsense, too much material stuff going on. My older sister has a really good handle on it. She says the real Christians are out here every day from day to day, minute to minute, striving to be Christians, and all those others are hair-raising devils that go to church every Sunday and show off their clothes and their cars and blah blah blah.


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I think I am probably much more religious and closer to feeling—to realizing my spirituality—being away from church. Well, I sort of have this philosophy that, you know, human beings living in the environment that we are in now, in this universe, are put here to sort of work through our imperfections and, as we age, hopefully get better and closer to God and everything. I think my perfect spiritual self is a person who can truly say that I love all people. Right now, I can’t say that, but that’s what I want my spiritual self to be.

Implications of Women’s Lived Experiences for Womanist Practical Theology These vignettes do not fully reveal these women’s lives. Vignettes never do. However, they raise important questions for womanist practical theology. Both these women’s development was strongly influenced by their active participation in religious life and by disruptive religious experiences related to those settings. These disruptive events, in spite of the years of positive experiences, took the form of developmental arrests. For Dorothy, talking about her pastor’s sexual advances invoked the original anger and longing for their former pastoral relationship. She used past and present tenses when she said “I admired him” and, when describing him as the most influential person for her spiritually, “I admire him.” At the time Dorothy was interviewed, she was single and had never had a relationship in which she could actually “love and trust” the man. Given that her pastor was the first man she trusted, it stands to reason that her psychosexual-relational sense, which was intertwined with the religious, was affected as well. It is possible that Dorothy’s longing to return to her prior relationship with her pastor, unencumbered by the imposition of his sexuality, expresses her longing to move forward in her relational life. Juanita’s experience of culture shock and being expelled from the aspirancy occurred during an important time of her psychosexual development. Consequently, that nuns stifled any attempt she made at expressing her adolescent sexuality (for example, by wearing short skirts, or by being outspoken) was particularly perturbing to her. The attempt to attend the school and to be like her older sister who had


I’ve been meditating more. I was in a car accident last week. It was a four- car pileup. Actually, it was a pretty serious car accident. Luckily everyone walked away. But at the time of the accident, I was meditating. And I’m glad I was, because I was very relaxed.


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thrived there was a disappointment. During her interview, Juanita fluctuated between knowing that racism and a form of antisexuality were implicated by her experience and feeling a sense of loss around the experience. There was something never named that Juanita wanted from living with the sisters. As an adult she could appreciate that “they bent over backwards” to make her more comfortable, but in so doing she also felt different and alienated. The “mean nun” came to represent her negative experiences and the “nice bending over backwards” students and teachers represented her positive experiences. What is clear is that Juanita was deeply disappointed by her dismissal. She did not experience relief upon her return to her familial neighborhood. The past permeated the present in her religious reflections. Unlike Dorothy, however, Juanita found her way back into active participation in the church. Most of her adult life has been as a lay leader, choir director, and volunteer in a black Catholic church. One of the possible historical factors that may have made it possible for Juanita to recover a sense of connection to her Catholic identity is the emergence of the black Catholic liturgical movement. Juanita was familiar with and benefited from the work of such liturgists as Clarence Rivers, who recognized that for many black Catholics the liturgy had little to do with their emotional, political, and social lives.9 Black Catholicism was in a new and exciting phase in its history, and, as an adult, Juanita was able to benefit from it. In Rivers’ work, and Juanita’s, music bridged the gap between worship and black life, and this was fulfilling for a long time. Only recently has Juanita gradually sought out forms of spiritual practices that are not dependent on church involvement. Her identity as a catholic rather than Catholic emerged out of her meditation practices, and these seem to have been part of an adult spiritual formation process. She has not entirely rejected the church, but neither is she confined to its understanding of spiritual or Christian identity. These interviews push us to ask, first, what is the state of womanist practical theology in light of the questions related to the following: First, social location of black women in church and society:


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A. What does womanist practical theology have to say about gender, race, and power in the black church? B. How does womanist practical theology both account for black women who find that the church offers something good and transformative as well as those who have closed the door to church?


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Second, the theological categories that are embedded in these interviews and vignettes: A. How does womanist practical theology discuss the structural, relational, spiritual, and intrapsychic dimensions of sin? And closely related, how does womanist practical theology understand the formation and malformation of the self theologically? B. How does womanist practical theology understand reconciliation in light of these women’s experiences? For instance, what does reconciliation mean and look like for Dorothy who has experienced such betrayal in the black church? C. How does womanist practical theology understand spirituality in light of someone like Juanita who is Catholic but not in the Roman way, and who draws on a variety of “spiritualities” to define her religious self? D. How does womanist practical theology understand authority, power, and role from an integrated theological, spiritual, and psychological perspective? E. How does womanist practical theology understand the church’s role in the formation and deformation of the self?

These questions suggest that womanist practical theology needs to articulate a womanist theology that is psychological and one that will help us understand and explain the complexity of black women’s religious and social experiences. In the next chapter we will examine the state of womanist practical theology and its psychology.


C. How does womanist practical theology account for the lingering attachment to liturgical practices that seem to reveal a flawed theological anthropology whereby some black men and women benefit from or settle for a view of humanity that diminishes the image of black women?


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The Current Shape of Womanist Practical Theology

You’ve got this [Black] culture that empowers you as a unit in the universe and places you and makes you know you are a child of the universe . . . When the culture is strong, you’ve got this consistency where Black people can grow up in these places with this voice just resonating about our specialness in the universe. And I always say you’re in trouble if you get too far away from that core that grounds you. —Bernice Johnson Reagon

Paradigm Shift: Pastoral Theology to Womanist Pastoral Theologies Womanist pastoral theology developed out of womanist theology and ethics and from reflection on the practices of care and counseling. Womanist theologians’ concerns differ significantly from the concerns of those engaged in the contemporary discourse on practical theology—where questions such as, is this a theology? or, what are the parameters of the field? are not framing their work. As a result, a map of the development of womanist practical theology reveals the bridges between the overlapping terms, womanist practical theology, pastoral theology, womanist theology and ethics, and womanist practices of ministry. This development, however, is undernourished, as evidenced by the fact that Carroll Watkins Ali’s 1999 Survival and Liberation: Pastoral Theology in African American Contexts is the only full-length text integrating a womanist perspective in pastoral theology. That said, we can rightly ask if womanist theology does indeed have a pastoral


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theology. Admittedly, locating womanist theologians’ work in the discrete categories of “practical” or “pastoral,” is not as straightforward as one might expect. Yet, I think a womanist practical or pastoral theology can be excavated from womanist theological thought more broadly; in fact, womanist pastoral theology is central to the concerns of womanist theologies. Even so, there is a problem of representation in terms of the discipline and field of practical theology. In her 2005 book entitled Introducing Womanist Theology, Stephanie Mitchem addresses pastoral theology in her final chapter with the observation that “Pastoral theology, also called ‘practical’ theology, is sometimes viewed as less important than theoretical constructions. However, womanist theology is serious about ensuring that practice and theory are connected.”1 She further notes that womanist theologians and ethicists are also practitioners in the various practices of ministry. It is, of course, an error to suggest that practical theology is not theoretical, and that this project as well as others I reference in this chapter will correct that perception. Specifically, Carroll Watkins Ali cited a different problem: “The practice of ministry needs to be responsible and accountable to the theological theory. Unfortunately, in reality it appears that all too often, once the theoretical work is done and the time comes to put the theory into praxis, . . . ‘Easier said than done’ seems to rule. The result is praxis that usually falls short of intended goals.”2 Current womanist theology and ethics demonstrate the relationship between womanist scholarship and practice. Womanist thought as appropriated by pastoral theologians aims to name the cultural dislocation of black experience and black modes of social and personal transformation and healing. The theological commitments of womanist theology and ethics are, however, most often a background and secondary influence in these works rather than a primary and explicit contribution. Theoretically they focus on the cultural impact of racism and sexism as well as the social aspect of personal pain.

An Afrocentric Womanist Perspective In the twenty-five years since womanist theology first emerged, a plethora of significant works has addressed its theological themes, ethical commitments, and specifically its practical theological concerns. Womanist pastoral and practical theology are not strongly represented in the academy, and, to date, Carroll Watkins Ali’s 1999 book Survival and Liberation: Pastoral Theology in African


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American Context is the only pastoral theology book written by a womanist scholar. In this work she redefines pastoral theology “as the theological reflection on the experience of the cultural context as relevant for strategic pastoral caregiving in the context of ministry.”3 In so defining pastoral theology, she significantly critiqued the prevailing understanding of pastoral theology, which lacked a critical analysis of race, gender, and class—and, I would add, sexuality. While her title does not explicitly call her work a “womanist” pastoral theology but rather a contextual theology emerging in the African American context, yet by focusing on “history from the perspective of Black women,” on “Black women’s resistance,” and on “the contemporary African American Context,” her method and theological content makes it clear that hers is a womanist project. Ali draws on James Cone and his approach to understanding black experience and black history, including “black sermon, prayer, song and story,”4 and, like Cone, Ali persistently grounds her work in black experience, black suffering, black religious and church experience, and black resistance to oppressive social structures. It is following womanist theologians, and Jacquelyn Grant in particular, that Ali critiques Cone’s limited focus on gender, sexism, black experience, and black psychology, observing that “it is instructive to note that although Grant’s intent is to focus in Black theology the experience of Black women, she appears to indirectly touch on psychological issues connected with the oppression of Blacks in general.”5 Ali brilliantly observes that Grant understands sexism in black theology and among black male theologians to be an uncritical and wholesale acceptance of white norms and values, an acceptance that, however, bolsters their self-esteem.6 So why is their identification with the norms and values that have oppressed black men and black women so compelling? Certainly black psychologies are useful, but they lack a theory to explain the psychic experience of black Americans. Ali gives significant attention to the work of black pastoral theologian Lee Butler whose dissertation and later works critique, appropriate, revise, and eventually reject Western psychodynamic theories as too ethnocentric and deterministic to appreciate and explain the worldview and experiences of black Americans. While sympathetic to Butler’s model, she rejects it because it “serves more as a bridge to traditional psychology than a corrective.”7 She insists, like other Afrocentrists, that African Americans are first African before American and, therefore, require a psychology that emerges from an Afrocentric philosophy that places African American’s pre-slavery history and worldview in


Shape of Womanist Practical Theology


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the forefront of an African American model of pastoral theology.8 This turn toward the pre-slavery worldview is an attempt to reclaim an idealized history of black experience before the trauma of enslavement; however, it assumes that such a worldview is recoverable and can serve as a corrective today. And it assumes that a psychodynamic approach must be rejected in order to achieve this. In my view, however, Ali is not as clear as she could have been about what is too ethnocentric about Western psychology to make it unusable for a black pastoral theology. Nor is it apparent that she understands how four hundred years in the West has affected African American’s worldview and psychology. Ali’s seemingly straightforward acceptance raises several questions for me: How does an Afrocentric model address inner world experiences that are not solely the result of a racist and oppressive social context? While a highly racialized context is everywhere, not all African Americans have the same experiences, and one must therefore expect there to be different psychic experiences among this cohort. Or, what constitutes an Afrocentric model of pastoral care and pastoral counseling? What theological categories, questions, and concerns are embedded in such a model? And what sort of clinical theory or theology of change underlies such a model? Ali’s attention is specifically concerned with the broader black American experience and black women’s place within it. She recognizes that poverty and economics negatively affect the quality of black women’s and men’s lives, and that their social location, in turn, directly affects the welfare of black children. In short, poverty and other social factors shape and misshape the psyche and the society. Ali seeks to develop “new strategies for the survival and liberation of African Americans that strengthen and heal the black psyche and help transform American society as well.”9 Employing a womanist sensibility, her methodology begins with an African American women’s narrative as a means to expose the larger contextual issues related to survival and liberation. Ali’s work is a response to the absence of African American women’s communal experience in the pastoral theologies preceding the publication of her work in 1999, as well as a response to pastoral theology’s reliance on psychological models that focus on the individual and assume an unacknowledged cultural monopoly where the whiteness of experience and maleness of the pastoral theologian is normative. Critiques like hers, however, changed little and continued “to rely on limited illustrations of persons . . . or clinical settings rather than communal settings of the society. . . . They


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do not do justice to the critical issues of African American women’s culture.”10 She insists on a pastoral theology that emerges out of the African American history, one in which the commitment to doing theology “contextually, communally, and concretely”11 must take seriously African American women’s particularity. As she demonstrates throughout the book, dialogue with both black Liberation and womanist theologies is crucial for the paradigm shift she is advancing. In a critique and reversal of Seward Hiltner’s understanding of the relationship between “operation-centered theology and logic- centered theology, this book asserts that pastoral theology in the African American context should serve as a link to African American theology. That is, pastoral theology in the African American context should provide the link to the logic- centered theologies of Black liberation theology and womanist theology because of their conceptual understandings of African American experience.”12 Furthermore, Ali asserts that this paradigm shift recognizes the ethical claims and responsibilities of an African American pastoral theology, and brings with it implications for how a community embodies and speaks of God and what God language it uses. Interestingly, Ali links her theology and a psychoanalytic psychology in her claim that black liberation theology, with its focus on blackness and freedom, is necessary to encourage black people to imagine God as black like them, and, as a result of that shift in their self-esteem, to feel empowered. Ali would say this shift is not primarily individual but contextual and communal. This is the gift of her work and, I believe, the place of our struggle. What do we mean when we want the community to imagine together a black God so that something psychological happens for the community? Can black psychology explain the intrapsychic shifts that have to take place for a group to make this kind of shift, and can a focus primarily on the communal reality simultaneously also address the individual psychic experience?

Communality and Forms of Womanist Care The important place of the communal context of African American women’s experience is also central in womanist perspectives on pastoral practices of care, such as pastoral counseling and chaplaincy. Marsha Foster Boyd defines “WomanistCare” as the “intentional process of care giving and care receiving by African American women. It is the African American woman finding her place and her voice in this world. It is the bold expression of that woman caring circle . . . in this




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process, the focus is on holistic care of body, mind and spirit in order that healing and transformation occur for African American women and their circles of influence.”13 While she agrees with a definition of pastoral theology as “the practical theological discipline concerned with the theory and practice of pastoral care and counseling,”14 she challenges the prevailing images of pastoral caregiver. Boyd tells of how she and other African American women in the pastoral care professions gathered in 1991 for a conference and dialogue that was published as Womanistcare: How to Tend the Souls of Women. What emerged from their discussions was that they found the traditional images of pastors and pastoral caregivers, as wounded healers and shepherds of a flock, offensive and not true to the experiences of black women pastoral caregivers. Instead, this group accepted “Cecelia Williams Bryant’s image of empowered cojourner” because it, unlike “wounded healer shifted the emphasis from ongoing and continued woundedness”15 to one that focuses on the realization that “envisions oneself as an empowered cojourner, one that understands through one’s life, through one’s hurts, through one’s victories, one has power to cojourn with others.” Furthermore, the cojourner image is understood as a time-specified relationship: “Cojourners are spiritual companions brought together on a common path for a particular time . . . (who) encourage us to work and walk together . . . and as we work and walk together, our community, our family, and ourselves as individuals are to be transformed.”16 In this model of pastoral caregiving, one goal of pastoral care is to “help women in both the church and the classroom forge and maintain healthy images. Thus, conversation between the academic world and the world of the church is vital.”17 Boyd identifies five essential features18 of womanistcare as explained here. (1) Communication, encompassing the verbal and nonverbal, written, sung, and performed, of the cultural and spiritual notions of healing. She critiques the limitations of the 45–50-minute psychotherapy session model prevalent in much of the pastoral theologies of the 1990s and earlier. However, she does not go so far as to rule out psychotherapy as a valid means for achieving African American’s healing but notes that it is “but one means for African American women to communicate their issues and stories.” She is taking issue both with psychodynamic models that limit communication to that which is made verbal and with the idea that only trained professionals are uniquely fit to determine the nature of healing and the process necessary for healing. Her work, in fact, predates much of the current


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dialogue in psychoanalytic circles concerning power and mutuality in relationships of healing and the place of the care receivers’ perspective. “WomanistCare enables African American women to take their healing into their own hands” in the context of supportive groups of other black women. (2) “Affirmation, validating, and affirming the stories and places of African American women.” (3) Confrontation between and among African American women and, as a result, confrontation of oppressive social structures. (4) Accountability for “walking the walk, talking the talk.” (5) Healing by helping one another. But this healing has a cumulative benefit because it involves a “dual transformation that takes place for the African American women, in that as an individual woman is transformed, she in turn works to transform each circle in which she has influence.”19 An important feature of Boyd’s work is her theological reflection on theological categories in light of a womanist pastoral care. Specifically, her article “Theological Implications of WomanistCare” considers (1) the epistemological significance of black women’s collective experience; (2) womanist hermeneutical and reading approaches to the Bible; (3) and the meaning of the revelation of Jesus in womanistcare with special attention to the development of a contextual Christology. This dialogue with womanist theology is important for womanist pastoral theologians, but it is also imperative that womanist theologians “continue to dialogue with womanist pastoral counselors and pastoral caregivers in order to insure the continued development of an authentic, viable, holistic womanist pastoral psychology.”20 Boyd is just such a practical theologian for whom theological categories are an inextricable part of her practical theology. Her call to womanist theologians and pastoral theologians to explicitly engage one another in their work is an important critical reading of womanist theologizing. Homiletician Theresa Fry Brown’s work echoes Ali’s focus on basic survival, and on the necessity of dialogue between the academy and women outside the academy. Black women who survive outside the academy responded to her attempts to teach them womanist theology with the critique: “You keep talking about finding your own voice; we can’t even breathe!”21 Brown’s work embodies a self- critical reflection required in a womanist approach. She recognized that her conversations about womanist theology with black women outside the academy required a shift in epistemological focus from the womanist in the academy to “regular” struggling and poor black women in the broader community. In this respect her work embodies both Watkins




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Ali theoretical and pastoral commitments and Boyd’s approach that pushes for continuing and widened conversations between black women. Brown insists that the locus of transformation is the group context. Here small dialogue groups are able to openly discuss “African American women’s social, theological, occupational, psychological, and health concerns”22 and engage in family ethnography as well as black women’s religious materials.23 This approach created a space for theological reflection that addressed the personal, familial, and communal, and one that emphasized mutuality, rather than a hierarchical model, to pastoral care. The need for womanists to attend to mutuality is part of the critique Brown levies against womanist theologians. Brown both critiques and challenges womanist theology to secure its own survival while speaking womanist theology in language used by everyday black women who live day to day “avoiding asphyxiation.” Brown also brings a critical self-reflective stance by challenging the ways in which womanists/womanist theology contribute to “asphyxiating” black women who are already on the margins even of the black community. She urges womanists to hear these silenced voices and convert them into speech, reminding us of Barbara Omalade’s powerful critique of black women who have turned a blind eye to those different from them: “They forgot the griot-historians that came before them. They omitted the blood of their sister’s abortions, their sister lesbian lovers, the gelelapa wrapped women . . . The academy had successfully trained Black women against herself and her sisters.”24 Such a selfreflective stance here is absolutely critical for a womanist practical theology and a necessary movement in the creation and assessment of womanist practices of care. We have an example of hearing the voices of black women who are located outside the privileges of the academy in Brown’s description of the Sisters Working Encouraging Empowering Together—SWEET—program. Brown’s transformation model SWEET began in 1988 in a local church with forty African American women, and by 1994 it had risen in membership to almost six hundred. The program utilized an inductive pedagogy method, required the women to engage in family networking, and created space for an intergenerational dialogue. One of the most creative aspects of this womanist community strategy was an ethnographic project in which members did a social analysis on their family sisters. This process not only helped women to develop a deeper understanding of the lives of the women in their families but also to appreciate how previous generational dynamics fueled their


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own choices and circumstances. The resulting sister stories grasped the social contexts framing each woman’s experience. Each woman also chose a historically significant figure to “interview” in terms of her legacy for the reader and the contemporary black woman. Brown describes the SWEET program as a process of “ ‘sistering’ each other.” Her view, in keeping with Ali’s theoretical and praxis commitments and Boyd’s practical theology, locates transformation in mutuality, dialogue, and in exposure to depictions of black women and life, other than those based on racist negative representations of blackness. Self-empowerment and transformation is for Brown a process that is located in community. Though not explicitly stated and theorized, Brown’s work carries an implicit psychology of the black woman’s self. She argues that the defining moment is an individual’s response “to a stimulus or situation. When one becomes ‘sick and tired’ of being ‘sick and tired’ one has the choice of staying, leaving or working to effect change.”25 Her model assumes an intrapsychic dimension at the point that “our sisters seek to avoid asphyxiation, attempt to speak, try to empty themselves of old tapes, old pains, old wounds, old stuff that blocks the pathway to liberation.”26 Though Brown and the SWEET program encourage reflection—certainly a component if authentic and lasting change is to take place—even though they require dialogue with other sisters and with the past, to my mind, the question is how such engagement frees one from revisiting old messages and wounds that block liberation or, even more essentially, what it is about those parts of one’s past that make them persist so.

The Cultural, Communal, and Psychoanalytic Turns More recent articles in pastoral theology representing womanist perspectives continue this focus on the communal and express the need for a pastoral theology and model of care that take the social as an important starting place. In that vein, Beverly Wallace in “A Womanist Legacy of Trauma, Grief and Loss: Reframing the Notion of the Strong Black Woman Icon”27 critique the “strong black woman icon” as a culturally imposed “controlling image” that is adopted in the service of black women’s cultural oppression by one generation after the next. 28 Citing black feminist Patricia Hill Collins, black psychodynamic feminist and psychotherapist Leslie Jackson, as well as




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womanist pastoral care theologian Teresa Snorton, Wallace supports the point that the “controlling icons . . . become a part and parcel of black women’s socialization process, and has ramifications for black women’s emotional life and ways of being intimate.”29 Wallace notes that the image is pervasive, “systemic,” and detrimental to black women’s “emotional well-being,”30 and is best remedied by intrapsychic healing processes that allow black women to discuss, regardless, their experience of this cultural expectation of strength and to “redefine the ideology of the strong black woman.”31 Yet Wallace never directly explains how the cultural expectation becomes a part of black women’s self-understanding and psyche or how discussing it changes experience and helps black women redefine this ideology internally and embody the said change in terms of interpersonal relationships, self-understanding, and religious experience. So, while her cultural analysis of this suffocating “icon” is a much-needed contribution to understanding pastoral care of African American women, her work would benefit from an explicit theology and greater clarity concerning the relationship of the pastoral theologian to this enterprise. Finally, Wallace points us in the direction of a psychoanalytic perspective; unfortunately, she does not articulate a critical reading of such a psychoanalytic perspective. Despite the fact that her article is not a psychoanalytic enterprise, if psychoanalytic theories are going to be employed in womanist perspectives, we need a robust discussion of the theories and how appropriate and problematic they are for use with black women. In chapter 5 we will consider the various uses of psychoanalytic theories in black thought, but now we turn to the work of the three womanist pastoral theologians who use psychoanalytic theory extensively: Carolyn McCrary, Phillis Sheppard, and Elizabeth Walker. McCrary’s work is a critique of the Western pejorative depiction of dependency, and she seeks in its place to articulate “A Womanist kind of Interdependence”32 —though she does not integrate specific womanist perspectives in the paper. However, womanist values such as the emphasis on relationality and community are inherent in her perspective. Her compelling psychoanalytically and theologically nuanced discussion advances the work toward a womanist practical theology in three ways. First, her work has an emphasis on interdependence as the normative value in human development, and therefore on the aim of pastoral counseling. Second, it implicitly critiques the normative value of independence in Freudian and Ego Psychological models of development and treatment. Third, by advancing interdependence as


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a value in human relationships, she signifies a theological anthropology that makes being in relationship a hallmark of human creation. Her article was groundbreaking in 1990 and remains an important dialogue partner in the field because of its dialogue with theology and psychoanalysis. Her warning that we have a tendency to “push independence as a goal rather than as a transitional state of being to be achieved on the road to Interdependence”33 remains valid. We find in this road to interdependency a caveat—a warning of sorts—that a critical cultural analysis of what troubles African Americans cannot be the only source for analysis. McCrary reminds us that psychological stress experienced by African Americans comes from a variety of sources and “it is important for us to note that though African Americans do suffer psychologically as well as in other ways, because of racism and sexism in the United States, such oppression is not the only catalyst for psychological fragmentation . . . nor would the removal of such oppression be the only balm that would heal the sin sick soul.”34 The experiences of oppression are the warp and woof of life, and an insidious indwelling of the self. In this same article, McCrary brings the black theologian/mystic Howard Thurman into dialogue with W.R.D. Fairbairn’s Object Relations theory. She appropriates Thurman’s Theology of Community for three reasons: (1) Thurman has struggled to articulate the complexities of Community and the tendency toward “whole-making.” Thurman’s ability to grapple with the tensions between the needs of the individual and the “possibilities of the group as a whole” mirrors McCrary’s convictions but also challenges the other scholars’ near total focus on the individual and intrapsychic. Thurman’s concern for the transformation of the social domain is a primary matter, yet he insists that individual transformation precedes it. (2) Thurman’s theology calls for the “development of a proper identity” with the facilitative input of primary caregivers and the larger society. Most important, Thurman insists that ultimate meaning, direction, and identity are fostered through religious experiences involving a mystical engagement with God. Thus, it is fair to assume that those who come for pastoral counseling come with some anxiety about the nature of a helping relationship, and about developing a dependency on the relationship. (3) And finally, Thurman emphasizes the need for reconciliation, the “rejoining of self to God, of self to others, and self to self.”35 Ever mindful of her pastoral and theological identity, it is only after she has articulated her theological commitment that she takes up the contribution of psychoanalysis.




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Object Relations theory is concerned with the way an individual takes in aspects of her early relational environment. This includes the variety of ways caregivers’ care is experienced and taken in as a part of the self. If, for instance, the early environment fluctuates between being satisfying and depriving. It is likely that the self and others will be, in later life, configured to reflect this experience. McCrary turns to W.R.D. Fairbairn for his language and process of internalization because it offers a “language and method for discussing the psychological process of internalization that comes as a result of acceptance, love, nurture, rejection and deprivation.”36 McCrary’s concerns with community and relationality finds, in Fairbairn’s theory, a means for linking the social and intrapsychic. Here, I attend only to two of her responses to his work: (1) Fairbairn rejected Freud’s drive theory of personality development in favor of the relational/structural model;37 (2) and Fairbairn reclaimed the capacity for dependency as the “essential quality by which relationships are distinguished.”38 Through a person’s development, this dependency, however, is transformed into the capacity for interdependence. “Dependency is no longer a bad word for mature relationships. In fact, mature dependency is the goal of development in Fairbairn’s theory.”39 McCrary suggests that the reclaimed value of dependency and relationality has particular implications for African Americans “in that the denotation and connotation of the ‘dependent person’ has been broadened and that being intimately and consciously related in a needful way to someone all one’s life is a natural . . . This attitude and the concomitant values of reciprocity and sharing fit better, in a foundational way, into the African American world view and its value system which reflects Interdependence as a positive way of living.”40 In my view, McCrary offers a womanist corrective to the much discussed stereotyped and cultural role expectation that present black women as strong, invincible, and independent. In so doing, she redefines the healthy as one who is relational, involved, and interdependent. Where McCrary makes interdependency the hallmark of a womanist view of psychological health, she also rethinks psychopathology. Again, with an eye on the relational, she turns to Fairbairn’s discussion of splitting as an aspect of psychopathology. In short, splitting is the process whereby affect, objects (people), and self are experienced in opposing valences. People are either good or bad, gratifying or depriving, exciting (life inducing) or rejecting (deadening). In this model, the object is split into two (or more) internal experiences


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where one side of the object is good or satisfying and the other side is bad or depriving and rejecting. These are as McCrary wants to make conscious and explicit, and in making intrapsychic processes conscious, a reconciliation of the split begins to take place. It is only when these splits have been reconciled that the foundation for interdependency is laid. McCrary’s unique contribution is that interdependence is not solely between individuals but also between, and within, communities. She proposes a “community Object Relations perspective of Interdependence”:41 Interdependence refers to that state of communal existence wherein each person is appropriately recognized for her/his uniqueness and ultimate worth, encouraged in her/his need to be significantly related to others, enabled in the fulfillment of her/his potential of worth and purpose, and supported in her/his responsibility for the survival, the physical well being, and positive mental, psychological, economic, and spiritual development of the group as a whole.42

The communal characteristic of interdependency has implications for the broader social critique, because to “recognize” each person requires the diminishment of preexisting internal templates and their cultural projections. This potential for a cultural critique would need to be directed across multiple social domains, including within the black community, in the intrapersonal dynamics among black women, and toward dominant sociocultural exchanges. McCrary’s tie between communal interdependency and the individual intrapsychic is best captured in her work on internalized shame. In her 2001 paper, “Intimate Violence against Black Women and Internalized Shame: A Womanist Pastoral Counseling Perspective,”43 McCrary considers the problem of internalized shame. Her focus is on black women who have faced violence in an intimate relationship. In the case of internalized shame, splitting is at the heart of this dynamic. These women have an unconscious split where they experience shame for having been abused. Shame is a powerful tool of socialization because it shapes and can redefine who the one shamed is in relation to everyone, not just her abuser. Shame induces a sense of loss of power and social standing; it is a loss of self that feels as if it began on the inside and therefore strikes at the heart of the self. Shame “is a loss of face . . . Shame feels like a wound made from the inside. Shame is a dishonor, fallen pride, a broken spirit. . . . if unchecked, shame can




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engulf the self, immersing the individual deeper into despair . . . secretly the self feels to blame; the deficiency lies within . . .”44 Shame has an adhesive quality because the interior has been colonized and sees this colonization of the self as self-created. Shame begins to be the self and therefore its power is intertwined with identity. Breaking the hold of psychic colonization cannot occur through an individual effort, and this makes McCrary’s interdependency necessary as a resistance to the imposition and internalization of shame as well as a means to deflate the power of shame, including shame that is due to the internalization of social structures and ideologies that are negative (i.e., racism, sexism, or more ideal ideologies). We are now positioned to ask the question: how and where does the changing power of interdependence occur? If we move beyond the individual person to consider the colonization of black women’s psyches through the internalization of shame, we are challenged with the problem of how interdependency can be realized within a community of black women. McCrary does not address this per se, but she advocates the use of womanist space as a form of resistance. Womanist space would allow these women, who have resisted acknowledging their vulnerability and needs, a space to be—it is a space both physical and psychic. This womanist space provides a countercultural resistance to black cultural expectations of black women regardless of what has come their way. West writes that “it seems there is no cultural space for a sad, weak, crying Black woman”45 and that black women’s heightened concern about being labeled pathological is fueled by the cultural depictions of black women in a negative light. “This sense of vulnerability is fed by the potent cultural messages that demean and stereotype blacks . . . the tenacious grasp of social ideologies that devalue Black women is never totally absent”46 —regardless of who is in the room. Even though a womanist social analysis and a psychoanalytic perspective are crucial for McCrary, the pastoral counselor is first grounded by her relationship with the “ultimate reality.” The fuller inclusion of a womanist perspective not only strengthens McCrary’s work but also makes it more useful in the treatment of black women. It allows her to contribute to the pastoral theological ideas concerning the nature of being human—in particular, a black female human—and to the features of selfhood such as selfimage, self-love, and Thurman’s notion of the “proper sense of self” rooted in religious experience.47 In her discussion of trust, McCrary again connects the theological and the psychoanalytic by linking the betrayal of sacred trust and its impact on psyche: the ravaging effect


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of internalized shame to the diminished capacity to have full religious experiences. This makes a strong foundation for both a womanist model of pastoral care and counseling model and a womanist practical theology; and the themes raised by McCrary are also resonant in Elizabeth Walker’s use of self psychology. Elizabeth Walker’s work is an outgrowth of her dissertation, which sought to articulate “a pastoral counseling theory of grace”48 by appropriating the psychoanalytic self psychology of Heinz Kohut. Throughout her work, Walker sees self psychology as an adjunct to her pastoral theological identity. Her emphasis on grace and on the agency of God in the counseling process emerges out of her pastoral commitments. She appropriates Tillich’s view that grace and healing as well as the restructuring of the self occur in relationship with God.49 Walker begins with black women’s narratives that surface in the clinical setting, and with the narratives of those who experience themselves as alienated from God, family, and their surroundings. These stories lead her to assert that “it is important to understand and conceptualize the psychological adaptation tasks of African American women for appropriate assessment and treatment in Western Culture.”50 Walker is concerned at the outset with the affect of racism on the psyche and development of black women. She directs her attention on the broader social structures as factors in black women’s lives. The cultural environment is an impediment because “cultural racism deprives some developing African American women the opportunity to experience adequate empathic relationships,”51 and this is due in part to the social location of black women. 52 Walker sees the clinical situation as providing a space where the pastoral counselor facilitates the counselee’s experience of grace through her empathic presence. Grace is Walker’s organizing principle around the task and definition of pastoral counseling. “Pastoral counseling, therefore, is defined as the ministry of grace to some African-American women clients in the atmosphere of caring relationships where Gods revelation is experienced.”53 Healing, then, is not solely psychological but is a religious experience that restructures the nature of the counselee’s self and relationship to God. She asserts that “the agency of healing is understood as the manifestation of the activity of the mystery of God and identified as an activity evoked by Christian grace that grounds the client in relationships of worth and value.”54 This grounding occurs in the counseling relationship through a three-pronged process. First is the




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“stage of pastoral counseling grace” during “which the self structures meaning and healing.” The second stage is discernment, where the pastoral counselor engages in an “estrangement analysis” and assesses the “social nature” of the counselee’s self estrangement. Here Walker is concerned with finding out how a client understands her difficulty, and whether she is emotionally isolated or able to communicate her interior experience to herself, her counselor, and a wider support system. The third stage is interpretation. This stage is the pastoral counselor’s conceptualization of the client’s situation and her empathic communication of this understanding to the client. Within this third stage is the element of reconnection, where the client has a renewed or new sense of self and can confidently engage in the communal aspects of her life. 55 Walker’s work is strong in its appropriation of psychoanalytic self psychology, and her three-stage process of grace clearly emerges from this dialogue. What is not clear is how Walker identifies with womanist theology and ethics. There is no reference to womanist identified theorists, and apart from the concept of grace and the activity of the mystery of God in the clinical setting, the theology underpinnings of her work remain opaque. What, theologically, is grace, and is the theological understanding of grace the same as her clinical grace? Most problematical for me is that Walker does not critically read self psychology through the experiences of black women. Rather, she assumes the psychoanalytic perspective, and while attention to race, gender, and culture are very important in her work, black women are not relevant in her epistemological point of departure. As a result, Walker offers a picture of black women’s self that looks strangely similar to Heinz Kohut’s (creator of self psychology) self where social location, race, and gender are never named as integral to the theory because the self is assumed to be white or at least like white, male or like male, and confident in the dominant social milieu. Walker’s discussion of self is concerned with black women’s experiences, but how do black women’s experiences demand a rereading of self psychology? Walker appropriates Kohut’s three-pronged approach to cure, 56 and also his view of the centrality of empathy, but does not discuss self psychology’s view of the self’s relationship to the environment. Furthermore, given that Walker is concerned with cultural experience, a reflection on cultural selfobjects is a surprising absence. It also limits her conceptualization of black women’s experiences and the impact of racism and culture. However, Walker’s attention to her


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pastoral identity and her theological understanding of the counseling process make her perspective very helpful for the constructive work of a womanist practical theology. In my own work, I have critiqued and appropriated Heinz Kohut’s psychoanalytic self psychology. Specifically, in Fleshing the Theory: A Critical Analysis of Select Theories of the Body in Light of African American Women’s Experience, 57 I sought to explore the relationship between embodiment, culture, and the continuity of self. Using self psychology and womanist psychology, I postulated that experience is always embedded in a cultural and historical relational milieu, and in order to articulate a womanist retrieval of the black female body, we must place our understanding of black women’s experience of embodiment in the broader social contexts. This did not eliminate the need for a careful consideration of the intrapsychic domain but, rather, necessitated a critical reading of those theories that conceptualized it without attending to race, color, gender, and the social structure that frame these realities. This meant that Kohut’s theory required a dialogue with womanist theology and black women’s experiences, and the end result produced a womanist pastoral perspective informed by psychoanalytic self psychology. However, my dissertation lacked a robust and full enough womanist practical theology, though it did bring self psychology into womanist pastoral theology in a way that had not previously been attempted. The theme of womanist perspectives on embodiment is a continuing one in my work, and a subject I consider essential to the construction of womanist practical theology. In my 2003 article, “A Dark Goodness Created in the Image of God: A Womanist’s Notes toward a Practical Theology of Embodiment,”58 a good portion of which provides the material for chapter 8 in this book, I am concerned with black women’s experiences of embodiment in a culture that frequently projects black womanhood in negative and degrading ways, the impact this has on black women’s sense of self and psychological well-being, as well as the articulating of womanist practical theology in light of black women’s bodily experiences. This article was a womanist ethnographic approach to the topic involving interviews and published biographical material. Theologically it focused on the imago dei and the need for womanist theology to articulate a theological anthropology that takes black women’s experiences fully into account. My critique of the paper is that while I alluded to the necessity of the psychological as an integral part of such a womanist practical theology, in actuality I assumed the psychoanalytic lens rather




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(1) a contexualized understanding of women’s experience; (2) an historically informed critical social analysis, engaging sources that give us entry into the lives of black women; (3) an articulation of ethical norms for embodied relationships; (4) This womanist methodology, then, also includes a dialogical stance benefiting from the human and social sciences; a hermeneutical re-reading the biblical texts for examples of the voices of those who have been marginalized, who are models for inspired resistance to oppression as well as re-reading our inherited religious traditions for liberative readings that have been overlooked in earlier readings; and practices that include justice work, worship, parish-based pastoral care.59

In many respects these elements are continued in “No Rose Colored Glasses: A Womanist Response to Sexual Abuse.”60 Here I offer a psychological and theological reflection on the experience of sexual abuse and the silence imposed on, and internalized by, black women in both church and society. I take seriously the ideologies of race and gender that undergird violations of power, and the theologies of suffering and sexuality that render women voiceless and the church inactive. Yet both this article and the preceding one failed to fully integrate a theological, and specifically a womanist theological, perspective on sexuality. I also note that while the psychoanalytic perspective is explicit, my theological perspective on the psychoanalytic theory is lacking. I conclude by proposing the following elements of a womanist response. The need to: (1) address the religious community’s silence concerning the abuse of women and children, (2) address the convergence of violence, oppressive power and sexualized violence in the Bible, (3) become a place where the experiences of women are welcome without censure, without shame, without blame and without the compulsion to forget, (4) support the need for communities of faith to be communities who are advocates to end violence against women, children and other vulnerable members of society, (5) articulate a clear understanding of the psychological, spiritual and social impact of sexual violence in the lives of African Americans.61


than placing it in full dialogue. Below are the elements of a womanist practical theology of embodiment that I included in that paper:

The final article that I mention is from 2008.62 In this article, I turn to psychoanalytic self psychology to examine the impact of embodied


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trauma for the development of self and the capacity for religious and cultural affiliation. I ask what is the impact of negative cultural representation as related to black women for black women. I examine the black church as a cultural selfobject and what happens when the black church is de-idealized and a source of cultural mirroring is lost. I suggest that when religious institutions, as cultural objects, are somehow integral to experiences of abuse and loss, the cultural object must be mourned in order for healing to take place. Further, one task of a womanist practical theology is to name the loss and to create spaces of mourning and reflect theologically and psychologically on the place of mourning. I conclude this article with the following recommendations for a womanist practical theology: (1) Trauma and mourning processes are religious experiences occurring in the intrapsychic and social dimension of experience; (2) Experiences of race, gender, sexuality, and religion are integral to the formation of the self and group affiliations; (3) It is necessary to understand religion and religious experience—whether rejected, adopted, or disavowed—as part and parcel of a process of mourning cultural and personal traumas and disappointments. (4) Practical theology must listen to the critical perspectives heard in the stories of those who have abandoned religion and religious institutions, and must contextualize, communally and historically, any effort to understand and respond to embodied experiences; (5) Practical theology, emerging from the reality of black women’s experiences, must, then, become embodied and embodied in practices of transformation, giving to mourning the personal and social dimension that connects gender, race, religion, and trauma.63

This article brings together my concern with theological anthropology, the help a psychoanalytic perspective can bring to womanist practical theology, trauma and embodiment, and the need for a critical social analysis. A revision of this piece comprises the bulk of chapter 7 where I provide, using a womanist self psychological perspective, an in-depth theological reflection on mourning cultural selfobjects and mourning aspects of the self. The womanist pastoral theology reviewed in this chapter has many of the elements needed for a womanist psychoanalytically informed practical theology; nonetheless, we need to deepen the engagement with womanist theology, especially with their perspectives on intrapsychic experience such as suffering and pain, and longing and love—the focus of the next chapter. Beyond this, we need to, first,




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examine how psychoanalysis has been used by black theorists and clinicians, which is the focus of chapter 5; second, place womanist perspectives in dialogue with psychoanalysis and evaluate how both are enhanced by the engagement; third, include sexuality in our reflections on embodiment in a more dynamic and courageous manner, which we do in chapter 8; and fourth, we require a nuanced psychologically informed engagement with Scripture that is a specifically womanist practical theology approach. I suggest that what is required is a psychoanalytic reader response, and we take this up in chapter 9.


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Suffering and Pain, Longing and Love: The Embedded Psychology in Womanist Perspectives

When we begin to make black women’s lives visible, we immediately confront the complexity and diversity of their social locations, relational configurations, and the dynamics of their psyches. And while womanist theology from its beginning has not shied away from this aspect of black experience, the material circumstances of black experience have tended to overshadow interest in the psyche. Womanist theology and thought can advance a fuller consideration of black women’s lives when psychic experience is examined as an epistemological source. Suffering and pain as well as love and longing are compelling forces in the lives of black women. The need for a dialogue between psychoanalytic and womanist perspectives presupposes the valuing of inner life in womanist thought. It also presupposes a womanist commitment to grappling with psychic reality. This chapter inquires how womanists understand their experiences of suffering and pain, longing and love, how they account for intrapsychic dynamics, and how they make their way into the self-understanding and interpersonal experiences of black women. Equally important, it asks how womanists articulate the relationship between the cultural and psychic domains, and how womanist theology explains the influence of cultural dynamics on psychological experience, thereby shaping, forming, malforming, and transforming African American women’s sense of self, culture, and community. My goal in this chapter is to examine psychology existing in womanist theology and ethics for its perspective on suffering and pain, love and longing.


