On Having Whiteness

2 CE credits for Licensed Psychoanalysts and Social Workers

Practitioners and General Public: $40; Students: $10

Payable by cash or check at the door if seats are available.

Donald Moss will discuss whiteness as a condition one first acquires and then one has--a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. He describes the condition as being foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world: Parasitic whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse; these deformed appetites particularly target non-white people; and, once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment requires a combination of psychological and social-historical interventions, which can reasonably aim only to reshape whiteness’ infiltrated appetites – to reduce their intensities, to redistribute their aims, and to occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages caused by the chronic condition can function either as a warning (“never again”) or as a temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.

Donald Moss, PhD, is the author of four books, most recently At War with the Obvious and I and You, and sixty articles, the most recent of which is “Hate Speech/Love Speech and Neutrality in and out of the Clinical Situation” (JAPA, 2019). He is a recipient of the Elizabeth Young Bruehl award for work against prejudice, 2017. At the 2016 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he presented “The Insane Look of the Bewildered Half-Broken Animal.” He is a founding member of The Green Gang, a group of psychoanalysts and scientists addressing the issue of climate-change denial.

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