Dorothy Holmes PhD

 

 

 

http://newcenterforpsychoanalysis.org/edu-event.asp?id=339&month=9&year=2013&the_type=Course

 

Dorothy Holmes PhD is an African American, female, senior psychoanalyst from Bluffton, South Carolina who speaks with the openness and honesty of her unique demographic, in a world, when she trained, was dominated by Caucasian men. She asked her analyst how he could possibly understand what a black woman goes through, and by her report, he responded that he was not going to interfere with her feelings of being alone in the world. This, she tells the audience, is what kept her going. She had a space to express how she perceived that her life must be hard to understand, based on her gender and her race, but predictably, she came to see that there is a sense of common humanity if people extend their imaginations into the other’s subjectivity. I asked her about racial relations in the South, and she kindly told me that I was projecting. “Projecting what?” I asked, worried that I had stepped over a racial line. She did not quite answer my question, but I assumed she meant that hatred is everywhere and that I wanted to believe that somehow, Los Angeles, was more tolerant than Bluffton. In fact, I do want to believe that, but it also may be true, and I was wondering about her experience as a Black woman in the South. At the same time, I recognize that my curiosity about racial relations and its geographic differences, is not necessarily something she wants to speak about. She then goes on to talk about how her patients assume she grew up poor, when in fact, she did not. Her relaxed nature in talking about this discrepancy was refreshing. How people came to assume her economic background could be prejudice, ignorance, and/or their own need to see her as a rags to riches story. I felt like she was an immigrant to our Westside culture. She could speak our psychoanalytic language, while at the same time, she could speak to issues of race and gender, which we, who live, in what feels like a more tolerant place, do not understand. The conclusion was the old saw. Deep listening transcends race, gender and economic situations.