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Black women’s experience of suffering and survival is a recurring theme in Delores Williams’ work, especially in Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, where she challenges womanists and black liberation theologians to make black women’s lives central to doctrinal statements in order to “exercise a prophetic womanist theological task.”1 Williams shook the theological ground of black liberation and feminist theologies when she turned to the life of Hagar and her struggle to survive as a more adequate and honest reflection of African American women’s experiences of suffering and living than the prevalent Exodus image. Williams claim that when we read Genesis 16: 1–16 with Hagar as our point of entry, her life “illustrates what the history of many African American taught them long ago; that is, the slave woman’s story is and unavoidably has been shaped by the problems and desires of her owners. In this text Hagar is introduced as the solution to a problem confronting a wealthy Hebrew slave-holding family.”2 Williams has been involved in a process of seeking answers to theological questions in light of the “genocidal impulses in American culture directed toward black people.”3 In spite of patriarchy and its abuses that limit black women’s voices, Williams notes that the church has also given solace by providing “psycho-social places where black women could find some relief from the burdens of their lives—whether these burdens came from low self-esteem, from negative experience in love relations, from early deaths in the family, from loss of children to street and drug culture or from white racism and economic oppression. The African-American denominated churches told black women they were ‘somebody’ in a society that hated their race and spurned their womanhood . . . ”4 Williams examines the suffering resulting from black women being used as surrogates. Like Hagar, black women have had their bodies appropriated and exploited on behalf of someone else’s need, desire, and economic gain. But she notes that black women’s surrogacy extends beyond the reproductive and have long been “associated with the social-role exploitation”5 that results when black women had to fill in for white women’s child care needs, labor that white women considered men’s work, and so on. These roles were enforced even following the emancipation, and though at that stage black women could more directly resist and refuse these surrogacy assignments, they were in fact under great social and economic pressure to fulfill these roles. Consequently, Williams sees such choice made under duress as “voluntary surrogacy.” Voluntary surrogacy did not protect freed black women from ongoing sexual exploitation,


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but accounts of black women’s determined resistance are important to note. “Nevertheless, there was not nearly as much sexual activity between black women and white men after slavery because black women could refuse to substitute for white women in providing sexual pleasure for white males.”6 Williams recounts the experience of domestic worker Nancy White: I’ve had to ask some [white male employer to take his] hands off me and I’ve had [to] just up [and quit] some jobs . . . I have lost some money that way, but that’s all right. When you lose control of your body, you have just about lost all you have in the world.7

Williams takes up black women’s suffering and resistance in her article “Women’s Oppression and Life Long Politics in Black Women’s Religious Narratives.” Her entry point is the literature of Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Margaret Walker because their novels reveal the complex dynamics of black women’s oppression, that oppression often being a mix of assaults on the body, on the psyche, on the ability to pursue particular social relationships, and on her reproductive and nurturing capacities. But, she notes, Black women’s self- esteem is [also] undermined by the use of alien aesthetic criteria to assess black women’s beauty and value. Finally, there is the assault upon black women’s independent right to choose and maintain positive, fulfilling, and productive relationships. 8

The exploitation of black women’s bodies through enslavement, rape, forced pregnancy, and other forms of violence reverberates relationally and intergenerationally and undergirds much of the tension and conflict related to colorism, dialogue related to hair, and black genealogy that is operative in families and the wider representation of blackness. Williams also directs our attention to the psychology of sexual exploitation of black women by powerful white men. Referring to Margaret Walker’s novel Jubilee, she proposes that Hetta is repeatedly raped and impregnated by the slaver John Dutton because “there was also ego appeasement involved on Master Dutton’s part. . . . [T]o be useful to John Dutton, her spirit had to be broken.” Williams is saying that Dutton’s self-esteem was enlarged by his debasement of Hetta, and further by his rape of her after he has given her to “Jake for a husband.” His ego is enhanced because he treats Jake as less than a man, knowing he has the power of death over him. He rapes his wife and throws her back to him pregnant until he demands use of her again.


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For a case of black domestic violence, Williams turns to Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine, where Amy, a freed black woman, believes that her freedom means that she can nurture and care for her own black children, but she “has not realized that while she may be free from white people’s demands, she is in no way free from her husband Ned’s demands for nurturance.” Ned is enraged when he discovers that she has fed their children before him, and he “uncoils the whip and brings it down across Amy’s back . . . she wheeled around to fight . . . ”9 Though Amy does not take his brutality submissively, the psychology of this exchange, on the part of Ned, is shockingly familiar. The image of him unfurling his whip can only bring to mind slavers whipping those they enslaved. Ned feels he has a right to whip Amy back into being an enslaved woman who not only responds to his command but also anticipates them. Ned expects Amy’s mind to be so closely tied to his needs, his wants, and his sense of entitlement that she will anticipate them and respond accordingly. Where does the notion of such a privileged masculinity come from? Clearly Ned has identified with those who previously enslaved him and Amy and who were the sources of their earlier suffering. Such identification with the psychology of the aggressor can be one of the psychic and relational legacies of subjugation; the body is free(er) but the psyche remains colonized. Ned becomes brutally violent when Amy does not immediately gratify his needs. He, like Amy, wants a different place in the world than that he occupied during enslavement. The result of this disappointment is a ruthless attempt to enforce compliance to his image of her role in relationship to his psychic needs. He reveals a surprising and even shocking disregard for her needs and hopes. Freedom from slavery has not freed Amy or Ned enough for them to have a relationship based on love and mutuality rather than one based on domination. Williams makes it clear that the impediment to this kind of relationship is deeply rooted in the assaults on their bodies, psyches, and on the relational life of black women and men. Thus the suffering they endured in the slave era has taken up residence in their inner lives and has become embodied in their relationships. An important point to remember is that while Amy resists further attack on her body and life, at this point Ned and Amy are locked in a violence turned toward each other. It is counter to Williams’ observation on love:


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Historically, love has been the foundation upon which the AfroAmerican community has structured its ethical principles governing conduct in human relationships. Blues songs, folk tales, the civil rights


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In the preface to Sisters in the Wilderness, Williams closes wishing for the women “who struggle . . . to bring dignity, hope, spiritual sustenance, economic well-being . . . to the everyday lives of black people . . . that . . . in all their giving . . . remember to love themselves. Regardless.”11 Clearly the love of which she speaks is not the romantic and overly sentimental charade passing as entertainment in our media driven culture. This love is ethically principled, and inspires conviction, courage, and action, and the need for black women to bring a loved self to their communities and commitments. Such a love moves toward the communal, and it is life enhancing. What, then, interfered in the expression of black love hoped for by Amy and Ned? Amy and Ned are living with the legacy of what the psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold has described as soul murder. “Soul murder is neither a diagnosis nor a condition. It is a dramatic term for circumstances that eventuate in crime—the deliberate attempt to eradicate or compromise the separate identity of another person. The victims of soul murder remain in large part possessed by another, their souls in bondage to someone else.”12 Williams offers additional evidence for the unconscious suffering that occurs through identification with former slave owners. Two examples include how slaves dealt with their names post emancipation. Some rejected the names given to them by their masters during slavery “so it was hard to tell who or where anybody was . . . any . . . name ‘cepting their master’s name.”13 Others, however, kept their masters’ names as a strangely perverted way to enhance self- esteem and social status by being associated with “quality white folk during slavery”14 —but such psychological bondage was at the profound expense of their pride and blackness. The power of psychological bondage is amplified by Stephanie Mitchem in her article “No Longer Nailed to the Floor,” which examines the place of silence and silencing in what I would call cultural soul murder. She conveys the story of a Native American grandmother relaying the forced Americanization of stolen children.


movement (e.g., Martin Luther King’s nonviolent movement built on principles of love) and black preaching all emphasize the value of love for black life and action.10

Only American clothing . . . Only English could be spoken. Whenever the students made the error of speaking in the People’s words, in that school, their shoes were nailed to the floor . . . No one was to speak to the student under punishment.15


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The grandmother was still traumatized by her experience, and “she could no longer speak the words of the People. Even the stories in her mind caused pain.”16 In similar fashion, Stephanie Mitchem draws on Patricia Williams’ notion of “spirit murder,”17 suggesting that this is not simply the murder of the individual psyche but of a people, and it involves social structures and institutions that both enforce the cultural-psychic murder while simultaneously denying the pain being inflicted. Williams argues that soul murder needs to be “elevated to the conceptual—if not the punitive—level of a capital moral offense. We need to eradicate its numbing pathology . . . ”18 Mitchem notes that a part of this cultural pathology is the silencing of black women’s pain: “Some people . . . prefer to never hear black women’s pain stories. How distasteful! How sad they are; still stuck in the past. Yet if there is to be an end to spirit murder, these stories need to be heard.”19 Mitchem’s implicit psychology is one of cultural trauma. She is clearly advocating for a process of transformation wherein compulsory silence is understood as oppressive and naming pain is central to the path to healing for black women. A return to M. Shawn Copeland’s “Wading through Many Sorrows: Toward a Theology of Suffering in Womanist Perspective” is instructive at this point: Suffering, always means pain, disruption, separation and incompleteness. It can . . . push us to the borders of hopelessness and despair . . . can maim, wither and cripple the heart. . . . I understand suffering as the disturbance of our inner tranquility caused by physical, mental, emotional and spiritual forces . . . 20

Copeland traces the suffering experienced by formerly enslaved black women as the result of slavery, whose stories reveal the brutality to which these women were subjected on a regular basis. She points out that “these narratives are of affliction, but not narratives of despair; the women may be caught, but they are not trapped. These women wade through their sorrows, managing their suffering, rather than being managed by it.” For us to understand their suffering properly, Copeland insists that these women speak for themselves and that we listen; their voices are a counter-narrative to the cultural depiction of enslaved women as passive and lacking any sense of themselves or agency in their lives. She reminds us that “a womanist theology of suffering is rooted in


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and draws on Black women’s accounts of pain and anguish, of their individual and collective struggle to grasp and manage, rather than be managed by, their suffering.”21 These women’s accounts expose the violent treatment and sexual exploitation that was a regular part of their lives. Not only were these women subjected to all forms of physical mistreatment, many also express a psychological double bind: they were taught a religious pietism that elevated virginity and “the cult of true womanhood”22 yet were themselves treated neither as virgin or true women. As a result, many of the women raped and forced into sexual liaisons grieved: Fourteen-year- old Louisa Picquet escaped from the sexual advances of one slave owner, only to be sold to another with similar intentions. Years later in an interview, the emancipated Picquet recalled: “I thought, now I shall be committin adultery, and there’s no chance for me, and I’ll to die and lost. Then I had this trouble with him and my soul the whole time.”23

Picquet’s sense of sin was of such a depth that she laments to her owner who tries to convince her that sex with him is not an obstacle, but Picquet sees the situation differently, “I but better than that. I thought it was no use to be prayin, and livin in sin . . . I begin then to pray that he might die so I might get religion . . . ”24 It is the nature of oppression to work to misshape one’s sense of self, one’s spirituality, and one’s connection to God. Picquet internalizes self-blame as if she had chosen her sexual enslavement, and she psychologically internalizes a spirituality that renders her guilty of immorality. Such a distorted psychology and spirituality transmitted from slaver to enslaved is a common feature of these narratives. The sexual, spiritual, and psychological distortion is also apparent in the life of Linda Brent (her actual name was Harriet Jacobs) whose narrative (included in the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers) reveals a “detailed presentation of the psychological and sexual torment . . . ” Copeland traces Brent’s early life of enslavement in a family that was able to hide the worst horrors of their situation until Brent reaches the age of twelve and the slave owner dies. In a betrayal of the late slave owner’s promise that the children would be free of hardship, Brent is willed to the late slave owner’s five-year-old niece, which placed her under the direct control the young child’s father, Dr. Flint. 25 By the time Brent reaches fifteen she is acutely aware that the owner, Dr. Flint, has an interest on her




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My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him . . . If I went out for a breath of fresh air . . . his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me . . . (he) had an iron will and was determined to . . . conquer me. 26

His interests are more than simply economic, or sexual. He desires to dominate her every aspect of being.27 Brent’s every resistance to him gradually strips him of even the superficial covering of decency. When Flint decides he will physically force Brent to live in a house in the woods—removed from the observation of his household—Brent refuses that too, but accepts the sexual interest of another white man, Mr. Sands, who is unmarried. Brent knows that once Flint discovers their sexual relationship he will be enraged, yet she also seeks a balm for the emotional harm inflicted by Flint’s threat and the sexualized and dehumanized fantasies through which he views her. Brent found Sands’ interest flattering; by degrees, a more tender feeling crept into my heart, I knew the impassable gulf between us; but to be an object of interest to a man who is not married, and who is not her master, is agreeable to the pride and feelings of a slave . . . it seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to compulsion.28

Brent’s psychological motivations for some measure of freedom from Flint are clear. She also seeks to enact her own revenge, and her narrative suggests that she had a deep understanding of Flint’s particular brand of sadism: both that another man would have the first sexual relationship with her, and that she decided of her own free will to submit to this other would rub salt into his wounded sense of power and control. But another psychological motive is evident too: Brent seeks to restore or bolster her violated self-esteem and “pride and feelings (evoked as) a slave”29 by choosing Sands. When a free black man subsequently attempts to buy her freedom because he wants to marry her, Flint not only refuses but “his taunts, insults and physical abuse force Brent to break off her engagement to Sands.” Because she still cannot choose the black man she most truly loves, her choice of


that is both sexual and psychological: he desires physically to rape her and psychologically to subjugate her. Not only did Flint “whisper foul words” to Brent, he responded to her resistance by insisting that he owned her and could do with her as he desired.


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Sands is nonetheless evidence that Brent’s sense of self is strong and constantly seeking self-expression and opportunities of agency. Brent’s efforts at self-determination are still fraught with struggle even after Flint discovers that she is pregnant by Sands. Flint’s rage does not free her from a sense of shame that she is single and bearing the child of a white man—“how could I look them in the face? My self-respect was gone! . . . And now how humiliated I felt.” Brent’s efforts to save herself from Flint ultimately diminish her sense of worth. Though she has asserted her autonomy, she has violated the purity code that her family has internalized, though most enslaved women could as good as never actually embody it. It is the psychological denial of the impossibility imposed by the situation as well the identification with the oppressor’s stated (though not lived) values and spirituality that led to her guilt and her family’s moral expectation. She is concerned that her character is now tarnished, though she made her choice on the basis of her circumstances, her needs, and her hopes for a modicum of freedom. In another sense, this morality instills in Brent an expectation concerning a spirituality of sexuality. Brent is so distressed because she has had a view of herself that she now cannot sustain, and because she is aware that psychologically she served a function for her relatives—they held her in higher esteem because she had been able to maintain her sexual purity. In the eyes of her family she has value because of her virtue, and she fears she will be diminished in their eyes and has lost them as a source for support, respect, and even admiration. Their self- esteem is lessened by the state of her body and life. Hence, their sense of agency is directly connected to her capacity to protect herself from sexual assault and sexual expression, meaning that there is a mutual psychological interdependence here, and Brent’s trauma is their trauma. Brent laments both what she herself has lost and what that loss means to her family. Yet, realistically, what other decision would have enhanced or left intact the pride and self-esteem that she had through great psychological effort sustained thus far? These kinds of dilemmas demand scrutiny and a womanist sexual ethic that is grounded in a theological anthropology that takes seriously the complexity of the psychological and the suffering that is the result of evil social structures. They also demand what Copeland in Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race and Being calls solidarity, which “begins with anamnesis—the intentional remembering of the dead, exploited, despised victims of history.”30 Copeland’s understanding of solidarity insists on “recognizing” those who have not been recognized or seen as fully human—“exploited, despised poor women of




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color”31—and the failure to do so reveals the blindness to “psychic suffering caused by social exploitation.”32 What is it that allows one to forgo such blindness for solidarity? For Copeland it is the “presence of the supernatural in the concrete. The history of human suffering and oppression . . . are transformed only in light of the supernatural.”33 More specifically, a relationship of love with “the mystical body of Christ” whereby the human love of Christ is for us irrevocable and fulfills our innermost longing34 is what induces solidarity. That solidarity “is an eschatological reality, anticipated concretely in the here-and-now through our response to the gift of grace.”35 God’s love “embraces us human creatures as daughters and sons. This deepens the already real relations between us as creatures and the God of Jesus . . . ”36 Love, then, is central to Copeland’s understanding of solidarity grounded in the love of God expressed in the human form of Jesus. The love between humans, then, looks to the incarnation and “responds concretely to the dangerous memory of the body broken and poured out for us all.”37 Such love “contests sin’s destructive deformation of ourselves and thus of society . . . ”38 because “[s]olidarity sets the dynamics of love against the dynamics of domination.”39 Emilie Townes continues this contestation of domination in relationships between black men and women, especially those in the black church. She draws our attention to the fact that the white view of relationships between women and men has been adopted by black men and that “The few leadership roles allowed Black men by the dominant oppressive culture are closely guarded . . . with little regard for the psychological, theological, ethical and economic damage done to the African-American Community and African American female,”40 who are in essence compelled to live with their suffering as a means of identifying with “the cross” or in the hope that things will improve. Yet, far from spiritualizing suffering, Townes adopts Audre Lorde’s understanding of suffering and pain as related but distinct experiences: Suffering is unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. Suffering is the inescapable cycle of reliving pain over and over when it is triggered by events and people. It is a static process . . . Pain is an experience that is recognized, named, and then used for transformation.41


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Townes challenges the black community to engage in the difficult task of “moving from suffering to pain, individually and communally.”42


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Townes sees suffering as an impediment to change and action because “Suffering is a way of being that prevents action and denies individual Black women and men or the African American community the right and ability to say ‘no’ to their oppression. . . . A womanist ethic is never content to merely react to the situation: it seeks to change the situation.”43 Her womanist ethic addresses the internal and external reality of suffering but also embraces a psychology that recognizes the importance and necessity of a transformation process that moves the experience of suffering to one of experiencing pain, because engaging our pain is the catalyst for victims to begin to “examine her or his situation and make a plan for a healthy future . . . A position of pain encourages an examination of the past and the recovery of the truth. Pain promotes self-knowledge, which is a tool of liberation.”44 Furthermore, the work of feeling one’s pain induces the pursuit of wholeness and confirms black women’s position in relation to God as loved.45 Finally, Townes’ discussion of suffering leads her to claim that “a womanist ethic rejects suffering as God’s will and believes that it is an outrage that there is suffering at all. . . . a womanist ethic must be dedicated to eliminating suffering on the grounds that its removal is God’s redeeming purpose.”46 Central to this womanist ethic is the place of love in the lives of black people. Townes makes this clear in the opening of her article “To Be Called Beloved: Womanist Ontology in PostModern Refraction.” She begins with one of her own poems, saying that “to be called beloved is to be called by God . . . be called deep within deep. . . . to be called beloved is to listen to the words of Baby Suggs holy who offered up to them (us) her great big heart.”47 The Suggs she references is, of course, the preacher of preachers in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, the Suggs who tells the folks: Here, [. . .] in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. . . . Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you!. . . . The dark liver—love it . . . and the beat and beating heart, love that too.48



Townes hears this as a corporate and individual “call to question the radical nature of oppression and devaluation of the self and the community in the context of structural evil.”49 Townes yearns “for African


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American society and culture to love”50 every single black part of who we are, “under the rubric of womanist concerns for ontology and by praxeological extension, wholeness.”51 Such an ontology emerging from a position of loving the entire black self contests the dualism that undergirds systemic evil and thus the “subject-other opposition that underlies much of Western thought.”52 Townes puts forward the notion of “is-ness”53 “ . . . being is physical and spiritual in womanist ontology. Therefore, [. . .] a womanist ontology advocates the self- other relationship, for it is in the relational matrix that wholeness can be found for African Americans.”54 Townes notes that the arguments of postmodernism to consider otherness and difference can actually reproduce the oppressive dualism it seeks to dismantle because it lapses into specialized language and abstractions that can eventually “become tools for hegemony” (95). But the “promise of postmodernism is that it provides . . . a way into concrete knowledge of and contact with African American realities.”55 Townes notes that the road into black experience in the United States has been paved by many black writers; however, she cautions, “the notion that we are aware of another person’s feelings and experiences only on the basis of empathic inferences from our own veers into solipsism . . . Self-consciousness and awareness of others are not natural dance partners.”56 Postmodernism, Townes emphasizes, can create its own “master narratives” in relation to others, for where it conceals the diversity of black life it also fails to recognize the multiplicity of ways that black women and men are exposed to multidimensional oppression. In the end, Townes notes that postmodernism “fails its liberative agenda. The call by Baby Suggs to love our hearts is a pithy reminder that particularity is more than an abstract construct . . . ”57 Townes traces the hatred of each body part that Suggs names through the historical realities of racism. Today the reality of economic poverty, restricted urban housing, and the newer forms of flights into the whiteness of suburbia reproduce new segregation—“we are living in a system that has no heart, little compassion”58 —and Suggs reminds that “And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. What you say out of it they will not heed.”59 Thus, “to love the mouth, eyes the hands, the neck the heart, to love the body is radical ontology within structured domination and control.”60 Love is at the heart of Townes’ response to the suffering imposed by the evil of systemic injustice. It “is a radical, and often communal response to cultural, social, religious, economic and political hegemony masquerading under the guise of cultural heterogeneity.”61 Townes wants the discourse on “self-other relation to be situated in


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the lived concreteness of life and succored in the flawed transcendent powers of our spirituality.”62 We need an ontology of wholeness that recognizes that there are many sites of destructive engagement in the lives of black people. By remembering “our fleshiness”63 we realize that “dualistic oppositions such as self-other, egoism-altruism, theorypractice, individual-community, and mind-body are interactive and interdependent.”64 Townes’ womanist ontology is radically relational; “(it) calls us to moral responsibility and accountability;”65 and it is fueled by love, for “to be called beloved is the ethical reflection with the deeply held knowledge . . . that we are washed in the grace of God.”66 Townes’ work offers a psychology of transformation that is theologically grounded and ethically motivated with an awareness of the historical and social contexts of suffering, and that makes use of an intrapsychic process of change that seeks to transform inner life and one’s relationship to external power structures. For, within any oppressed group, the members of that group are prevented from acknowledging their anger and frustration at the system . . . but if we believe God is a just God and a loving God . . . then (we) must allow and challenge ourselves to search for the roots of our suffering . . . 67

She knows that the suffering is in individuals and moves between generations, and here she quotes Eula from the movie, Daughters of the Dust: We’re the daughters of those old dusty things Nana carries in her tin can. . . . We carry too many scars from the past. Our past owns us. We wear scars like armor . . . for protection. Our mother’s scars, our sister’s scars . . . Thick, hard, ugly scars that no one can pass through to ever hurt us again. Let’s live our lives without living in the fold of our old wounds.68

She links the inner and social, the conscious and unconscious, and urges us to include psychodynamic processes without neglecting the social processes that frame all experience. All in all, Townes’ discussion of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain, suffering as an arrested process, and the urgent need for black people to love every part of the black self—or their “is-ness”—makes her contributions essential for the constructive work of a womanist practical theology. Copeland’s view supports Towne’s understanding of the necessity of moving from suffering toward pain rather than being arrested in a repetitious cycle of suffering—a suffering that reproduces itself




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psychologically without activating a process of transformation or activism. Remembering and pain are linked in healing, and are crucial to the recognition required for solidarity. This is both a structural and social, and an individual and social, psychological recognition. In moving toward remembering, pain, recognition, and solidarity, we acknowledge our connectedness to one another that comes from knowing that all are “God’s own creation. Solidarity preserves the universality of love without renouncing preference for these women of color.”69 Remembering as a psychological and social mechanism is individual and communal, and it is also redemptive in that it creates a space for others to remember, to experience the related pain, and then to recognize and move into solidarity with the suffering. Brent is reexposed to the horrors and pain of her life in order to incite solidarity in the women of the north in the remembering and telling of story. It is repetitious only for the sake of social and psychological solidarity. If such a process and intent are indeed redemptive, then womanists’ theologies of suffering and redemption are intrinsically psychological, and ethical. Patricia-Anne Johnson’s work on a theology of suffering makes an important contribution. Johnson stresses that the task for womanists is to address two questions in light of black women’s suffering: “First, how do womanists constructively confront the reality of systemic evil as it interacts within the lives of Black African American survivors of the Diaspora? Second, in light of the reality of such evil, how do womanists maintain a belief in God as the all-powerful creator and sustainer of the universe?”70 From here, Johnson outlines a womanist theology of suffering that “draws upon Black women’s experience with pain and suffering,” coupling this experience of pain with approaches to “overcome their anguish” by drawing on “strategies adopted by their mothers, grandmothers . . . to handle their own suffering.”71 Johnson’s psychology of resistance uses stories to evoke “growth and change, proper outrage and dissatisfaction,” and to “enlarge Black women’s moral horizon and choices.” This psychology of resistance is in response to psychic experience—that of “pain,” “suffering,” and “anguish,” and to “socially constructed evil” that is the “source of existential and physical suffering”72 for self and community, as well as suffering resulting from theologies that make a virtue of passive suffering. Johnson then calls for womanists to make an inward turn:


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Womanists must continually seek to challenge the African American Christian and lay communities and to turn their gaze inward and


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It is this inward shift that allows for the examination required to challenge those oppressive theologies and practices that cause suffering, and this same inward shift will lead to the call for the repentance “from silence and complacency” and to rebuke the benefactors of patriarchy. The shift is inward because it calls for a reexamination of the practices in black churches but also psychologically inward because black women must make a psychological shift to challenge black men’s attachment to sexist practices. Johnson notes that black men have much to lose in terms of their privileged position in the black church, but such sexist practices, while they maintain men’s sense of self and self-esteem, do so at the expense of women. Practices that sustain and bolster the self- esteem of some at the expense of others include heterosexist practices that ignore, vilify, and ostracize lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered members in the church and beyond. Often their very existence is denied and made invisible. “An example of this denial is the response many Black women had to The Color Purple. Several Black seminarian women said that they had not been conscious of the lesbian sexuality expressed between Shug and Celie. I find this most surprising. Two women are in bed, they kiss, they explore each other’s bodies; they make love and talk about making love . . . How might one miss the plain and beautiful sexual relationship between these women? Also, as a result of their relationship, Celie is transformed.”74 How did they miss this? We know that silence and invisibility are two of the most effective tools used by cultures to oppress any group of people—and the black church has used these tools well to enforce compliance and hiding. Such overt and subtle enforcement of compliance is deeply tied to sexism and homophobia. Dwight McBride challenges that “we can no more excuse black homophobia than black sexism. One is as politically and dare I say, morally suspect as the other.”75 And Stephanie K. Dunning asserts that the invisibility of black lesbians is far more extensive than that of black gay men both in queer discourse and the broader culture.76 Missing here is the realization that a womanist understanding of love seeks not only to transform the asymmetrical social order that scripts relationships according to the model of the dominant and the subjugated, but also to heal the psyche and


put their houses in order . . . This is particularly true for the African American community as men of color have much to lose by dismantling their own sexism. . . . Womanists challenge the motives behind such practices.73


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the sense of self. Celie’s view of herself changes in the context of love: being loved moved her first to love her self and then to love her black community. It is not a black lesbian relationship that makes one more able to love, because, after all, lesbians are shaped and formed in the same power-hungry and often death-dealing contexts as everyone else. Rather, it is the hard psychological and public work of undoing, disentangling, recognizing, and consciously working to thwart internal and external relational ties of oppression that makes it possible. This ethic finds a place for passion, relational transformation, forgiveness, and reconciliation on behalf of abundant life. Yes, this is the “stuff” of our faith—but also our psyches, our relationships, and our world. What is clear to me is that womanist concerns always include a psychological reality. Womanists take seriously both the conscious and the unconscious. In every instance of our discussion of suffering and pain, love and longing, the psychology of the issue is laid out waiting for a psychoanalytic construct to frame it. And yet, in the thirty-plus years of womanist thought, we have yet to articulate a robust womanist psychoanalytic perspective. The delay has probably been because we have until now been focusing primarily on material, cultural, and economic realities—though they themselves still describe intrapsychic realities. So the groundwork has been laid, and any psychoanalytic turn must be made with a firm grasp on black women’s cultural contexts and experiences. Yet the transition is far from easy. Womanist pastoral psychotherapist Christine Wiley captures the cultural shock that she experienced in her clinical training in pastoral counseling: When I completed seminary a few years ago, I decided to redirect a career path in psychiatric nursing that I had been traveling for many years. . . . With my degree in hand, . . . enrolled in a training program to prepare myself for the specialized discipline of pastoral counseling and psychotherapy. Little did I realize at the outset that not only would I experience the program as a culture shock, but that the program would also experience me in a similar manner. As an African American woman, I realize now that if I had initially known more about the history of the pastoral counseling movement, particularly as specialized ministry, I would have understood that this movement, with its Eurocentric approach, was largely oriented toward white males . . . Although, it has undergone many changes . . . it has not been immune to the effects of racism, sexism, and classism . . . Nonetheless, I am convinced that pastoral counseling and psychotherapy are appropriate tools for


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The cultural shock that Wiley and others experienced in their pastoral theology and psychotherapy programs is a result of the cultural assumptions that permeate these training programs. The required reading rarely relates to the culture, race, sexuality, and the economic and social location of students of color. The result is that such students either take the certificate without a conviction that the training will be of benefit in their communities or they attempt, to no avail, to explain their culture and black experience, to educate their teachers and supervisors, or to rail against the limitations of the program in the hope that some change will result. Therefore, though I am convinced about the necessity of a psychoanalytic perspective, I recognize that any appropriation of psychoanalysis for a womanist practical theology requires both critical knowledge of the history of the relationship between black experience and psychoanalysis as well as knowledge of black psychoanalytic perspectives in and out of the clinical domain.


healing within the Black Church and the African American community. I speak as a “womanist pastoral psychotherapist.”77


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Psychoanalysis and Black Experience: Critique, Appropriation, and Application


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In 1998 when I saw my first patient for psychoanalysis, as a candidate at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, I was determined to take the “rules” of psychoanalysis seriously—especially as it regards establishing a neutral psychoanalytic space unencumbered with “myself and my stuff.” I wanted to be a near blank screen, one able to receive whatever made its way into the clinical arena. This was, of course, a fantasy psychoanalyst—and certainly not a useful fantasy. I suspect that for most patients, regardless of their analyst, the first glance exchanged, if not already the first phone call, is filled with me-ness—and her response to me. New patients typically express some surprise that I am a black psychoanalyst. Discovering the meanings associated with this convergence of black and psychoanalyst takes—well, it takes what only time can offer—a relationship. Yes, I am a black psychoanalyst. I am also a black woman; and a “full-bodied” black woman; and a lesbian; and a womanist; and a practical theologian. The late black feminist lesbian poet Pat Parker thought that it would be revolutionary: If I could take all my parts with me when I go somewhere, and not have to say to one of them, ‘No, you stay home tonight, you won’t be welcome,’ because I’m going to an all-white party where I can be gay, but not Black. Or I’m going to a Black poetry reading, and half the poets are anti-homosexual or thousands of situations where something of what I am cannot come with me. The day all the different parts of me can come along, we would have what I would call a revolution.1


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It is not that all these parts of me are immediately apparent all the time, but they all are certainly always an integral part of me. This endeavor to create a dialogue between psychoanalytic theory, specifically self-psychology, and womanist perspectives is a tricky one, for so often the conversations across disciplines are burdened by the unacknowledged and preexisting power relations. In this chapter I draw on two underutilized fields as models of appropriating psychoanalysis. The first is that of African American psychoanalysts drawing on the works of Margaret Morgan Lawrence, MD, Hugh F. Butts, MD, Dorothy E. Holmes, Ph.D., and Kimberlyn Leary, Ph.D. The second source is black feminist psychoanalytic literary criticism specifically represented in the works of Hortense Spillers and Claudia Tate. The biases of the cultural ground from which theories emerged are embedded in psychoanalytic practices, and each scholar has her or his way of addressing the implications of these concerns for understanding and responding to the racialized experiences. I think each brings something of import and use to the table, and simultaneously reveals the shifts that have happened and are happening in terms of African American reading and appropriation of psychoanalysis. A rich and ever deepening conversation is occurring. This kind of exchange requires a critical reciprocity in the dialogue and, in the process, lived experience and psychoanalysis must face each other in a disciplined dialogue. The lived experience, of course, is also genderedsexuality experience, though gender and sexuality, in my view, have not figured as thoroughly in the foreground as race. The cultivation of a womanist perspective, more fully taken up in the next chapter, will contribute a needed voice to this perspective. In the final analysis, I argue that these writers demonstrate that the conversation, interrogation, and intermingling of psychoanalysis, self, and culture can be difficult but can also offer a richer reading of the social realities of black women’s lives, and it can lead to a womanist practical theology that is more robust as well.

Dialogue between Black Psychoanalysts and Black Experience


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It should come as no surprise that the relationship between psychoanalysts has been, at best, a problematic one for black scholars. It is a fair question to ask how a theory that so profoundly and solely originated from the narrow interest in middle-class white Victorian


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women’s and men’s psyche can have anything to offer by way of black experience. Many black scholars familiar with psychoanalytic thought find that its treatment of women and non-Western cultures is so distorted that it is nearly impossible to imagine a revision thorough enough to disentangle the patriarchal and ethnocentric assumptions for effective use with African Americans. This is certainly the position of the pastoral theologian Lee H. Butler.2 Butler’s practical theology has, in my view, provided the most well-developed engagement with black experience, Afrocentric values, and psychoanalysis. Butler rejects Western-based psychoanalytic perspectives for use with African Americans, and opts for an Afrocentric perspective. According to Butler, Western psychological models are beyond repair, and at best should be used for Euro-Americans. There are several problems with these models. Butler raises the important issue of cultural and contextual particularity. He rightly wants us to reimagine the African American psyche outside the pejorative and racist underpinnings of the founders of psychoanalysis. My differences with a sole reliance on the Afrocentric perspective in Butler’s work is that it leans toward an essentialist view of the African American psyche, and it does not account sufficiently for intrapsychic dynamics and the place of culture. For instance, he takes up the issue of colorism, but it is not clear how colorism takes up residence inside the psyche. In other words, what is the relationship between culture and psyche and how is it mediated for the individual and in the community? Is there a communal psyche? Butler calls for an indigenous perspective because he contends that African American identity emerges within a “distinctive cultural group.” I tend to agree with the literary critic Barbara Christian that Afrocentrism “betrays the fact that Afrocentricism is generated from narrow nationalist Western thinking, that is akin to Eurocentrism, which it apparently opposes but also mimics.”3 Afrocentrism, then, can seem to suggest that African Americans develop in a monolithic context, though a historically situated context, and ignores the differences that may emerge between African Americans raised in the rural South and those raised in the urban or rural North. Further, it does not account for how these different contexts may result in a variety of black identities, differences in intrapsychic dynamics between self and culture, and understanding and experience of black communal contexts. Butler does leave room for Western psychoanalytic theories for use with Euro-Americans, while reserving his theory for work with African Americans. What then is one who is black to do with a patient or faith community, for example, who is neither white


Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism


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European nor African American? What about those who identify as biracial and/or bicultural? Does this mean that the Afrocentric practical theologian who is also a clinician needs to keep a variety of psychologies in the back pocket? Furthermore, if psychoanalytic theory is problematic for black folks because of its whiteness and related privilege and values, it would seem that it is clinically and socially problematic for “Euro-Americans” too. The problems concerning the biases embedded in psychoanalytic theories, including, for instance, difference, racism, and sexism as foundational blocks of psychoanalytic theory, have been the topic of contemporary assessments.4 This has occurred simultaneously with an increase in interest in psychoanalysis in the Human Sciences,5 and among African American clinicians. African American clinicians who have sought psychoanalytic training have taken the track of not revising the theory but offering a critique of the deficient mental health services provided because of the ethnocentric and racist assumptions of psychotherapists. These scholar clinicians work to employ psychoanalytic theory clinically in such a way that race, gender, and/or class is highlighted in their work. What is striking, when reading these African American psychoanalytic scholars, is that their work does not overtly challenge theoretical concepts (i.e., notions of transference, countertransference, defenses, etc.) but rather challenge the racial and class assumptions embedded in the practices of psychoanalytic treatment that has pathologized the emergence of content focused on racism, sexism, and so on. It becomes apparent that the work of these scholars ultimately challenges the power dynamics of training institutes and how psychoanalytic theory might be used significantly in their post-training articles. The significance of this is that during their psychoanalytic training the use and misuse of power could advance or derail one’s progression through the training program and one’s analysis and professional future. While such abuses can still occur today, they are far less frequent, in part because in many institutes training analysis is separate from the reporting structures of the curriculum and supervision (non reporting analyses). However, given that the maintenance of a healthy psychoanalytic practice requires a reliable referral source, confrontation with institutional power brokers and their favored theories involves some risk and integrity. Finally, it is when we turn to black feminist literary criticism that some of the most critical readings of psychoanalytic theory and the most creative appropriation of it are found. While not facing the possible censorship implicit in the clinical training experience, these scholars have had to


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defend and explain their openness and even commitment to a psychoanalytic lens to other black literary critics.

Margaret Morgan Lawrence graduated from the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute in New York training program in 1951, and the clearest evidence that she considered cultural, racial, and social location important factors for consideration in clinical work can be found in her professional life and scholarship. Lawrence brought an ego psychological perspective to her work with children and families as the founder and director of the Rockland County Community Mental Health Board; in private practice; as a founding board member of the Harlem Psychoanalytic Center (now the Harlem Family Institute); and as having served as the Chief of the Developmental Psychiatry Service for Infants, Young Children, and Their Families at Harlem Hospital Center. Lawrence maintained a rock-solid belief in the strengths and capacities for love in those she treated. I cannot offer an in-depth discussion, but, in brief, ego psychology6 is concerned with the functioning of the ego and its resultant impact on one’s life. For instance, the ego is responsible for negotiating the tension between one’s wishes and impulses (emerging from the id) and the expectations of the environment. The ego’s work, then, is to facilitate adaptation to/in the environment. This work begins early in life and through therapy and other supportive efforts continues and is enhanced. Ego functioning is evident in the capacity to delay gratification, to negotiate the distinction between reality and fantasy, and, in general, help one experience ego syntonic feelings, behaviors, and fantasies. Anxiety arises when one’s impulses are ego dystonic or when the expression of one’s impulses is combined with a fear, or reality, of punishment, loss, and so on. Conflict and symptoms arise when, for instance, one’s impulses under these circumstances forcefully attempt to make themselves known across the area of repression or boundary between the conscious and unconscious. In a shift from a sole focus on the intrapsychic, an ego psychologist will also be very conscious of how the patient relates to the external environment, the defense mechanisms generally utilized to manage wishes, and those social (familial and societal) expectations restricting or dictating the acceptable means for gratifying those wishes. In viewing this through a developmental lens, Lawrence’s view is that “Psychodynamic givens in the study of a child’s development include drives for sex


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and aggression. They also include rudiments of an ego which looks toward the child’s ability to cope with his inner (wishes fueled by drives such as aggression and sexuality) and outer world.”7 In treatment, the revival of these wishes are directed toward the clinician in, initially, disguised form and make up the content and flavor of the transference. So it is the one seeking help who, optimally, has her old wishes activated in treatment, and the psychoanalyst makes her aware of them and how they affect her life in the present. There is an assumed asymmetrical power relationship in this model of psychoanalysis, and, in actuality, in all models of treatment, but Lawrence is uncomfortable with the ways in which this is lived out, especially among the poor, vulnerable, and marginalized people in her care. She is acutely aware of the way in which the culture of clinical training programs can pass these attitudes of power to new therapists, and she has an answer for such a problem. In her quotation on the Harlem Family Institute Web site, she reverses the assumed power relations of psychoanalysis, clinician over patient, and shifts the focus to the intrapsychic and the ancestral: “There are great strengths in the people of Harlem; strengths passed from generation to generation despite deep suffering. This Institute will teach new therapists to recognize those strengths, and build on them toward a growing capacity for love.”8 Lawrence, as a classical theorist, takes the drives for sex and aggression as biological givens; even so, it is love on which she bases healthy development. Love made possible via trust in the earliest relationships of one’s life. In and from those moments of being well, held, and fed, a baby gradually “comes to know that he is loved, is worthy of being fed. This act of trust is for all babies the cornerstone . . . making possible not only physical growth . . . but the growth of a person who can love, work, act and make a contribution to the world. . . . Young black children in Harlem have the same developmental tasks to perform as do all other children . . . regardless of whether their families have fathers, no fathers, or multiple mothers.”9 Her emphasis on love surely makes her stand apart from most classical psychoanalysts of her day, but she also stands apart and even foreshadows black feminist psychological and womanist perspectives when she alludes to the notion of “other mothers” in her term “multiple mothers,” based on an extended kinship of the notion of parenting and thereby refuting the nuclear family bias of mothering as an enclosed dyad.10 She quietly asserts a culturally based understanding of the developmental contexts and experiences of black children. According to Lawrence, there are three areas of concern in need of assessment that are integral


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to black children’s development:11 (1) nature in terms of the child’s givens or constitutional factors; (2) nurture or the environment in which the child’s thrust toward development is facilitated and where care and love are experienced; (3) and Noxia, the factors contributing to trauma. Noxia includes physical trauma such as debilitating illness, physical abuse, poverty, or emotional neglect. What is crucial for her to understand is that these three factors overlap during development but are intertwined with “ego strength.”12 Lawrence’s persistence in the face of unbridled racism during her psychoanalytic training speaks to her own ego strength, the importance she placed on understanding the interior life and its relationship to the social surround, and her strength of character that made her able to confront the misuse of power. In her earliest encounter with the director of the psychiatric institute, he refused to shake her hand upon meeting her. The director was under pressure to accept a black student because he had unknowingly told a reporter that there were no “negro” doctors or patients at the New York Psychiatric Institute because “I don’t think the faculty would like that. The next day the newspaper”13 covered the conversation. Lawrence was an answer to a public relations nightmare, but an unappreciated one. She pressed on and eventually entered training. In another instance of overt racism and abuse of power, Abram Kardiner, author of the Mark of Oppression, “asked Dr. Lawrence to travel South with him to ‘interview negroes.’ ” She refused, citing her obligations as a wife and mother as well as her reluctance to interrupt her own analytic training. She was also suspicious of his perspective and his methods, and worried that in his research Negroes might be portrayed as powerless and inarticulate. Kardiner was furious that this black trainee—the only one available to him—would dare resist his offer. He needed her to make his work legitimate, and she had the nerve to refuse, from that moment on he stopped talking to her. Kardiner then tried to interfere with her graduation by telling the director that she needed additional psychoanalysis, and that she needed to meet with him to determine this. Lawrence refused but did agree to meet with her psychoanalyst and supervisor. They “took care” of the matter—a fact that offered relief and a feeling of unease.14 What is obvious here is that Lawrence knew she was confronting a powerful figure in her institute but refused to participate in what she felt would be biased study of black people, and that she already had a psychoanalytic perspective on how to work with African Americans in traditional treatment settings as well as the community, and she brought this




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perspective to bear on her evaluation of Kardiner’s research attitude and approach. Lawrence refused to be subjugated;15 I think it is safe to say that her training as an ego psychoanalyst helped to understand the psychology of Kardiner in relation to her and the exercise of power, in a broader sense, at her institute. She uses psychoanalysis to effectively understand and respond to the social and psychodynamic pressures of the situation. Her confrontation with abusive power-wielding ways is both akin to a womanist response and yet offers a perspective that could strengthen and deepen our analysis of the contributing factors. Lawrence’s use of the psychoanalytic lens extended to her consultant work with schools. Her books Young Inner City Families: Development of Ego Strength under Stress as well as The Mental Health Team in the Schools argue that mental health professionals must be committed to finding the strength in individuals and families regardless of race or socioeconomic environment, and must widen their context for helping beyond the “ivory tower” of the privatepractice office. Furthermore, she contends that mental health professionals, whether black or white, are “too little aware of the inherent and historical strengths of those with whom we labor. And the tools of our various disciplines are made dull in our own despair. We defend ourselves for our lack of success with the belief that our precious tools, such as psychiatry, . . . and psychoanalysis do not apply for the poor and minorities . . . ”16 Lawrence advocated a psychoanalytic model based on the setting of community, out of the office and into the school, agency, and/or home, fully knowing that it would be challenged by some because of its short-term nature and location. “Our response to this argument . . . is that effective dynamically oriented education and treatment can be provided in a relatively short time, and in other than orthodox circumstances.”17 Not surprisingly, Lawrence asserts a set of criteria for treatment based on “openness, respect and trust.”18 Without these components, the professional is more likely to conclude that those she seeks to assist are “flat, distant, and unavailable to insight.”19 In other words, the problem may be one of a negative countertransference to blacks and the poor, or even a setting where one’s sense of power is not supported by the accoutrements of privilege. Lawrence’s radical community psychoanalysis is not limited to insight, and personal and family changes, she makes a radical ethical claim about the mission of psychoanalysts: “I am repeatedly reminded . . . that important changes must be made in a society which offers so many hazards to the growth, development, safety and future of so many of its people. This would seem to indicate, . . . that persons


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trained in the mental health disciplines are bound to work to some extent on two fronts: the one for which their disciplines have specifically prepared them, and the other . . . front that is dedicated to fundamental social change.”20 Lawrence, again, signifies another contemporary discussion on the therapists’ use of self, and she calls for a radical disciplined place for clinicians—not the blank neutral screen that recognizes reality and the intrapsychic. In this way, again, without explicitly revising the theory, she demanded a psychoanalytic practice that was subject to the local context to determine what help was needed and useful. This stance leads to change, and it challenges the ideas of who needs changing. In her article “The Roots of Love and Commitment in Childhood,” written with grace and self exposure, Lawrence writes that love, just enough love, that recognizes the lovability of the other and lovability of one’s self can stave off personality difficulties. In her case-material and interviews, she reveals herself to be a therapist who has an acute ear for creating links not only between the intrapsychic and the intergenerational but also between patient and therapist: Having treated a young boy, Paul, and having worked closely with the whole family, she notes: “I believe that all three, parents and therapist, made additional gains. The work with each family member supported the whole.”21 Lawrence’s perspective of a mutually transforming experience and a strength focused treatment model foreshadows contemporary discussions, are important contributions to the field, but it is the embedded religious perspective, which is also evident in her work, that is most striking. Love, she, claims, “frees us to move into the world to love and work,” and she cites the apostle Paul as a “theological example” of this interplay: “Be angry but do not sin.” What he means is that love is strongly relational, while sin is to be interpreted as separation or alienation. 22 The importance of love is extended to her understanding of the development or emergence of a self in a socially interactive field, and this is most apparent in her final statement on love, “Love, Spirit, or Soul that permits humanization of the other, a recognition of our common humanity, commits us all, I believe, to a concern for justice and peace for all people.”23 Her view of psychoanalysis challenges those advocating a singular and individual focus on the intrapsychic, or on the family. She foreshadows contemporary discussions on the relationship between psychoanalysis and spirituality. She has described her work as “integrating psychoanalytic wisdom with spirituality,”24 and in my view it offers




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Hugh F. Butts Hugh F. Butts graduated from medical school in 1953, from the Columbia Institute for Psychoanalysis in 1961, and became a supervising and training analyst in 1961.25 Like Lawrence before him, he sought to connect his psychoanalytic training to social reality of black experience, but Butts’ work more explicitly challenged racism in society and the psychoanalytic culture of his day. Butts’ scholarship has a quiet intensity where he reveals the deep effect of racism, cultural oppression, and marginalization of black Americans, and the ways in which negative images of blackness and positive images of whiteness take up residence in the psyches of patients and psychoanalysts, and also in the training of psychiatrists. Beginning his career as a psychoanalyst in the early 1960s, his focus on these issues is supported by other black psychiatrists and mental health professionals addressing these concerns. He uses an ego psychoanalytic lens for clinical articles as well as applied psychoanalytic research aimed at challenging resistances to awareness of the way color and race reside in the psyche and is sustained by the broader culture. One of his first significant articles to attend to race and psychoanalysis, “Transference and Countertransference in Interracial Analyses”26 (coauthored with another analyst, Judith Schachter) was written a year after he achieved the highly political and coveted status of a supervising and training psychoanalyst. Schachter and Butts examine the unconscious meaning of race, blackness, and sex for patients and psychoanalysts in psychoanalytic treatment. They begin their article with the statement “Although the focus of this paper is on the analytic relationship, we are necessarily cognizant of the current social revolution. Many patients are involved in the interracial tensions which permeate our society.”27 In other words, Butts and Schachter make the argument that the external world makes its way into the clinical world and into the intrapsychic domain. In another compelling article written by Butts in 1970, “White Psychiatrists’ Racism in Referral Practices to Black Psychiatrists,”28 coauthored with Phyllis Harrison, the authors report their research findings on the feelings and attitudes that white psychiatrists have toward black psychiatrists, and found


a psycho-theological anthropology that makes relationality and love the central feature of human wholeness, and it even offers a practical theology that makes a loving pursuit of “justice and peace for all” the heart of psychoanalytic practice.


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that these attitudes, both conscious and unconscious, extend to black people in general. Butts’ and Harrisons’ recommendations include the following: (1) psychiatrists need to recognize racism and stereotypes as a psychological issue and a “crippling symptom” for which treatment is indicated; (2) and that psychiatrists should broaden their professional socio- ethnic relations as an “educational and egobroadening”29 experience. They describe racism “as the predication of decisions and policies and behavior on considerations of race, the inferiority of one, the superiority of the other, for the purpose of subordinating a racial group . . . racism may be individual or institutional, passive or active, overt or covert and conscious or unconscious.”30 This is made strikingly obvious when one of their interviewees states, “Of course I would tell a patient that the physician is black. I would tell them if he were fat, crippled, blind, or had a thick accent or any other physical defect.”31 This brings to mind Frantz Fanon’s observation: “ . . . the black man is the symbol of Evil. . . . when one is dirty one is black—whether . . . physical dirtiness or of moral dirtiness. It would be astonishing, if the trouble were taken to bring them all together, to see the vast number of expressions that make the black man the equivalent of sin . . . ” As long as one cannot understand this fact, one is doomed to talk in circles about the “black problem . . . The archetype of the lowest value is represented by the Negro. . . . How else is one to explain, for example, that the unconscious representing the base and inferior traits is colored black?”32 This racially directed destructive feature of psychic life and social relations permeates Butts’ concerns because it clearly has implications for white psychiatrists’ as well as black psychiatrists’ economic well-being (and the broader black community’s psychological, social, and family health). In summary, their research found that white psychiatrists expressed (1) fear that black psychiatrists were not as capable; (2) that they would not be able to handle the intense racial issues raised when referring someone white to a black psychiatrist; (3) that they were best at treating those on the social margins (i.e., hippies, children, super-liberals, protesters, poor, working class, etc.) and also less likely to pay a full fee; (4) disbelief that racism is an indicator of psychological problems and should be treated as such.33 Harrison and Butts, furthermore, strike at the heart of psychoanalytic private practice when they link race and fees, where they note that low fee or free clinics are “remarkably free of any such consideration when serving clients. Only as fees increase or in private practice does racial differentiation in selection of therapists become an important issue. Fortunately, these low fee or free clinics help us




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see the irrelevance of race”34 in clinical practice. Clearly this research was a direct challenge to psychiatric educational norms that, generally, explicitly ignored racism and classism in the curriculum. Butts and Harrison use an ego psychological approach to understanding and explaining the findings of their research. They examined both conscious and unconscious material as well as responses suggesting anxiety reactions and countertransference-provoking material. For instance, in terms of countertransference, they solicited responses from 100 psychiatrists in Chicago, New York, and Detroit among psychiatrists with whom they had some familiarity, and suggested that they possibly failed to widen the group to unknown white analysts because “exploring our feelings we discovered that we did not trust white people, whom we did not know personally, to give us the courtesy of a reply.”35 Both past racial experiences and their anxiety were operative in their research decisions. Their recommendation for educational and ego-broadening experiences is also indicative of theoretical preference, and an indication of their belief that racism, prejudice, and stereotyping will be eradicated or at least lessened through a modification of the ego. Butts’ ongoing psychoanalytic scholarship has continued to focus on the individual’s and society’s need to grapple with race. In Psychology of Black Language, 36 coauthored with James Haskins, Butts examines black English in the context of psychoanalytic treatments, the child educational system, and the psychology of oppression. The authors make the argument that black English is a valid or “true language form”37 and as an adaptive language it should be acknowledged and studied in its cultural and historical contexts as well as comparatively with other forms of English. They draw in particular on the work of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks for examining the relationship between language and colonization. Central to the process of colonization is the colonization of the psyche such that “natives” identify with the colonizer and come to view their own “mother tongue” as a negative because it is associated with being black. However, the identification with the colonizer fails to relieve the psyche of the painful effect of being colonized: “Identifying with the white ego ideal, however, is doomed. Since that ego is unattainable, the subject can only experience frustration, rage, and depression. This psychodynamic is operative in any country like the United States that has a ruling, white powerful majority.”38 The maintenance of whiteness as an ego ideal is advanced overtly by the educational system. Whiteness and the rightness of whiteness are very early on


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linked with language. First at the primary school level: the overvaluing of whiteness and the rejection of blackness and language associated with blackness shape a “disadvantaged” child’s psyche from the moment she enters school. When she is out of compliance with “standard” English, she is corrected by black and white teachers alike on a regular basis.39 At the college and graduate school level, this is evident in languages associated with “scholarly” research. While this has shifted in recent years, only certain European languages associated with whiteness (i.e., German, French, and possibly Italian) were considered acceptable to meet the language requirements for doctoral studies (the biblical field being the exception). As a doctoral student interested in doing ethnographic research on black women, I sought to have black English count as a language. An African American faculty member strongly advised against it and would not support “such a petition.” I was, however, able to use Spanish. This black faculty person represented, and enforced, an unexamined complicity in the maintenance of standard English as the legitimate language regardless of research focus. The “adaptation” to these kinds of forces is of concern to both Butts and Holmes. Butts, for instance, sees child abuse in black families as a reaction to the “societal abuse” suffered by blacks, which results in the belief that abuse of others is the only recourse available. The model he advances is his adaptational model that employs a socialpsychological model. This model, “rather than precluding an individual psychopathological model, complements it. . . . What is (currently) lacking is an approach that will ‘fix the road on the cliff that causes the accidents.’ ”40 Butts argues that most of the research on child abuse has tilted toward the examination of intrapsychic factors while ignoring or diminishing the impact of social factors. While Butts’ perspective is a useful corrective, in my view, it is tilted toward one aspect of social influences, and that is race. His argument would have been strengthened by the integration of a gendered analysis. Furthermore, the model does not fully explain why abuse is the symptom to reactions against the forces of racism. Butts is actually interested in confronting the biases in psychiatric practices where black families are concerned. Increasingly, Butts’ use of an ego psychological approach is designed to demonstrate that racism in psychiatry and psychoanalytic culture and the broader society are indicators of impaired functioning of the ego of the participants. In particular, his argument posits that the impairment is severe because racism and racist practices reveal a break




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with reality, that is, the finding related to white psychiatrists’ referral practices. Racism is pathological on three levels: individual, institutional, and social. However, Butts clearly advances the discourse on race and psychoanalysis and psychiatry and he continues to write in this area. A problem remains because his solutions, in the final analysis, are psychoanalytic treatment for the individual and educational remediation for the institutional settings. Given what black psychoanalysts are writing today, it seems that educational approaches do not necessarily impact the unconscious and, as a result, the practices of some white psychoanalysts or most psychoanalytic institutes. I think that one of the problems is the dearth of black psychoanalysts, and of those who are practicing, most are not writing or engaged in their institutes. Those who are doing so, we shall see, increasingly find ways to theorize and practice psychoanalysis with a lens on integrating social reality into their work while holding a firm perspective on the intrapsychic. As a result of this, they are shifting theory and practice.

Dorothy E. Holmes The points discussed below were more recently developed by psychoanalyst Dorothy Holmes, a psychologist and director of the doctorate in psychology program at George Washington University, as well as training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. They appeared in Holmes’ 1999 article “Race and Countertransference: Two ‘Blind Spots’ in Psychoanalytic Perception.” Holmes had initially addressed these issues, in her 1992 article “Race and Transference in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,” with a lens toward countertransference limitations when psychoanalysts identify with patients’ racial content or avoid the racial content of the transference.41 Identification in this sense was seen to block the accessing of deeper psychic processes such as resistance or projection. In her 1999 article, Holmes reviewed the psychoanalytic literature on race and psychoanalysis and what has been suggested for mediation. “The most frequent recommended approaches to race and countertransference have been didactic or post treatment efforts (for example, self analysis),”42 but when used as the only way to address race in the intrapsychic, these approaches have failed. Holmes ultimately sees as a treatment issue the inability to master racial prejudices and blackness as a site for the projection of negative feelings. What is quite different in the 1999 article when compared to her earlier work is the


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more forceful recognition of racism. And in her 2006 article “The Wrecking Effects of Race and Social Class on Self and Success” she goes so far as to first challenge Freud’s definition of success neurosis. Freud “defined the phenomenon as an intraspsychically determined aberration in which one is wrecked by one’s success when that success triggers” the childhood fantasies related to the oedipal victory.43 In other words, she more clearly discusses race in the clinical arena and in the intrapsychic as having antecedents in the cultural-external milieu. It is clear that in the years since her original article, she has become more insistent on grappling with the real events related to race as a clinical concern and as a point for ongoing analysis of racial fantasies outside the treatment room. Those who are on the dominant side of the racial construct, and who manage their internal states through defensive racialized projections, also suffer from “serious ego disturbances.”44 The implications of these ego disturbances are evident in the ways in which white analysts have tended to turn a blind eye toward unconscious race content in their work with white patients. For instance, Holmes points out that the literature seldom includes the racial content of the transference even when its presence is obvious (at least to a black psychoanalyst). She cites Moskowitz,45 a white Jewish patient with a white psychoanalyst, who published an account of his racialized content during his own psychoanalysis. One of the powerful eye-openers of his material, involving his dream of a black man, was that his early developmental experiences did not involve engagement with blacks. This would not seem to indicate that racial content of the intrapsychic need emerge out of direct experience but enters through the direct exposure to cultural values and attitudes.46 This is a challenge to the tendency of psychoanalytic perspectives to look for the roots of content in early experience. The fact that Moskowitz did not have these early racial interactions does not mean that they are not connected to early nonracial experiences. But it does indicate that racial and racist sociocultural content was readily available for displacement and projection. And these defensive uses of race are insidiously reproduced by the very institutes that train psychoanalysts. For instance, the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Board of Professional Standards has not established curricular or accrediting guidelines related to race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual preference. Psychoanalytic institutes are made up of individuals who most often benefit from the privileges of whiteness and economic well- being. The failure to bring race, gender, sexuality, and economic privilege to the




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couch for a full analysis, in the end, reveals a greater commitment to retaining social position at the expense of one’s psychoanalysis in general and in the broader society. And it reveals a lack of conviction and hope that psychoanalysis is relevant. Holmes retains her conviction about the utility of psychoanalysis and about the ways in which the clinical and training practices have failed. Neither Lawrence, Butts, nor Holmes take up for consideration the relationship between racism (as well as sexism and classism), the internalization of values embedded in racism, and paths of remediation. It is not as clear in their work whether the serious consideration of social and cultural factors means that their theories should be critiqued and/or revised. It is clear that the very important ego psychology concept of adaptation is not used unilaterally—they do not think that blacks should adapt to the forces of racism.

Kimberlyn Leary Kimberlyn Leary is probably the most prolific African American psychoanalyst today. Leary is a psychologist and a graduate of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. Over the past fifteen years she has written numerous articles concerning race in the clinical endeavor. She has steadily engendered a nuanced and theoretically coherent perspective on the varieties of ways and meanings that race (and gender) shows up in treatment. Leary notes that race talk in treatment is understood best when its meaning is negotiated by patient and therapist rather than being dictated by “socially correct conceptualizations from outside the treatment.”47 In this early article, “Interpreting the Dark,” Leary brings to the discussion an element missing from previously discussed black perspectives: Leary posits that race talk is, and also must be, body talk, because race talk requires that the parties take the plunge into bodily difference that include smell, texture, and color. But it is the patient’s meaning of these differences that Leary wants to take up in the clinical endeavor. As a result, Leary critiques theoretical remedies that attempt conceptualizations based on the unique status of African Americans. For instance, in the case of Afrocentric psychotherapies, Leary is suspect of the model’s contention that psychodynamic therapies are not effective with the black patient, and instead engage in a treatment that teaches the patient about the beliefs and cultural practices that are specific to (and idealized by) black people. In so doing, “Africentric perspectives offer new norms for behavior, health, and pathology”48 that are distinct from


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those of whites. The biggest problem here is that such models advocate a “standard for racialized identity”49 and risks subjugating the “individuality of African Americans in contemporary life.”50 Such models also, I assert, render a view of the African American self that does not take into consideration the diversity of experience of black life in the United States (such as economics, gender, region, and sexuality). The path between the social and the interior is littered with tension. Leary also effectively demonstrates how attending to race based on historical realities can inhibit or prohibit the direct expression of racial content in the transference. In other words, the failure to effectively psychoanalyze race content in the clinical dyad leads to “counterreactions”51 that are produced by “cultural prohibitions and ego ideals”52 evoked in the therapist and clinical institutions. The emergence of countertransference at the institutional level is important because, as Leary describes in a supervisory instance when the clinic determined that a black patient would do best with a black therapist (without input from the patient), it has implications for the clinical work and for the formation of the therapist. What is also interesting about Leary’s discussion is that while she acknowledges the reality of institutional dynamics as a valid point of concern, it is not clear why this external is privileged over other external conceptualizations outside the treatment. I wonder if, at this point, taking the realities of racism, that is the structural realities impacting the lives of all patients, is just a little too anxiety provoking. However, Leary’s increasing sophistication in linking self experience and cultural productions is just the perspective that womanist practical theology should be engaging. If Leary was hesitant in taking up the impact of sociality, it was short-lived. She assertively pursues the psychosocial dynamics of race in her paper “Race, Self-Disclosure, And ‘Forbidden Talk’: Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Clinical Practice.”53 Here she locates race and racial difference in the intersubjective realm and “suggest that contemporary psychoanalytic formulations and multicultural perspectives from outside of psychoanalysis can together create more meaningful conceptualizations which take into account the lived realities of race and the ways in which these may be shaped by individual psychology.”54 As an introductory statement, Leary’s position is problematic or at least asymmetrically tilted again toward the intrapsychic. It would seem to me that the point of taking into account the lived experience of race would be to understand how the realities related to race shape the individual psychology and the intersubjective spaces




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that are integral to one’s life. Leary, however, does increasingly lead us back to the social. For example, she reflects briefly on the different reactions to the O.J. Simpson trial in terms of preexisting racial antipathy. Where most whites expressed shock, a significant number of blacks felt that the system had finally worked in favor of blacks. The different reactions to the Simpson verdict are certainly related to the differently lived realities of blacks and the social justice system. These different social realities that frame our lived experience contribute to how we understand the broader social systems and our place in them, and shape our ways of relating intersubjectively based on race, gender, and class. This most definitely “creeps its way” into the clinical domain. One poignant example from my clinical practice bears mentioning. During a consultation with a white senior colleague, I presented a patient, a white male, who would enter the office, throw his coat, bag, and any food he was carrying on my desk. He was destructive (ripped the upholstery on the chair and damaged a door). His dream material was filled with racial content where the color black and black people, particularly women, were associated with “shit and ugliness.” My consultant’s first response to me upon hearing his dream material was “well you must feel that way about being black too, right?” Though shocked, I asked why this would be the case, and after much rambling, silence filled the space. I stated that clearly this was the way he felt and that his view about blackness and about me resonated with my patient’s material, but no, I did not feel this way. There are multiple ways of understanding these exchanges, but it is not enough to locate them as sole features of the intrapsychic and unconscious realm. This experience reflects an observation Leary makes when she comments that when race is generally a point of discussion by white psychoanalysts it almost always refers to people of color. 55 I am convinced that greater attention to the external social environment by psychoanalysts is mandated, but it is also important that womanists attend to what is happening psychoanalytically. There is an assumption that white people are free of race and the socializing forces related to race. These forces shape the intersubjective space between whites and all other people, but they also shape the space between whites (as in the space of my patient’s views and my consultant’s views). When this fact is ignored, even clinical discussions about race can result in a perspective reproducing of negative cultural representations by making the societal disappear behind a pseudo-intrapsychic perspective, that is, “you must feel this way too.” Another result is


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that of making race invisible. In a review of Holmes’ case presentation where a patient is said to have projected her negative feelings about herself onto the race of the therapist, Leary points out that the final result is a discussion that leaves out the cultural, racial, and embodied reality in the room. 56 Again, Leary tilts us toward socially lived reality. Leary shifts her discussion back to the social and analyzes the ambivalent relationship of psychoanalysis to culture, and, for the majority of psychoanalysts, their position of social class and status. Race is, of course, a social construct and, in many ways, a social contract. Leary asserts that “racialized experience—the experience of being raced—operates through people and through everyday cultural forms and is not a matter of individual intention and agency alone.”57 This again affirms that race as we know it, experience it, and project it is maintained in the social, structural, and interpersonal domains that link us. This social world is, of course, a world where gender, class, and body are inextricably linked internally and in the social negotiations in which we engage daily. Thus, we exist in a relational world, but a relational world where some people are immediately related to based on the color of their skin, their gender, and sometimes their, assumed, sexuality. Here we are again directed toward embodied experiences. Skin color, hair, and other bodily matters can permeate black women’s interior and social dialogue. These bodily matters, as previously noted by Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, have motherdaughter and family and cultural antecedents, and intersect with feelings related to gender, sexuality, and self-image. The intrapsychic dimension of embodiment cannot be predetermined as each woman brings her own background to her own experience of embodiment. Our work so far has shown that the unconscious finds its way into the character of social interactions and cultural representations. In fact, I am convinced that they are inextricable and link gender and sexuality through similar, though again most often unconscious, projective activities. As it concerns black sexualities, the psychoanalytic case literature seldom presents a helpful non-pejorative picture. Leary offers a distressing example that occurred in a conference where a psychoanalyst presented a patient’s dream “to give the audience a snapshot of the patient’s inner life. In the dream, the patient represented herself and her desires in racially stereotyped imagery. The black girl in the dream was depicted as insatiable, bestial, and unlovable.”58 Neither the case discussants nor the audience raised the gendered racial content in the material. Much like my consultant’s response,




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the material mirrored their unconscious view of black women. This is really the psychoanalytic reproduction of the negative racist view of black women. Leary, before making her observation, takes pains to say that the presenting analyst is a very fine clinician. I do not doubt her assessment, but I do wonder why the need to preface her critique. What is being protected here? This case vignette should remind us of our tendency to place black experience of racial-gender content in a special category. By this I mean that the clinicians’ unexamined negative images and fantasies of black women impacts her clinical work, and not just with black clients, because these images are operative socially, clinically, and intrapsychically. I also contend that, in a subtle way, psychoanalytic meetings and case conferences impose a culture of nonconfrontation where it comes to racism in the clinical presentation. There is an assumption that racism will be discussed in a way so as to avoid making a direct link between the individual presenting and the very obvious issue of race, and, in this case, gender. It is not the individual, however, who is most protected. The relational and political life governs psychoanalytic institutes and conferences, and given the demographics of these bodies, those most protected from becoming aware of how racism is mediated to their psychological advantage are white and privileged.

Race, Gender, and Sexuality Gender is a feature not fully fleshed out in the work of the black analysts discussed. Experiences that, to my reading, are racial and gender-based tend to be discussed primarily in terms of race. For instance, Leary’s article “Racial Insult and Racial Repair” discusses how racial insults impact “the experience of being desired and desirable” and begins with a brief discussion of the movie Crash where Ryan, a white police officer, pulls over a black couple and: interrogates the pair and then in full view of Christine’s husband and the other police officer, Ryan begins to slowly rub his hands down Christine’s body. This exchange—a White man asserting his prerogative on the body of a woman of color—replicates countless occurrences of the same during slavery and its aftermath. 59


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In the early months of treatment, Dawn began to wonder if some of her negative assessments of herself (e.g., that she was aggressive, romantically unfit, sexually problematic, and only a temporary love) might reflect subtle accommodations on her part to disowned perceptions Daniel may have had about her. She could recognize these perceptions as cultural stereotypes of Black women “out there” that might also have been played out in some of their relational and sexual problems.60 For some analysts, a turn to explanations of this sort would be viewed as collusion with resistances that undermine analytic understanding. I expect the reader to imagine I feel otherwise. . . . the experience of being raced operates through people and through everyday cultural forms and is not a matter of individual intention and agency alone.61

What is missing here is the link between being raced and gender. In both examples cited, gender permeates as a subtext when actually it needs to be made explicit. Leary is on to something, that we are raced as a product of the cultural and interpersonal exchange, but as womanists have demonstrated again and again, race and gender are lived simultaneously. If race and gender are stifled in psychoanalytic perspectives, when we turn to the clinical pictures of black lesbians (and gay men) in black psychoanalytic literature, we find that it is close to being nonexistent. Psychoanalytic views of black sexualities are subject to an unacknowledged censorship. I would suggest that while the censorship is similar to the silencing of race and black women in the clinical situation, the confluence of countertransference, biases, and transference issues in the treatment of black lesbians also involves the issues involved in coming out, physically violent forms of homophobia, and the heterosexism embedded in psychodynamic developmental models, and also the very real impact of laws that seek to dictate how black lesbians live their lives together. Beverly Greene, a black psychodynamic psychologist, comments that she and Nancy Boyd-Franklin declared that “African American women are barely a footnote in American psychology; here I might add that African American lesbians are less than a footnote to the footnote.”62 The absence of a full black psychoanalytic perspective on expressions of heterosexism and homophobia as an intrapsychic as well as cultural symptom is problematic. It limits black experience to race and, if discussed, heterosexuality.


that shapes the rest of her discussion. In her case vignette, she discusses an African American woman who has ended a relationship with a white man.


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This is an area where both womanist theology and ethics and black psychoanalytic perspectives must develop, and the dialogue between the two disciplines will only enhance the result. Womanists theology, however, brings to the dialogue another area remarkably missing from our black psychoanalytic perspectives, and this is the place of religion and spirituality in the lives of black women and black experience in the United States. With the exception of Lawrence’s comment on her psychoanalytic identity being shaped by psychoanalytic wisdom and spirituality, there is no reference to religion and spirituality as a feature of black culture or as having a role in development and self-understanding. This dimension, taken so seriously in womanist thought, will contribute to the psychoanalytic perspective emerging from black experience. Black psychoanalysts are few and far between. What we can tell from those we have considered here is that the clinical engagement with race is inevitable and desirable. This engagement has not engaged gender and sexuality to the extent needed. Black psychoanalysts, regardless of their training contexts and theoretical commitments, are compelled to address race in terms of personal psychology, cultural and social lived experience, and the need to recognize that culture is integral to the formation and maintenance of the self. What is also evident is that black psychoanalysts, especially post training, become more and more strident in their insistence that the nexus between the intrapsychic and the social (in which the ego, self, and relational being are maintained) must be theorized and practiced in ways that enhance black experience. To do otherwise renders psychoanalysis irrelevant for black people and for the culture it could be poised to help. Even so, there remain, in my view, several under- examined areas in these psychoanalytic discussions on race. First, there are aspects of the self and cultural experience that are tied to interconnected experiences of race, namely, gender, sexuality, and religious experience (and its meaning in the clinical exchange with black patients). Second, none of these works has offered a thoroughly critical assessment of their theories. In other words, theory directs the questions and approach to race, and so on. We do not yet know what happens to our favored theories and related concepts when race, gender, religious experience, and sexuality are made visible and even become interrogators of the theories. We will not fully address this question until the next chapter; however, in the next section we will consider the approach of black feminist psychoanalytic literary criticism, which can offer a broader perspective.


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Black Feminist Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism

Hortense Spillers’ interest in psychoanalysis arose out of her concern for black communal life. She makes the critique that we’ve not dealt with the internal, and suggests that part of it may be gender-related. She turned to psychoanalytic theory because “the psychoanalytic seemed to open up . . . possibilities, that you could talk psychoanalytically at many different levels and all the time you’re talking interpersonally, intersubjectively . . . ”63 But bringing psychoanalytic theory to black experiences is fraught with difficulty because it is immediately associated with the single figure on the couch and a very private exchange. Spillers, however, is interested in the way in which psychoanalytic theory supports a “self conscious and self critical capacity in your relationship to others.”64 But psychoanalysis can also help us speak about “how ‘race’ carries over its message onto an interior; how ‘race,’ as a poisonous idea, insinuates itself not only across and between ethnicities, but also within.”65 Therefore, what she has in mind is not just the individual’s self-critical capacity but the groups’ increased self conscience, and she turns to the setting of the black church to give it a framework. She locates her own memory of black community and black church experience in the center of her consideration of black religion as formational. The black community, especially the black church, in Spillers’ experience, supported development and a connection and commitment to something larger than self. “There was a dimension of that they engaged which made them critical of themselves and others. So, I’m looking for the equivalent of that in the world in which we find ourselves now. The psychoanalytic might in fact offer a way to remain critical and to secularize that value that had its center in the religious, in religiosity.”66 But the secularizing, for Spillers, is that the discourse moves, again, to a space wider, with greater depth, than the individual. The result she is looking for is the linking of psychoanalysis or the psychoanalytic dialogue to an ethic of other oriented interest.67 Spillers believes religion, or rather the black church, can be a conduit for this linkage. She may be a little overly optimistic about what the black church can or will do at this point in its history. “The black church as an institution remains the single most powerful Black institution. A politically conscious, politically progressive ministry


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today could do a lot towards helping us move away from drugs, prostitution, destructive behavior, violence. . . . I realize it might be a little dangerous for the preacher to try to play therapist, but discussion groups are possible.”68 She also wants a different model of church where the preacher sometimes stops talking and starts listening. She wants to turn the power relationship upside down—the one authorized to speak now listens, and she wants a “different paradigm of the analyst/analysand or patient/therapist”69 relationship. But listening is tied to intersubjectivity and intersubjectivity is tied to someone speaking. “To speak” resituates the speakers in relation to the “social economy and in the case of the racialized subject”70 we know the speaking and the occupying of a place is hard won and seldom granted. Those who have been sidelined to the margins, children, women, the patient, must be given authority to speak through recognition and must be heard. This is the beginning of what she calls the work of black culture. Black cultural work is political, and it is psychoanalytic work because social productions are the symptoms. It is possible that one of the symptoms, of which she speaks, is tension in African American culture between “community” and what she calls the “one.” Spillers notes that there is a firmly held conviction in black resistance to the individual, because to be individualist and black is death-dealing. So “the individual of black culture exist strictly by virtue of the ‘masses,’ which is the only image of social formation that traditional analysis recognizes.”71 Black cultural productions require that this difference between individualistic and the collective consciousness become the backbone of black discourse. This backbone is the point on which African American culture maintains its opposition to the dominant culture and announces and sustains its “collective enterprise in strict antinomy to the individualistic”72 of the dominant/dominating culture.

Claudia Tate and the Racial Protocol of African American Claudia Tate takes up this matter in her discussion of the racial protocol of African Americans. The protocol demands that black literature represents racial oppression as the text of black life. To do otherwise is to be misunderstood, ignored, or to be viewed as suspect.73 The black experience is predetermined to be racial oppression and righteous protest. Employing a move from psychoanalysis, Tate aims, in her reading of black novels, to shift from the prescribed manifest racial storyline to include the “latent” racial content. She is convinced that


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psychoanalysis can tell us much about how race matters. Like Spillers, Tate wants to look at content that has been discarded, repressed, or disavowed on a social level. But she is cognizant that while “psychoanalytic theory can help us analyze the social pathology of racism, its practice has carried . . . baggage that has made it anathema”74 to black intellectuals. But Tate counters this view, rather than discard it, by trying to “understand its own compensatory defenses by questioning the cultural effects of its Jewish origins in anti- Semitic”75 context. Freud’s psychoanalysis silenced its historical context by focusing on the family, but it was a family conceived as outside of culture; so family is family. Thus it defensively locates all traumas in the familial and the cultural of the psychoanalytic scrutiny. In terms of racism, the psychoanalytic enterprise could only see its effects in terms of the personality and the family. The reality of social disorder is thus lost, and, as Tate notes, it is then very easy to construe the black family as pathological, and the effect of racism on the family is vaporized. Black literary productions, on the other hand, recover the social and cultural sources of trauma but impose a gag order of their own on the writer and her, or his, internal contribution to the storyline. Instead, the narrator, in order to be received as a black writer, must highlight the negative impact of racism on the lives of black people; it is one where black victimization is the black experience and white privilege prevails regardless of other “materialist” factors.76 But other factors are jettisoned as well. In her consideration of the maternal in her discussion of William E.B. Du Bois, Tate grapples with the powerful influence of his mother on his life and novels. Du Bois says of his mother, “Mother was dark shining bronze, with smooth skin and lovely eyes; there was a tiny ripple in her black hair,” but he also “blamed his mother for his father’s absence. The youngster believed that she had deserted his father and was responsible for their demeaning material predicament . . . ”77 His feelings for his mother were clearly complicated, and the sociologist Allison Davis suggested that he dealt with their incongruity with the use of “compensatory fantasies.”78 Du Bois’ complicated feelings toward his mother were fueled by his fantasy that she abandoned his father when actually his father got married to another woman while still married to her. Du Bois’s early life was filled with poverty and punctuated by racist assaults on his psyche. His mother, by his account, adored him: “She did not try to make me perfect. To her I was already perfect.”79 Tate reads the mother, his mother, back into his work, creating a link between his fantasies of his lost mother, his novels, and his political




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actions related to race. The place of gender in his psyche and social exchanges is complex. Maternal adoration existed alongside female rejection as the most highlighted formative experiences. Both are intertwined with race. At the age of twenty-five, in a ritual (including candles and oil, and singing), he dedicates his library to his deceased mother; he also commits himself to the work of racial upliftment. 80 Female rejection figures as a psychic and public force in his life related to race and sexuality. His early memory of having a white girl reject his calling card in class (in a class where everyone was passing these out) stayed with him. He writes, “I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Tagkanic to the sea. . . . in a wee wooden schoolhouse, . . . the boys and girls . . . (bought gorgeous visiting- cards to) exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer refused my card . . . ”81 We know that she is white, and the non-exchange leaves a lasting mark in his memories, which was referred to in various places in his writing. We cannot continue with Tate’s very thorough analysis, but we can see that gender, race, and sexuality are linked in a psychoanalytic reading of black experience. But they are not just linked in, or through, the psyche, but in the social milieu. Race is generally the focal point of the cultural image of Du Bois’ work and life. Such readings conform to, and confirm, the racial protocol. We can see where this leads us: unexamined fantasies and literary characters where whiteness is associated with power and blackness with impotence. It seems to me that this reading compels us to see black literature/black life that conforms to this prescription as a trauma repetition. No, not the trauma theory resting on (according to Freud, female) the masochistic pleasure gained but rather a repetition of trauma that is a powerful cultural trauma, but not fully absorbed. Wishes, longings, fantasies, and events that counter the internal and external script are (nearly) obliterated. But then again, how are we to deal with the real repetitions of the script? An African American male student reported that a white twenty-something-year-old graduate female student inquired if all his siblings went to college? Upon hearing yes, she is briefly surprised but quickly recovers and asked, “Did your parents go to college?” Yes, his parents went to college. Only briefly stunned, she again asks, “well, did your grandparents go to college?” No they had not. Neither had hers, but the African American student left the exchange feeling angry and ashamed. The white woman seemed to feel relieved. The racial script was reinforced


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for/in her and in him. The external and internal are so very intertwined. It may very well be that we will have to consider what would be lost/mourned if the repetition were analyzed enough to the end. Tate wants a racially contextualized model of psychoanalysis that can “help us analyze black textuality by identifying the discourses”82 that serve as a catalyst for the text. Spillers guides us in similar directions, but she maintains that the “one” is, as a concept, missing. The one is not the individual, though they are not entirely separate. The distinction she is calling for also makes a distinction between the perception of psychoanalytic interests as private and personal. Spillers wants to place the notion of the individual within a historical and economic vortex; it is, she comments “a certain kind of formation in relationship to property. It’s bourgeois . . . Whereas the ‘one’ I think of as a concept born with Freud . . . is put in place by the social, it is put in place by language, one’s relationship to the social . . . ”83 Of course, Freud’s individual is born within a bourgeois nuclear family where “Mama” and “Papa” and their parenting roles had not been trampled with the reality of enslavement and its denial of black parenting. A child stolen, sold, and purchased “neither belonged to the mother” nor the father. 84 Psychoanalytic interests, then, must turn toward the social, ethical, and interior. Just as we ask how the insidious message of race moves outside and inside, we have to ask how the social black community, which is not singular, makes it way inside. This is psychoanalytic cultural work. Womanist theology and ethics is cultural work, and it brings to this discussion an unambivalent stance toward African American women’s cultural experience. The psychoanalytic perspectives we have examined bring culture and/or society as an add-in to their psychoanalysis. Their work takes, for instance, race and racism seriously, but it is not the starting point for their analysis. Womanist theology and ethics seek to transform the social, political, and religious structures and patterns that negatively impact the individual and the possibility of a just and loving society. Womanists are guided in their work by a moral imperative in this regard. Womanists have an epistemological interested stance, and therefore they give priority to black women’s experiences. So when womanists engage black women’s literature because it has the potential to reveal the circumstances of black women’s lives, it is doing so because of ethical aims. Black women’s literature is especially critical for naming those circumstances that have been shrouded in silence. Womanists’ cultural work readily engages




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race, gender, class, and, infrequently, sexuality, and it requires us to confront the realities of religious experience and trauma. This should be the heart and guts of a critical conversation between psychoanalysis and womanist thought and makes the cultural-communal-self of central importance, but such a resituating requires a grappling with the ways that the experiences of the community accumulates intersubjective currency (in and out of black contexts) and take up residence within our fantasies, hopes, convictions, and suffering—that is, in our psychic life. It seems to be that it is to the realm of suffering and trauma, and the ways these are carried by communities and by the individuals of communities, where our attention must turn. A turn in this direction must be undertaken with care, however, because to claim that trauma are only cultural (due to racism, sexism, objectification of the other, etc), or to claim no cultural basis to trauma, renders the analysis useless. The psychoanalytic and womanist dialogue is crucial and necessary. It is also saturated with possibility and with danger. Let me return to Spillers and her discussion of the ethic of the group. Groups, such as communities, also maintain self-interested forms of being. In the name of community, black women can be rendered silent or unaware. For example, it is still common for black women, in any variety of settings, to focus their analysis on race but not gender, or gender but not race, or race, gender, and class but not sexuality. Progress, or the progress of the people, will be inhibited if too many “issues” are raised. Or it is declared that cooperation will break down due to theological diversity. These are exploitive tactics that cannot serve the deepest interests of black women and black communities. Even so, they continue and are reproduced in subtle and blatant fashion. These patterns of control are the symptoms and the evidence of cultural trauma. And the imposition of silence is the fertile ground for its repetition. These forms or symptoms that inhibit progress are related to intergenerational trauma and the silencing of such trauma from one generation to the next. Spillers, for example, explains one of the reasons she privileges the intellect and the capacity to verbalize: “for a long, long, long time, through the centuries of slavery, there were strictures on intellectual development . . . We’re still coming out [of] that stricture that intellectual work is something that white people do, that Europeans do, not something that black-skinned people do.”85 There is a process of projection and identification that is operative here. The


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belief that black folks do not do intellectual work is projected onto cultural representations of blackness and internalized by whites and blacks. In the case of African Americans, it is sometimes internalized as an accurate depiction, and black intellectual work can be viewed with suspicion. Spillers suggest this is the basis of, for example, the failure of blacks to engage in academic pursuits or their less than capable results on “objective” tests. She challenges these assumptions and locates this struggle at the center of her work with psychoanalytic theory. “I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with Black genetic structure, Black brain power, ain’t nothing wrong with it. But we’ve got to changes [sic] some things in the outer and the inner. . . . That’s the cultural work, that’s the political work. . . . For me, that’s where the literacy/psychoanalytic/theoretical thing is pointing . . . ”86 Again, the appropriation of psychoanalysis must hold tightly to the cultural and the intrapsychic, and for Spillers it has political aims. This multipronged agenda makes it cultural work. Cultural work cannot avoid the traumatic. Cultural work is, in many respects, initially, a recovery work, and the recovery is of the past events, persons, and hopes that are still operative in the unconscious or out-of-awareness present. Spillers’ reflection on the “packaging of trauma”87 and the effect this has on people is very helpful here for understanding how communal trauma can be vaporized and why it is in need of recovery. She wonders how the story of Africans being enslaved would be told today if The Geneva Convention or Amnesty International had existed and had identified the war criminals’ actions as crimes against humanity. She wants to critically appropriate trauma and posttraumatic stress syndrome as critical tools to “re-fashion our understanding of slavery,”88 but Spillers cannot fully grasp or explain the reality of the social pain that continues as the legacy of slavery, and this makes her return to it. “I think that’s one reason why slavery presents itself to me now, for instance, as a society having a massive psychotic episode.”89 Psychosis involves a split with reality. It seems the split with reality in this regard is the split with the fact that violence and sexualized violence were integral to the economic institution of enslavement. But another feature of this psychotic episode of over four-hundred years is that “society is torn between our own inclination toward violence and barbarity toward one another and our own reaching and striving to be something we’re not quite yet.”90 The psychotic episode continues, but Spillers is not fully clear how the psychotic and its aftermath is passed on to each new generation.91 But she knows the pain is transmitted




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in the traumas like the beating of Rodney King and re-lived in the ineffectual news reporting of it. Watching the news was traumatic: “I watched it and I trembled, it frightened me . . . It traumatized me.”92 What are we to do in the face of such trauma? Do we watch it or turn away? Do we/can we repress it? Can it be repressed if the pain is carried in the body, in the psyche, and in the cultural projections, and day-to-day interpersonal negations of race and self? Womanists advance the recovery of the history of such traumas and the resistance-strategies undertaken by black women and men. As black women and men, we cannot completely repress it or disavow it, because there is, in some form or another, a regular reliving of it. Hugh F. Butts has named the repetition as the abuse and violence in family life. Frantz Fanon has named it in our identification with the values and thoughts of those who define our blackness as evil, mad, base, and in need of destruction. Emilie Townes has named it in the cultural (re-)production of evil. We relive, daily, these kinds of cultural and interpersonal interactions. We are confronted with a powerful legacy, one that we seek to disinherit while revealing it at the same time. Where we render the intrapsychic invisible, we provide fertile ground for the destructive intersubjective, social, and psychic forces. Silence breathes new life into debilitating forces, and it siphons off the air supply we need to engage in the struggle for change. In order to resist the lure and power of silence in the face of struggle and trauma, we must link trauma, self, and culture within a womanist psychoanalytic analysis. In the next two chapters we do just this, first by bringing womanist perspectives and psychoanalysis into a conversation, and then by bringing a psychoanalytically womanist perspective to culture, black religious experience, and trauma.


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Black Women and Self Psychology: Toward a Usable Dialogue

The Contextual Nature of Self From the beginning, my introduction to self psychology was steeped in questions related to race, gender, and sexuality. The Center for Religion and Psychotherapy of Chicago, where I trained, offered a program specializing in the work of Heinz Kohut and the theory he developed, known as self psychology. I was struck by and drawn to what many thought of as Kohut’s radical and necessary shift from Freud’s classical drive model postulating that humanity is primarily motivated by innate sexual and aggressive instincts. Kohut stressed innate developmental needs that we turn to others to meet. The shift from drives leading our way into relationship to needs ultimately produced a view of the person where self-ness emerged out of the experience of satisfaction of crucial needs throughout life. We immediately see that Kohut recognized the importance of early developmental environment, the related needs, and advocated the lifelong need for others—as opposed to a developmental trajectory always toward a radical independence. The aspect of his work that I have found most compelling is where he links culture and self-experience. We will expand these ideas later in the chapter, but I think the following vignette can help us see why a psychoanalytic view of the relationship between culture and self is crucial. Vasumati, a woman from Southeast Asia, was referred to me for treatment after having met with two previous therapists. The referral source, a senior colleague, also trained in self psychology, stated that Vasumati needed a “cross- cultural therapist.” I am not a cross- cultural


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therapist but I took his statement to mean that she needed someone who understood culture as integral to self experience. After ten years of graduate work here in the United States, Vasumati was graduating and expected to return to her homeland and fulfill her filial and professional obligations. With her return home, she would be leaving behind friends of long duration, a former lover and friend, colleagues, and a way of life quite common to many graduate students of the United States but quite different from the life to which she was returning. Her previous therapists, upon hearing her deep distress, encouraged her to stay in the United States. It seems they understood her struggle as one of an individual woman needing to make a developmental move toward independence from her family. While there was “sensitivity” to her culture, neither therapist was able to understand its place in her psyche and its importance to her. She was gifted, incredibly intelligent, and had several excellent career offers. Furthermore, she knew that she would miss her way of life in the States. The therapists could not understand her plans to return home given her longing to remain. I listened to her situation, her pain, and her sense that these other therapists did not understand, as she stated that “I have no dilemma.” I heard her distress as sadness and grief. The cultural context in which she developed had created relational and communal obligations in her. Unlike many others raised in a more individualist cultural context, her sense of self was not linked solely to what might satisfy her current longing. Again, she knew herself to be primarily oriented toward her relational world from which she came; this included her relationship to her family, community, and cultural institutions. The loss of her life here, and how she had experienced herself here, needed to be grieved. As her therapist, I was not committed to her staying or leaving based on some preconceived notion about her right to autonomy, independence, and her “own life.” I recognized that powerful cultural and psychological forces were at play and had been at play throughout her time at graduate school. In fact, I believe her expansiveness of self while staying here was, in part, due to her understanding that she would return home. In her grieving was also a longing to return home. There was an expansion of herself here that was, I believed, congruent enough with herself in her home cultural context. She very clearly imagined her life upon her return as one fueled by her experience out of the country, but she also understood she would not express it in the same manner there. Therein was a central component of her grief.


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This vignette should direct our attention to the contextual nature of the self. The self cannot be excised from the social milieu, and, moreover, this social context gives rise to a gendered, cultural, sexual, and racial/ethnic self. In other words, the individual’s experience of self and, in this case, the desires, obligations, and ethical expectations need to be understood contextually. Thus the self is simultaneously a cultural and a psychic experience. Until recently much of the debate on self has arisen because the notion of self has been predicated on the basis of narrow Western models of being, that is, white, male, middle- class, educated, and, in psychoanalytic theories, affluent enough to afford a specialized form of treatment. Though this has shifted considerably in many areas, the relationship between self and culture is still in need of conversations arising from approaches that have moved beyond a privileged social location in Western contexts. Malcolm Pines, a self psychologically oriented theorist in group processes, offers a useful conceptual shift. He insists that “The individual identity of each one of us is constituted by intrapsychic, interpersonal and transpersonal processes; the boundaries of the individual extend beyond those of the corporeal self . . . Healthy human beings grow within a culture of embeddedness where others provide reciprocity, gratification and impetus for continued growth . . . whereby the person enters not only into the cultural system but also into the moral systems of society . . .”1

Selfobjects: Self Psychology and the Contextual-Relational Self Self psychology is based on the premise that early caregivers’ empathic responses to the child’s needs lead to the development of a cohesive self whereby one has a sense of self continuity and coherence over time. Kohut and Ernest Wolf described the self as “the core of our personality”2 and as having “various constituents which we acquire in the interplay with those persons in our earliest childhood environment whom we experience as selfobjects.”3 This self is not thoroughly static but is, rather, one with fluidity, flexibility, and expandability in terms of experiencing and as experienced by others. This self is subjective and intersubjective in nature. It is the nature and tone of the relational dynamics between the self and its selfobjects in childhood that shape the self and determine whether it will be experienced “either as a firm and healthy structure or as a more or less seriously damaged


Black Women and Self Psychology


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one. The adult self may thus exist in states of varying degrees of coherence, from cohesion to fragmentation; in states of varying degrees of vitality, from vigor to enfeeblement; in states of varying degrees of functional harmony, from order to chaos.”4 Therefore, the self is not rigid or inflexible or set in cement. In my view, Kohut’s understanding of the self allows for different expressions and experiences depending on setting and even activity, stressors, and pleasures. This flexibility of the self allows for a sense of expansiveness experienced upon hearing beautiful music or gazing upon a powerful work of art or holding a baby close to one’s heart or staring into the eyes of one’s lover or making love or worshipping. The type, degree, and setting for the expanding of this flexible self are very much dependent on contexts of early socialization as well as the contemporary settings. Esther Meneker noted that in this highly technological ethos in which we now live, the self, while able to search out and find needed selfobject experiences in the culture, is also having to adapt to rapid and frequent change. 5 She suggests that the self’s pursuit of cultural experience is one based on the impulse toward survival in the absence of individual or personal selfobjects; thus the person turns to the broader context for the psychological provisions that are necessary.6 Both self psychological and womanist perspectives would agree that the broader cultural climate, shifts in values, hopes, and needs influence and shape our understanding and experience of the self and obviously give particular importance to race, gender, and sexuality.

Heinz Kohut on Culture A distinguishing feature of Kohut’s empathic immersion perspective was the refining of the difference between “culture” and “civilization.” The civilization of the individual and group was the result or response to the fragmentation of the cohesive group and served, for example, to contain and repress its rage. Culture, on the other hand, actually served to facilitate group cohesion by expressing the deepest longings, sufferings, and celebrations of the group. Kohut writes of cultural selfobjects, which he defined as those creative persons in “religion, philosophy, art and the sciences” who, in the case of group illness, are in “empathic contact with the illness of the group self and, through their work . . . , mobilize the unfulfilled narcissistic needs and point the way toward vital change. These creative persons give form to the cultural malaise and the societal conditions that perpetuate


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group illness.”7 The recognition that cultural imagoes may have a role in the celebration of the self that is integral to belonging, and that this experience may function for the individual (and group) as a developmental step toward the formation of a cohesive self,8 forms the foundations of a self psychological theory that can acknowledge the importance of both cultural selfobjects for individual development as well as the psychological maturation of a group self. But, clearly, cultural selfobjects are not solely individuals. They are also the symbols, language, institutions, and cultural productions that meet those needs for individuals and groups that are sometimes embodied by individuals. In fact, the concepts of “self” and “cultural selfobject” are cultural productions. And, as cultural productions, the self and cultural selfobjects are unique to the context in which development, needs, and care occur. This leads Karen Seeley to assert that the selfobject concept is “problematic for intercultural treatments because Kohut presented selfobject functions as universal. Self psychology assumes that all children everywhere have identical needs for mirroring, idealization, and twinship. Yet these needs are specific to segments of Western cultures,”9 as is most of the valuing of individualism versus collective or communal efforts. In my view, Kohut does not favor individualism, but his perspectives emerged out of a context where the cultural myth of individualism, as the desired outcome of development, permeates the theoretical air. Kohut walks on both sides of the Enlightenment’s prized individual and the more contemporary relationalist line because he, as Teicholz states, “placed self and relationship at the center of human motivation and narrative and questioned Freud’s sexual and aggressive drives as primary motivators of personality, experience and psychopathology.”10 Even so, Kohut’s relational is steeped in his cultural social location, and this means that our understanding of selfobjects and appropriation must be specific to contexts and demonstrate a greater appreciation of the social. In fact, from a womanist perspective it means that to theorize the self involves theorizing the relational and contextual. Self psychologists such as Malcolm Pines are cognizant of this and have made this integral to their group clinical work. His claim that “Healthy human beings grow within a culture of embeddedness where others provide reciprocity, gratification and impetus for continued growth . . . whereby the person enters not only into the cultural system but also into the moral systems of society . . . ”11 is an explicit shift in psychology toward aspects of the social and contextual. The self becomes and is maintained, and disrupted, in the relation sphere that is always situated in the sociocultural field.




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If we make greater use of the work on culture and cultural selfobjects, we can find within self psychology a sociocultural psychology of the self, and this sociocultural dimension rests, in large part, on its emphasis on the idea that the experience of one’s self achieves a sense of a cohesive continuity that remains, by and large, most of the time. In Kohut’s theory, this focus on continuity is interesting, and possibly surprising, because in many ways Kohut lived with his own version of a discontinuity of self. It is by now well known that his most famous case, “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z,”12 is most likely based on his self-analysis. It came as a surprise to some the degree to which he had denied his Jewish background and his extensive experience of Judaism.13 How and why this discontinuity existed for Kohut cannot be fully known, nor is this aspect of his life the focus of this paper. Our awareness of his personal struggles sheds light on the sensitivity he brought to the issue of continuity of self. Constance Goldberg, in her reflection on Kohut, suggested that his emphasis on continuity had to do with the distress with which he lived because of the lack of his own continuity. Her view is that he understood this about himself and what it cost him in terms of his own mental health. “ . . . he knew what constituted health, not by the way in which he had lived his life, but by what he had learned from making the choices he had made.”14 This explanation is helpful, but we would also need to consider the societal forces at play in 1938 when he was forced to leave Vienna due to the rise of Nazism. Anna Ornstein insists that for Kohut it was such a major upheaval in his life that it destroyed and obliterated his childhood social and cultural milieu, and this experience most likely fueled his emphasis on continuity.15 Kohut needed to escape the danger building in Vienna and eventually found his way to Chicago in 1940 by way of London. Once in Chicago, he systematically disavowed any relationship to his ethnic past.16 The continuity and sense of self that Kohut described as the hallmark of the mature self must be understood as emerging from early developmental experiences and as a response to his position of ethnic marginalization and economic privilege. This dual social location, that of physician and Jewish immigrant as well as his own particular psychology, converged to produce a man familiar with a brittle sense of self. It is his familiarity with the social and psychological forces that made him strain toward continuity, albeit primarily in his theory.


Black Women and Self Continuity


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The push toward a cohesive self and experiences of discontinuity are relevant for our understanding of black women’s experiences. Black women in the church and broader society know all too well that regardless of where one is situated in terms of education and/or income, there is, sooner or later, some experience that challenges one’s sense of self. Social and cultural forces are always present, and, depending on the place and concerns of the particular context, these forces can serve to enhance black women’s self experiences and their work, or impede it. The self is always contextualized culturally, while it is also simultaneously a psychic experience. This is an element to the discourse on self that a womanist contribution to psychoanalytic self psychology makes. The implication is that the self cannot be understood outside its contexts and contextual forces that either support or impede the formation and maintenance of the self. Another is that notions of continuity and discontinuity must be understood historically and intergenerationally. I have begun with the self that is cultural, but self psychology first posits a developmental schema that is primarily relational within the family and between the child and mother. Self psychology proposes a model of development for a cohesive self that depend on an appropriately mirroring environment where “throughout his life a person will experience himself as a cohesive harmonious firm unit in time . . . as long as at each stage of his life, he experiences certain representatives of human surrounds responding to him.”17 These experiences of those who provided “mirroring” and other needed functions were conceptualized by Kohut as selfobjects. The functions provided were so essential that in their provision or gratification the recipient experienced them as originating within one’s self. In summary, Kohut initially posited three selfobject needs that later were increased to five. These can be described as:18 • Mirroring needs: the need to feel recognized, affirmed, and confirmed as a whole person; the need to feel accepted and appreciated. • Idealizing needs: the need to experience oneself as an extension or part of a respected, strong, and admired person. This person is able to allow the developing infant to feel merged with his or her calming presence especially during distressing or anxiety producing periods. In the case of the developing child, this often involves the physical merger permitted through holding, caressing, and the use of voice. • Kinship/twinship needs: the need to feel that one is essentially like those important in the developmental milieu. Children often express this in terms of wanting to be like the parent of the same and opposite sex; wanting to walk and dress and care for her or his body in a way similar




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to the parent or primary care person. It may also be expressed as a child’s need to identify with a parent’s racial/color/ethnic self. • Adversarial needs: a need to oppose a benign force who will remain present, caring, and encouraging in the face of opposition; the expression of one’s assertiveness without fear of undue reprisal or loss. The bodily expression of this is often expressed in children’s need to say “no,” “I can do without your help” or to disagree with a parent’s taste in activities, clothes, and friends. • Efficacy needs: the need to experience oneself capable of impacting one’s environment; the capacity to evoke needed experiences; the ability to seek the engagement of those in the environment. In its bodily expression, there is the need for children to be able to feel that they are able to elicit nonintrusive interest in their developing bodies.

We see that self psychology insists that the self coalesces as the result of exposure to sustaining selfobject experiences. In the clinical setting, the context from which these ideas were developed, these needs may be archaic in their expression. By archaic, Kohut meant that they were related to early development. However, an important contribution of self psychology was to position them as needs that are transformed and mature throughout the life cycle, not as needs that eventually recede into oblivion. We do not grow beyond these needs but, through development, become more mature.19 According to Ernest Wolf, people will experience a sense of self cohesion, that is “. . . as a cohesive harmonious firm unit in time and space, connected with his past and pointing meaningfully into a creative-productive future . . . as long as, at each stage of his life, he experiences certain representatives of human surrounds as joyfully responding to him, as available sources idealized strength.”20 This may be one of the most creative contributions in self psychology but also one of its most problematic when we move culture, gender, race, and sexuality center stage. Yet the idea that others provide “reciprocity” and “gratification” as the impetus for growth is carefully interrogated. Again, the childdyad that self psychology posits is not one that would be recognized in any number of cultural contexts (i.e., the Israeli Kibbutz, African American ‘other mothers,’ Indian group parenting); obviously, notions of mothering, parenting, and families must be culturally and historically situated. Black feminist psychologists Tracy Robinson and Janie Victoria Ward remind us that


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configuration . . . African American adolescent girls, [like] their Euroamerican counterparts, are engaged in the process of identity formation and self creation. . . . However, African American adolescent girls [who] are making this passage embedded within a family and community . . . [are] negatively impacted by a sociopolitical context framed by . . . oppression . . . We suggest that an African American female can be consciously prepared for the sociopolitical environment in which she will live by fostering development of a resistance that will provide her with the necessary tools to think critically about herself, the world and her place in it. 21

The need to foster resistance because of negative cultural views of black femaleness was not on Kohut’s mind, and I would say it has not grown in importance in more recent work. A womanist informed self psychological perspective must make specific inquiries. For instance, we must ask what is required, in the United States, for the “continued growth” of black women. And we know that the answer cannot be based on what is provided to those who are already steeped in privilege. Furthermore, when black women’s experiences are central to self psychology, we note that the requirement for “representatives of human surrounds” does not recognize that the cultural contexts may reflect something that is less than a joyful response, and, as a source for idealization, are actually a danger to the development of a healthy black female self. This, then, requires an active intervention or interference by black mothers and fathers on behalf of their children. My own mother, for example, employed a dialectic model aimed at fostering a questioning and interrogating stance toward what was heard in the broader context and what we knew about blackness from what she demanded we read and learn. She stood ready to stave off the many misguided, ignorant, curious, and racist messages directed at our psyches. Her way was not always the easy way. She challenged any sign of conformity; a “simple” movie or television program was an opportunity for her to ask “whose story is being told here?” She worked hard to dislodge any identification or pleasure in the quintessential U.S. mass-marketed version of history proliferated by John Wayne movies. She reminded us that our great- great grandmother, who was Cherokee, used to talk about the trail of tears. Whenever John Wayne made an appearance on television, she would ask, “you don’t believe John Wayne person could kill off a whole tribe do you?” Or, if he were saving some damsel in distress, she would ask, at the important point in the show, “What makes him think she can’t figure




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out how to use the rifle? What do you think he thinks about women?” She did not deny us access to these cultural productions; she problematized them and made us question not only what was on the screen but also what was happening to us as we watched. Black women’s experiences problematize many assumptions in self psychology because placing black women at the center of self psychology reveals that the conceptualizations of selfobjects’ functions have presumed privileged position for the developing child in the family and the broader culture. These notions were not written with those not at the center of power in mind. Gender, race, poverty, and non-heterosexual sexualities do not necessarily allow for a smooth path of development. The complex reality of black women’s societal contexts means that we must reckon with the impact of a mirroring that projects not only opportunities for healthy acceptance but also a distorted reflection. A womanist-informed self psychology recenters the important location of the cultural and gendered embodiment and the social. This recentering does not dismiss the familial, but rather suggests that the familial context is always in relationship to the broader social structures and that where there are faulty or even abusive selfobject experiences they are very often contiguous with the reflections in the broader culture. As a result, we can expect a compromised developmental trajectory and a failure to develop a healthy and firm sense of self (not self harming, psychotic, or foreign to one’s self-understanding), with an ambivalence or hostility toward one’s own culture, gender, race, and sexuality. 22

Countering the Cultural Ambivalence toward Black Women There is no doubt that black women have not been at the center of, or even included in, psychoanalytic theories. Counteracting the ambivalent relationship to one’s cultural-racial group requires that we struggle to articulate the relationship between self and social structures, and that in using psychoanalytic theories to assist us in conceptualizing the dynamics between race, culture, and psyche we do so critically; thus, we need to bring a critical lens to the way in which psychoanalytic theories often offer decontextual perspectives that ultimately serve to reproduce the very social impingements that black women work to resist. 23 This perspective, again, reveals a blindness to the failure of society to mirror women’s development and its


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relationship to parents’ faulty mirroring of their girls and women, 24 and an even greater blindness with regard to women of color. Joan Lang noted that self psychology has not addressed the genderspecific impact of such a selfobject milieu for the development of self.25 This critique, as I have stated, also holds true for inadequate cultural and racial mirroring, and is especially problematic given that we begin life breathing the cultural values that our parents, extended family, and communities embody, or as Esther Menaker, while critically noting Freud’s universalism of culture and personality, succinctly states it, “culture is the medium in which self grows.”26 To counteract the invisibility of black women’s lives and black cultural experiences, womanist and other black feminist perspectives must be integral to a psychoanalytic analysis. The factors that contribute to black women’s well-being as well as their distress have been discussed by several psychodynamic clinicians. Two very rich edited volumes, Psychotherapy with African American Women and Women of Color: Integrating Gender and Ethnic Identities in Psychotherapy offer psychodynamic approaches to psychotherapy that hold intrapsychic, interpersonal, and cultural dynamics in relation to one another. But just as importantly, the editors note that “Often the theorists from the dominant culture, male or female, are writing from their position of power, and generally invested in maintaining this hierarchy without examination.”27 These psychodynamic practitioners recognize that attending to race, gender, and sexuality while applying theories uncritically is barely an improvement. In order to understand African American women’s lives, we need to be cognizant that the developmental context is complex and that, more to the point, as Beverly Greene observes, it is “a social environment that is rich but also treacherous.”28 Black women’s lived reality challenges the uncomplicated and straightforward presentation of an empathically mirroring social environ because empathy, where present enough in the family, is repeatedly thwarted in the social realm. This is especially conspicuous where black women’s embodiment is concerned. For every “you are a beautiful black baby” cooed to young girls, there are a myriad of ways it is countered just beyond the front door. This induces a struggle to understand the psychic dissonance and can result in intermittent or severe ambivalence toward experiences associated with black community and cultural experiences, as well as the culture of others. Like the concept selfobject, Kohut assumed cultural selfobjects to be sources of self cohesion brought about via the engagement with




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cultural productions such as art, important figures, literature, music, and so on. Thus, he held that cultural selfobjects served to facilitate self cohesion for the individual and for groups. However, Kohut’s use of the concept failed to adequately address those experiences of culture, cultural productions, and cultural experiences that undermine self cohesion as well as how negative experiences are sometimes used by individuals and groups to serve to enhance self-esteem and cohesion. 29 In particular, Kohut’s development of the term did not take into consideration the convergence of embodiment, gender, and race in the history of black women’s experiences. Accordingly, culture and society are implicated in selfobject experiences, but both selfobjects and cultural selfobjects are far more complex than Kohut articulated and certainly less reliably available for selfenhancing mirroring than he imagined. So, yes, “culture is the medium in which self grows,” however, culture as a medium for development often means that one must stand opposed to the ambivalent, misrepresentative, and sometimes violent, cultural depictions of one’s self in order to resist self-annihilation. 30 This is why a womanist-informed self psychological perspective is crucial. And for every critical analysis womanists provide, psychoanalytic conceptualizations can help formulate a womanist perspective that considers how a variety of messages about black female self are developed, maintained, and changed. This work confirms that both intrapsychic processes and cultural experience are crucial dynamics, underscoring the need for a clear understanding of how cultural, gender, and sexual experiences take shape in the psyche and function in terms of shaping one’s relationship with the self and others. 31 This means that we need psychoanalytic theory, but it must be shaped by the realities of black women’s experience. Here I take bell hooks’ words seriously, that “We do not need anyone to simply take white critical texts of psychoanalysis and superficially transpose them onto black life. What we need is the kind of sophisticated explication of these materials that would enable us to take from them what is useful. We also need more black men and women entering the field of psychoanalysis in order to do more research and generate theory which is inclusive, sensitive and understanding of black history and culture.”32 An engagement of this sort with self psychology will not only bring something to womanist thought but will also undoubtedly bring something to self psychology. Specifically, it will advance a model of self psychology that takes seriously black women’s experiences—embodied, cultural, gendered, and sexual experiences—and,


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Womanist Contributions to Self Psychology: Specific Cultural Selfobjects Related to Color, Gender, and Religion So while I maintain that the notion of selfobject is useful, as articulated by Kohut and in most of self psychology, its unexamined use does not fit all people and contexts, so this raises the question of what selfobject needs apply to African American women? What specific gender, race, and cultural location needs do they have, and therefore what kind of mirroring, idealization, and kinship are most appropriate? For example, kinship needs include a sense of community, a sense of belonging and engagement that embodies and ignites active resistance to the cultural misrepresentation of black women, and a sense of belonging that regards black women’s individual and communal ways of being as normative. This is not narcissism and individualism gone unchecked, nor is it a feel- good-and-let’s-get-together-andshare community. It is a community with a purpose. This community hears, heals, and acts creatively. Selfobject functions are met in a variety of ways, and some of these may be exploitive of others and their needs. This would also mean that selfobject failures can be the result of intentional and unintentional dynamics. Unintentional but detrimental failures can be the result of the internalization of negative social views related to gender, race, color, or sexuality. Such failures can also be the result of the failure to empathically hear or express care when we have subjected the less powerful to the negative ways we have made use of cultural projections in order to bolster our own self-esteem. This would also mean that the selfobject disappointments we experience can occur in a variety of scenarios. For example, consider the young boy Bradley who was referred for counseling because he presented as sad and possibly depressed. He was brought to the session by his mother. Bradley was quite striking in his looks. He was of average height and weight for a seven-year-old boy, he was dark brown in skin tone, with a short curly haircut. His eyes, however, were large and expressive and made him seem older, as if he had lived many years beyond his seven years. They had an unflinching quality. His mother explained that his teacher thought “he might be depressed.” I asked Bradley if he knew


in so doing, make a claim to redefine the most foundational of self psychological concepts, the selfobject.


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what depressed meant, and he said “yes, it means you’re sad all the time.” Bradley, after some time, explained that he was, indeed, sad all the time because no one (at his all-black school) liked him “because I am black.” While Bradley located the problem of not being liked because of dark skin color at school, I heard its roots as originating, for Bradley, in his home dynamics and in the broader societal context. When I turned to the mother to ask her what she thought of Bradley’s sadness, she informed me that “We don’t even talk about color in my family. I mean we don’t think about it. His father is dark skinned. That’s why he married me. He wanted someone lighter so the children wouldn’t be picked on like he was.” Bradley, however, was dark like him. This was a complex family situation, but it is clear that the father’s self-esteem was enhanced because he had married a woman of lighter skin color than him, and by so doing he could experience a sense of efficacy in protecting his children from the color struggles of his life. The mother’s self-esteem was enhanced because her color made her feel desirable. She did not question the roots of her feelings. Bradley, however, did not meet the selfobject needs of the parents. Skin color was the source of selfobject gratification. And Bradley realized that his skin color was a disappointment to his parents, and this awareness contributed to feelings of deep longing and depression. Bradley, like his parents, idealized skin color. But not dark brown skin color. We understand the color dynamics of this family; it is clear that it was intergenerational and based, in part, on the historical struggles of colorism in the United States. His family embodied the cultural desire for whiteness that was projected in a myriad of forms. The mirroring in this vignette was negative and based in negative experience at home and outside the home. Bradley and his mother demonstrate that the complexities around selfobject needs and mirroring also occur in black cultural contexts. Recall the vignettes in chapter 2 where the women did not notice the sexism or the unexamined use of color in the worship. These women are not fully aware of how these kinds of experiences are woven into their religious experiences, and the mirroring they receive contains both positive and negative aspects. In these examples, African American racial experience is valued for theological reflection in the church. However, there is a split between what is experienced and what is verbally expressed by the black male pastors, and what is sustained by the congregations’ corporate complicity. Such experiences take up residence in the psyches of us all, and very often silence surrounds them. The lesions etched by silence not


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only make their marks but also set the parameters that define who black women believe themselves, and others, to be. The dynamics are complicated because of the intertwining of positive and negative selfenhancing experiences. These women feel enhanced and special during these services, but the positive mirroring includes the requirement that they disavow the negative mirroring related to black women’s gender in order to receive the positive racial message, feelings of kinship, and even idealization via their relationship to the pastor and the church. We must think about the ways in which color, race, and gender are mirrored back to us by a variety of sociocultural sources. Emilie Townes is prophetic in her observation: “so black women can, if we must, begin with the wounds, those scars, . . . that are our mothers’, daughters’, sisters’ thick and hard so no one can ever pass through to hurt us again—the folds of those old wounds, that in some cases maimed us with lies, secrets and silences . . . these wounds mark us, these wounds mark us . . . but they need not define us.”33 These silences, wounds, and hopes are embedded in psychological and relational processes, and this means that an exploration of African American women’s lives that does not include the psychoanalytic perspective is sorely limited. Womanists must wrestle with this reality.

The Need for a Womanist Self Psychological Perspective on Religious Experience Finally, these vignettes suggest the need for a womanist self psychological perspective of religious experiences, and also point toward a religious selfobject need as a distinct and specific form of a cultural selfobject. In my experience it is not uncommon for African American women to express the importance of their religious experience or awareness of the interruption of religious experience. Not infrequently, their narratives express a longing for a reconnection with religion or religious community or an absolute rejection of religion. The interruption or loss may be because of the pain due to sexism, homophobia, personal disappointment, or trauma. It may be due to the use of other group cultural experiences meeting the need. Whatever the case may be, typically the loss of one’s relationship to religious experience ultimately requires the engagement of a painful process of mourning.




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As a clinician it is not unusual for me, at least in my work, to encounter a woman who has been abused, and for the abuse to have had prolonged negative intrapsychic and relational consequences. In the case analysis that follows, we will see how abusive experiences reach deep into the psyche and entwine their way into all aspects of the relationship with self, culture, and others. In this chapter we bring a womanist self psychological perspective to a discussion on the loss of cultural selfobjects after trauma. Mourning becomes a central consideration as a necessary process to move beyond trauma and as the path toward the reengagement of cultural selfobjects that are sources of self-enhancing experiences.

Clinical Vignette Rosie, a twenty-eight-year-old black woman, was referred to me due to ten years of chemical dependency coupled with prostitution and a near indigent existence. Rosie was an only child, raised in close contact with a large extended family. Her father worked at a shoe factory, and her mother had worked in a library until Rosie’s birth. Initially Rosie described a loving family where she received all the material things she needed. The family held membership in a large black church where they were respected and active participants.


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Rosie had stopped attending church during young adulthood. She rejected any religious affiliation and often cited the hypocrisy of the church, noting that “saved people sin and just ask for forgiveness and turn around to sin again.” Occasionally, she revealed her loss of religion as a personal concern and questioned how she could approach God, given the life she now lived. She sometimes made vague references to the unreliability of God. On the whole, however, she seemed to function without an explicit association to organized religion, ideology, or spirituality. More apparent was her motivation to survive the atrocities of daily life on the street and to do this with a certain attitude of toughness and self-sufficiency. Outside of her irregular family contact, her significant relationships were with other prostitutes, drug dealers, and users. She was intelligent, articulate, and something of a street philosopher: she would eagerly discuss the politics of drug laws, police brutality, and the impact of social systems on her life. Although she was for a time reluctant to discuss her life prior to adulthood, Rosie readily recounted events leading to her ten-year cocaine addiction, her “street job” as a prostitute—the only job she had held after high school—and the power she felt over men and women who would pay her for sex. She acknowledged the violence associated with her lifestyle but expressed confidence about “doing what she had to do to make it.” When she could not make it, Rosie would turn to her parents to bail her out of jail, give her money, or care for her two daughters. When her life was out of control, her family typically behaved as if she were just away. While they wanted to be supportive, forgiving, and ready for rapprochement, they could not understand the pain with which she lived. Several months into her therapy she visited her mother and told her she was in therapy. Her mother encouraged Rosie to “get all the help” available. With her mother’s blessing, Rosie returned with a far different life story. The childhood that gradually emerged was one filled with silences and denials in a family where violence was hidden from the public eye. Rosie’s father provided for the family while controlling them with an iron fist. Rosie never saw her father’s violence toward her mother, but she heard it through the walls. In the mornings after such violence, everything would be “normal” again. Silence also covered Rosie’s own abuse. She suffered years of repeated sexual and physical abuse at the hands of her uncle, Dan, whom she described as “crazy.” He raped Rosie when she was nine. When Rosie told her mother, she explained that he was emotionally ill but did nothing to prevent it happening again, other than keeping


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her away from her cousins’ home for a few weeks before letting weekend visits resume. At the age of fifteen Rosie stole a gun from her father, and during a weekend visit shot her uncle in the leg. The family reported it as a shooting by an unknown assailant. The uncle was no longer left with the children, and a short time later he was arrested for molesting a child in the neighborhood. Once again the family rallied to his defense and, rather than going to jail, the uncle was hospitalized.

Color and Trauma in the Treatment: Theological and Self Psychological Thoughts on Transference and Countertransference Rosie’s therapy was extremely painful. Often my capacity to help her regulate the intensity of her rage was stretched to the limit. During some individual sessions Rosie said that she hated me for “torturing” her by “making” her talk about painful feelings and memories. She was convinced that I, like her uncle, enjoyed seeing her in such pain. As Rosie talked, her body ached. Rosie revealed that when she was four her father had sexually abused her. She frequently spoke of wanting to “rip her skin off;” once when I noticeably cringed at her mention of that, it enraged her: I too had abandoned her in her pain. The extent of Rosie’s bodily and psychic trauma was evident during an art class. As part of a project in which she was to tell her life in pictures, Rosie drew a young girl whose head was severed from its body. The vaginal area was colored in bright red blotches, and her arms and legs were covered in thick black lines. The horror and pain Rosie revealed in her art was in stark contrast to the empty smile on her face as she reviewed it. As her therapist, I attempted to mirror the reality and effect of her splitting by recognizing her suffering and by holding on to her fear of living into the reality of imago dei. On a very basic level, she realized that if, through our work, she pulled together the pieces of her splintered self, she would have to risk being seen, noticed, and possibly retraumatized in this present context, and she decided that this would be torture. The longing to be recognized as a person is fraught with anxiety for many, and with terror by those who have been so violated. As with any patient, I must sit, as the therapist, with this dread, hers and mine, with an eye toward hope. Sometimes failing, sometimes approximating, and sometimes, together, experiencing a


Religious Experience after Trauma


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tenacious yet powerful connection. In these moments, I was most present and empathic, and she was most present with her fear and hope. The relational context of therapy is complex, surely, and it can be a source for healing these dangerous splits. Therapy can contribute to the emotional groundwork necessary to challenge the belief that one’s blackness and gender are the site of “badness.” But this is a slow process and a limited context, because therapy sessions last only about an hour and involve only one other person. For most black women, the process of reclaiming one’s black self fully will mean becoming engaged in increasingly wider circles of black women where a sense of kinship unfolds. But this too involves struggle because increased engagement with black kinship also pushes her pain to the surface. During the most difficult times, Rosie directed her rage at herself, her parents, and me. She felt unprotected and violated by them. She felt unprotected by me. I was confused as to how to regulate the force of her affect, and how to protect her from it. I worried that the treatment would not last. I also worried that the treatment would last. She came to hate her “nice black” family, about whose secrets many were aware but did nothing to prevent her abuse. Over time, the solid family image that Rosie unconsciously retained unraveled. She was disturbed that her family myths were coming apart “around all these white people”—the other therapists. “They think black people are crazy anyway,” she said, and as far as she was concerned, I was in on the betrayal. To her, I was trying to be “more white than black.” Rosie was not convinced I knew enough to help her; she was not sure I really understood the “street”—her life—and I did not. Throughout our work together, I was struck by how her feelings coalesced around her color and her body, and how her therapy with me, a black woman, evoked these feelings so intensely. If Rosie could not believe herself to be black and created as good, then she had every reason to question whether a black woman sitting across from her could be good. This question extended beyond the two of us into black culture and relationships. The awareness of the far-reaching arm of early experiences of abuse means that a womanist practical theology will bring the realities of gender, race, sexuality and abuse to bear on our consideration of a womanist theological anthropology. The challenges lie in the area of lived experience, and in how to transform deformed expressions of the imago dei. While Rosie’s struggle to unite good and black was intensified with me in a particular way in the therapeutic contexts of individual and group therapy, she continued those same struggles


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outside the clinical setting of therapy sessions. When Rosie attended Alcholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings, these same dynamics arose in relation to the other members, in particular to the women. Where the company of other black women could have been a site for hospitality and healing,1 it was not so, because Rosie could not yet respond openly to what was offered by black women. Self-hatred grows out of experiences of being hated, and hate is an unbearable pain. In order to protect herself, Rosie built incredible walls that worked to protect relational contact that might revive her painful past. The result was that she was walled against efforts to respond empathically to her. We need to be able to accompany others into the harshest of suffering, and in braving such territory we will find arising within us responses that derail our efforts. These countertransferences are very often related to unanalyzed feelings about color, gender, and sexuality. What is very important to remember is that in these intense moments of treatment we can represent not only the abuser but also the cultural context most intimately connected with the abuse. In Rosie’s case, I frequently represented the negatively experienced black culture.

Cultural Selfobjects and Rosie’s Attempts to Compensate for Selfobject Failures Rosie’s life is an example of how individuals as well as groups experience cohesion around negative experiences and how people’s cohesion may be organized and maintained around negative aspects of self and social experience, including gender, race, and sexuality. We need to understand these dynamics. In Rosie’s case, her family, and most obviously her uncle and her father, were sources of abusive selfobject experiences. We might then expect that her experience of herself and significant others would retain—or repeat—aspects of the abusive experience. Given that she also experienced herself, at times, as capable of ending abuse to herself, as she did with her uncle, it would seem that she also retained aspects of this capacity to end abuse in future experiences. For instance, her relationship with me, her black therapist, was painful partly because of her relationship to black culture, black women and men, and black skin was embedded in conflict and fear of betrayal, and our work reminded her of this. At times Rosie was able to end or modulate some of her negative experiencing of me. She




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raged and accused, and when I could acknowledge how my response or lack of response was experienced as faulty, she experienced some form of efficacy. She railed that I stood by and let her suffer when I did not make an intervention or interpretation quickly enough. When I was able to acknowledge her experience, and stay with her in her rage, she sometimes experienced a degree of efficacy in her capacity to elicit my interest and help. Thus she could, for that session, end the abuse. When I could really hear her feelings of hatred about blackness, only then could we see how the confusion and pain of being with me was related to her experience in her family and the split evidenced by their “religious,” “good family” public presentation. Rosie railed, and needed to, in order to keep me at bay. She would vacillate between feelings of power and control, and despair and helplessness. This shift between feelings of grandiosity and inferiority was the legacy of her abuse and neglect. We know that “events are traumatic when they severely damage an individual’s sense of self in relation to the selfobject world. In the aftermath of trauma, an individual does her or his best to restore a sense of self, but inevitably must resort to methods of self-restoration for which a heavy price is paid.”2 One of the prices paid by such individuals is that the fear of revictimization becomes a central organizing force of their personality.3 In the case of Rosie, trauma, and the lack of an empathic response to that trauma, resulted in her experiencing her body, and her very self, as suspect. Rosie’s response, while generally detrimental to her well-being, was, we need to remember, aimed at psychological survival. The family’s concealment and lack of response to her abuse left Rosie without the necessary selfobject experiences that would have permitted her to feel emotionally and physically protected. Rosie’s mother’s own unresolved issues prevented her from fulfilling this function; in fact, she could barely acknowledge Rosie’s experiences. Rosie eventually expressed great anger about her mother’s inability to intervene and protect her. Rosie experienced her mother as abandoning and unable to protect her. Nor could Rosie’s mother regulate or modulate Rosie’s terror-induced fragmentation following the abuse. Rosie employed splitting as a way of managing her pain of the abuse, but also employed it against the pain and anger related to her mother’s powerlessness and the resulting abandonment. Rosie’s splitting was evident in her fantasies and feelings regarding the prostitution and cocaine abuse. The great inconsistencies of her life (evident in her life choices, her belief systems about her family, herself, and her children) are evidence of severe splitting. The


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childhood traumas to her body and psyche were so severe that she was unable to integrate them, which meant that important aspects of her development continued to remain at the level of development when the abuse occurred. Grandiosity, in particular, was vertically split in her personality structure. If she felt powerful and in control, she did not recall that she had felt and could feel otherwise. She actually believed that she was powerful merely because she was not feeling powerless at the moment. The two feelings were not modulated and, consequently, not integrated. Rosie attempted to live up to a version of “the icon of the Strong Black Woman,” as described by Regina Romero. The paradox of the image, writes Romero, is that “she wears it like a suit of armor, a badge of courage. While it helps her to maintain tenacious [grip] against the dual oppression of racism and sexism, it is also an albatross around her neck . . . It keeps her from falling victim to her own despair, but it also masks her vulnerabilities . . . It is the substance around which folklore and legends, fact and fiction, have been written.”4 Rosie used her involvement in prostitution in part to bolster her feeble self and to “mask her vulnerabilities.” She was most often unaware of the feelings of powerlessness she had felt as a child or their relationship to her current experiences: her addiction to cocaine as well as the prostitution that made her a frequent target of unwanted sexual demands and violence. Betrayal by customers and “boyfriends” as well as “girlfriends” was common. In speaking of her childhood experiences, she attempted to ward off the painful effects and the fear of further fragmentation through disavowal and by focusing on the actions that protected her and her siblings from their uncle. She was terrified of recalling her experiences of powerlessness and repeated trauma. Her attempt to ward off her feelings can be recognized in the posture she had long maintained toward her father. For much of her life she retained a “trusting little girl” stance toward him—in and out of her therapy. In her early descriptions he was the idealized father: strong, caring, and a good grandfather to her children. Yet, as an adult, there seemed to be a correlation between the deterioration of her self- cohesion and the development of her daughters. Her depressive episodes and alcohol and cocaine abuse became more problematic when her daughters reached ages four and five. Her daughters’ development reactivated feelings related to previously unacknowledged abuse by her father. Fearful of confronting him, she initially withdrew from her daughters and her extended family. The lack of




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appropriately protective responses during her development had left her inadequately prepared to respond to the needs of her children. Rosie’s father did provide her with money, an apartment, and/or food; he did save her from further self-destructive episodes. Rosie felt dependent on him and did not have to relinquish her wish for an idealizable experience of him. He was not forced to acknowledge his abuse of her as a child, and he did not. Rosie had not grown up, and in fact had actually been discouraged from doing so. Rosie’s trust in him permitted her to retain a defensive trust in his motives, allowing her to split off the reality of her betrayal. Rosie’s effort to sustain a perception of her father as trustworthy is common to many abused children. These children employ what W.R.D. Fairbairn, labeled a “moral” defense. These children protect their parents by believing that they embody goodness while the children embody badness to the core. This helps understand how Rosie could trust that her parents would adequately care for her daughters. As a young woman, Rosie was ashamed of herself and her behaviors. “It becomes obvious, therefore, that the child would rather be bad himself than have bad objects (internalized experiences of the parent) . . . By using this moral defense, the child sacrifices his goodness; however, he is compensated by the illusion that he is attached to a ‘good’ object.”5 The need for the parent compels the child to choose the fantasy of a good parent over reality. The price paid here is the malformation of the child’s character,6 including the capacity to make trusting relationships. The trust that Rosie bestows on her father is one that requires her to split off what she knows about him. This splitting is one that carries over into the rest of her life. Thus, relationships are not chosen on the basis of actual trustworthiness but on the basis of her felt-need for the person. Doris Brothers’ work with patients sexually abused by parental figures helps us understand this aspect of Rosie’s experience: “sexual trauma, as the pathogenic factor, cannot be valued highly enough when people thought to be trustworthy . . . misuse . . . the child.”7 Such abuses result in a derailment of the child’s development of the capacity to trust, because the child desperately needs to preserve the relationship of trust with the parental figure. Out of this desperate need, the child will attempt to maintain the fantasy that she has a trusted relationship with the one who has actually betrayed her. 8 Like Rosie, these children will, well into adulthood, employ a number of psychological maneuvers to hold on to the belief that the abuser is a trusted figure. Thus, Rosie suffered from what Brothers has conceptualized


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as a disturbance in “self-trust.” It is the “hope or wishful expectation of obtaining from others and providing for others the selfobject functions necessary for the development, maintenance, and restoration of self-experience.” Self-trust, then, is a necessary experience for a sense of interior safety.9 Rosie’s disturbance of self-trust placed her in the position of making distorted attempts at self-repair in the context of her relationship with her father and mother, as well as in the relationship with prostitutes and drug users. Her self disturbance was also evident in her intrapsychic use of (ambivalent relationship to) her perceptions of black culture and black communities. Hers were not attempts to reexperience her trauma, as some theorists suggest, but rather manifestations of her longing to “re-script the original trauma scenario.”10 Rosie sought not only to alter the bodily significance and relevance of these but also to alter the ways in which her trauma was integral to her current cultural experiences. By contextualizing her experience via African American women’s experience, especially the experience of cultural mirroring, we can better understand how it is that Rosie chose prostitution as the means to force a form of self coherence—between how she felt about herself and her family and black community.

Black Feminists and Womanists on Traumatic Cultural Experiences Patricia Hill Collins and other black feminist/womanist scholars help us to see how African American women are gazed upon through the hostile lens of white domination. Mirroring—or what is reflected back—is the sexualized and distorted racialized vision (representation) in the gazer’s eyes.11 What we see reflected in the gazer’s eyes teaches us about “race, gender, and social class without obvious teaching or conscious learning,” and these images “grafted onto existing social institutions are so pervasive . . . black women’s portrayal as the Other persists.”12 This otherness is perpetuated through the daily experiences of projection and internalization of negative representations of “black” and “female.”13 These descriptors are entangled in the intrapsychic experience of culture, and they need to be included in our understanding of black female development.14 An aspect of Rosie’s struggle to work with me, a black female psychotherapist, was related to this dynamic: I was a complicated experience for Rosie because I was black and a




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woman, and possibly resembled too closely the early figures in her life. Rosie appropriated my bodily self as part of her internal struggles of blackness, gender, and self. Rosie’s development was marked by the experience of her family, which was incongruent with stated cultural and religious ideals, so that we might understand her adult life as an attempt to bring about coherence between her psychic, cultural, and embodied experience. Rosie’s sense of self fluctuated among the diminished and humiliated child, the grandiose prostitute, and the angry clinical patient. Rosie was emotionally and sexually a captive, but her life included acts of resistance—including the shooting of her abusing uncle, her commitment to a difficult and painful psychotherapy, and telling her story. Her life as a prostitute in a community filled with brokenness told a truth about her experiences, anger, and pain, and resisted the lie that her parents and the church, as well as a part of her self, wanted her to believe and live. She suffered by living this form of expression. Steven Pile observes that “Freud provides a developmental account of the psyche that simultaneously reveals the ways in which people give meaning to their world, where they act according to the interactions between these worlds, and where people are resourceful and devious in the ways that they deal with, and express, the pleasures and pain that they live through.”15 Rosie lived her sense of otherness, her grief, and her memory—in the open. Like the self-portrait revealing the trauma of her life in bold red colors with her head severed, her life was a shocking and compelling attempt to give voice and meaning to her suffering. Her neighborhood was one that looked abandoned, and was economically and socially depleted. The street was lined with houses that had been boarded up for years. This environment—depleted, broken, dangerous, and often blatantly antagonistic toward black females— made up her primary selfobject milieu. Rosie’s distress was related to her past familial and sexual trauma, but it was also embedded in the absence of appropriate mirroring from, and of, her current (and past) cultural group. Prostitutes and drug users served her need for cultural affiliation. An aspect of this affiliation was the sexualization of her betrayed childhood needs for protective and idealizable others in her life, for appreciative mirroring of her developing self, and her need for kinship to bolster her sense of belonging. Rosie’s cultural attachments and affiliations were compromised, not because of where she lived and her associates but more because of the conflict-filled relationship she maintained within herself and those with whom she lived.


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What is the relationship between culture, in particular religion, and the self? Rosie could not turn to the black church as a reliable cultural institution the way her family had. Her church did provide social resources to the community. What it did not provide was protection for members suffering abuse at the hands of some of those in leadership. This failure contributed to Rosie’s decision to cut ties with this institution. Ultimately, her relationship to herself, family, and black culture was not resolved in a way that freed her from the conflict presented by her family’s position in the church. The message is clear: early experiences of the body will permeate later experiences of self and culture. Research suggests that the religious experience and institutions of African Americans provide a setting for cultural affiliation, selfenhancing experiences, and group belonging; Gilkes has stated that black religious practices have served to lessen the symptomology associated with mental illness.16 Evidently, black religion works for many and is a source for meeting cultural selfobject needs. In recognition of the crucial role black religion can take, family therapist Nancy Boyd-Franklin has reminded clinicians that they are viewed by many African Americans as “anti-spiritual” because of their “neutral” stance. Furthermore, she adds that “black churches have long served a multitude of needs in African American communities” through the creation of educational, political, economic, and social services.17 This, however, was not Rosie’s experience. The increasing acknowledgment of stories such as Rosie’s have prompted black feminist and womanist scholars to show how the church is an ambivalent cultural institution for many black women, despite the historical role of the black church as a site of group belonging, efficacy, and mental well-being. Black religious experience is not free of sexism, abusive power relationships, or theologies that warp the psyche and spirit.18 Cultural selfobjects can serve the mirroring, idealization, and kinship needs of groups, providing a sense of self continuity—or they can fail to serve them. Clearly we require exposure to mirroring from cultural sources, and where this is absent or compromised, the consequences for the self become severe. Mark Gehrie’s comments bear repeating,


Failed Cultural Selfobjects: Black Religion, Culture, and Loss

Without . . . mirroring from, or . . . an idealized attachment to, a culturally cohesive ideology . . . the child’s cultural group membership . . . may


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I take this statement to mean that mirroring from a culturally cohesive ideology, to which one is attached, is essential for an integrated psyche. Theologically, we are speaking of (1) being in and recognized by a community that affirms our relationship to the imago dei; (2) and being in relationship to a community that is deeply related to The Idealized One. When we hear and read “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is One,” we are reminded of our kinship within a community that has had the power to shape us as individuals and as a culture. Kinship counters foreignness and rejection and fosters firmness and conviction of identity. The community acts as a conveyor of kinship and is a necessary cultural selfobject that we pursue on behalf of selfformation and cohesion. The absence of deep kinship leaves one flailing. Thus, Rosie’s structuring of her relationship to her childhood community as well as to her current community suggests something about the state of her self. Clearly, she felt both foreign to and unaccepted by her family’s community while rejecting their religious commitments, practices, and values. She did not acquire the experience of kinship or mirroring in the contexts handed down to her, and neither ideology nor lived practice provided opportunities for her to satisfy her idealizable selfobject needs. Furthermore, Rosie was unable on her own to discover aspects of the religious and cultural legacy to engage in an adaptive or substitutive fashion, rendering her attachment to religion, culture, and race ambivalent and hostile, with unmodulated ties to her early parental images and selfobject needs. Rosie’s responses to her early experiences suggest a need to examine the place of cultural selfobjects—including those that comprised religious experience—in our patients’ lives. In her case, adequate cultural selfobject experiences may have helped buffer some of her early trauma. The groups to which one claims affiliation and the dynamics of those relationships are certainly influenced by early selfenhancing or self-fragmenting milieu. For Rosie, black culture was either a false expression of family care, because she was not protected, or it was real, like her life as a prostitute, and again dangerous. It is important now that Rosie, though filled with racial ambivalence, anxiety, and rage, sought out some form of affiliation that included a black cultural group experience. We see here that identification with a cultural group had taken place, albeit, in most respects, limited and distorted


not be integrated into the psyche, and will be experienced with a . . . sense of foreignness and rejection.19


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in scope. The structural deficits with which Rosie lived made it impossible for her to respond to her situation with an awareness of the magnitude of her loss, because just such an awareness may have left her far more fractured and less able to function. Lacking a social context to compensate for the deficits in her familial environ, mourning had to be sacrificed by her.

Mourning as a Process toward Self-Enhancing Cultural Selfobject Experiences: A Theological Reflection On some level, we, black women who are black Americans, who are African Americans, know that mourning is an exquisitely painful and required process for us as a people and as individuals. We can trace mourning in our literature, music, and other art forms. Some of our most important literature is illustrative of the necessity of individual and cultural mourning. Womanist practical theologians also turn to the Bible, particularly the Hebrew Bible, as a source on mourning. We must turn to the Bible because of its status as a primary source in black literature and language, and because it is deeply embedded in black culture. We also turn here because of the pastoral identity of womanist practical theologians. In the book of Lamentations, 20 the movement in the text suggests an important dynamic for mourning: Early on we hear “Lonely sits the city. Once great people! Bitterly she weeps in the night, Her cheek wet with tears. There is none to comfort her of all her friends . . . Zion’s roads are in mourning” (1:1a; 1:2a; 4:1a). There is deep unavoidable despair here. It is a communal mourning wrestling with the past and the present. Thoughts of future offer no solace. The language fluctuates between the first person “I” to the communal “we” and “our”: “I have called on Your name”(3:55) and “our hearts are sick”(5:17a). After destruction and forced exile, mourning is a requisite act in the moving toward prayer for restoration— for relationships, the faith community, and self. Exile is emotional, spiritual, and, again, it must be communal. It is also embodied, and throughout the text we hear of cheeks covered with tears, energy being sapped, misery like a yoke upon the neck, and there is disabling shame. Exile is to be in relationship with one’s God and one’s people in a broken way; exile is a soul sickness that forces the question “Who can heal you?” (2:13b).




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Can Rosie experience healing? Rosie’s experiences reveal that the “structural deficits” were not limited to her individual intrapsychic life—rather, her structural deficits are also communal. We are confronted with the lack of a “supportive, rehabilitative, social milieu” following her earliest abuse. Is this not what Lamentations is telling us—that there is no one who understands and weeps for the suffering? Unlike Rosie, the writer of Lamentations can, at one point, proclaim, “But this do I call to mind, therefore I have hope: the kindness of the Lord has not ended . . . ample is your grace” (3:21a, 23). Most of us have learned by now that grief is a process, not an event. And this process is not one we are to engage in isolation. Real grief is messy, social, and potentially transformative. Martha R. Fowlkes, writing about grief, notes that when resolution is achieved in a timely fashion “the personal and social are so closely intertwined as to be virtually indistinguishable.”21 Thus, if the grieving process moves forward quickly, we are less likely to notice the role of the cultural domain in mourning. In the absence of a supportive cultural context, in contrast, we are more immediately drawn to consider the necessary influence of the work of culture in mediating trauma. We may look at Rosie’s relationship to black religion in two ways. Lee Butler labels black spirituality as “one of the most influential forces within the African American community. It is the core resource that has shaped the community from within.”22 Therefore, within this pastoral theological framework, religion and spirituality are to be understood as resources for survival. Another view is that Rosie’s rejection of black religion also expressed a form of resistance to pain suffered within the family. Accepting that her response was a form of resistance would also have to acknowledge that her resistance sustained by rejection and avoidance proved insufficient. In fact, her fluctuating feelings about her black self actually revealed her longing for an experience wherein the abused and abusers would coexist but not in secret (that there would be a context for truth-telling—shared by her mother who eventually sent her back to therapy with her blessing), and one where the institution of religion would offer protection and acceptance of those like her. Self-restoration—individual, familial, and communal—from this perspective, would have required that Rosie not take in her family’s experience of the black church but rather mourn it. She needed to mourn black religion’s failure to serve adequately as a meaningful religion and as cultural selfobjects—not just avoid or even reject it, but rather to fully engage in this mourning.


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On another level, aspects of Rosie’s ties reflect aspects of the history of African Americans. As Maurice Apprey23 and Michelle Scott 24 have shown, African Americans’ current life stories must be understood in light of a much broader history, specifically the disruption and exploitation of black people whose ancestors were enslaved in the Western Hemisphere, along with the many contradictions embedded in this history. This history also contains the legacy of religion appropriated to sustain relational patterns of abuse: religious institutions supported and financed enslavement. Slavers regularly engaged in sexual exploitation, creating families in which blood ties were denied and split off from public celebrations. These traumas are part and parcel of the history of black-white relations in the Western Hemisphere. We hear this history embedded in Rosie’s anger about “all these white people” somehow involved in her pain. The historical, familial, and personal converge to reveal a cyclical repetition, one aspect of which includes unfinished mourning. As Rosie could not mourn her past, it was impossible for her to imagine a future different from the one she was living—a reenactment of the past. No amount of treatment could give back what was taken from Rosie, and this made mourning all the more necessary. Much repair could be done, but the past could not and cannot be replaced. Because she could not grieve and mourn these losses, she could not conceive of herself in relationship to her broader religious and social context. Martha Fowlkes makes the case that loss resides in the social and intrapsychic25 spheres, and mourning leads to a transformed view of the world and self. Fowlkes, who is not a practical theologian, offers a theological statement: this transformation radically alters one’s tie to that which has been lost, and, furthermore, this shift in attachment allows for the reengagement with life that is creative. 26 This transformation, then, comes about through engagement with a broader, caring community, and this honest engagement is the path to hope.27 This we witness in Lamentations; hope begins to emerge in the naming of the suffering and in the midst of mourning. Then we can bring to mind that the “Lord’s kindness and grace is ample.” This kindness and grace are experienced in the embodied practices of care that are encountered in the midst of mourning. Mourning creates a psychic and relational space that allows for a new way of seeing one’s self and culture as beautiful, complex, and lovable.




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A Dark Body of Goodness Created in the Image of God:1 Navigating Sexuality, Race, and Gender, Alone and Together

Katie then discovers that she has lost the backing to one of her earrings. I can’t be wearing one earring. I can’t be wearing dreadlocks. I need to be correct.2

Each year that I prepare to teach my course “Experiences of the Body and Pastoral Ministry,” I wrestle with how to contextualize the way we speak about and understand the complexities of black women’s experiences of embodiment. Some years ago, I reported the following case vignette to them: An African American mother is in family court where it will be determined whether she regains full and unsupervised custody of her four-year-old daughter. The mother is twenty-seven and a graduate student who for eight months of her life used drugs extensively. In an attempt to rescue her daughter from the jaws of a hellish drug addicted life, mother reports her drug use to the department of Children and Family Services. The court places the three-year-old in the care of the grandmother. It is a powerful wake-up call and the young mother enters substance treatment and parenting classes. Everyone is pleased, the grandmother, the social workers, and the court-appointed lawyer for the minor. During the court proceeding, the judge, a middle-aged white male, begins to talk to the little girl about living with her mother again. The little girl becomes excited, and laughing she begins to dance a dance called the butterfly. She laughs and claps her hands. Clearly she is excited— even overexcited. The judge tells her to stop and calls the mother and lawyer forward and says, “I think this girl has been sexually abused.” The judge further went on to say that the four-year-old was “sexually


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provocative.” He turned to the lawyer, who reports that there has been no complaint or any indication of sexual abuse. The judge then required another “extensive assessment” of the “situation” because “clearly something was going on for her to dance this way.” The return home was delayed and I was called in to meet “extensively” with the mother, child, and grandmother. What was so apparent to me was how excited this girl was to return home, how loved she felt by her mother and grandmother, and how much she loved them in return. On one occasion I saw her dance the butterfly, and she looked like a four-year-old dancing. Four months later, I was placed on the stand to give my report. When it did not match the judges’ report he demanded that I explain why she would “perform” such a dance. I explained that she was thrilled and excited to be with her mom, that her dance was the equivalent of jumping up and down, and that, furthermore, this dance was a common one and she could observe others dancing on television and in the neighborhood. I pointed out that children throughout the city do the dance, and I asked him if he was suggesting that all of them were “sexually provocative.” He had me leave the stand and the family was reunited. I mention this story because it captures some of the psychological and social dynamics of power and black embodiment. In this case, the judge looked at a four-year- old girl dancing and he found her sexually “provocative.” He then projected his unacceptable response, his own sexual excitement, onto her. His psychological response involved denial of his feelings and disavowal, coupled with “outrage” and “concern” that she “is probably sexually abused.” The abuse then resided outside any thoughts or fantasies that were apart of his associations or psychic life. This process involves four psychological and social processes previously discussed: splitting, disavowal, sexualization, and projection. Furthermore, by not examining his response, he felt free to wield his power as he chose without regard for presenting his concerns in a respectful way to the mother, grandmother, or professional social service providers. And he blatantly and shamelessly shamed a powerless child. Power and the sexualization of this young black girl combined in ways that are seldom challenged, and in ways that repeat the past treatment of black females’ embodiment. We live in a culture that sells tans—the darker the better—and simultaneously portrays black peoples in a myriad of negative associations: criminal, promiscuous, sub-intellectual, uneducated, lazy, evil, and unmotivated. Black women, in particular, are singled out as most


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problematic, as conduits of these “cultural” or “racial” traits. So much energy is employed in counteracting these malignant stereotypes that Katie Cannon, the womanist ethicist in the opening quote, begins by saying “I must be correct.” Later we will hear her speak of her hunger, weight, color, size, and hair as integral to her experience of black female embodiment—experiences of self also embedded in the social practices of being “corrected”—to conform, to be formed, shaped, and defined into a “mythical normative”3 embodiment of self. These cultural forces pulsate through the societal as well as in our personal relationships. As practical theologians, pastoral ministers, and seminary educators, I am convinced that we need to pay attention to the various sites where “the body” is directing our attention. We need to have the experience of the body speaking meaning to us—and to contribute to the many voices that are laying claim to the right and responsibility of making meaning of experiences of embodiment. We need to consider “the body” in the context of a society where certain bodies are exploited to create a desire for commodities regardless of the need or the ability to afford them; where the color of our skin continues to so greatly influence our quality of life, our experiences in society, and our economic location; where poor women and children coexist alongside great abundance; where beauty is determined by perpetual youth and distorted thinness; where sex and sexuality are used to sell “entertainment” infused with violence. We need to hear what the body has to tell us about being created in the image of God. Recognizing these kinds of concerns distinguishes our theological and pastoral approach to the body from that of those whose interest is primarily economical, sociological, or political.

Womanists’ Narratives of Embodied Experience The narratives of womanists’ experiences of their bodies and their theological reflections will guide us in this section. I will weave their stories together in a dialogue with other black women’s narratives to develop a womanist perspective on reclaiming black female embodiment.


Goodness Created in the Image of God

Katie Cannon is a large brown-skinned woman with penetrating eyes, big sweeping gestures, and a full, contagious laugh. We have a 1:00 p. m. lunch date and she arrives ten minutes early . . . saying she has taken the edge off her hunger by eating a banana. Then with mischief in her eyes she jokes, I work at being this fat.


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So begins the chapter “Beginnings” on Katie Cannon’s life in the book I’ve Known Rivers by Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, who collected the stories of black women and men to discuss how their lives were oriented toward liberation. Her “Beginnings” focuses on her lightbrown-skinned self—an aspect of her embodiment—and this is not surprising given the proliferation of scholarly works in the social and human sciences. Katie Cannon’s reflection on her life, in conversation with Lightfoot, weaves back and forth through past and present, from her earliest memories of being a black girl child to the present as a professor of religion. Throughout, we are pulled into contact with her body; her body is central to her understanding of herself, whether she is describing a sensuous experience of body massage with her clothes on, or her speech impediment, or the anger and isolation of being a member of a multiracial group of women where she alone speaks from a race/class/gendered perspective. Here we experience a Katie who lives in her black female body. She repeatedly links her blackness of skin color, the nappiness of her hair, and the femaleness of her body with her understanding of herself and African American culture. She is convinced that the body, her black female body, matters. More importantly, it matters theologically for black women but is just as important for broader theological projects as well. 5 Katie Cannon grew up in a mill town in North Carolina. She described her extended family as “breathtaking in number.” She has three brothers and three sisters. Katie’s experience in her family is one of an outsider within: “Well, I am not married, I don’t have children, I do not follow the absolutes.”6 Having grown up in a family that she felt dominated the town with their Cannon blood, she stands outside the norm. She is the only one of her siblings not to have children. In addition, she is a minister who does not have a parish; she teaches. Unlike her brother, also a minister, she is not really viewed as a minister by her family, and in particular by her mother. Furthermore, having grown up in a religious family, she no longer adheres to their theological positions, and this is realized in how she approaches her sense of embodiment. For instance, she has communicated to her family that she prefers cremation, and wishes to have her ashes taken


This doesn’t come naturally . . . Katie then discovers that she has lost the backing to one of earrings . . . I suggest she wear just one. I’m not ready for that . . . I can’t do all those wild things . . . I tell my friends if I want access to the pulpit . . . I can’t be wearing one earring. I can’t be wearing dreadlocks. I need to be correct.4


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to a ranch in Santa Fe. Her mother’s grave concern is “if you were cremated how could you get up and strut around God’s heaven?”7 Katie seemed not to experience the dissonance her mother experienced. Death and dying issues are not the only places of bodily dissonance experienced in her family. We find that all matters related to embodiment are experiences of dissonance for Katie and her family, and that they live with a hierarchy of embodiment, a dualism whereby one’s color, sex, and gender are considered good or bad, pure or impure, that have ramifications for relationships within the immediate and extended family.

Hierarchies of the Black Body in the Family: Skin Color, Sex, and Sexuality Cannon tells us that she had an aunt who valued light-skinned blacks over darker-skinned family members so much that she seldom paid much attention to Katie and her siblings. When Katie allowed this and other family truths to be published, her mother was horrified by her lack of attention to privacy, in spite her daughter’s commitment to telling the truth of brown-skinned experience. She also recalls that almost as soon as she crossed the threshold of the local college she attended, she was pressured to find someone, a man, with whom to have sex. Cannon reports the pressure was almost unbearable. Katie then continues to describe the dormitory talk about sex, the extreme peer pressure she felt, and her reluctance to give in to their urging. Her language is plain and evocative: Growing up, we were drilled that we had no worth beyond our virginity. If we got pregnant our lives were over . . . I viewed it like a body count. The closeness of sex was sinful. There was nobody who worked on salvation the way I did . . . I was a super Christian kid. During my first semester at Scotia, I went from a size thirteen to a size twenty-two. I was so desperate, so alone . . . there was no one there to help me process this thing . . . Even though there were only five hundred people at Scotia, I felt like I was living in a foreign country of thirty thousand people. 8



Several thematic concerns emerge from Cannon’s reflections. Cannon describes herself as fat—a fatness that she contextualizes psychologically and socially: she saw her fatness as connected with her difficulty in separating herself from her family, the feeling of being overwhelmed


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as she tried to process issues related to sexuality, virginity, and sin without mentors or guides, and feeling isolated as a first-year college student. Her black female adolescent body is a cause for ambivalence, anxiety, and overwhelming, if not unpleasant, excitement. She is not alone in her ambivalence and anxiety. In spite of the commonness of this kind of ambivalence, conflict, and self-disdain for black female bodies, African American women’s experience of their bodies is very much in the early stages of being given theological ground in black feminist and womanist scholarship. Given the commitment to the epistemological claims based on black experience, one is struck by the glaring absence of a welldeveloped theological perspective on black women’s experiences of their bodies. This absence relegates the body to the peripheral in our articulation of experience in race and gender analyses. In order for womanist theology to fully enflesh the epistemological shifts inherent in womanist theory, African American women’s bodies must make its way to the center of theological concerns. In other words, our bodies must assume an epistemological status without reducing “experience” to the body. We must more forcefully articulate what we know in our bodies. Toward this end, first, I ferret out womanist theologians’ reflections on their bodies and its place in the ongoing development of womanist theology, and, second, I point toward the impact of bodily experiences on one’s sense of self in society, family, and community. Sociologist Cheryl Townsend Gilkes has focused on black women in the black church addressing black bodily scapegoating and hatred in the African American community.9 Grappling with the implications of this kind of racial, sexual, and gender splitting in black church, religion and spirituality are essential for articulating an authentic understanding of black experience in the United States and for cultivating genuine self-love by and for black people.10 Our bodies, rather than experienced as good, pleasurable, and integral to who we are—to ourselves but also to each other—have become the scapegoats for internalized black body ambivalence. Gilkes specifically focused on black women’s negative experiences of their bodies in her essay “The Loves and Troubles of African-American Women’s Bodies: Womanist Challenge to Cultural Humiliation and Community Ambivalence.” Her work speaks poignantly to African American women’s diminished “self- esteem due to bodily humiliation.”11 Gilkes notes that many African Americans have internalized negative and oppressive views of black women, and that, as a result, “self hatred may be one of the deepest sources of


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conflict and turmoil in the African American community. This may be especially true concerning women and their bodies.”12 There is “diminished self-esteem” for many African American women, and being embodied “includes and is greatly influenced by having to cope with others’ responses to our hair, skin, and size.”13 Furthermore, these responses often outweigh any sense of positive self-image and esteem available in the wider culture: “straight talk about the loves and troubles of our bodies is almost impossible because there is so much pain.”14

A Dark, Plump Black Woman Without Compass or Maps: Navigating the Treacherous Waters of American Body Culture Gilkes describes herself as “a dark, plump, African American woman.”15 In sharing her reflections she notes that she is writing as a large black woman who has always been large, and who has always been the focus of others’ concern because of this. She lays out some important points to consider in her examination of black women’s experiences of their bodies. My own experience as a dark, plump, African-American woman informs my reading and hearing of Walker’s call to love food and roundness. Her call also challenges me to examine the scripts of my childhood and see the sources of my own conflicted inner visions. I am not a woman who became plump as the years have passed, but I have been so my entire life.16

She tells us she is dark in color, and that her childhood experiences of color and plumpness have influenced the messages or “inner scripts” as well as the “inner visions” of the self that she lives with today. My mother weighed only eighty- seven pounds on the day she married my ex-football-player father. My father’s genes are clearly dominant; I look like him and am built like my dad. However, since my mother had rickets as a child, her size may also be a function of some deprivations in early childhood.17 My mother’s lack of experience with fatness forced me to navigate the treacherous waters of American body culture without the compasses and maps that often make “becoming a woman” a taken for granted process, regardless of how painful and destructive. I was actually forced to think about myself and my size and where I fit




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In Gilkes’ reflections we find four identifiable thematic concerns that undergird her understanding of her black female bodily self: (1) she is explicit about her experience as a black and plump woman; (2) she is cognizant of the intrapsychic implications of being black and female as “she suffers from inner visions and has internalized body scripts” of her childhood; (3) her body had implications for her relationship with her mother and other important women of her family; (4) her experiences occurred within the context of the dominant “American body culture” and the African American community. The interlocking features of her painful early experiences are punctuated with the knowledge that she is physically different from her mother and not acceptable in a very basic way. This bodily difference greatly influenced her relationship with her mother and her mother’s family. Importantly, Gilkes also shares that she heard, in the midst of these debilitating messages heard from her mother, another message that countered her mother’s perception as well as the broader cultural messages on female bodies: My great-aunt and grandmothers saw things differently, and said so. They thought my mother was too thin and told her so in front of me. They delivered a set of counter messages along with a dazzling array of delectably cooked dishes for their very special niece and grandchild . . . My size, and my size alone, exposed me to a diverse set of voices during the formation of my cultural world . . . 19

Gilkes was forced to attend to her body and to the familial and cultural messages she received about her body and black women’s bodies in general. The messages she received were not one-dimensional but were complex, psychologically impactful, and interiorized early. Conflicting familial and cultural views intertwined in such ways as to sometimes humiliate, anger, confuse, and sometimes bolster, her sense of her self. Gilkes’ mother’s lack of experience with fatness forced Gilkes to be acutely aware of her black female body and to contextualize that experience from the perspective of black female bodied experience in this “American body culture.” Bodied experience is inextricable from the realities of race, color, gender, and size. And, as Gilkes (and others) demonstrate, these bodily features have complex meanings


in community and the family as my friends at school thought of newer and more creative names for my size and as my mother and her relatives agonized over strategies to make me slimmer . . . 18


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socially, historically, and intrapsychically. Certainly, Gilkes’ reflection on her experience of being a large black woman makes us realize that we need a theory that addresses the psychology of black femaleness and is informed by womanist cultural analysis. The significance of internalized values regarding standards of beauty, size, hair, and colorism—that form of discrimination that values lighter shades of blackness more than darkness—for black women and men is great, and it ought to have a theological ground in theologies aimed at liberation. Gilkes situates her views on embodied experience in the cultural and familial contexts in which black women develop. As far as she is concerned, all human experience is embodied experience and the consequences of cultural humiliation are most dramatically shown with reference to the body. Not only is experience embodied, but stereotypes, pernicious cultural representations of people, are also embodied images. All racial stereotypes are usually named images attached to an image of a body, and all those named images are gendered.20

Black women’s relationship to their bodies—and other peoples’ bodies—has developed in a historical context that includes the legacy of slavery, and black feminist and womanist voices remind us that both powerlessness and resistance were present during African American peoples’ enslavement; such powerlessness and resistance remains a reality for black women. The “sordid history and exploitation” of black women’s bodies continues to be a reality “within black communities and in the wider culture.”21

The Black Female Body as Historical Text22 In order to fully understand the construction of this sexual self, we must go back and view the black woman within the context of her early experience in American life. The construction of the sexual self of the Afro-American woman has its roots in the days of slavery. During those days the black woman was thought of, at best, as a worker, and at worst, as an object for sexual gratification and as a breeder of more slaves.23



Naming the historical context of the relationship black women have with their bodies should cause us to immediately realize that embodiment is always historically located and is a basis for articulating


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epistemological statements. In other words, we have to let the flesh speak, and in so doing we will hear the state of the psyches involved. Or, as Katie Cannon has written, the relationship between the experiences of the body and psyche is relational, psychical, and historical: “Our bodies are the texts that carry the memories and therefore rememory is no less than reincarnation.”24 Over and over again, slave-holders wrote their text on Black women’s bodies. 25

For instance, the use of black women for the expression of a distorted and perverted sexuality has long been noted by black feminist scholars. Black feminists note that the treatment of black women’s bodies in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States is the basis on which “contemporary pornography’s objectification, domination and control is based,”26 and black women’s bodies in pornography are imitations of the slave auction block. The experience of slavery, as experienced and fantasized by white male slaveholders, then set the pace for racially based form of contemporary pornography. An analysis of race, gender, color, and sexual dynamics rooted in the history of sexual domination and resistance to such domination are integral to black women’s analyses. The convergence of these realities is inseparable and must be articulated as such when examining black female bodily experiences. African American feminists and womanists recognize the legacy of dualistic thinking in terms of its significance in the justification of the institution of slavery and the rape and sexual exploitation intrinsic to it in the Western Hemisphere, as well as in contemporary attitudes toward rape and other bodily mistreatment of black women. In dualistic thinking, some “bodies”—white, male, Christian—are considered good, acceptable, desirable, and morally superior, while other “bodies”—black, female, poor—are considered the opposite. The ramifications of dualistic thinking in black communities is evident in relationships of abuse, sexual and color conflict, and struggles toward relationships of mutuality. Darlene Clarke Hines has noted that the rape of black women has been “institutionalized . . . [it] has always involved the patriarchal notions of black women being, at best, not entirely unwilling accomplices, if not inviting sexual assault.”27 Jessie Daniel Ames noted in 1936 the power of constant attack on black female sexuality:


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Hayes has noted that these beliefs were also accepted by the wives of rapists as recounted in the experience of the slave Linda Brent, who said of her mistress, I was soon convinced that her emotions arose more from anger and wounded pride. She felt her marriage vows were desecrated, her dignity insulted; but she had no compassion for the poor victims of her husband’s perfidy. 29

The bodily abuse of black women has not been limited to their experiences with white men and women. The legacy of slave/master dynamics continues in the cultural imagination and relationships among African Americans. These dynamics cannot be reduced to psychological functioning between individuals but must be understood in the historical context. It is true that the legacy of the history of the treatment of black women’s bodies is “inscribed on the bodies of black women,”30 but it is also written on their psyches and in a multitude of relationships. The next section of the chapter engages the narratives of two black women:31 (1) “Julia” is a single black Episcopalian woman whose narrative allows us to trace the psychological impact of early loss on self continuity and religious experience, and the racism on an adult woman’s experience of her self; (2) the second transcript is of “Rene,” a self-identified black lesbian who reviews her life in light of issues of mother loss, sexual abuse, and gender identity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of black/woman/lesbian/embodiment as a source of womanist epistemology. “In America, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within society.”32

Julia: Early Childhood Loss and the Discontinuity of Self


chaste Negro woman—but that a Negro woman could not be assaulted, that it was never against her will.28

Julia Johnston is a forty-two-year-old single black woman who is immediately striking on several counts—she presents as a stately, reserved, and commanding figure with shoulder length auburn hair. In height she is 5’3” but seems taller because of her dancer-like posture.


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I am Julia Johnston. I am forty-two years old. I am a black woman, and I am Episcopalian. I was born and raised on the east coast. My parents are from the deep south. I am, now, Episcopalian but come from Baptist and some Pentecostal roots. My maternal grandmother was very religious, and a minister, I think. My grandfather was a leader in the Baptist church he attended. I don’t know much more about them. My father was adopted very young so I didn’t know anyone from his family. I was very close to him. He had cancer and died when I was pretty young.

In the dialogue between womanist theology and self psychology, a commonality rests in large part on both their emphasis on the facilitation of the cohesive self—though womanist theory contributes the analysis that necessitates an emphasis on a racial, gendered, and cultural self. Early losses, of a traumatic nature, can be an impediment to this development of a continuity of self in a number of areas, including relationality and cultural and kinship ties, as well as in the psychological capacity to have a firm sense of one’s self regardless of context. Kohut suggested that traumatically experienced early losses interfere “with the basic structuralization of the psychic apparatus itself.”33 In other words, the result is that there is a vulnerability to a sense of diffuse identity, depression, or denial regarding aspects of self features34 that inhibits one’s capacity to maintain “narcissistic homeostatis”—as we saw in the previous chapter with Rosie. 35 In terms of Julia’s story, a central concern will be the convergence of early loss and subsequent cultural experiences, that is, racial and/or religious identifications. Remember that cultural selfobjects can serve as a conduit to this experience of connectedness as one establishes a relationship to the group. Where there is intense or significant unconscious ambivalence or disavowal toward one’s cultural group or background, we are likely to encounter an individual psychology as well as a cultural component at play; this is especially so if one is of an ethnic, gender, or racial group that is the target for social negative or stereotypical projections. In the cases of Julia and Rene, we will see a series of personal and cultural experiences that resulted in a compromised self,


She is Episcopalian and very involved in her faith community. Julia readily agreed to be a participant in my research project because she felt she had spent a great deal of time reflecting on her life, particularly as a black woman and as a faithful Episcopalian.


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When I was six years old, I had a dream of Jesus on the altar. There was blood on the altar. When I reflect back now, I wonder if the dream was a premonition of my becoming Episcopalian. I loved Bible stories and all those movies about religious figures. I used to think about Catherine of Sienna and her visions. My mom sent us to an Episcopalian school. I was really attracted to the ritual, the mystery. When I was in 7th grade, I was confirmed. When I was in 4th grade I found out my father had cancer. He was in the hospital for a whole month. This was the beginning of a traumatic period. Well, (and she offers a quick laugh) I became a little introspective—withdrew. Well, I started daydreaming and fantasizing a lot. I got more into religion. It became the stable feature of my life. (Another laugh): I became a little religious child. (She shakes her head): You know what I mean?

Adding to her difficulty was her mother’s emotional unavailability and lack of response: Mom didn’t notice the difference. I am more sensate. Mom wouldn’t notice if I was depressed unless I told her. My mom was really withdrawing and was disordered. I was close to my siblings. But really after my father died, my mom really wasn’t there. She remarried pretty quickly and my step-father . . . well it was not a good match, he had problems. There was just more chaos. I was depressed about all this. My mom left him at one point and then returned. I remember feeling angry toward the family. I went to confession—I needed to talk to someone—someone who didn’t know me.

Julia’s response is withdrawal into religion, but she also set in motion a long search for belonging that was so strong that at times Julia sacrifices her self—to be a “people pleaser.” Not only is her mother not able to help her negotiate her grief, she is a disappointment to Julia especially when she leaves her husband, only to return. Julia is thrown back into the chaos and overwhelming feelings of anger. Again, she turns to religion and confesses her anger. Julia’s relationship to religion should raise a number of questions: What was the nature of her religious experience? In one sense, we see it operating in the service of displacement. She says her mother left the stepfather and then returns. Julia remembers feeling angry toward the family, though it is her mother who has thrown her back into the painful situation where the reminder of her


and it ultimately impacted her response to a racially motivated attack on the context of her ministry.


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father’s absence permeates her existence. Next, in another psychological move, she redirects anger from the mother/family to herself—she decides to confess her anger. What was the relationship of her religious experience to selfobject needs? What was the relationship of her cultural background and history as conveyed via her parents to her selfobject needs and her sense of self? Yeah. (Another sigh): I was really alone. Yeah. In some ways, I was alone. I prayed. I had my faith. Until 8th grade. In 8th grade I had a crisis of faith. The religion teacher talked about Adam and Eve—the literalness was taken away. I wondered, what else can’t I believe? I didn’t doubt God, I don’t think. I doubted what I was told about God. No, I didn’t doubt God. I developed an interest in other religions. I started exploring. I went to different churches and a synagogue. Most people didn’t know I was exploring religions because I was so introverted. I went back and forth over the years. I thought I had a personal relationship with God but I didn’t. In college I discovered a near-by Episcopal church and started attending. Got involved in the youth ministry program, entered a volunteer ministry program. I felt called to work with youth in the city. I thought about joining an Episcopal Franciscan order but no . . . thought about volunteer programs and became a lay member of community. I wanted to be with a black community. Lived in another city with 2 priests and 3 other lay-women. During this time I saw a Prime Time special on Youth deaths. It made me cry. I went back to school for my M. Div.

The Worst Year of My Life: He Had Never Worked With a Black Woman I became a youth minister. That was a little hard. The director of the program had never worked with a black woman, and he didn’t want to work with a black woman. This was one of the worst years of my life. I felt intimidated. He terrorized all the women. During my evaluation he told me that the only thing I was good for was Xeroxing, and I made him ill. Yeah. Yeah, this was one of the worst years of my life. My talks with him made me ill.


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I had always been a people pleaser. Most people, even racist people, eventually liked and respected me. This had never happened like this before. This had happened when I became director of a volunteer program but I had more support. Here, all white people surrounded me.


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I realized that my people pleasing ways weren’t working. My withdrawing wasn’t working. I became more grounded in my inner resources. He finally told his superiors that one of us had to go. He thought because of my being black it would be me. Eventually they suggested he take a break and leave. I stayed on but when this was going on I had to stand up for myself . . . Well, he terrorized the others, especially the women. Well this taught me that in all my people pleasing, in my trying so hard to love my “neighbor” I had overlooked myself. I took some time off from ministry and began to “be still and know”—myself. Felt burnt out. I needed a break. I worked temp work for a year and did therapy. I went to the Employee Assistance Program and they recommended more therapy. This is when I really realized how much I was a people pleaser, and the impact of my childhood. I realized a lot of youth have issues with self- esteem and attempt to fill some void. For me, it was probably religion. I’ve been single all my life. Still some things to work on there; I will probably do some more therapy. I want to work at relationship with my family. My mom and I have a good relationship now. I confronted her about my anger, and we eventually reached a point of reconciliation. I had blocked this previously. I was moving back toward a contemplative place, and I was feeling more comfortable with myself as a black Episcopalian. Religion has changed where it’s more real . . . well, I guess my spirituality is more genuine . . . it used to be that church was an obligation that God would be upset if you didn’t go. Used to be that I was often in situations where I was only one of a few blacks. I discovered that white Episcopal circles are different than black religious circles. I think that white religious circles have more irreverence for the Church and religion. I began to realize that there was something wrong with this picture for me.


I was dealing with being the only black person. I changed. I withdrew. When I tried new ways of doing things, of dealing with him, I was put down. He thought I was the black person he assumed I would be. He thought of me as a black person, as he thought of all black people.

I have gone back to more reverence and respect for the Church and not apologizing for being Episcopalian. Don’t always agree with the pope but I am more conscious of tradition. More comfortable with being Episcopalian. Now yeah, I’m Episcopalian and well loosely a lay Franciscan (secular). Now I am unapologetically black and Episcopalian.


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It seems Julia frequently found refuge living on the fringe of the experiences of others; her understanding of herself as a black woman who is Episcopalian was ill-developed. Her story is one of becoming a “little religious” child during a time of loss and confusion. She became introverted, relied on fantasies to support her vulnerable self, and found herself isolated during this crucial developmental disruption. Clearly the death of her father was a traumatic selfobject loss, with little support available for processing her grief. In the absence of such support, Julia turns to various religious experiences searching for a new selfobject experience that would provide the mirroring she needed. By the eighth grade she is in the midst of a crisis of faith and doubt concerning what she could believe about God. It is in the midst of loss, grief, and loneliness that she sets out on a search for new selfobject experiences that will provide, it seems, the functions previously offered in her relationship to her father. Possibly there is some identification with him in the loss of identity as she notes “my father was adopted very young so I don’t know anyone from his family. I was very close to him,” and after his death, she seems to not know about her self. She becomes Episcopalian, but it is only much, much later that she becomes self-consciously—reflectively—a black Episcopalian woman. This becoming occurred in the context of ministry where she was very obviously treated as if her humanity was not a given. In the mind of the director she was nothing but a black woman who made him sick; her very embodiment as a black woman gave him license to try to reduce her to a thing, a bother, a gnat to be swept away—and that too with the silent complicity of his supervisors. They did not intervene until he attempted to force them to fire her without justification. Nor did she receive advocacy from her white colleagues. She was the only black minister there and she felt isolated and temporarily paralyzed. She attempted to change this minister’s mistreatment of her by being “nice,” and then, when that failed to change his heart and behavior, she sought to avoid him and withdrew. Julia’s response to this situation suggests an already existing compromised relationship to her black self. She laments that “he thought of me as black”—and how did this challenge the way Julia thought of herself as a black woman? Change did not come about until she realized that she had to actively confront him, the senior minister, and her coworkers who had ignored his unethical and racist behavior or, as in the case of the other women, cower in fear. Only then could she confront herself and her use of, and need for, a black religious experience and identity. She


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took time to “be still and know myself” “I realized that a lot of youth attempt to fill a void. For me, it was religion.” Prior to this forced confrontation, Julia lived with a discontinuity of self experience—trying to live on white religious terms and not hers, not black and Episcopal. She discovered that “there was something wrong with this picture for me”—for her as a black woman. Julia’s self-discovery also leads her to realize that she had “overlooked” “her self”—and her needs—and this realization provokes Julia to recognize that her relational life has been fraught with limitations: “I was alone. Been single all my life. Still more work to do there. I will probably do some more therapy.” Without her further exploration, this facet of Julia’s life cannot be fully understood. It is not surprising that at the conclusion of this painful process she becomes more aware of a desire to be in a relationship—and this she sees tied to her desire to also work on her relationship with her family. Her relationship needs are integral to her needs for cultural affiliation— and linking cultural affiliation, family, and personal relationship is a cyclical movement between the self, others, and culture. Julia’s final comments highlight the fact that throughout her interviews there is a stark absence of any reference to her expressed embodiment, a sense of enduring relationships or sexuality. In fact, her understanding of her blackness focused primarily on her supervisor’s response to her color and gender. How is this exchange between gender, body, culture, and sexuality that is embodied in a cultural context often dominated by the exploitive treatment of black women’s embodiment? And what is the epistemological place of sexuality in a womanist practical theology, and where should we turn to connect black, woman, body, and sexuality in our theorizing?

“No More Hidden Lives”36 : Black/Woman/ Lesbian/Embodiment as Epistemology Clearly we should turn to the missing and muted voices of black women in our constructive work. In 1988 when I wrote my Masters in Theology thesis on secrecy and abuse in the lives of black lesbians, I was concerned with the intrapsychic, intergenerational, and ecclesial impact of secrecy abuse. I specifically critiqued the black church for its imposition of silence and self- denial in exchange for a tenuous sense of belonging. Kelly Brown Douglas, in her Black Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective, 37 unravels the complex




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impact of colonialism’s lingering effect of maligning stereotypes, slavery, and cultural images in the psyches of black people as well as in the lived theologies of the black church. In particular, she traces the treatment of black women’s bodies—as the “condemned gender and condemned race”—leading to the cultural view that black women are “depraved.”38 This fostered, and continues to foster, the embodied and cultural exploitive use of black women as a blank screen for projections of disavowed lust, greed, immodesty, and sexual availability. The public degradation of black women was, and continues to be, perpetuated through the process of disavowal, distorted cultural representation, exploitation, and blame. These are vertical splits that are culturally supported, for example, in the form of dualistic ideologies, and are also rampant in African American communities and religious institutions. Julia Spellers’ article “Marginality within Margins” specifically names sexist dualism as “the systemic subordination of women in the church and society, within interpersonal relationships between males and females as well as within the linguistic patterns and through formulations by which women are dominated.”39 Sexist dualism is based on a body-spirit dichotomy that permeates Western Christian thought and culture. The impact of its emergence in the African American community has been the internalization of the norms for beauty, color, sexual expression, and orientation. Black male perceptions of women as good/virginal or bad/whore often falls along color lines so that good is posited with white/light skin color and bad with black/dark skin color.40 In other words, black bodies and black female bodies become the repository for those aspects of sexuality that are rejected.41 Clearly, an aspect of the psychology of racism and sexism is a dynamic between one’s own manner for dealing with anxiety, hostility, and fear and the societal structures (i.e., laws, norms, religious ideas) that legalize or permit biases and discriminatory practices. Thus, some people become the embodiment of those rejected characteristics of one’s self or one’s fears. The insidious nature of this process can be noted in the area of sexuality. Historically, the black female body is a site of desire, repulsion, discomfort, and struggle. Multiple processes, socially and interpersonally, enact this conflict and become internalized individually. One of the issues immediately apparent is the relationship between dualistic ideologies and black bodily control. Confronting dualistic thinking challenges white male sexual privilege as well as white female privilege that sanctions and maintains her sense of desecrated marriage vows and wounded dignity42 at the expense of black


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women’s bodied sexual violation. It also challenges the hierarchical male/female norms for relating. Thus, power, sexual privilege, and black female bodies are linked when black women examine dualistic ideologies. The inseparableness of these issues takes on greater significance when the very same power, privilege, and sexuality are linked to African American communities. Gilkes asserts: Because we are African-American, the assaults on our lives and bodies are historically molded and take on a more ominous character and meaning. We find that our history of racial oppression has always been sexualized. And that all sexism is racialized and often by homogenizing we miss the peculiar ways sexism is able to reinforce racial privilege for some and sharpen the consequences of racial oppression.43

The issues of black sexuality moved from the implicit heterosexual concerns to gay and lesbian issues in a roundtable discussion in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. The question framing the discussion “Christian Ethics and Theology in Womanist Perspective” concerned the appropriation of “womanist” for theological construction. Issues related to heterosexism, homophobia, black family life, and ethical norms for the expression of sexuality provided the focus.44 Raising the issue of homophobia in a critical and visible context has furthered the theoretical analyses of the links between sexuality and power45 and focused attention on heterosexism and homophobia as a context where African American women realize the potential to oppress.46 Cheryl Sanders, a Christian feminist, raised questions concerning the appropriation of womanist values on sexuality. She wondered if the “term womanist provide(s) an appropriate frame of reference for the ethical and theological statements now being generated by black women? What is necessary for doing womanist scholarship? To be a black woman? A black feminist? A black lesbian?”47 Her concerns are directed toward the content of Walker’s definition of a womanist. She holds that Walker’s womanist does not rely on God or Jesus for her resistance and self-determination. In addition, and more importantly, Sanders is concerned with the sexual ethic posited in the definition. Walker asserts womanists’ sexual freedom. Womanist is a preferred alternative to lesbian because



it connotes connectedness and not isolation. Clearly, in Walker’s view, sexual preference is not a morally or ethically significant factor in determining whether or not one is “committed to the survival and wholeness of [an] entire people, male and female.”48


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The issue at stake, according to Sanders, is that the black church asserts a very different ethical norm regarding sexual practices and advancement, and wholeness of black families. Further, she adds that in order for black women’s ethical positions to be relevant for the needs of the black community, then “at least some of us must be in a position to offer intellectual guidance to the church as the principle (and perhaps [the] only remaining) advocate for marriage and family . . . the womanist nomenclature . . . conveys a sexual ethic that is ambivalent . . . to the value of heterosexual monogamy.”49 For Sanders, black Christian sexual ethics is heterosexual ethics. Katie Cannon, in response to Sanders’ position, asks What are the ideological and theological forces, the specific determinations that equate Black feminism and lesbianism? And whom does this equation serve? A womanist liberation theological ethic rejects heuristic concepts such as heteropatriarchal familialist ideology and compulsory heterosexism but seeks instead heuristic models that explore sacred power and benevolent co-humanity. 50

While both women place African American women and justice at the heart of their theological statements, Cannon brings forward the thorny issue of homophobia, and thereby “furthers the theoretical analyses of the links between sexuality and power,”51 and Sanders brings forward the equally thorny issue of the relationship between theologies of sexuality and the women and men sitting in the pew. However, we grapple with the issue, we must remember, that the power of homophobia to silence and oppress black women and men must be addressed theologically and pastorally—and Sanders falls short on both counts. Sanders is preoccupied with the physical aspect of sexuality, and lesbian sexuality in particular, thus she is concerned with lesbians’ embodiment of sexuality—what lesbians do with their bodies and with whom. In the following vignette, we will discuss these concerns.

Rene: The Struggle to Embody Self: Sexuality and Gender Negotiations


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Rene Norris is a fifty-eight-year-old black lesbian. She is about 5’4”, with a smile almost as wide as her height. She wears her mid-length dark brown hair relaxed, with a slight “bounce” to her curl. She describes herself as having “curves”—a fact that gives her pleasure. She, and her brother, grew up in an economically stable working


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lower-middle- class black neighborhood in a northeast midsized city and were raised by their father. The family was quasi religious without religious affiliation. Upon hearing about my research, Rene responded, “you need to talk with me. I am so tired of carrying this in me, pretending nothing happened, and that everything is okay between me and this person.” Her life began in secrecy. Rene grew up with her father (and, for a short time, her stepmother). She was never sure of the circumstances concerning the relationship between her natural mother and her father until six months ago, and she later reported she had never discussed much of this material since she was eleven. My father had been married for fourteen years when he got a fifteenyear- old white girl pregnant with my brother; I was born a year after him. Right after I was born, we went to stay with my father and my step-mother. My mom had visiting rights until I was about one, and then she brought us back late one night, so my father wouldn’t let her see us anymore. About a year later, my step-mother and dad split up.

This was the only mother Rene had truly known. She remembers nothing about her natural mother. Rene speculated that her mother lost custody because she was so young: She was young, and I guess that because she was young, she didn’t have any rights anyway. Anyway my father was married and stuff, so he got us kids. There was no court or anything involved, but she wasn’t allowed to see us anymore.

The secrecy that surrounded Rene’s birth has continued into her adult life. It has not occurred to Rene to question the rightness of her father’s decision. She was denied access to her birth mother and eventually to her stepmother. She has not recognized the injustice done to her because of the secrecy that surrounded her mother’s absence from her life. Rene is, however, beginning to acknowledge the exploitation and oppression of her childhood because of the sexual abuse by her father and the secrecy about that, which still lingers. Rene’s father began sexually abusing her when she was ten years old. She began the telling of her story by de-emphasizing the impact that the experience has had on her life.



It didn’t really amount to much more than fondling at first, and there was never any actual penetration. I can only remember three episodes,


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maybe four. Three of the four were just fondling. When my father used his tweezers to get hair from his chin, he’d have me or my brother do it for him. On this one occasion, he reached up and put his hand between my legs. I was shocked, and I knew it wasn’t something that should have been done, but I was torn because this was my father. When he said do something, you’d do. You didn’t tell him no, or you don’t want it. And it doesn’t feel bad. Part of the guilt that I think a lot of sexually abused kids have is that it didn’t hurt. It probably didn’t last more than ten minutes. Eventually, I got flustered and went to the bathroom or something.

Rene recalls that as children she and her brother were often left at home alone at night, and she would become frightened. During these times she would sleep in her father’s bed downstairs. It was while sleeping in his bed that she recalls that his sexual advances went beyond fondling. He actually put his penis to my vagina and just rubbed it on there. He didn’t have an orgasm—not that I would have known what an orgasm was then, but after I got older I realized what would have happened if he had had one.

Even though Rene was terrified of her father’s anger, she realizes that by the time of this incident she was very angry with him. By the time this happened, I was really angry with him. Nothing else ever happened, but my anger had been building for a period of time.

Her anger at her father was not expressed to him directly, but when Rene was around eleven, in spite of her fear of repercussions, she revealed the abuse to the woman her father was dating. She describes the results as having a profound impact on her at the time. The most devastating thing that came out of these episodes was that he had a girlfriend. She was one of the few that he had an doing ongoing relationship with for a couple of years. Sometimes she would stay for the weekend. She was nice. . . . My dad was especially nice when she was around because they wanted to be alone. He’d send us to the movies all day.


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Eventually we were alone one day. I was about eleven years old. I don’t know what we were talking about . . . but I told her what my dad had been. Not in any detail or anything, and not because I wanted it to stop or whatever, but because I was a kid. I wasn’t even confiding in her. I


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Within a couple of days or so, my dad yelled at me about something that was wrong. And he was saying that I had a big mouth and why did I run my mouth off to Sally and that I wasn’t supposed to run my mouth off about things at home. It terrified me. He’d yell and yell and rant and rave. I never knew what he was going to do; sometimes all he’d do is yell, another time he’d beat us. There was a level of unpredictability. When he got through that, he never mentioned it again and he never treated me that way again (in terms of the verbal abuse). He never touched me again. It changed his relationship with Sally. The thing was that I knew what sex was and that what had happened was wrong. I was such a repressed spirit as a child. There was no question that he loved us, but he wasn’t a nurturing father.

Throughout her narrative, Rene fluctuated between diminishing the effect of the abuse and acknowledging its continuing impact. As with Rosie, Rene lived with a defensive split that offered a protection against the affect of her abuse and the awareness of its impact. Rene says that the incestuous abuse did not cause her problems as a child, and she and her father never discussed it then or now. We never talked about it. It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t a problem and has never caused me a problem. At least so I thought. But the problem it’s causing me (now) is that I have less and less respect for him as a person. Now I analyze him a lot closer and differently than I did as a child. I’m quicker to find fault with him.

As an adult, Rene realizes that part of the reason she is free to perceive her father differently is because she is no longer dependent on him financially or emotionally. She realizes that his treatment of her as a child caused her pain and confusion, and made her remain secretive about many of the things that were happening in their home. Rene was not the only child that her father sexually abused. She is also convinced that secrecy and disavowal were a big part of the way they lived that other incidents of a sexual nature were often ignored.


just said what was happening. She was surprised. She left the room and I thought nothing of it.

“I Didn’t Know I was a Lesbian”: Sexuality and Gender Identifications This refusal or inability to process important experiences of the family carried over into her early recognition of a growing sense of attraction


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to females. Rene recalls that when she was about eleven or twelve, she and a girlfriend would get together and play sex “games.” They would go into the bathroom and stay there for long periods of time “making out” while her brother would watch television or be outside. She was convinced he knew what they were doing but decided to ignore them. This studied unawareness and lack of dialogue continued as Rene became more sexually active during late adolescence. I didn’t realize that I was a lesbian until I was about sixteen or seventeen. I was dating this guy, the only one my dad would allow me to date. He was bisexual at the time. My dad thought he was great. My dad didn’t know it, but he used to take me to the gay bar and I’d have a great time. I had a very close relationship with him at the time. Closer than anyone else; maybe because there was no pressure. I knew he was bisexual, but we had an understanding. What I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me. I didn’t care until he fell in love with some guy. So I said bye-bye. By this time I had met some black lesbians; it was the beginning of my senior year in high school. My dad knew of this lesbian couple I used to spend time with. Before this, my dad never let me go anywhere, so this was like coming out. They would take me to the bar and I would hang out with the women. I was always the aggressive one in the bar. The reason was because at this time if you were considered the “fem” you couldn’t ask anyone to dance; you had to wait. Anyway, I was like a little “butch.” I felt comfortable doing this (but) I also thought I had to do this to be attractive—at the bar. When I went to school, it was a whole different story—I was a “princess” at school. I was the total opposite. I was like a princess. Nobody knew about me being a lesbian. I was really alone there. With everything else, it was hard. It was really hard. At one point it was just too much. I attempted suicide.

These early days of discovering and experiencing her sexuality were fraught with a form of splitting (extreme polarities in her self representation at the bar and at school), depression, loss, and a sense of isolation in many ways. She was most often the youngest woman in the bar and, early on, trying to learn the established rules for social engagement. These were not immediately clear or clearly communicated. Rene soon enough realized that being a lesbian in this “scene” brought with it freedoms and constricted interpersonal possibilities.


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Her experience is captured poignantly in Audre Lorde’s reflection on her early years as a lesbian: “I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of time it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was pure hell. There were no mothers, no sisters, no heroes. We had to do it alone, like our sister Amazons, the riders on the loneliest outposts . . . We young and Black and fine and gay, sweated out our first heartbreaks with no school or office chums to share that confidence over the lunch hour.”52 A recurring theme in her narrative, though not explicitly grappled with by Rene, was that of having important sources of self-support compromised. The first such compromised relationship was the unremembered teen mother who was denied access to her children, and later, of course, the loss of her father as a trustworthy source of emotional support because of the abuse. The theme emerges again when Rene confides in Sally about the father’s behavior, who then leaves him—leaving Rene with him. During her adolescent sexual exploration, Rene relied for companionship and guidance on a man who was bisexual and with whom she had an understanding in her nascent exposure to opportunities for experiencing black gay life. She most probably had stronger feelings of affection than she realized or acknowledged—and this is suggested more by the lowering of voice when she speaks of the loss of this relationship. This source of needed self-support was lost when he fell in love with a man. Rene was unprepared to negotiate the meaning of her feelings of betrayal and instead “said bye-bye.” Later, she attempts suicide. The pressure on her fragile and developing sense of self was significant, and it resulted in her vulnerability to depletion and fragmentation. Rene had to bear these internal struggles alone—and it is this experience of isolation and insufficient support that most contributed to her mental health status. Her suicide attempt brought with it an opportunity for therapy. Rene could not say what in particular about her therapy contributed to the lessening of her depression and her renewed interest in life, except that she felt understood. It was after this period of therapy that Rene’s social networks broadened, and she moved away from “following all the rules” that governed “butch/fem” interactions. One striking fact was that Rene, by the time of our interviews, had adopted a style of being and a concurring nickname suggesting a much more “feminine” sense of herself (though with far less rigidity than she described during her adolescence, and with far more coherence in that she was




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not projecting one “self” in one context and a seemingly opposite one in another setting out of fear of rejection). She felt this was a truer self than the polarized ones between which she fluctuated as a young adult. Rene’s process sounds remarkably similar to “Ain,” one of the black lesbians included in “black./womyn: conversations,” a new documentary on the experiences of black lesbians. Ain reports that at one time I was much into it. I was fem and I loved it and my girlfriend was aggressive or whatever. But it’s closing or confining and I just think a lot of times people are just boxing themselves into one area. A lot has to do with being comfortable with who you are which is a total human self- esteem issue but it that gets heightened in the lesbian community so then it’s hard for people who aren’t set in those roles. 53

At the time of the interview, Rene was in a relationship for about eight years with a woman she had met at work—a relationship in which they “ignored all those butch/fem rules” and “just shared companionship and life.” She presented as a more playful person in relation to her expression of gender identification. On a camping trip to a feminist women’s festival, Rene and her partner occupied a tent that was very large—so they could entertain. The layout of the tent’s inside suggested a queen ready to receive her court—a bright carpet, a folding table with cloth and silverware, chairs, Champagne in an ice bucket, cheese, fruit, and spreads. She described her attire as a casual silk caftan. And yet, when it was time to go for workshops, Rene said she changed into “nice jeans and blouse and sneakers.” A significant change in Rene over time was her relationship to the broader community. She was an active participant in the black, and broader gay and lesbian, community, and was known for organizing groups of women to support one another, and she encouraged other black lesbians in the community to attend women’s music festivals. Rene’s self-initiated efforts to understand the complexity of her experiences and her willingness to discuss her life make clear the multiple forces involved in her development and her current life. This speaks to the role that a supportive partner and an increasingly supportive lesbian (and gay) culture had in her life. Rene’s life suggests that this cultural context has had a role in her increased sense of belonging to an important group (black lesbians and the broader gay and lesbian community) and that this experience of group affiliation


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functioned, in part, to support and facilitate the development of her more cohesive sense of self. Unlike Rosie, Rene’s cultural affiliations were eventually broadened and far less tinged with unmanageable ambivalence or hostility. Though she has gained significant ground in terms of dismantling the shame she internalized, related to her abuse, she finds it difficult to discuss the impact of her sexual abuse on life, particularly in terms of the early expression of her sexuality as well as gender. For instance, as a “butch,” Rene felt relatively in control of her sexual life—though the script she adhered to meant that she was supposed to initiate and determine sexual relations. I suspect that an additional factor in Rene’s gravitation toward the butch in the control role was informed by this very feature of control afforded in the realm of sexual relations. Yet, an aspect of her dissatisfaction with the rigidity of gender roles was the lack of sexual intimacy that she later determined to be more possible. What is also important to recognize, of course, is that Rene’s relationship to her self experience (gender, sexuality, sexual expression, race, and intrapsychic life) cannot be reduced to her personal history and/or intrapsychic domain. It is part of the much broader contested space of black women’s embodiment, sexuality, and misrepresentation. By engaging womanist theology on the edges, we widen the epistemological lens of our work. Rene’s narrative is compelling, and stories such as hers suggest epistemological significance. If we take embodiment seriously, then yes, we must bring a critical interest to what black lesbians—and others—do with their bodies, that is, we must claim the questions that emerges when considering how gender, race, pleasure, and sexuality are experienced, expressed, and represented in the social and private domain. We need to reflect more on Walker’s definition that defines a womanist as a woman who loves other women both sexually and nonsexually. Much of our theorizing tacitly assumes the nonsexual relating as normative, and so we script and constrict the discussions of relating among womanists. Renee Hill wrestles with this issue and its impact on womanists’ relationships with each other. Quoting Audre Lorde, she challenges womanist thinkers who avoid the concerns of black lesbians, “we cannot settle for the pretense of connection . . . We cannot continue to evade each other on the deepest levels.”54 Hill calls for womanists to take seriously Walker’s inclusion of women loving women sexually and their claims of knowledge, and holds that womanist thought must include lesbian voices and acts of women loving each other. 55 At the heart of this discussion




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is the theological and very public meaning of black women’s bodies and embodiment—especially to black women. Jade and Michelle, a lesbian couple in the “black./womyn: conversations” documentary remind us that “straight people don’t have a little person in their heads saying ‘can I hold her hand?’ I come from a place that when I roll\e down the street that people automatically know that I am a lesbian. I have had men say ‘get your hand off my girlfriend.’ Like how deep is that? Like every woman that walks down the street is his property? Where do you get that from?” Indeed, where does that come from? In a cultural context where bodies, black women’s bodies in particular, are exploited on almost every front, resistance must begin in the telling of the many stories that make up our lives. What will happen to theologies of black embodiment if we move to the further edges of the “normative” in womanist theology by claiming the epistemological power of black lesbian experience? What might beginning with black/lesbian experience mean for our question: what is theological about black women’s embodied experiences? An approach that takes the black women’s embodiment as an epistemological given cannot begin with an abstract and experience a distant perspective. It is an engagement with real black women’s embodiment that will lead to a conviction that we—black women— are a dark goodness created in the image of God. As Brown Douglas has noted, we need a theology of the black body that articulates an “appreciation of the body as the very temple of God.”56 Such a theology is crucial for developing a resistance to the distortion of black female embodiment and black sexuality in the broader culture and its particular manifestation in the black community. Reclaiming black lesbians’ full embodiment is to break the rules of silence, invisibility, and exploitive appropriation, and make a way for us to fully reclaim all black women’s embodiment to recognize that black women’s embodiment—black women’s sexualities—are good. From this position, we will have a womanist practical theology situated to create practices whose work it is to transform black women and black communities into those who embody the conviction that they are a dark goodness created in the image of God.


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Several years ago, during a worship service I attended at a synagogue, the rabbi asked the children, “What in the world reminds you of G-d?” Children as young as five and as old as twelve excitedly cited all forms of creation: trees, the oceans, their parents, grass, siblings, friends, and music. Rabbi Gerson wanted every child to be heard, so the list was quite long, and with some repetition. Just as the Rabbi seemed to be nearing the end of this part of the service, a round-faced brown-skinned girl of six or seven raised her hand and said, “The dark. That’s when I know G- d, when I see the dark.” She was so pleased and presented us with a big smile. Who knows what experiences prompted this girl to experience God in the dark, but I was struck by the fact that it was a brown faced girl who associated darkness with the Holy. This little girl has something to teach us, and her observation suggests a powerful opening for a womanist practical theological anthropology and a doctrine of God. Let us start in darkness; let us turn to the “Song of Songs.” How does a psychoanalytic womanist practical theology read, respond to, and comment on scripture? This chapter takes up this question in particular with regard to the “Song of Songs”—the text with the most fully portrayed self-identified black woman in the Bible. The text invites theological reflection, and thus poses the question of what it means theologically to take seriously one’s blackness, gender, social location, and relationship to and with others. My concern, however, is with how the text has been experienced by black women, and the implications this information might offer a womanist practical theology. Taking two translations of chapter 1,


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verses 5–6 (“I am black and comely” and “I am black and beautiful”) as its starting point, this chapter articulates the transformative potential of reading (and rereading) the text and attending to the reader’s response. The Bible has offered us very little about the way black women thought of themselves or how others viewed them during ancient times. One exception is the black woman in the “Song of Songs.” Here we become witnesses to this black woman’s longings, complaints, passion, imagination, disappointments, fears, anger, and hopes in the sociocultural Babylonian context. Hers is not a narrated love song of isolated pining but rather, we quickly see, one situated within an existing sociocultural context where color and gender are conscious factors in the poems. Her love and desire are negotiated, even embedded, within the themes of power and gender; amidst the vivid language and images of passion, pursuit, fear, determination, and longing. Her life is relationally complicated in her present cultural milieu, in her familial context, and in the relationship with the object of her love. Her “self,” that highly contested social and psychic construct, must be understood contextually. By reading a section of her story through the lens of a womanist self psychology, we can move toward a deeper psychology of experience in the “story.” As we reread her story within the “Song of Songs,” we will also ask ourselves how might the black woman of the “Song of Solomon” help us understand the experience of black women today.

The Text 1. “Song of Songs” 1:5–6 Tanakh1 I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Look not upon me, that I am swarthy, that the sun hath tanned me; my mother’s sons were incensed against me, they made me keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept. 2. “Song of Solomon” 1:5–6 KJV2 I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me: my mother’s children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept. 3. “Song of Songs” 1:5–6 NRSV3 I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon. Do not gaze at me because I am dark, because the sun has gazed on me. My mother’s sons were angry with me; they made me keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard I have not kept!


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Black Female Embodiment and the Social Location of She Who Says “I am” What does it mean—psychologically, socially, culturally, theologically—to say “I am”? What does it mean that the woman of The Song of Songs locates her I am in her embodied self? Very early in a set of poems she announces to her audience, community, lover, and us, “I am black.” She situates her relationship to the world around from an embodied stance. She invites the future reader to see her through her eyes. She invites us to an embodied reading. And we are obliged to obey because reading is embodied reading. It is also contextualized. My reading of the “Song of Songs” is from an embodied perspective that includes color, race, and social location: I am black. I am a black woman. Given the fact of my own socially located positions and womanist commitments in the reading of the “Song of Songs,” when the modifier “but” shifts to “and” it conveys a psychological, cultural, and a theological conversation concerning the embodied meaning of blackness. All reading is an embodied process. We look for our bodies in the text. Sometimes we assume a particular body in the text. One of the reasons that the female body jumps off the pages of the “Song of Songs,” for me and other black women, is because it is one of the few instances of reading the Bible where we find our black female body mirrored. I am black, she asserts. All reading is contextualized. Again, black women find resonance in these verses, in the words of self-description and explanation. When given the opportunity to reflect on these verses, black women respond. Questions are raised. Pain is evoked. Pleasure breaks through. Anger flares. Sadness descends. Inspiration springs forth. In the NRSV, the maiden describes herself as black and beautiful but she feels compelled to beseech those around her “not to stare” at her because of her darkness. Oh for the love of a black-skinned woman. She explains she has been subjected to forced labor under the sun’s heat. Depending on the translation, she is “black but comely,” “swarthy but comely,” and “black and beautiful,” and “yes, I am black! And radiant.” What are the commitments that render such different translations? Just as all reading is embodied and contextual and embedded in a myriad of ideological and theological commitments, all


4. “Song of Songs” Marcia Falk4 Yes, I am black! And radiant— O city women watching me— As black as Kedar’s goathair tents Or Solomon’s fine tapestries.


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translations are embodied and embedded in the commitments of the translators. Renita Weems offers helpful perspectives. First she tells us that the black female writer “speaks with pride, self- confidence, and, contrary to what some have argued, without apology as she describes herself.”5 Furthermore, there should be no confusion here because the Hebrew word she uses to describe herself is sehora, and is unambiguous, despite the numerous efforts by translators to render it more euphemistically and palatably as “dark,” “very dark,” “swarthy,” “blackish,” and so on.6 Weems also argues that in other places in the Hebrew Testament, including the “Song of Songs,” where the word is used, the color black is clearly understood by translators.7 Translation always involves decisions based on a variety of factors beyond the actual content of text. Weems tells us that “waw” can be translated as and or but; however, the decision to translate waw as “but” in the King James Version was likely related to the pejorative view of blackness, and therefore the idea of this black woman declaring herself black and beautiful was unimaginable.8 Regardless of the translation, her experience in this setting compels her to discuss her color—not apologize for it—while maintaining her sense of selfworth. Thus, she precedes her comments related to the stares with a self-affirming sense of “I am black” and beautiful or comely. She represents a model of black womanhood in the cultural context that seems not to be affirming of black womanhood. The work of the contemporary black woman reader is to understand the impact and meaning of the biblical black woman’s experience for black woman today, its impact on black women’s experience of community, and the nature of kinship experiences with each other intersubjectively and intrapsychically. Thus, the question that is at the center of concern in this essay is “what difference does this Biblical black woman’s experiences of self make for contemporary black women?”

Resisting Erasure of Black Female Self Subjectivity Why is the “Song of Songs’ ” woman’s self-identification such an important fact to consider? This black and beautiful woman says I am and yet she is not even taken under consideration in some contemporary collections of women of the Bible! I searched in vain to find her in Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s indispensable Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories. In Lillian Klein’s From


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Deborah to Esther: Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible she is only mentioned briefly in the preface and in a footnote referencing jealousy among women in the Bible. She privileges not the black-skinned woman, but instead reports that an exception to the frequency of envy among women in the Bible is the “Song of Songs. The daughters of Jerusalem demonstrate no jealousy of the Shulammite maiden.”9 These women, she reminds us, refer to her as the fairest of maidens. And yet, The “Song of Songs,” a book filled with the beauty and struggle of desire and sexuality, is not addressed in Klein’s book. The Shulammite woman, whose poem is a statement of “I am,” knows that she exists, and yet the evidence suggests that powerful others do not treat her as one with subjectivity or as a woman of the Bible. Klein’s work is an example of the erasure of black women’s subjectivity. Klein’s footnote does not speak of the black woman’s subjective experience but rather of the Daughters’ of Jerusalem lack of envy about her beauty. In her work, the black woman evaporates before our eyes. Cheryl Exum chides Weems for assuming the black woman’s subjectivity and immediacy; she tells Weems that “the immediacy of the Song of Songs is an illusion,” and that if we think otherwise we have been deceived. Furthermore, Exum, continues, the woman of this text does not exist! She is “an artistic creation.”10 Exum accuses many feminists of becoming “bubbling romantics”11 when reading the “Song of Songs.” She notes there are few exceptions to this reading, but she finds that Fiona Black “looks at the darker side of desire.”12 What exactly is the darker side of desire? Has Exum made a Freudian slip or is she absolutely conscious of how she is using darker? And Fiona Black’s own words first make the association of dark with the negative, “desire for the other involves tensions and inconsistencies— darker moments, times of doubt, loss of drive, the quest for possession, envy, perhaps even repulsion, if only fleeting.”13 Every reader and reading brings critical commitments. What commitments are served by these readings? Here, I bring a womanist hermeneutical approach and choose to stand on the side of the black woman in the text and with the black women who read the “Song of Songs.” In the biblical text, and in her own context, the black woman has a clear voice, and she herself accuses those who have claimed and attacked her subjectivity. This is what has happened during her forced labor status. This labor is imposed on her by her brothers. She indicates that they could coerce her to “labor” and that they did so because they were angry. Clearly the forces of power were on their side. What we observe here is that she has experienced a form of


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domination. Her self-interests have been thwarted, denied, and devalued. But domination is not just the ability to force someone to bend to your will, it is an intrapsychic experience, such as fantasies and affects, that finds concrete expression. The brothers are angry. They force her to labor in their gardens. Exerting control over this black woman is the form of their domination. The intersubjective expression of domination is also apparent when we read that there are those who gaze upon her because she is black. But the black woman resists the dominating gaze through confrontation. Marcia Falk translates her as saying, “I have faced the angry glare.”14 This indicates a decision on her part to face those who turn a negative gaze toward her. She does not internalize their view of her but properly locates the negative affect as originating in them. So, in this instance of negative mirroring, she rejects their distorted reflections. Weems says that “she becomes the object of her own gaze: she is by her own estimation, black and beautiful.”15 So confident is she that she loudly claims and pursues her lover. But we know the story; she encounters obstacles along the way. Yes, she is assertive about who she is and the one she desires. She is sexual, sensuous, and palpably ardent! This, however, is no Harlequin Romance where you know from the opening page that these lovers will indeed collapse in each other’s arms and ride off into the sunset. The Shulammite’s sense of efficacy is constantly challenged throughout the text, to the very end, yet she remains constant in her pursuit, her sense of self, and her perspective.

Dialogues between the Text and Black Women Readers: An Opportunity for Self and Other Transformation How do black women read the “Song of Songs” 1:5–6? The next section is a brief reporting on three different contexts for black women’s reading of this text, which is translated variously as “I am black” with “and” or “but” preceding the descriptor lovely. The responses to these different translations in light of women’s experiences indicate the need for a womanist self psychological approach to the Bible and black women’s responses to particular texts. Furthermore, these women’s experiences and reflections on blackness as a descriptor of skin color should suggest that a particular reading of, and thus a particular rereading of, familiar Scriptures is embedded in psychological meanings that have developed in a psychosocial context. Readings


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Strengthening the Black Female Self: Reading “Song of Songs” 1:5–6 at a Women’s Retreat I led a women’s day retreat at a large black Baptist church for a hundred plus women, between the ages of twenty-something and seventysomething, using various translations of the “Song of Songs.” We read the different translations several times but particularly read the “I am black and lovely, O daughters of Jerusalem like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon. Do not gaze at me because I am dark, because the sun has gazed upon me.” Some, if not most, had never heard the translation that reads “I am black and lovely.” Most had only heard or read “I am black but comely.” As I looked around the room the first time we read aloud together, I felt anxious. The women were every shade of black, from ivory to blue velvet black. The women’s facial responses were mixed. There was clearly a discomfort in the room. The room went from being lively to a deep quiet. I wondered if I had made a mistake in choosing this text. I did not know these women. Even though I had been asked to facilitate a retreat that would deepen their spirituality and be particular to black women, I was asking them to trust me, a stranger. At the same time, I realized while standing there that I had split off from my awareness just what I would be asking them to do in a group setting: to open their hearts and their experiences of being black women in a color conscious world with women with whom they prayed, laughed, and cried, but with whom most had never revealed their complex relationship with their black embodiment. The work and transformation began when the women in the group began to tell of their experiences as black women to other black women. Some had seldom spoken of the racism they had experienced or the way they felt at being constantly bombarded with notions of beauty that never included black-skinned women. Some spoke of how much more they were able to embrace their black embodied self after taking a class in African or African American history, dance, or literature; others had discovered the spiritual practice of liturgical dance to be a healing path of self appreciation. Some spoke of deep wounds experienced related to color in their family of origin. Some shared feelings of deep anger, some related to the “benefits of being light skinned,” and others shared


and rereadings therefore, reveal meanings that are both multifaceted and not necessarily fully in the readers’ conscious awareness.


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their hurt at being ostracized because of being “too dark” or “too light or white looking.” They critiqued the wider culture and the black community. They shared the ways they believed and carried the very ideas they hated. Some of the women “confessed” that there were times when being dark made them feel better than their lighter- skinned sisters. And some of the lighter-skinned women “confessed” that they sometimes believed they were better than dark-skinned women. We spent time discussing the internal and interpersonal impact of growing up in a culture that frequently depicts black-skinned and brown-skinned women in negative ways. The psychological dynamic is one of identification with the aggressor’s view or values. When this happens, some black women’s self is bolstered at the expense of the relationships between black sisters. There were tears, raised voices, and holding hands. By the end of the retreat, they were discussing the need for them to create ways to address the way in which black women are viewed spiritually, theologically, and socially. They talked about ways to continue the transformation begun during the retreat. At the end of the day, each woman gazed into a mirror as we read once again, “I am black and lovely.” What happened in the context of this retreat? These women became their own advocates for the transformation and provision of deeper kinship needs. They directly confronted the ways they had previously split out of awareness, disavowed, and projected their experiences of being black women. These women, in the company of other women and women with whom they would have ongoing relationships, opened themselves to empathic responses and were able to more readily empathize with others’ experiences. This allowed them to experience together anger and sadness about how silence had protected them from unmanageable thoughts and feelings as well as reactions, it had also walled them off, at some deeper and more intimate level, from each other. Their increased awareness led to some mourning of lost opportunities from the past and thus situated them for a different relational and self experience.

A Failure of Empathy: “Song of Songs” in a Gender Studies Forum at a University


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In another group setting, this time at a university where the audience comprised a somewhat racially and ethnically diverse group of staff, students, and faculty, I gave a presentation on womanist theology and black female embodiment. And again I used the reading of the “Song of Songs” in different translations as a way to begin the discussion.


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The discussion juxtaposed the black woman in the Scripture, with all her assertiveness and self- definition, with contemporary cultural depictions of black women. I speculated that the daily assault on contemporary black women’s self-image effected black women’s psyche and spirituality as well as our sense of black sexuality. A group of black women sitting in the front row looked, to me, to be displeased. When the discussion opened up for the audience, several of these women spoke of frustration related to racism, discrimination, and narrow beauty standards, but in a very distant and intellectual way. Others in the audience spoke and asked questions. Finally one of the black women in the front row, who had been quiet the whole time and tight-lipped, raised her hand to speak, and I held my breath. She said, “I am glad you did this presentation. It’s important and black women need to talk about how we feel our blackness makes us treat each other, not just how white people treat black people. But I want you to know that right now, I hate you for doing it. I hate you for making me think about this. And I hate you for presenting this here at the university where I can’t get away from it. I have to say it, I know we need to talk about this but right now, I hate you.” The black women sitting near her quietly shook their heads in empathic agreement. It is difficult to convey, but my experience was that her anger saturated the air. For these women, the engagement with black embodiment had failed, and I was implicated. The previous group of women experienced a sense of efficacy in managing their intrapsychic and intersubjective experiences during the retreat, and had an enhanced capacity to own their feelings, share their feelings, and initiate changes that would help them in their ongoing self-transformation and community transformation. In other words, the women in the first group described a strengthened sense of self, and rather than feeling diminished by their retreat experience, they seemed to become more self-aware and cohesive after their initially unsettling response. The second group of women left feeling angry, exposed, and vulnerable. Furthermore, while they verbally recognized the social and cultural contribution to their feelings about blackness and gender, their feelings of anger were specifically directed at me. Why? At a basic level, I failed to give enough consideration to the different context. This second group did not have the opportunity to interact with each other and with me without an audience. When they discussed or considered their black embodiment during this presentation, it was with white onlookers who had not had experiences related to blackness. The result was that, for most of the discussion, these women resorted to an intellectualized and nonpersonal discussion as a


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way to protect themselves from the gaze of white women and men. This meant that they could not mirror each other’s experience, could not face their own conflicts, and could not begin the work of transforming deeply held beliefs that interfered with their capacity to identify positively with being black and being with black women. This is not to suggest that they did not have positive experiences about being with black women, but rather that their capacity for being with black women was not widened to include being with black women in a way that allowed for deeper self-revelation and intersubjective intimacy. The woman who expressed her hate actually came the closest to this, but, given the setting, I could not respond adequately then and there in a way to work with this hate. The best that I could do was to agree that I had opened a door that, in this context, we were not prepared to enter. Some of these black women gathered afterward and asked if I would consider leading a group for black women at the university. We may have another opportunity to work on this together.

Sylvia Beckett: “This Text Is a Mile Marker for Me in the Human Text of Who I Am” Sylvia Beckett is a fifty-one-year-old black woman who is married and the mother of seven children, three are her children from her first marriage and four are from her second husband’s first marriage. Sylvia described herself as a late adult learner; she decided to attend seminary after her children were grown and out on their own. Her response to the “Song of Songs” is intertwined in a family history where color has figured positively and negatively and shaped her early identifications with female and male family members. Most noteworthy is that Sylvia’s first introduction to the different translations was as a seminary student, and she found it changed her sense of her experience of being a black woman. Her second reading of the different translations was as a part of this project, and she found that this reading resulted in a dialogue between her lived experience and the text. Her narrative follows.


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Family background: I come from a very small family. It was just my parents and just my brother and me. My Father worked for the railroad, and if I am not mistaken he was the first African American switchman. This had a lot of bearing on us as community members because he had a job where he


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Both of my parents were young parents. My mom was a teen mom and she didn’t graduate from high school. That might be why she was not involved in my education. My dad did graduate from high school. There were different dynamics in his family than my mother’s family. He was 3 years older than my mom. Education was not important in her family. Well, her father died when she was seven, so survival was most important. My parents, they were young, I am sure they made mistakes. Mom was 15 and dad 18 when they married and I was born 6 months later. They loved each other but their relationship fell apart after both became alcoholics . . . There was a lot of partying. My dad died from alcoholism. My mom recovered as an adult and then she went back to school and got her GED. She started college but wasn’t able to finish; she died of cancer before she completed her degree.

Sylvia’s Experience in the Family Ups and downs . . . shaped how I thought about life . . . I partied a lot and education was not important in my family. They had hopes that I would go to college but there was no nurturing that. This affected my life because education was not important to me. My parents hoped I would go to college but there was no nurturing of this. . . . another pattern was passed on and I became a teen parent. It was a struggle. . . . I had a lot of struggle but my paternal grandmother, who was living upstairs, showed me how to be a parent. It was a struggle, what do you know at fifteen? She was a woman of faith; she prayed and believed in the good in everyone and in every situation. Very little riled her and she was a great stability for me. We always lived within a few doors from her. In fact, she was so close to my mother that when my mother died, people were shocked to learn that she was not her mother.

Color and Gender in the Family


could, you know, provide for his family. There was a lot of pride that he could work and pay the bills. It was a gift for my mother to stay at home. It wasn’t unusual for a mom to stay at home . . . a lot did but a lot had to work—those with big families. Growing up I never felt we needed anything. Whatever we needed we had. We were not poor.

My mother is light skinned. She was part Indian with very long hair. There were 6 girls in her family and all [of] them were light with long hair. They were tight-knit and it was hard to get in the circle. She was beautiful. A real car stopper. I can remember that at 4 I knew how beautiful she was. Walking with her, cars would stop! It affected how


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There was a lot of tension between my mom and me when I was young. I always needed my dad to discuss things with. This was sometimes hard because of his work pattern. My mom, I think, didn’t understand me and my father did. And I think my mom was jealous of that because probably she did not know how to relate to me. My brother and I are very close. I am the extrovert and he’s the quiet one. I have a great deal of appreciation for him. My brother learned from my father. He is very thoughtful and he remembers special days for all the women in the family. He has two daughters who are adults now. He was married but divorced. He has found the person of his life. Well, about color, it goes back to my paternal grandmother; she was a hard working-black woman. She is still living. There were 9 girls in her family and 2 were dark and always being teased in the family. She was not allowed to work because of the color of her skin. This was in the 1930s. She had a younger sister who was fair skinned. So she and her younger sister applied and her young sister got the job. They told my grandmother that her skin was too dark, and she accepted that. I watched her not letting that bring her down. It was hard for her. When I got this call to ministry, I thought maybe I should be a pastor’s wife even though in this church I am affirmed in my African Americanness and womanness. But husband believed I had a call, and he said, honey I do not have a call to be pastor, you do. And this released me from this false teaching about being a woman and being called to ministry. I have no hang-ups being a woman I love it!

Rereading of the “Song of Songs” and Rereading Color They (the different translations) pretty much say the same thing. This text is a mile marker for me in the human text of who I am as an African American woman. During my seminary experience we dealt with this text. The professor rebuked this text. In its original Hebrew form it should have read “dark and lovely” or “I am lovely and dark.” That was such a revelation.


she formed relationships . . . with all the jealousy. She never had women friends. I don’t look like her.

You know my husband loves my chocolate colored skin. He just loves me. The reason I bring that up is because my first husband did not. I remember him saying things of a negative nature about my skin color and feeling self conscious about it.


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I remembered about my mother and her fairer skinned sisters. My mom was fair skinned and my father was dark skinned, and he was aware, he was self- conscious of his color. So color had a great influence in my family dynamics as in many African American families. My mom was a trophy wife for him and he was jealous—not that he ever took it out on her—but he was protective. It was quite a challenge in their relationship. I mean I was closer to my dad. I hadn’t thought about the Song of Songs and my family this way. Mmm. And how color was in my family. But that is one of the scriptures that said to me that God is calling me as a woman and as a black woman. Reading the Song of Songs now is very different from what I—how I read it when I was younger.

The Psychological Work of the “Song of Songs” Sylvia’s reading and rereading of this text demonstrates the need for time and opportunity for the text to do its psychological work. Sylvia demonstrates that the transformation of one’s self also requires not just exposure to the text but an opportunity to read the text in light of her own experiences and to reflect on her experience in light of the text. The text teaches Sylvia about herself and about how blackness has worked in her and her family only after she has placed the two on the table, so to speak, together. The “Song of Song” teaches us many lessons. Renita Weems has plucked ten lessons “for living passionately,”16 from the text, and my colleague Paul Koptak has read the black woman of the “Song of Songs” as a wisdom teacher offering lessons about love, justice, and mutuality.17 I think both are accurate readings; I would add that the “Song” teaches because we place our lives in a dialogue with the text. What began in the classroom continued, and it was deepened in the interview process as she reflected on her experiences with another black woman. We learned from Sylvia that in some fundamental way color was a factor in her early identification with her father and grandmother. She felt mirrored and understood in relation to them, and she did not experience this with her mother. Of course, her mother was a teen mother struggling to parent. However, Sylvia unconsciously identified with her mother and in her relationship to education and teen parenting. Her relationship with her mother is troubled by a lack of mirroring because her mother “did not know how to mother.” This relationship is transformed when her mother returns to school. Only


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then did Sylvia return to school and begin to explore what her own aspirations might be. I think this suggests that there were genderspecific idealizing and kinship needs that she needed her mother to meet. Even though her father appreciated education and work-related goals, his values did not shape her view of education or work as much as her mother’s return to school did. Thus she experienced a sense of kinship around color with her father and grandmother; however, this kinship may have unconsciously contributed to her marrying a man who did not appreciate her “chocolate skin.” Thus her identification and kinship with them bolstered her sense of self, but around a negatively experienced feature. This did not change until she chose to marry a man who appreciated her and her color and supported her educational and ministry goals. Reading the Scripture through the lens of her experiences and reading her experience through the lens of Scripture became a means for her to strengthen her black female self and to assertively choose a richer life for herself. I think that this enhanced understanding of her life was additionally supported by the context of the second reading. It is possible that like the women of the second group, working with the material related to color and gender in a classroom setting, with predominantly white students and a white professor, was ultimately too inhibiting. Given a second opportunity with a black woman, she allowed herself greater introspection even though some of the relational material was painful to recall. It has set in motion, however, a process of transformation, and a transformed sense of being created and called by God. This is the work of a womanist practical theology—to set in motion processes of transformation.


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Final Thoughts

We have traveled on whirlwinds, down to the deep loving having found our salvation in each other. We travel on whirlwinds loving each other back into the black and beautiful.

I am Black and Beautiful: Womanist Theological Anthropology Embracing the black and beautiful self is demanding, transformative, and rewarding. Is this not how Scripture works in our lives? The black women we have encountered in this book, the biblical one and those who have read her story, direct us to think about what it means to be human, a good creation, in a world heartbroken by sin that dehumanizes so many based on color, ethnicity, gender, class, religion, and sexual orientation. They direct us to think about our humanity in theological and holy terms. Generally, when we speak of theological anthropology, we reflect on Genesis 1:26–28 where the Creator declares that humans are created male and female—and good—in God’s image. We have heard, over and over again, the affirmation that human creation is good. And, in spite of humans’ infliction of pain and suffering on all forms of creation and the incarnation of the most blatant forms of body- denying and death-dealing theologies and practices, I stand by this affirmation. Nevertheless, I want to propose that we require an epistemological shift for a womanist theological anthropology. I am persuaded that we need to reposition both the “Song of Songs,” particularly 1:5–6, and black women’s hardwon declaration that “I am black and beautiful” to the center of this effort.


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Such understandings of black women’s goodness mean that we practice and foster the development of this self-understanding as black and beautiful, respond to the malformation of black women’s self, and counter the structures producing malformation. There are places where we have blatantly avoided linking black and beautiful. Black women’s sexuality, and black lesbian sexuality in particular, are often noticeably absent from womanist practical theology. As womanist practical theologians, we require greater depth and fierceness of integrity in our work. There is, of course, the historical legacy of black women’s sexuality that is operative, as well as their personal histories. But our avoidance of sexuality reveals a truncated theological anthropology. Sexuality is a part of our black and beautiful self. What would it mean for a womanist practical theology of sexuality to begin with “I am black and beautiful”? If we believe this statement, then we must take up the task of discussing how we would embody and theologize this conviction. I will repeat Linda Thomas’s question: “If historically suppressed voices were central to our thought processes, would our conception of the world and analytical sensibilities be any different?”1 We must begin to listen to black women’s experiences of sexuality; I am convinced that when we do listen, we will have additional epistemological sources not only for a womanist theological anthropology but also for other theological categories with which we wrestle today—incarnation, revelation, ecclesiology, suffering, love, hope, and ethics. A womanist practical theology of sexuality should help us reflect theologically on love and lovemaking, hate and resisting hate, and power and powerlessness. Therefore, a womanist practical theology announces three interrelated theological concerns: the innate goodness of black women’s humanity, the reality of sin, and the intrapsychic-social as well as the individual-relational nature of our being. The womanist practical theology that we need today must recognize that responding specifically to the needs of black women means that we will (1) be engaged across a disciplinary lines; (2) will articulate a theology that resists the impact of dehumanizing gaze toward black women and other marginalized groups; (3) develop praxes that address the intrapsychic and social aspect of need; and (4) create spaces for the loving and appreciative gazes that celebrate, challenge, and work for the ongoing transformation of black women and the contexts in which they live. These are spaces of deep hospitality. These spaces of listening, dialogue, worship, counseling, theological reflection, and activism must lead us to grapple with the structural and individual


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mechanisms of what Delores Williams has so well described as the sin of black women’s defilement. It is the sin that dehumanizes through the advancement of a hierarchy of existence, it is social, theological, relational, and interior, and where it has taken hold, its roots run deep and are resistant to change. As practical theologians and theological educators, we see the tenacity of the resistance to transformation on a regular basis in our selves and our students. It is this tenacity that we must understand before we can actually create spaces for change in the pedagogical forum.

Linking Psyche and Pedagogical Practices Several years ago, I photocopied the covers of several new womanist and feminist theology books and attached the copies to the Women in Ministry bulletin board outside of my office. The next day they were gone, and one of my students, a middle-aged white woman, came and said she took them down because she thought that, as a participant in Women in Ministry events, people might think she was a lesbian. To say that I was surprised would be an understatement, but not as surprised by the series of questions that her actions and comment evoked: What fears, anxieties, hate, and culturally supported assumptions privilege her theology, her psychology, and social practices? How were race and gender implicated in this situation? How did the convergence of these foster her decision to take something from a bulletin board outside my door? But I also struggled with my power in the situation, and wondered whose bulletin board it was. Was it mine, as the chair of Women in Ministry, or of the women on campus, such as this woman? What power dynamics were embedded in our exchanges? And to deny the power that is institutionally granted the professor, even if in faulty ways, is to undermine my conviction that teaching can make a difference. How were my own psychology and pedagogical assumptions operative? As a midcareer theological educator, I am regularly made aware of the need for a womanist pedagogical theory and practice that has been informed by psychoanalysis and practical theology. Such a pedagogical approach will have as its starting point the experiences of black women, those who teach in the academy, those who teach as students, and those wisdom figures we encounter in everyday life. During my tenure in theological education, I have been a teacher and a student of womanist pedagogy of perspectives. One year, when


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. . . . the men of the city, base fellows, beset the house round about, beating on the door; and they said to the old man, the master of the house, “Bring out the man who came into your house, that we may know him.” And the man, the master of the house, went out to them and said to them, “No, my brethren, do not act so wickedly; seeing that this man has come into my house, do not do this vile thing. Behold, here are my virgin daughter and his concubine; let me bring them out now. Ravish them and do with them what seems good to you; but against this man do not do so vile a thing.” But the men would not listen to him. So the man seized his concubine, and put her out to them; and they knew her, and abused her all night until the morning. And as the dawn began to break, they let her go. And as morning appeared, the woman came and fell down at the door of the man’s house where her master was, till it was light. And her master rose up in the morning, and when he opened the doors of the house and went out to go on his way, behold, there was his concubine lying at the door of the house, with her hands on the threshold. He said to her, “Get up; let us be going.” But there was no answer. Then he put her upon the ass; and the man rose up and went away to his home. And when he entered his house, he took a knife, and laying hold of his concubine he divided her, limb by limb, into twelve pieces, and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel. 2

Voices from the Pedagogical Sanctum It is near impossible to avoid the violence and terror in the Bible. Or, as Barrie Mosher puts it, “Only Bible readers who wear the thickest rose- colored glasses can fail to notice all the blood and violence that fill its pages”3 and only those with even thicker glasses can avoid the abundance of violence directed against women. Generally this violence converges with sexual violation. The longing to disavow the presence of these graphic images is intense. In this class, I stressed that we brought to our reading an “interested” stance. I brought a womanist critical analysis of gender, power, and sexuality to our discussion informed by a psychoanalytic reader response to our discussion. The class noted that, once again, women’s bodies are offered as the solution to satisfy the raging of “base” and violent men. The host offered his virgin daughter and his guest’s concubine. In this story, the men of the town rape the woman all night until they are exhausted. The text tells us that her master seems to have slept through the night


teaching my class on Experiences of the Body and Pastoral Ministry, we read, aloud and together, Judges 19: 22–30:


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and rose up early in the morning to leave. He is surprised on finding her lying just outside the door; his response is a shocking absence of concern: “get up and let us be going.” His concubine, a woman he has gone to retrieve from her father’s home, has been raped and abused all night, and he says “get up”—as if raping a woman all night is just part of a long journey home. I asked the class “what are we to make of this text?” One very anxious student, a white woman, middle-aged and interested in evangelism, looked at me and said “I don’t care. God is still a God of love.” This shocking story shook her foundation—but she did not want her picture of God to be challenged. The text, she was saying, could not make her rethink her “God talk”—and she was not the only student to feel some impending doom. The struggle for the class was to hold the tension between a firm and unshakable conviction that God is a god of love and the brutality of the text. I would suggest that my students were afraid that I was on the verge of forcing them to lose something important and precious to them. The temptation to spiritualize the text, to blame the raped and battered woman, and to save the text without a critical reading was great. It may be obvious that these students sensed that they would lose a foundational and core belief concerning the nature of God. But I suggest that this fear was also related to a core sense of self; somehow this conviction about God was tethered to each student’s belief and sense of self. We cannot tread lightly on each other’s psyche even when we think we are having a theological conversation. On the other hand, when hearing a statement such as “I don’t care; God is still a God of love,” it means we must also carefully discover with the class the reason for the terror in the classroom, and we need to see how paralyzing terror constricts our reflection on our deepestheld beliefs. This kind of terror inhibits and harms individuals and communities. The disavowal of violence in the Bible is insidiously present in our present. Disavowal shapes our response to the victims and producers of violence today. What is the theological and transformational efficacy of a text if it does not shake and make us tremble and risk all for transformation? The terror of losing this “god” of love reduces us to silence, and it renders this “god” to one who is powerless, impotent, and useless when the violated stare at us bruised and battered, and useless when we are the bruised. But if our pedagogical approach only deals with the cognitive, or proceeds without regard to the psychology of students’ convictions, we make for adjustments and adaptations to our convictions without deep change.


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At the conclusion of a class on hospitality and spirituality, a fortythree-year- old single black woman warned me, “You shouldn’t talk so much about sexism—you know they are accusing you of being a lesbian, don’t you?” In another class on pastoral care and justice, a white male middle-aged student, formerly employed in law enforcement, quietly asked, “are you a communist?” In my third or fourth year of teaching, an African American woman, a few years older than me, came to my office and said, “I would like a word with you, when I heard you were coming to North Park, I was pleased because they were finally hiring a ‘sister,’ but instead what I got was a professor.” Frankly, it took me sometime to realize that she was experiencing disappointment concerning my availability as a black woman because, in my anxiety as a new professor, I was acting the part of the professor. In one of the Pastoral Care and Counseling class I teach, one white male student asked, “when are you going to start talking about how I feel marginalized because I have to listen to this stuff on justice and race. . . . Jesus didn’t just talk to the marginalized!” Early on when these kinds of statements were made, for the most part I kept them to myself and wondered if others also faced these kinds of situations. As a midcareer faculty woman, one of the shifts for me is that I know it is not just me alone, and that these kinds of experiences of racism and sexism are quite prevalent among many faculty of color. Nancy Lynne Westfield made the struggle of black women in theological education transparent in her article “Researching a Womanist Pedagogy to Heal.” Her attention to the internalization (not her word) of patriarchy reminds us that those who suffer from social oppressions are vulnerable to identifying with those who are the most powerful in their contexts even if it means that such identifications add, in some manner, to their suffering. Westfield’s student Pat expressed a clear disdain for Westfield as a professor, a black woman and someone possibly admirable, idealizable, or helpful. Pat had been a dismissive and underperforming student in class but returned the next semester with a changed attitude:


Challenge and Transformation in the Classroom

Pat took note of a book on my shelf—African-Americans and the Bible edited by Vincent Wimbush. Her expression grew animated. With excitement, she said that she learned that I had a chapter in the book. Cautiously, I shook my head yes. Continuing, she said to me, in


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Westfield’s analysis of what happened is that the problem is black female patriarchy, “which idealizes the black patriarchal male role.”5 Westfield further notes that Pat, at this point, could only learn from a male somebody, and it was Westfield’s work published in a volume edited by a well-known black male scholar that brought about a shift in appreciation of Westfield. Of course, the appreciation is only partial because it is tied to Pat’s asymmetrical overvaluing of maleness. I would like to suggest, however, that there is more to Pat’s overvaluing of black maleness and devaluing of black femaleness.6 This case example requires, first, an exploration of Pat’s attachment to her idealization of black male embodiment, and, second, it requires a pedagogical approach that empathically leads her toward a critical self-reflection of what she gains, and what she loses, by this de-idealization of black women. Westfield holds that a womanist pedagogy that strengthens “coalition building and partnership with the brothers” and the “collaborations with healthy, progressive AfricanAmerican men” are crucial, as are “models for new ways of being together as equals, true colleagues, as interdependent co-thinking coteachers.”7 And I agree with her. However, these kinds of reeducational efforts will only address the surface of what fuels Pat’s attitudes. What is important for womanist practical theology is the psychology of the concerns raised by these students. It is not enough to understand these statements as racist, sexist, or homophobic. Rather, we have to also hear in these statements fear, loss, hope, need, and anger and respond in ways that deepen students’ self-understanding. These students feel the absence of mirroring, or they decline mirroring, in the class and society that demand that they recognize other worldviews, recognize their use of power, recognize their powerlessness, and recognize others’ full humanity. This kind of pedagogical intentions demand much from those who teach and learn from their students. It is demanding, psychologically taxing, to hear a sexist or homophobic conviction of a student and also hear and care about her or his deep experience of fear—and mourning. Our pedagogical practices require us to give up being the center of the universe; it involves loss, so that we might be affected and transformed. A psychologically informed pedagogy is crucial because it moves us toward the interior attachments and to those areas that legislation and progressive rhetoric leaves untouched.


a warm, affirming, even complementary tone, “Had I known you were somebody, I would have done better in your class.”4


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Womanist practical theology requires a deep self-awareness and an openness to helping others work toward awareness. This awareness will help us deepen our understanding of the nature of black women’s various relationships to organized religion, spiritual practices, and to religious experience. Psychoanalytic theory as a collaborator in womanist practical theology does not offer a magical balm to the complexity of black women’s lives or overturn the powers and principalities in culture, people, and society that bind us to domination and the tyranny of dehumanization. Psychoanalytic theory on its own cannot lead or take us where we need to go. It is the dialogue between womanist theology, self, psychoanalytic theory, and culture that creates a stronger framework for grasping and responding to the lived experience of African American women. The dialogue opens a wider space for us to welcome into our conversations and practices a deeper listening, empathy, and responses that create environments of hospitality to self, others, and culture. These thoughts hold my concern for the development of a womanist practical theology of sexuality as well as a womanist psychology of religion and womanist pedagogical commitments. The movement between self, culture, and others is theological, psychological, and relational. Finally, a womanist practical theology will point toward the womanist practices of care, relational ethics, and the social and intrapsychic transformation of self and society.

Between Self, Culture, and Others: Hospitality toward Self and Others Where do we now stand? A book with such an ambitious task is, in the end, a beginning and an invitation. It is an invitation for womanist theologians, womanist pastoral theologians, black women who claim womanist identities, and those who support womanists’ aims to take the content of our psyches seriously. Regardless of what we find in these previously untraveled furrows, we must go there to continue the work of womanist theology. This work of mine, of course, builds on those earlier works, and I hope I have contributed to the womanist theological work yet to be undertaken. Four areas that this work begins to explore and also suggest the next trajectory for further womanist consideration are (1) a womanist theology of sexuality, (2) a womanist psychology of religion and spirituality, (3) womanist practices of care including but not limited


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to pastoral psychotherapy, and (4) a womanist theology of pedagogy that incorporates the reality of the intrapsychic. In the endeavor to take up these areas, we must lead with the conviction of the “Song of Songs” that “I am black and beautiful.” Christopher Bamford calls hospitality to diverse experiences of holiness sacred hospitality. “Sacred hospitality is a call to go out of ourselves toward others, to love outside our own milieu and relationships. It puts hospitality at the center of our spiritual lives.”8 This hospitality toward self and the Holy is a way of saying that we are made to turn our eyes on what is within us, but just as important is the turning toward what is not yet there. To imagine a world that stands counter to the hate and hopelessness that we see “out there” requires that the “in here” be transformed. Our hope for a different future is each other. This is what I hope we have seen along the way in this book. Our hope is in each other. Our hope is in loving the deep and dark beauty that we have sequestered off from the staring gazes conveying anger, fear, envy, desire, longing, pleading, relief, and even hope. We are facing tremendous challenges today. More than ever, we require the possibilities that a religious sensibility offers—but in order to have it come to bear on us individually and collectively, we will have to change by going deep. We will have to go to the deep core to make a difference in the world. Then we will be able to announce the arrival of a mighty wind that reveals the Holy among us and in us. We who have traveled on whirlwinds down to the deep darkness of longing and light have discovered our black and beautiful goodness in each other in spite of, and in the face of, the unbelief that whirls around us.


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Black As You See Me

1. Delores S. Williams, “The Color of Feminism or Speaking the Black Woman’s Tongue.” Journal of Religious Thought 43, 1 (1986): 42–58. 2. Bonnie Miller-McLemore, “Feminist Theory in Pastoral Theology,” in Feminist & Womanist Pastoral Theology, ed. Bonnie Miller-McLemore and Brita L. Gill-Austern (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1999), 78–94, 85. 3. Carroll Watkins Ali, “A Womanist Search for Sources,” in Feminist & Womanist Pastoral Theology, ed. Miller-McLemore and Brita L. GillAustern, 52–64, 52. 4. Quoted in Watkins Ali, 57. 5. Delores S. Williams, “Womanist/Feminist Dialogue: Problems and Possibilities,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 9, 1–2 (Spring–Fall 1993): 67–73, 67. 6. Williams redefines Rich’s definition of patriarchy, which had been focused on men’s subjugation of women. See Delores S. Williams, “The Color of Feminism: Or Speaking the Black Woman’s Tongue,” Journal of Religious Thought 43 (Spring/Summer 1986): 42–59, 48; and see Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 40. 7. Alice Walker, “Coming Apart,” in The Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3–11. 8. Ibid., 7. 9. Ibid., 5. 10. Ibid., 6. 11. Ibid., 10. 12. Ibid. 13. Alice Walker, “Womanist 1983,” in The Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), 19. 14. Katie G. Cannon, “Response,” in The Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), 135. 15. Ibid., 136. 16. M. Shawn Copeland, “Response,” in The Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), 145.


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17. Margaret Morgan Lawrence, “The Roots of Love and Commitment in Childhood,” Journal of Religion and Health 40, 1 (Spring 2001). 18. At http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Dec06/COFHE.MLawrence.pdf. Accessed July 30, 2008. 19. At http://www.harlemfamilyinstitute.org/home.html. Accessed July 30, 2008. 20. Margaret Morgan Lawrence, “The Roots of Love and Commitment in Childhood,” Journal of Religion and Health 40, 1 (Spring 2001). 21. Camille Warbrough, Cornrows (New York: G. P. Putnam Juvenile, 1997), quoted in Lawrence, 2001. 22. Rosemarie Tong, quoted bv Bonnie Miller-McLemore in “Feminist Theory in Pastoral Theology,” in Feminist and Womanist Pastoral Theology, ed. Bonnie Miller-McLemore and Brita L. Gill-Austern (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1999), 78–94, 81. Bracketed words added. 23. Linda E. Thomas, “Womanist Theology, Epistemology and a New Anthropological Paradigm,” Cross Currents 48, 4 (Summer 1998); www. crosscurrents.org/thomas.html. Accessed January 10, 2007. 24. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York, Routledge, 1991), 192. 25. Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Reproduction of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 2. 26. Phillis Isabella Sheppard, “Fleshing the Theory: A Critical Analysis of Theories of the Body in Light of African American Women’s Experience,” Ph.D. dissertation, Chicago Theological Seminary, 1997, 129. 27. M. Shawn Copeland, “Wading through Many Sorrows: Toward a Theology of Suffering in Womanist Perspective,” in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), 109–129, 109. 28. Ibid., 110. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 121. 32. Ibid., 123. 33. For example, see Lee H. Butler, Liberating Our Dignity, Saving Our Souls (Duluth, GA: Chalice Press, 2006). 34. Carroll Ali-Watkins, Survival and Liberation: Pastoral Theology in African American Context (Duluth, GA: Chalice Press, 1999), 65–66. 35. Ibid., 66. 36. Ibid. 37. Carolyn McCrary, “Interdependence as a Normative Value in Pastoral Counseling with African Americans,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 18 (1991): 119–47; “The Wholeness of Women: An African Woman’s Story,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 25 (1998): 258–294; “Intimate Violence Against Black Women and Internalized Shame: A Womanist Pastoral Counseling Perspective,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 28 (2000): 3–37.


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38. Elizabeth J. Walker, “Pastoral Counseling With African American Women: A Conceptual Model,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 31 (2004): 281–289. 39. Phillis I. Sheppard, “Mourning the Loss of Cultural Selfobjects: Black Embodiment and Religious Experience after Trauma,” Practical Theology 1, 2 (2008); “No Rose Colored Glasses: A Womanist Response to Sexual Abuse,” in In Spirit and in Truth: Essays on Theology, Spirituality, and Embodiment, ed. Phillip J. Anderson and Michelle Clifton-Soderstrom (Chicago, IL: Covenant Press, 2006); “A Dark Goodness Created in the Image of God: Womanist Notes Toward a Practical Theology of Black Women’s Embodiment,” Covenant Quarterly 61 (August 2003); “Fleshing the Theory: A Critical Analysis of Theories of the Body in Light of African American Women’s Experience,” Ph.D. diss., Chicago Theological Seminary, 1997. 40. We have both used psychoanalytic theory to address violence in the lives of black women, and both bring to it a historical analysis of the legacy of slavery. 41. See Phillis Isabella Sheppard, “Mourning the Loss of Cultural Selfobjects: Black Embodiment and Religious Experience After Trauma,” Practical Theology 1, 2 (2008). 42. Elizabeth Walker, “Pastoral Counseling with African American Women: A Conceptual Model,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 31 (2004): 281–282, 281. 43. Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford, 1998), 5. 44. Ibid., 18. 45. Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, Mining the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2006), 20. 46. Tate, 17. Italics added. 47. Ibid., 16. Italics added. 48. Ibid., 6. 49. bell hooks, Yearnings: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990) 227. 50. Heinz Kohut, Self Psychology and the Humanities: Reflections on a New Psychoanalytic Approach (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 84. 51. Sheppard, 1997; Judith Teicholtz, Kohut, Loewarld and the Postmoderns: A Comparative Study of Self and Relationship (New York: Routledge, 1997). 52. Lallene Rector, “Early Selfobject Experiences in Gendered Representation of God,” Progress in Self Psychology: Basic Ideas Reconsidered Vol. 12 ed. Arnold Goldberg (Hillside, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1996): 249–268. 53. Joan Lang, “Notes toward a Psychology of the Feminine Self,” in Kohut’s Legacy: Contributions to Self Psychology, ed. P. Stepansky and A. Goldberg (Hillside, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1984), 51–69. 54. Phillis I. Sheppard, “Fleshing the Theory: A Critical Analysis of Theories of the Body in Light of African American Women’s Experience,” diss., Chicago Theological Seminary, 1997, 189.


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55. Susann Pangerl, “Self Psychology: A Feminist Re-visioning,” Progress in Self Psychology: Basic Ideas Reconsidered Vol. 12 ed. Arnold Goldberg (Hillside, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1996): 285–298. 56. Phillis Isabella Sheppard, “Mourning the Loss of Cultural Selfobjects: Black Embodiment and Religious Experience after Trauma,” Practical Theology Vol 1, 2 (Fall 2008): 233–257. 57. Sheppard, 1997, 190. 58. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 3. 59. Susan Rubin Suleiman, The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 60. Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, ed. Audre Lorde (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 149. 61. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press/Feminist Series, 1982), 176. 62. Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, ed. Audre Lorde (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 41. Italics added. 63. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “The Loves and Troubles of African American Women’s Bodies,” in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993) 233. See also Phillis Sheppard, “A Dark Goodness Created in the Image of God: Womanist Notes toward a Practical Theology of Black Women’s Embodiment,” Covenant Quarterly (August 2003): 15. 64. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: Bantam Books, 1969). Quoted in Collins, 80. 65. Townes (2006), 11. 66. Morrison, quoted in Philip Mehne, “Writing and Orality in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon,” Philologie im Netz 20 (2002): 14. At http://web.fu- berlin. de/phin/phin20/p20t2.htm. Accessed July 31, 2008. 67. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970), 22. 68. Ibid., 145. 69. Delores Williams, “A Womanist Perspective on Sin,” in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 144. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., 145. 72. See Lee H. Butler, Liberating Our Dignity, Saving Our Souls (Duluth, GA: Chalice Press, 2006) for further discussion of racism in a theological and psychological perspective. 73. Ibid., 147. 74. Ibid., 145. 75. See Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Williams, 2001; for a finely tuned ethical discussion of these issues. 76. Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 123.


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77. Ibid. 78. Phillis I. Sheppard, “A Dark Goodness Created in the Image of God: Womanist Notes Toward a Practical Theology of Black Women’s Embodiment,” Covenant Quarterly 61 (August 2003): 7. 79. Teresa de Lauretis, quoted in Laura E. Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminism: Race, Gender and Empire Building (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 137. 80. Bonnie Miller-McLemore, “Practical Theology,” in Encyclopedia of Religion in America, ed. Charles Lippy and Peter Williams (forthcoming; Congressional Quarterly Press, 2010, unpublished version). 81. Ibid., 5 (unpublished version). 82. Joe Holland and Peter Henriott, Social Analysis: Linking Faith and Justice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1983). 83. Bonnie Miller-McLemore and Brita Gill-Austern, Feminist and Womanist Pastoral Theology (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1999). 84. Katie G. Cannon, “Metalogues and Dialogues: Teaching the Womanist Idea,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (Fall 1992): 124–132. 85. Stephanie Y. Mitchem, Introducing Womanist Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005). 86. Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Mining the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2006). 87. Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black (New York: Signet, 1969), 106 as quoted in Collins, 88.

2


1. Bible, “Song of Songs,” New Revised Standard Version http://bible.oremus. org/?passage=Songofsongs+1. Accessed May 20, 2010. 2. Linda E. Thomas, “Womanist Theology, Epistemology, and a New Anthropological Paradigm,” in Living Stones in the House Hold of God: The Legacy and Future of Black Theology, ed. Linda E. Thomas (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 37. 3. Elsa Barclay Brown, “Mothers of Mind,” Sage 6 (1989): 3–10. 4. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “The Black Church as a Therapeutic Community: Suggested Areas of Research into Black Religious Experience,” Journal of Interdenominational Theological Center 8 (1980): 29–44, 31–21. 5. Mary B. McRae, Patricia M. Carey, and Roxanna Anderson- Scot, “Black Churches as Therapeutic Systems: A Group Process Perspective,” Health Education & Behavior 25 (1998): 782–784. http://heb.sagepub.com/cgi/ content/abstract/25/6/778. Accessed June 8, 2010. 6. Ibid., 783. 7. Marla F. Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 4; quoted in Deidra Rochelle Turner, “Religion and Womanism in the Lives of Central Texas African American Baptist Women,” dissertation, Texas A & M University, 2007, 20.


Notes


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Notes

8. Deidra Rochelle Turner, “Religion and Womanism in the Lives of Central Texas African American Baptist Women,” dissertation, Texas A & M University, 2007, 20. 9. Ronald D. Harbor, “Constructing an African American Catholic Liturgical Aesthetic,” in Let It Shine: The Emergence of African American Catholic Worship, ed. Mary E. McGann, RSCJ (Society of Sacred Heart), with contributions by Eva Marie Lumas, SSS. (Sisters of Social Service), and Ronald D. Harbor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 119.

3 The Current Shape of Womanist Practical Theology 1. Stephanie Y. Mitchem, Introducing Womanist Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), 124. 2. Carroll Watkins Ali, Survival & Liberation: Pastoral Theology in African American Context (Duluth, GA: Chalice Press, 1999), 145. 3. Ibid., 10. 4. Ibid., Quoted in Ali (1999), 15 Cone, James H., God of the oppressed (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 15. 5. Ibid., 50. 6. Ibid., 51. 7. Ibid., 85. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 38. Italics added. 10. Carroll Watkins Ali, “A Womanist Search for Sources,” in Feminist & Womanist Pastoral Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore and Brita L. Gill-Austern (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1999), 57. 11. Phillis Isabella Sheppard, “No Rose Colored Glasses: Womanist Practical Theology and Response to Sexual Violence,” in Spirit and Truth: Essays on Theology, Spirituality and Embodiment, ed. Philip Anderson and Michelle Clifton- Soderstrom (Chicago, IL: Covenant Press, 2006). 12. Watkins Ali, 111. 13. Marsha Foster Boyd, “Womanistcare: Some Reflections on the Pastoral Care and the Transformation of African American Women,” in Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation, ed. Emilie Townes (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1997), 197–202, 198. 14. J.R. Burck and Rodney J. Hunter, “Pastoral Theology,” in The Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1990), 867; quoted in Boyd, Marsha Foster, “Womanistcare: Some Reflections on the Pastoral Care and the Transformation of African American Women,” in Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation, ed. Emilie Townes, 198. 15. Ibid., 199. 16. Ibid., 198–99. 17. Ibid., 199. 18. Ibid., 200–201.


202


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203

19. Ibid., 201. 20. Marsha Foster Boyd, “Theological Implications of WomanistCare,” in Womanistcare: How to Attend to the Souls of Women (Joliet, IL: WTMI Publications, 1992), 44–57, 56–57. 21. Theresa Fry Brown, “Avoiding Asphyxiation: A Womanist Perspective on Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Transformation,” in Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation and Transformation, ed. Emilie Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press 1997), 73. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Brown, 79, quotation from Barbara Omalade, The Rising Song of African American Women (New York: Routledge, 1994), 109. 25. Teresa Brown, 77. 26. Ibid., 78. Italics added. 27. Beverly Wallace, “A Womanist Legacy of Trauma, Grief, and Loss: Reframing the Notion of the Strong Black Woman Icon,” in Women Out of Order: Risking Change and Creating Care in a Multicultural World, ed. StevensonMoessner, Jeanne, and Teresa Snorton (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 43–56. 28. Ibid., 49. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 54. 31. Ibid. 32. Carolyn McCrary, “Interdependence as a Normative Value in Pastoral Counseling with African Americans,” Journal of Interdenominational Theological Center 18, 1–2 (Fall–Spring 1990–1991): 118. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 121. 36. Ibid., 129. 37. Ibid., 129. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 130. 40. Ibid. Italics added. 41. Ibid., 132. 42. Ibid. 43. Carolyn Akua L. McCrary, “Intimate Violence Against Black Women and Internalized Shame: A Womanist Pastoral Counseling Perspective,” Journal of Interdenominational Theological Center 28, 1–2 (Fall- Spring 2000– 2001): 3–37. 44. Ibid., 16. Quotation from Gershen Kaufman, The Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of Shame- based Syndromes, 2d ed. (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1996), 24. 45. Ibid., 31. Quotation from Traci C. West, Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 209. 46. Ibid., 31–32. West, 1999, 176.


Notes


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Notes

47. Ibid., 34. 48. Elizabeth Johnson Walker, “Counseling Grace: A Pastoral Theology,” in Women Out of Order: Risking Change and Creating Care in a Multicultural World, ed. Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner and Teresa Snorton (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 243–54, 243. 49. Elizabeth J. Walker, “Pastoral Counseling with African American Women: A Conceptual Model,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 31, 1–2 (Fall- Spring 2003–2004): 282. 50. Ibid., 243. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Elizabeth J. Walker. “Pastoral Counseling with African American Women: A Conceptual Model” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 31, 1–2 (Fall- Spring 2003–2004): 283. 54. Walker, “Counseling Grace,” 246. 55. Ibid. 56. Heinz Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure? ed. Alnold Goldberg and Paul Stepansky (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 57. Phillis Isabella Sheppard, Fleshing the Theory: A Critical Analysis of Select Theories of the Body in Light African American Women’s Experiences, dissertation, Chicago Theological Seminary, 1997. 58. Phillis Isabella Sheppard, Phillis Isabella, “A Dark Goodness Created in the Image of God: Womanist Notes toward a Practical Theology of Embodiment,” Covenant Quarterly 62 (August 2003): 5–28. 59. Ibid. 60. Phillis Isabella Sheppard, “No Rose Colored Glasses: A Womanist Response to Sexual Abuse,” in Spirit and Truth: Essay On Theology, Spirituality and Embodiment in Honor of C. John Weborg, ed. Phillip J. Anderson and Michelle Clifton-Soderstrom (Chicago, IL: Covenant Press, 2006), 241–256. 61. Ibid. 62. Phillis Isabella Sheppard, “Mourning the Loss of Cultural Selfobjects: Black Embodiment and Religious Experience after Trauma,” Practical Theology 2, 1 (2008). 63. Ibid.

4 Suffering and Pain, Longing and Love: The Embedded Psychology in Womanist Perspectives 1. Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 216. 2. Ibid., 15. 3. Ibid., xxi. 4. Ibid., xiii. 5. Ibid., 60. 6. Ibid., 72. 7. Ibid.


204


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205

8. Delores Williams, “Women’s Oppression and Lifeline Politics in Black Women’s Religious Narratives,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 1, 2 (Fall 1985): 59–71, 60. 9. Ibid., 61. 10. Williams, Sisters, 8. 11. Ibid., xvi. 12. Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989), 2. 13. Williams, Sisters, 76. 14. Ibid. 15. Stephanie Mitchem, “No Longer Nailed to the Floor,” Cross Currents (Spring 2003): 64–74, 65. 16. Ibid. Italics added. 17. Ibid. She is referring to Patricia Williams’ The Alchemy of Race and Rights: The Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 78. 18. Mitchem quoting Patricia Williams. Ibid., 66, 78. 19. Ibid., 68. 20. M. Shawn Copeland, “Wading through Many Sorrows: Toward a Theology of Suffering in Womanist Perspective,” in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emile M. Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), 109. 21. Ibid., 111. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 112. 25. Ibid., 113. 26. Ibid.,114. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 115. 29. Ibid. 30. M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 100. 31. Ibid., 98. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 102. 34. Ibid., 103. 35. Ibid., 104. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 105. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 94. 40. Emilie M. Townes, “Living in the New Jerusalem: The Rhetoric and Movement of Liberation in the House of Evil,” in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emile M. Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), 78–91, 79. 41. Ibid., 84.


Notes


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42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

76.

Notes Ibid. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 86. Ibid. Ibid., 83–84. Emilie M. Townes. “To Be Called Beloved: Womanist Ontology in PostModern Refraction,” The Annual of the Society Christian Ethics (1993): 93–115, 93. Ibid., 93–94. Ibid., 94. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 95. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 101. Ibid. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 113. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 114. Ibid. Ibid., 84. Emilie Townes, “A Womanist Perspective on Spirituality in Leadership,” Theological Education 3, 2 (2001): 81. Ibid. Patricia-Anne Johnson, “Womanist Theology as Counter-Narrative,” Gender, Ethnicity and Religion: Views from the Other Side, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 208. Ibid., 209. Jamie T. Phelps, “Joy Came in the Morning, Risking Death for Resurrection: Confronting the Evil of Social Sin and Socially Sinful Structures,” in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emile M. Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001); quoted in Johnson, “Womanist Theology,” 209. Johnson, “Womanist Theology,” 211. Phillis Sheppard, “Secrecy in the Lives of Black Lesbian Incest Survivors,” MA Thesis, Colgate Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall, 1988, 12. Dwight McBride, quoted by Stephanie K. Dunning, in Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire and Contemporary African American Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 87. Ibid., 86.


206


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207

5


1. Pat Parker, Movement in Black (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1978), 11. Italics added. 2. Lee H. Butler, Liberating Our Dignity, Saving Our Souls (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2006). 3. Barbara Christian, “Fixing Methodologies: Beloved,” in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1997), 363–370, 365. 4. See Celia Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press); Moncayo, Raul, “Cultural Diversity and the Cultural and Epistemological Structure of Psychoanalysis: Implications for Psychotherapy With Latinos and Other Minorities,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 15, 2 (1998); Dalal, Farhad, “Insides and Outsides: A Review of Psychoanalytic Renderings of Difference, Racism and Prejudice,” Psychoanalytic Studies 3, 1 (2001). 5. For example, these recent conferences are indicative of the ongoing conversation between psychoanalysis and the humanities: The Symptom in Psychoanalysis and the Humanities, March 24, 2010 at Tel Aviv University,; The Muriel Gardiner Program in Psychoanalysis and the Humanities, 2009– 2010 at Yale University, New Haven, CT. 6. For an in depth understanding of ego psychology, see Heinz Hartman, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (Madison, CT: 1975); and Gertrude Blanck and Rubin Blanck, Ego Psychology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). 7. Margaret M. Lawrence, Young Inner City Families: Development of Ego Strength Under Stress (New York: Behavioral Publications Inc, 1975), 32. Italics added. 8. Margaret Morgan Lawrence. http://www.harlemfamilyinstitute.org/hfiquotes.html. Accessed April 22, 2010. 9. Lawrence, Young Inner City Families, 33. 10. Gloria I. Joseph, “Black Mothers and Daughters: Their Roles and Function in American Society,” in Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives, ed. Gloria I. Joseph and Jill Lewis (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1986), 76–81. Patricia Hill Collins, “The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother–Daughter


77. Christine Wiley, “A Ministry of Empowerment: A Holistic Model for Pastoral Counseling in the African American Community,” Journal of Pastoral Care 45, 4 (Winter 1991): 355.


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11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Notes Relationships,” in Double Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters, ed. Patricia Bell- Scott et al. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993): 47, 53. Lawrence, Young Inner City Families, 33–35. Ibid., 35. Wynn Jackson, “Margaret Morgan Lawrence: The Center’s First Black Graduate,” Bulletin of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine The Society of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training Research 42 (Spring 2008): 4–10, 7. Ibid., 9. See Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer (Massachusettes: Addison-Wesley, 1988). Margaret Morgan Lawrence, Young Inner City Families, 19. Ibid., 133–134. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 135–136. Margaret Morgan Lawrence, “The Roots of Love and Commitment in Childhood,” Journal of Religion and Health 40, 1 (Spring 2002): 61–70, 69. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 70. Changing the Face of Medicine/Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence http:// w w wcf.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine /physicians/search. cgi?letter=L. Accessed April 22, 2010. Hugh F. Butts, The Blackness of Darkness (New York: Clementine Publishing Company, 1993). Judith S. Schachter and Hugh F Butts, “Transference and Countertransference in Interracial Analyses,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 16 (1968): 792–809. Ibid., 792. Italics added. Phyllis Harrison and Hugh F Butts, “White Psychiatrists’ Racism in Referral Practices to Black Psychiatrists,” Journal of the National Medical Association 62, 4 (July 1970): 278–282. Ibid., 282. Ibid., 278. Ibid., 279. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 188–189. Ibid., 282. Harrison and Butts, 281. Ibid., 279. James Haskins and Hugh F. Butts, Psychology of Black Language (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1973). Ibid., 38. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 50.


208


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209

40. Hugh F Butts, “Child Abuse: A Black Perspective Utilizing a SocialPsychological Model,” Journal of the National Medical Association 71, 9 (1979): 899–901, 899. 41. Dorothy Evans Holmes, “Race and Transference in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 73 (1992): 1–11. 42. Dorothy Evans Holmes, “Race and Countertransference: Two ‘Blind Spots’ in Psychoanalytic Perception,” Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 1, 4 (1999): 319–331, 322. 43. Dorothy Evans Holmes, “The Wrecking Effects of Race and Social Class on Self and Success,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 75, 1 (2006): 215–236, 215. 44. Ibid., 216. 45. Ibid., 219. See Michael Moskowitz, “Our Moral Universe,” Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 1, 4 (October 1999): 333–340; Donald Moss, Hating in the First Person Plural (New York: Other Press, 2003). 46. Ibid., 218. 47. Kimberlyn Leary, “Interpreting the Dark: Race and Ethnicity in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 12, 1 (1995): 127–141, 127. 48. Ibid., 131. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 132. 51. Ibid., 139. 52. Ibid. 53. Kimberlyn Leary, “Race, Self-Disclosure, And ‘Forbidden Talk’: Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Clinical Practice,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 66, 2 (1997): 163–189. 54. Ibid., 163. 55. Ibid., 188. 56. Kimberlyn Leary, “Racial Enactments in dynamic Treatment,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 10, 4 (2000): 639–654, 651. 57. Kimberlyn Leary, “Racial Insult and Repair,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 17, 4 (2007): 539–549, 544. Also see Holmes, Dorothy E., “Racial Transference Reactions in Psychoanalytic Treatment: An Update,” in Race, Culture and Psychotherapy: Critical Perspectives in Multicultural Practice, ed. R. Moodley and S. Palmer (New York: Routledge, 2006), 61–73; Tang, N.M. and Gardner, J., “Interpretation of Race in the Transference: Perspectives of Similarity and Difference in the Patient/Therapist Dyad,” in Race, Culture and Psychotherapy., 89–99; Yi, K.Y., “Transference and Race: An Intersubjective Conceptualization,” in Race, Culture and Psychotherapy, 74–88. 58. Kimberlyn Leary, “Racial Insult and Racial Repair,” 546. 59. Ibid., 530–540. 60. Ibid., 544. 61. Ibid. 62. Beverly Greene, “African American Lesbian and Bisexual Women in Feminist Psychodynamic Psychotherapies: Surviving and Thriving between a Rock and a Hard Place,” in Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations


Notes


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63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

Notes in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, ed. Leslie C. Jackson and Beverly Greene (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 82–125, 82. Hortense Spillers, Interview by Tim Haslett. Black Cultural Studies Web site: www.blackculturalstudies.org/spillers/spillers_intvw.html, February 4, 1998: 1–17. Accessed March 15, 2010. Ibid., 6. Hortense Spillers, “All the Things You Could Be by Now, if Sigmund Freud’s Wife was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race,” in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1997), 135–158, 140. Spillers, “Interview,” 2. Ibid. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 9. Hortense Spillers, “All the Things,” 135–158, 144. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 141. Tate, Claudia, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3. Ibid., 16. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 58. Ibid. Ibid., 178. Ibid., 26–27. Ibid., 178. Ibid., 17. Spillers, “Interview,” 1–2. Spillers, “All the Things,” 139. Ibid., 11. Ibid., Italics added. Ibid., 12. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 14. Ibid.


210

6 Black Women and Self Psychology: Toward a Usable Dialogue 1. Malcolm Pines, “The Self as a Group, The Group as a Self,” in Self Experiences in Group: Intersubjective and Self Psychological Pathways to Human Understanding, ed. Irene N.H. Harwood and Malcolm Pines


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2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

211

(London; Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998), 24–29, 25, 26, 27. Heinz Kohut and Ernest S. Wolf, “The Disorders of the Self and Their Treatment: An Outline,” in Essential Papers on Narcissism, ed. Andrew P. Morrison (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 177. Ibid. Ibid. Esther Menaker, The Freedom to Inquire: Self Psychological Perspectives on Women’s Issues, Masochism, and the Therapeutic Relationship (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc, 1995), 45. Ibid., 44. Heinz Kohut, Self Psychology and the Humanities: Reflections on a New Psychoanalytic Approach, ed. Charles B. Strozier (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 84. Mark Gehrie, “The Self and the Group: A Tentative Exploration in Applied Self Psychology,” in Advances in Self Psychology, ed. Arnold Goldberg (New York: International Universities Press, 1985). Karen Seeley, Cultural Psychotherapy: Working with Culture in the Clinical Encounter (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc, 2000), 56–57. Judith Teichholz, Kohut, Loewald, and the Postmoderns (Hillside, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1999), 6. Pines, Malcolm, “The Self as a Group, The Group as a Self,” in Self Experiences in Group: Intersubjective and Self Psychological Pathways, ed. Irene N.H. Harwood and Malcolm Pines (Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publications, 1998), 98. Heinz Kohut, “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 60 (1979): 3–27. See also Charles Strozier, “Heinz Kohut and ‘The Two Analyses of Mr. Z’: The Use (and Abuse?) Of Case Material in Psychoanalysis,” The Psychoanalytic Review 86 (1999): 569–586. Charles B. Strozier, Heinz Kohut: The Making of A Psychoanalyst (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). Constance Goldberg, “A Personal and Professional Reminiscence of Heinz Kohut,” Progress in Self Psychology: Explorations in Self Psychology, Vol. 19, ed. Mark J. Gehris (New York: Routledge, 2003): 347–358. Anna Ornstein, “Trauma, Memory and Psychic Continuity,” in Progress in Self Psychology: A Decade of Progress, Vol. 10, ed. Arnold Goldberg (New York: Routledge, 1994), 131–146, 132. Strozier, “ Heinz Kohut,” 39–41. Ernest S. Wolf, “Selfobject Experiences: Development, Psychopathology, Treatment,” Mahler and Kohut: Perspectives on Development, Psychopathology, and Treatment, ed. Selma Kramer and Salman Akhtar (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc, 1994), 72. Ernest S. Wolf, Treating The Self (New York: The Guilford Press, 1988), 55. Miriam Elson, Self Psychology in Clinical Social Work (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986). Ernest S. Wolf, Treating The Self (New York: The Guilford Press, 1988), 55. Ibid.


Notes


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Notes

21. Robinson, Tracy and Janie Victoria Ward, “A Belief in Self Far Greater Than Anyone’s Disbelief: Cultivating Resistance Among African American Female Adolescents,” in Girls, Women and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance, ed. Carol Gilligan, Annie G. Rogers, and Deborah L. Tolman (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 1991), 87–103, 88–89. Also see Patricia Hill Collings, “The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Cultures and Black Mother-Daughter Relationships,” Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 4, 2 (Fall 1987): 4–11. ; Suzanne Carother, “Catching Sense: Learning from our Mothers to be Black and Female,” in Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1990), 232–247. 22. See Mark Gehrie, “The Self and the Group: A Tentative Exploration in Applied Self Psychology,” in Advances in Self Psychology, ed. Arnold Goldberg (New York: International Universities Press, 1985). 23. Sheppard, “Psychoanalysis, Race, and Culture: Compromised Selfobject Experiences and the Need for Mourning,” unpublished presentation, 2009. 24. Lang, Joan, “Notes toward a Psychology of the Feminine Self,” in Kohut’s Legacy: Contributions To Self Psychology, ed. Paul E. Stepansky and Arnold Goldberg (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1984); see also Menaker, Esther, The Freedom to Inquire: Self Psychological Perspectives on Women’s Issues, Masochism and the Therapeutic Relationship (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc, 1995), 87; Gardiner, Judith Kegan, “Self Psychology As Feminist Theory,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12, 4 (Summer 1987): 761– 780 Pangerl, Susan, “Self Psychology: A Feminist Revisioning,” in Progress in Self Psychology, Vol. 12, ed. Arnold Goldberg (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1996); Rector, Lallene, “The Function of Early Selfobject Experience in Gendered Representations of God,” in Progress in Self Psychology, Vol. 12, ed. Arnold Goldberg (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1996). 25. Lang, “Notes Toward a Psychology of the Feminine Self.” 26. Esther Menaker, The Freedom to Inquire: Self Psychological Perspectives on Women’s Issues, Masochism and the Therapeutic Relationship (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc, 1995), 87. 27. Beverly Greene and Leslie C. Jackson, Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice (New York: The Guilford Press, 2000), xvii. 28. Lillian Comas-Diaz and Beverly Greene, “African American Women,” in Women of Color: Integrating Ethnic and Gender Identities In Psychotherapy (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), 10. 29. Sheppard, “Psychoanalysis, Race and Culture: Compromised Selfobjects Experiences and the Need for Mourning,” unpublished presentation, 1997. 30. Frances K. Trotman, “Feminist and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy with African American Women: Some Differences,” Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, ed. Leslie Jackson and Beverly Green (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 253. 31. Jessica Henderson Daniel, “The Courage to Hear: African American Women’s Memories of Racial Trauma,” Psychotherapy with African American Women:


212


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Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, ed. Leslie Jackson and Beverly Green (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 126. 32. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999), 227. 33. Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 145.

7


1. N. Lynne Westfield, Dear Sisters: A Womanist Practice of Hospitality (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2001). 2. Laura S. Josephs, “The Treatment of an Adult Survivor of Incest: A Self Psychological Perspective,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 52, 3 (1992): 201–212, 201. 3. See Doris Brothers and R.B. Ulman, The Shattered Self (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1988); Doris Brothers, “The Leather Princess: Sadomasochism as the Rescripting of Trauma Scenarios,” Progress In Self Psychology, ed. Arnold Goldberg (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1997). 4. See Regina E. Romera, “The Icon of the Strong Black Woman: The Paradox of Strength,” Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, ed. Leslie Jackson and Beverly Green (New York: Guilford Press, 2002), 225–238. 5. David Celani, “Applying Fairbairn’s Object Relations Theory to the dynamics of the Battered Woman,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 53, 1 (Winter 1999): 60–73, 65. 6. Mark J. Gehrie, “Empathy in a Broader Perspective: A Technical Approach to the Consequences of the Negative Selfobject in Early Character Formation,” Progressions in Self Psychology: Basic Ideas Reconsidered, Vol. 12, (Hillside, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1996): 19–182, 163–164. 7. Sandor Ferenczi, quoted in Doris Brothers, “Trust Disturbance and the Sexual Revictimization of Incest Survivors: A Self Psychological Perspective,” in Progress in Self Psychology: New Therapeutic Visions, Vol. 8, ed. Arnold Goldberg (Hillside, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1992): 75–92, 76. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 77. 10. Doris Brothers, Falling Backwards: An Exploration of Trust and Self Experience (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 82–83. 11. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991), 231. 12. Ibid., 78. 13. Ibid., 79.


Notes


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Notes

14. Only very recently has this aspect of race and self begun to be included in the critical work pertaining to African American women’s lives. See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000); and Katie Canon, “Womanist Perspectival Discourse and Cannon Formation,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 9, 1–2 (Spring-Fall 1993): 29–37, 36. 15. Steven Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space, and Subjectivity (New York: Routledge, 1995), 8. 16. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “The Black Church as a Therapeutic Community: Suggested Areas for Research into the Black Religious Experience,” The Journal of the I. T. C (Fall 1980): 31–32; also see Nancy Boyd-Franklin and Tonya Walker, “Spirituality and Religion: Implications for Psychotherapy with African American Clients and Families,” in Spiritual Resources for Family Therapy, ed. Froma Walsh (New York: Guilford Press, 1999); A.J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution of the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Archie Smith, “Religion and Mental Health Among Blacks,” Journal of Religion and Mental Health 20, 4 (Winter 1984): 264–287. 17. Nancy Boyd-Franklin and Tonya Walker Lockwood, “Spirituality and Religion: Implications for Psychotherapy with African American Clients and Families,” in Spiritual Resources in Family Therapy, (New York: Guildford Press, 2003), 90–103, 93. 18. For examples, see Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999); Jo Anne Marie Terrell, Power in the Blood: The Cross in the African American Experience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998); James Evans, “Black Theology and Black Feminism,” The Journal of Religious Thought, 38 (Spring- Summer 1982). 19. Gehrie, Mark, “The Self and The Group: A Tentative Exploration in ‘Applied Self Psychology’ ” in Advances In Self Psychology, ed. Arnold Goldberg (New York: International Universities Press, 1980), 381. 20. The Jewish Study Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 21. Fowlkes, Martha R., “The Morality of Loss—The Social Construction of Mourning and Melancholia,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 27 (1991): 532. 22. Lee H. Butler, Liberating Our Dignity, Saving Our Souls (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2006), 105. 23. Maurice Apprey, “Reinventing the Self in the Face of Received Transgenerational Hatred in the African American Community,” Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 1, 2 (1999): 131–143. 24. Michelle Scott, “A Perennial Mourning: Identity Conflict and the Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma within the African American Community,” Mind and Human Interaction 11, 1: (2000):11–26. 25. Fowlkes, “The Morality of Loss,” 529. 26. Ibid. 27. The application of the idea of the inability to mourn cultural phenomena is not an idea unique to my work. For resent applications, see Avner Falk, “The Problem of Mourning in Jewish History,” in The Psychoanalytic Study of Society: Essays in Honor of Alan Dundes, Vol. 18 (New York:


214


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215

8 A Dark Body of Goodness Created in the Image of God: Navigating Sexuality, Race, and Gender, Alone and Together 1. This paper includes material from my ethnographic research project “African American Women’s Experience of Religion and Spirituality,” which was made possible by a grant from the Randall Mason Research Endowment, Center for Religion and Psychotherapy of Chicago. 2. Katie Cannon, in Lightfoot, Sara Lawrence, I’ve Known Rivers (New York: Perseus Press, 1994). 3. Lorde, Audre, Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 116. 4. Katie Cannon, in Lightfoot, Sara Lawrence, I’ve Known Rivers, 17. 5. Ibid., 30. 6. Ibid., 19. 7. Ibid., 94. 8. Ibid., 39. 9. Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend, “The Loves and Troubles of African-American Women’s Bodies: Womanist Challenge to Cultural Humiliation and Community Ambivalence,” in A Troubling In My Soul: Womanist Perspectives On Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 232–249. 10. See Garth Baker Fletcher, “Black Bodies, Whose Bodies?: African American Men in Xodus,” in Men’s Bodies, Men’s Gods: Male Identities in a (Post-) Christian Culture, ed. Bjorn Krondorfer (New York: New York University Press, 1996); bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992); Annecka Marshall, “From Sexual Denigration to Self-respect: Resisting Images of Black Female Sexuality,” in Reconstructing Womanhood, Reconstructing Feminism: Writings on Black Women (London; New York: Routledge Press, 1996). 11. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “The Loves and Troubles,” 232–249. 12. Ibid., 232. 13. Ibid., 238. 14. Ibid., 240. 15. Ibid., 244. 16. Ibid., 243. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 244. 20. Ibid., 242. 21. Ibid., 248.


Analytic Press, 1993), 298–315; Peter Homans, The Inability to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989).


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Notes

22. The concept of the body as historical text is borrowed from Mae Henderson, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Re- Membering The Body as Historical Text,” in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationalities in Modern Text, ed. Hortense Spillers (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), 62–86. 23. Rennie Simson, “The Afro-American Female: The Historical Context of the Construction of Sexual Identity,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 229–235. 24. Toni Morrison, quoted in Katie Cannon, “Womanist Perspectival Discourse and Canon Formation,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 35 (1993). 25. Cannon, Katie, “Womanist Perspectival Discourse.” 26. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991). 27. Darlene Clarke Hines, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs: The Journal of Women In Culture and Society, 14 (Summer 1989): 912–920. 28. Jessie Daniel Ames, quoted in Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Mind That Burns in Each Body: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 331. 29. Diana L. Hayes, “Feminist Theology, Womanist Theology: A Black Catholic Perspective,” in Black Theology: A Documentary History Volume Two: 1980–1992, ed. James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 327. 30. Cannon, Katie, “Womanist Perspectival Discourse,” 30. 31. Pseudonyms are used. 32. Lorde, Audre, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 116. 33. Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self : A Systematic Approach to the Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1971), 44. 34. Ibid., 47. 35. Ibid., 49. 36. Title of article by Barbara Christian, “No More Buried Lives: The Theme of Lesbianism,” in Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (New York: Pergamon, 1986). 37. Kelly Brown Douglas, Black Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999). 38. Ibid., 35. 39. Julia M. Speller, “Marginality within the Margins;” and Avis Clendenen and Phillis Sheppard, “The Grace of Difference: A Dialogue Between Sisters,” The Chicago Theological Seminary Register: A Professional Journal for Ministers, 89 (Spring 1999). 40. Gilkes, “The Loves and Troubles,” 232–249. 41. Ibid. See also Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin (eds), Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance (New York: Guilford Press, 1994).


216


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217

42. Hayes, “Feminist Theology, Womanist Theology,” 327. 43. Gilkes, “The Loves and Troubles,” 235. 44. Sanders, Cheryl J., “Christian Ethics and Theology in Womanist Perspective,” Journal of Feminist Studies In Religion 5, 2 (1989): 83–112. 45. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 192. 46. Ibid. See Jewelle L. Gomes, “A Cultural Legacy Denied and Discovered: Black Lesbians in Fiction by Women;” and Cheryl Clare, “The Failure To Transform: Homophobia In The Black Community,” Home Girls: A Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983). 47. Sanders, “Christian Ethics”: 338–340. 48. Ibid., 342. 49. Ibid. 50. Katie Cannon, “Response to Cheryl Sanders,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5, 2 (Fall 1989): 83–112, 93. 51. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 192. 52. Lorde, Audre, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press/Feminist Series, 1982), 176. 53. Tiona McClodden, black./womyn.: conversations, tiona.m productions, 2002, is a feature-length documentary focusing on the lives and views of lesbians of African descent living in the United States. 54. Audre Lorde, quoted in Renee L. Hill, “Who Are We For Each Other?: Sexism, Sexuality, and Womanist Theology,” in Black Theology: A Documentary History, Vol. II: 1980–1992, ed. James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 345–351. 55. Hill, Renee L., “Who Are We For Each Other?: Sexism, Sexuality, and Womanist Theology,” Black Theology: a documentary history, Vol. II: 1980–1992, ed. James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 345–351. 56. Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church, 118.

9


1. Tanakh, “Song of Songs,” http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/ Bible/Songs1.html. Accessed May 20, 2010. 2. Bible, King James Version, “Song of Solomon,” http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Song- of- Solomon-1–6/. Accessed May 20, 2010. 3. Bible, “Song of Songs,” New Revised Standard Version http://bible.oremus. org/?passage=Songofsongs+1. Accessed May 20, 2010. 4. Marcia Falk, The Song of Songs: Love Lyrics From the Bible (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2004; Harper Collins Press, 1993), 25. 5. Renita J. Weems, “The Song of Songs: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in New Interpreters Bible Proverbs- Sirach, Vol. 5, ed. Leander E. Keck and Richard J. Clifford (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1997), 383. 6. Ibid., 382.


Notes


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Notes

7. Ibid. 8. Renita J. Weems, What Matters Most: Ten Lessons in Living Passionately from the Song of Solomon (New York: Warner Books with Walk Worthy Press, 2004), 33. 9. Lillian R. Klein, From Deborah to Esther: Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 127, n. 2. 10. J. Cheryl Exum, “Ten Things Every Feminist Should Know about the Song of Songs,” in A Feminist Companion to the Bible Song of Songs, ed. Athalya Brenner and Carole R. Fontaine (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 27. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 26. 13. Fiona C. Black, “Beauty and the Beast: The Grotesque Body in the Song of Songs,” Biblical Interpretation 8, 3 (2000): 302–323, 320. 14. Falk, The Song of Songs, 25. 15. Weems, “Song of Songs: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” 383. 16. Weems, What Matters Most: Ten Lessons in Living Passionately from the Song of Songs. 17. Paul E. Koptak, “The LORD Set His Heart on You, A Sermon from Song of Songs 8:6–7,” in Preaching Character: Reclaiming Wisdom’s Paradigmatic Imagination for Transformation, ed. Dave Bland and David Fleer (Abilene, TX: ACU Press, 2010).

10 Final Thoughts 1. Linda Thomas, “Womanist Theology, Epistemology, and a new Anthropological Paradigm” Cross Currents 48, 4 (Summer 1998), http:// www.crosscurrents.org/thomas.htm. Accessed October 21, 2010. 2. Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. 3. Barrie Mosher, “Blood and Stone: Violence in the Bible and the Eye of the Illustrator,” Cross Currents 51, 2 (Summer 2001), http://www.crosscurrents.org/moser0701.htm. Accessed June 19, 2010. 4. Nancy Lynne Westfield, “Researching a Womanist Pedagogy to Heal,” Religious Education 101, 2 (2006): 170. 5. Ibid., 171. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 174. 8. Christopher Bamford, “Badaliya: Mystic Substitution and Sacred Hospitality,” Parabola 28, 1 (Spring 2003): 32–42, 33.


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Note: Numbers in parentheses refer to the page on which the note appears. Italicized entries and those in quotation marks refer to book and journal article titles respectively found within the body of the book, not in the Notes. Ali, Carroll Watkins, 1 Ames, Jessie Daniel, 152–153 Angelou, Maya, 14 Apprey, Maurice, 141 Bamford, Christopher, 195 Beckett, Sylvia, 182–186 Black, Fiona, 177 Boyd, Marsha Foster, 45–48 Boyd-Franklin, Nancy, 101, 137, 214 n16 (137) Braxton, Joanne M., 216 n41 (160) Brothers, Doris, 134 Brown, Elsa Barkley, 24 Brown, Theresa Fry, 47–48 Bryant, Cecelia Williams, 46 Butler, Lee H., 43, 83, 140 Butts, Hugh F., 82, 90–94, 96, 110 Cannon, Katie, 3, 6, 19, 145–147, 152, 162, 216 n24 (152) Carby, Hazel, 7 Carother, Suzanne, 212 n21 (119) Christian, Barbara, 83 Collins, Patricia Hill, 6, 49, 135, 212 n21 (119) Cone, James, 43 Copeland, M. Shawn, 3, 7, 8, 66, 67, 69–70 Davis, Allison, 105 de Lauretis, Teresa, 18–19 Douglas, Kelly Brown, 18, 159, 170 Du Bois, William E. B., 105–106 Dunning, Stephanie K., 75

Evans, James, 214 n18 (137) Exum, Cheryl, 177 Fairbairn, W.R.D., 9–10, 51, 52, 134 Falk, Avner, 178, 214 n27 (141) Fanon, Frantz, 91, 110 Floyd-Thomas, Stacey, 10, 19 Fowlkes, Martha R., 141 Freud, Sigmund, 10, 50, 52, 95, 105, 106, 107, 111, 115, 136 and family, 105 Freudian slip, 177 Frymer-Kensky, Tivka, 176 Gardiner, Judith Kegan, 212 n24 (121) Gardiner, Muriel, 207 n5 Gehrie, Mark, 137 Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend, 9, 14, 27, 99, 137, 148, 149–151, 161 Gill-Austern, Brita L., 19 Goldberg, Constance, 116 Gomes, Jewelle L., 217 n46 (161) Grant, Jacquelyn, 6, 28, 43 Greene, Beverly, 101, 121 Grosz, Elizabeth, 13–14 Hall, Jacqueline Dowd, 216 n28 (153) Hansberry, Lorraine, 20 Harrison, Phyllis, 90–92 Haskins, James, 92 Henriott, Peter, 19 Hill, L. Renee, 169, 217 n54 (169) Hiltner, Seward, 45 Hines, Darlene Clarke, 152 Holland, Joe, 19


Author Index


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Author Index

Holmes, Dorothy E., 82, 93–96, 99 hooks, bell, 11, 122, 215 n10 (148) Hurston, Zora Neale, 63–64 Jackson, Leslie, 49 Johnson, Patricia-Anne, 74 Kardiner, Abram, 87–88 Klein, Lillian, 176–177 Kohut, Heinz on continuity, 116–117 on culture, 12, 114–115, 121–123 on developmental needs, 111–112 on discontinuity, 116 and Elizabeth Walker, 55 on empathic immersion, 114 and Freud, 111 on loss, 154 on selfobject and cultural selfobject, 10, 11–12, 55, 56, 57, 113, 114–115, 117, 121 Koptak, Paul, 185 Lang, Joan, 121 Lawrence, Candy-man, 5 Lawrence, Margaret Morgan, 3–5, 82–90, 96 Lawrence-Lightfoot, Sara, 4, 146 Leary, Kimberlyn, 82, 96–100 Lightfoot, Sara Lawrence, 146 Lorde, Audre, 2, 14–15, 70, 167, 169 Marshall, Annecka, 215 n10 (148) McBride, Dwight, 75 McCrary, Carolyn, 9–10, 50–54 McRae, Mary B., 27 Menaker, Esther, 11, 114 Miller, Alice, 11 Miller-McLemore, Bonnie, 1, 19 practical theology definition by, 19 Mitchem, Stephanie, 19, 42, 65–66 Morrison, Toni, 15, 16, 71 Mosher, Barrie, 190 Moskowitz, Michael, 95 Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo, 6 Omalade, Barbara, 48 Ornstein, Anna, 116 Parker, Pat, 81 Pangerl, Susann, 12

Pile, Steven, 136 Pines, Malcolm, 113, 115 Raboteau, A.J., 214 n16 (137) Reagon, Bernice Johnson, 41 Rector, Lallene, 12, 212 n24 (121) Rich, Adrienne, 2, 197 n6 (2) Riggs, Marcia, 28 Robinson, Tracy, 118 Romero, Regina, 133 Sanders, Cheryl, 161–162 Schachter, Judith, 90 Scott, Michelle, 141 Seeley, Karen, 115 Shengold, Leonard, 65 Sheppard, Phillis, 9, 12, 50 Smith, Archie, 214 n16 (137) Snorton, Teresa, 50 Spellers, Julia, 160 Spillers, Hortense, 82ff, 103–105, 107, 109 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 14 Tate, Claudia, 10–11, 82, 104–107 Taylor, Charles, 1 Teicholz, Judith, 115 Terrell, Jo Anne Marie, 214 n18 (137) Thomas, Linda, 6, 24, 188 Thurman, Howard, 9–10, 51, 54 Tillich, Paul, 10, 55 Townes, Emilie, 6–7, 16, 17, 70–73, 110, 125 Turner, Deidre, 27–28 Walker, Alice, 2–3, 14, 63, 149, 161, 169 Walker, Elizabeth, 9, 10, 50, 55–56 Walker, Margaret, 63 Walker, Tonya, 214 n16 (137) Wallace, Beverly, 49–50 Warbrough, Camille, 5 Ward, Janie Victoria, 118 Watkins Ali, Carroll, 1, 8–9, 41, 42–45 Weems, Clenora Hudson, 6 Weems, Renita, 6, 176, 177, 185 Westfield, Nancy Lynne, 192–193 Wiggins, Daphne, 28 Wiley, Christine, 76–77 Williams, Delores S., 1, 6, 17, 28, 62–64, 189, 197 n1 (1) Williams, Patricia, 66 Wimbush, Vincent, 192 Wolf, Ernest, 113, 118


220


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Note: Numbers in parentheses refer to the page on which the note appears. Italicized entries and those in quotation marks refer to book and journal article titles respectively found within the body of the book, not in the Notes. Abuse, 9, 30, 53, 58, 59, 62, 68, 84, 87, 93, 110, 127–132, 141, 144, 152, 165, 191 and gender identity, 153, 159, 169 as repetition of enslavement trauma, 109–110 by father, 162–165 child, 58, 93, 134, 163–164 cocaine, 132–133 false accusation of, 144 incestuous, 165, see also abuse, by father of power, 87 religious, 151 sexual, 9, 129, 134, 153, 163–164, 167–169 societal, 93 verbal, 165 adaptation, 55, 85, 93, 96, 191 adversarial needs, 118 advertisement (and women’s bodies), 3, 27 African-Americans and the Bible, 192 Afrocentrism, 83 Ain, 168 alcoholism, 183 anger, 30, 36, 37, 73, 132, 136, 150, 153, 155, 156, 157, 164, 174, 175, 179, 180, 181, 193, 195 anxiety, 51, 85, 92, 97, 117, 129, 138, 148, 160, 192 authority, 27, 39, 104 awareness, 3, 4, 72, 73, 90, 116, 124, 125, 130, 139, 165, 194 in womanist practical theology, 179, 194

Balm in Gilead, 5 Bantu-Rwandaise philosophy, 9 Beloved, 71 benefits, 28 of being light skinned, 179 Bible, 23, 29, 32, 47, 139, 190, 191 experiences of women in, 58, 174, 177 as resource for mourning, 139 violence in, 58 womanist reading of, 47, 173–195 black church, see church, black black English (or black language), 92–93 black liberation theology, 45 Black Sexuality and the Black Church, 159 Black Skin, White Masks, 92 blackness, 13, 45, 63, 65, 90, 91, 98, 119, 175–178, 181, 185 in Bible, 20, 176, 185; see also Song of Songs and darkness as positive or good, 130, 151, 170, 180, 182 and darkness as negative or bad, 13, 18, 90, 94, 98, 99, 110, 130, 144, 151, 160, 177, 180, 182, 189 and gender, 4, 90, 130, 136, 173, 181 and impotence, 106 and race, 90, 146 and self-esteem, 5 The Bluest Eye, 15 body talk, 96, 145, 150 Brent, Linda, 67–74, 153 butch/fem, 24, 166–168


Subject Index

care, womanist practices of, 48, 194


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Subject Index

Catholic schools, 32, 33 chaos, 17, 114, 155 chemical dependence, 127, 132 child abuse, see abuse Christology, in womanist perspective, 47 church, black, 25–28, 38, 39, 43, 46, 48, 59, 62, 70, 75, 77, 103, 104, 117, 127–128, 136–140, 148, 159, 160, 162, 184 cojourner, pastor as, 46 “The Color of Feminism or Speaking the Black Woman’s Tongue,”197 n1 (1) The Color Purple, 75 colorism, 13, 63, 83, 124, 151 collaboration in womanist pedagogy, 193 Columbia Institute for Psychoanalysis, 90 common folk, 2 community and individual, 46, 104, 107, 138, 162, 188, 194 community involvement and transformation, 141 community psychoanalysis, 88 continuity of self, 57, 116, 153, 154, 159 Cornrows, 5 correctness, 143, 145 countertransference, 84, 88, 90, 94, 97, 101, 129, 131 in psychiatrists, 92, 94, 97, 131 Crash, 100 cross-cultural therapist, 111 cultural obligations, 112 cultural selfobjects, 56, 59, 114–116, 121–123, 127, 131, 137, 138, 140, 154; see also selfobjects cultural work as recovery, 109 culture v. civilization, 114 “A Dark Goodness Created in the Image of God,” 57 darkness (of skin), 13, 14 and badness, 184–185; see also blackness Daughters of the Dust, 73 death and dying, 147 defilement, 17–18 of image of black women, 17, 189 degradation (of black women), 160 dependence, 52; see also independence; interdependence depression, 30, 92, 124, 154, 166, 167 disavowal, 13, 14, 133, 144, 154, 160, 165, 191 Dorothy (vignette about), 28–31, 37

dream material, 98, 99 drive theory, 52; see also Freud, Sigmund economic privilege and APA Board of Professional Standards, 95–96 efficacy needs, 118 ego functioning, 85 ego psychology, 85, 96, 207 n6 ego strength, 87 embodied practices, 18, 141 embodiment, 13–20, 56, 57, 58, 99, 120–122, 127, 143–170, 158, 159, 169, 180, 181 intrapsychic dimensions of, 99 lesbian, 153, 159, 162, 170 in Song of Songs, 175ff Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race and Being, 69 enslavement, 44, 63, 64, 67, 107, 109, 141, 151 and psychosis, 109, 141 epistemology, 7, 8, 153, 159 text-based, 24 ethnicity, 95, 97, 187 APA Board of Professional Standards and, 95 evil blackness as, 91, 110, 144 cultural production of, 17, 110 structural, 69, 71, 74 systemic, 72, 74 Exodus, 62 experience (in theologizing), 1–2, 12–13, 18, 19, 23, 47, 55, 57, 61, 62, 158 father figure, 133 fear, 28, 85, 91, 118, 129–133, 158, 160, 164, 168, 174, 191, 193, 195 fees in psychoanalysis, 91 fem, see butch/fem The Female Body in Western Culture, 14 female rejection, 106 Feminist and Womanist Pastoral Theology, 19 flesh, 71, 152; see also embodiment Fleshing the Theory, 57 Dr. Flint, 68 From Deborah to Esther: Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible, 176–177


222

gender, APA Board of Professional Standards and, 95–96 God language, 26, 31, 45


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grace, 10, 55–56, 70, 73, 89, 140, 141 McCrary on, 55–56 grandiosity, 132, 133 gratification, 85, 113, 115, 117, 118, 124, 151 grief, 6, 49, 112, 140, 155, 158 Hagar, 62 hair (black), 15, 99, 105, 145, 149, 151, 183 Harlem Family Institute, 85–86 healing, 42, 46, 47, 50, 55, 56, 59, 66, 74, 77, 130, 131, 140, 179 healthcare, inadequacy of, 31 homophobia, 13, 25, 75, 101, 125, 162, 165 hope, 27, 29, 65, 70, 77, 96, 129, 140, 141, 188, 193, 194, 195 hospitality, 131, 188, 192, 194, 195 I’ve Known Rivers, 146 icons, controlling, 50 idealizing needs, 117, 186 imago dei, 57, 129, 130, 138 independence, 50, 51, 111–112 intellect and blacks, 18, 27,108–109 interdependence, 9, 50, 51, 52–54, 69 womanist, 50–51, 52, 54; see also McCrary, Carolyn; dependence “Interpreting the Dark,” 96 “Intimate Violence against Black Women and Internalized Shame, 53 Introducing Womanist Theology, 19, 42 inward turn, 74–75 Jacobs, Harriet, 67 John Wayne, 119 Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 64 Juanita (vignette about), 31–38 Jubilee, 63 Julia, 153–162 King, Rodney, 110 kinship needs, 117, 123, 125, 137, 180, 186 Lamentations, 139, 141 language acceptable scholarly languages, 93 black, 92 and colonization, 92 leaders, women as, in black church, 26 lesbian identity, black, 14, 101, 162, 217 n53; see also Rene

223

Linda Brent, see Jacobs, Harriet Listening, preacher’s need to, 104 Literature, as source of analysis, 10 Longing and love, 61–76 Loss, 141, 193 Love, 3, 4, 5, 14–18, 20, 37, 52, 54, 59, 61, 63–65, 67, 69, 70, 72, 75–77, 85, 86, 89, 90, 101, 114, 148, 149, 157, 166, 167, 174, 175, 185, 188, 191, 195 “The Loves and Troubles of African– American Women’s Bodies,” 148 “Marginality within Margins,” 160 Mark of Oppression, 87 Martin Luther King, 65 maternal adoration, 106 relationships, 15 the, 105 mental, 29, 53, 66, 84 health (and black religious experience), 4, 27, 29, 137 professionals, 88, 90 The Mental Health Team in the Schools, 4, 88 “Metalogues and Dialogues: Teaching the Womanist Idea,” 19 Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, 96 Mining the Motherlode, 19 mirroring, 11, 117, 121, 124, 125, 129, 135–8, 158, 182, 185, 193 and culture, 11, 12, 59, 135, 136, 137, 138 faulty, 11, 12, 121, 124, 178, 185 mother blame, 11, 15 mother loss, 153, 162ff mourning, 139–141, 180, 193 and Bible, 139 of cultural objects, 59 of negative objects, 9 of past, 141 of violence, 9 unfinished, 141 “Mourning the Loss of Cultural Selfobjects,” 59–60 multiple mothers, 86


Subject Index

names, of slaves, 65 Nancy White, 63 negative objects, 9 “No Longer Nailed to the Floor,” 65 “No Rose Colored Glasses,” 58 noxia, 87 nurture, 52, 64, 87


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Subject Index

object relations theory, 9, 51, 52, 53 One, the, 107 ontology, 71–73 other mothers, see multiple mothers otherness, 72, 135, 136 overvaluing black maleness, 193 whiteness, 93 pain, 7, 8, 42, 59, 61, 66, 71, 74, 76, 130–132, 136, 140, 141, 149, 165, 175 and love, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67 and longing, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, and suffering, 70, 74, 129, 187 particularity, 6–7 pastor, influence of, 30 pastor, male, 25–37, 30 patriarchy, 2, 17, 75, 192, 197 n6 (193) black female, 193 PecolaBreedlove, 16 pedagogy, womanist, 189–191, 192, 193, 195 people pleaser, 155, 156, 157 physical trauma, 87 Picquet, Louisa, 67 pornography, 2, 18 and women’s bodies, 27, 152, 184 postmodernism, 72 poverty, 31, 44, 87, 105, 120 practical theology (definition of), 19 projection, 94, 95, 108, 135, 144 prostitution, 104, 127–133, 135, 136 psychoanalysts, black, 82, 94, 102 psychoanalytic literary criticism, 81–109 psychoanalytic turn, 7, 19, 20 Psychology of Black Language, 92 psychopathology, 52, 115 Psychotherapy with African American Women, 121 “Race, Self-Disclosure, And ‘ForbiddenTalk’, 97 “Race and Countertransference,” 94 “Race and Transference in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,” 94 racial assumptions in psychoanalysis, 84, 102 “Racial Insult and Racial Repair,” 100 racial protocol, 104, 106 racism among psychiatrists, 90–91, 95, 100 as ego disturbance, 95 as impairment, 93

roots of, 95 rape, 63, 68, 152, 190–191 Reading the Women of the Bible, 176 reciprocity, 52, 82, 113, 115, 118 reconciliation, 18, 29, 39, 51, 53, 76, 157 rejection of religion, 30, 125 relationship needs, 111 religious affiliation, 32, 128, 163 remembering, 8, 15, 69, 73–74 Rene, 162–169 “Researching a Womanist Pedagogy to Heal,” 192 resistance, 136 fostering, in black females, 7, 15, 43, 54, 63, 68, 119, 123, 140, 170 psychology of, 74 resources of, 7–8 “The Roots of Love and Commitment in Childhood,” 5 Rosie, 127 St. Rita’s Catholic high school, 33–34 Mr. Sands, 68 scapegoating, bodily, 148 Scripture, see Bible secrecy and abuse, 159, 163–164 self contextual nature of, 113 and cultural experience, 102 definitions of, 113–114 and God, 191 flexible, 114 of therapist, 89 Western notions of, 113 self cohesion, 118 self discovery, 159 self-esteem, 17, 18, 30, 62, 63, 68, 75 and body, 148 self formation, 39, 154, 174 self hatred, 149 self love, 16 color and gender as, 12 self psychology, 11–12, 20 Kohut and, 111 self restoration, 140 self support compromising of, 167 self trust, 135 selfobjects, 10, 113–115, 123, 136 abusive, 131 and culture, 115, 116, 120, 121, 127 loss, 158 needs, 117–118, 156 and religion, 125


224


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sex and aggression, 85–86 sexism, 26–27, 192 and self-esteem, 43 sexist dualism, 160 sexist language (in worship), 25–26 sexual abuse, 134, 153, 162; see also abuse sexual exploitation, 18, 152 sexual preference APA Board of Professional Standards, 95–96 sexual violation, 100 sexuality, 188, 194 body, culture, gender, and, 159 lesbian, 75, 76, 81, 161, 162, 166, 188 slavery and, 151–152 theology and, 188 sexualization, 144 of black females, 160 shame, 53–54, 55, 169 silence, 17, 18, 66 and trauma, 110 Simpson, O.J., 98 sin, 39, 89, 188, 189 sister stories, 49; see also SWEET program Sisters in the Wilderness, 62 skin (black), 99, 124 Social Analysis, 19 sociality, psychosocial impact of, 97 socialization and church, 30 somebody, 193 Song of Songs, 20, 173–195 gender studies forum responses to, 180 psychological work of, 185–186 Women’s retreat responses to, 179–180 soul murder, 65 spirit murder, 66 spiritual, definition of, 25 spirituality, 39 black self-understanding and, 102, 194 hospitality, and, 192 psychoanalysis, and, 89 splitting, 52–53, 54, 132, 134, 144, 166 stolen children, 65 stories of black women, 146 Strong Black Woman, 133 substance abuse, see chemical dependence success neurosis, 95; see also Freud, Sigmund suffering (definition of, by Copeland), 7 suffering, theology of, 74

225

suffering and pain, 61–76 Audre Lorde’s definition of, 70 suffering and trauma, 108 Suggs, 71, 72 suicide, 166, 167 support, 168 surrogacy, 62 voluntary, 62 Survival and Liberation, 41, 42–43 SWEET program, 48–49 Temple, Shirley, 16–17 terror, 16, 129, 132, 191 Bible and, 190 classroom and, 191 theological education, 192 “Theological Implications of Womanist Care,” 47 theology of community, see Thurman, Howard “To Be Called Beloved,” 71 “Transference and Countertransference in Interracial Analyses,” 90 transformation and womanist practical theology, 186 trauma (shaping personality), 11, 106, 110, 132 repetition of, 110 A Troubling in My Soul, 7 trust, 54, 86, 134; see also Carolyn McCrary; self trust truth-telling, 140 “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z.,” 116 undervaluing black femaleness, 193 Vasumati, 111–112 violence, 9, 13, 16, 18, 53, 58, 63, 104, 109, 110, 128, 133, 145 biblical, 190 homophobic, 101 sexual, 58, 63 toward women, 128, 190, 199 virginity, 23, 67, 147–148, 190 “Wading Through Many Sorrows,” 7, 66 “White Psychiatrists’ Racism in Referral Practices to Black Psychiatrists,” 90 whiteness, 5, 90, 92, 93, 106 as ego ideal, 92–93 and lightness as goodness and privilege, 18, 44, 84, 92, 93, 106, 100


Subject Index


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Subject Index

wishes, 85–86, 106, 146 withdrawal into religion, 155 womanist (definition of, by Katie Cannon), 3 womanist (definition of, in “Coming Apart”), 2 womanist (definition of, in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens), 3 womanist (definition of, by Shawn Copeland), 3 “A Womanist Legacy of Trauma, Grief and Loss,” 49

womanist practical theology summary of, 194 womanist space, 54 Womanistcare, 46 womanistCare, 45–46 features of, 46–47 Women of Color, 121 “Women’s Oppression and Life Long Politics in Black Women’s Religious Narratives,” 63


226

Yearnings, 11 Young Inner City Families, 4, 88 youth minister, 156


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Self, Culture, and Others in Womanist Practical Theology

Culture, Self and Emotion

Deaf Liberation Theology (Explorations in Practical, Pastoral and Empirical Theology)

Emerson and Self-Culture

Theology without Words (Explorations in Practical, Pastoral and Empirical Theology)

Christ and Culture (Challenges in Contemporary Theology)

Understanding Theology and Popular Culture

Culture and practical reason

Theology of culture

Culture, Self-Identity, and Work

Social Cognition: Understanding Self and Others (Texts in Social Psychology)

Hints For Self Culture

Theology and Families (Challenges in Contemporary Theology)

Others in Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness

Practical Guide to Self Hypnosis

Emerson and Self-Culture (American Philosophy)

Reclaiming Culture: Indigenous People and Self-Representation

Jerome Bruner: Language, Culture and Self

Practical Guide to Self Hypnosis

The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others (OPUS)

Narrative Theology and Moral Theology

Others

Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture

Normativity And Empirical Research In Theology (Empirical Studies in Theology)

White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity (Black Religion Womanist Thought Social Justice)

Black Theology in Transatlantic Dialogue (Black Religion Womanist Thought Social Justice)

Kant and Theology (Philosophy and Theology)

Practical Flatfish Culture and Stock Enhancement

Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture

The Challenge of Practical Theology: Selected Essays

Self, Culture, and Others in Womanist Practical Theology

Culture, Self and Emotion

Deaf Liberation Theology (Explorations in Practical, Pastoral and Empirical Theology)

Emerson and Self-Culture

Theology without Words (Explorations in Practical, Pastoral and Empirical Theology)

Christ and Culture (Challenges in Contemporary Theology)

Understanding Theology and Popular Culture

Culture and practical reason

Theology of culture

Culture, Self-Identity, and Work

Social Cognition: Understanding Self and Others (Texts in Social Psychology)

Hints For Self Culture

Theology and Families (Challenges in Contemporary Theology)

Others in Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness

Practical Guide to Self Hypnosis

Emerson and Self-Culture (American Philosophy)

Reclaiming Culture: Indigenous People and Self-Representation

Jerome Bruner: Language, Culture and Self

Practical Guide to Self Hypnosis

The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others (OPUS)

Narrative Theology and Moral Theology

Others

Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture

Normativity And Empirical Research In Theology (Empirical Studies in Theology)

White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity (Black Religion Womanist Thought Social Justice)

Black Theology in Transatlantic Dialogue (Black Religion Womanist Thought Social Justice)

Kant and Theology (Philosophy and Theology)

Practical Flatfish Culture and Stock Enhancement

Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture

The Challenge of Practical Theology: Selected Essays

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