Abstract
The lack of mentalization of Asian American experiences has contributed to a collapsing of subjectivity within psychoanalysis and broader society. Racism directed against Asian Americans is often minimized or dismissed. This paper explores psychoanalytic perspectives on the invisibility, dissociation, and repression of Asian American experiences, the problem of homogenization, and the discomfort with multiplicity within the United States. Drawing on clinical vignettes and research findings, the author describes how subjectivity is collapsed and reclaimed, with an emphasis on the experiences of Indian Americans.
The term Asian American was first used publicly in 1968 by two graduate students at the University of California in Berkeley, Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka. Gee, a Chinese American and Ichioka, a Japanese American, initiated a group on campus called the Asian American Political Alliance. In tandem with the Black Power Movement and the American Indian Movement, Gee and Ichioka, an interethnic couple, brought together an alliance of pan-Asian ethnic groups to fight for civil rights. As such, the term Asian American developed in the context of a long-standing history of discriminatory policies directed against people of Asian ancestry, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1922 to deny citizenship to anyone of Asian descent (Okamoto, 2014).
As of 2022, Asian Americans encompassed over 24 million people with ancestral roots in over 20 countries in East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia (Pew Research Center, 2025a). Yet, the term Asian American, initially adopted for political, social, and economic survival in the United States, has inadvertently led to the collapsing of important differences concerning the circumstances of migration, pre- and postmigration experiences, culture, language, religion, immigrant generation, and political perspectives (Li, in press). Relatedly, the homogenization of racial minority groups in the United States is evident in commonly used racialized language in the media and the Internet, such as references to the Black vote or the Latino vote during elections and the normalization of profiles on dating websites and apps stating, “No Asians.”
Within psychology and education, there has been a call to disaggregate research data that potentially masks critical sociocultural differences to better understand the unique experiences of Asian American subgroups. However, there remains a tension between recognizing differences and maintaining an Asian American alliance for political purposes as discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and religion persists in contemporary United States. For instance, the area of Asian American psychology has been pivotal for students, researchers, clinicians, and patients whose experiences have been unacknowledged and dismissed. Yet, it is unclear how many people fully identify with the term Asian American rather than with their specific ethnicities, such as Bangladeshi American, Chinese American, or Vietnamese American. I too have been reflecting on my own identifiers. Culturally, I am Indian American; however, in professional contexts, I adopt the terms South Asian and Asian American.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, subjectivity has been described as “a person’s innermost vulnerabilities and requires particular safety conditions for its emergence, such as empathy, gentleness, and mirroring” (Yadlin-Gadot, 2017, p. 164; Kohut, 1982). Recent psychoanalytic theorizing has centered the inextricable connection between the psychic and the social, where the therapists’ and clients’ inquiry and engagement with sociocultural context is essential to discovering one’s subjective experience and more broadly to therapeutic change (Akhtar, 2014; Holmes, 2016; Tummala-Narra, 2022; Yi, 2023). In what follows, I highlight the contrast between racial identifiers, such as Asian American, and the felt subjectivity of Asian Americans, particularly Indian Americans. I begin with considering psychoanalytic perspectives on the invisibility, dissociation, and repression of Asian American experiences. Through clinical vignettes and research findings, I explore the internalization of colonized, homogenized conceptualizations of Asian Indian immigrants, and the discomfort with multiplicity within the United States, both of which dismiss the complexity of inner life. Lastly, I discuss how individual subjectivity is collapsed and reclaimed, emphasizing the interaction of individual subjectivity and relationships within a racialized immigrant context.
The Invisibility and Dissociation of Asian Americans
Eng and Han (2024a, p. 442) recently described how Asian Americans are viewed as “middle man minorities,” situated outside of White and Black racial frameworks, and as adjacent to White privilege. They describe the subjectivity of Asian Americans as one of “in-betweenness,” embedded in a structural position that implicates Asian Americans holding rage and racial guilt for others. Asian Americans are implicitly and explicitly told that racism they face is not as significant as that experienced by other racial minorities. We are told that we should be grateful for the privilege that we have been given, for being able to enter and live in the United States and for the economic security we may have. Hard work is mistaken for innate qualities such as intelligence and servitude, and silence about racial trauma is mistaken for an absence of psychic pain. As Eng and Han note, our real “feelings are repressed, unconscious, or dissociated” (p. 443). They propose that “while rage and guilt turned inward feed upon the racial subject, rage and guilt turned outward can be transformed into shared action, marking the socializing of unmetabolized rage into a politicized anger” (p. 443). However, anger and rage turned outward carry the potential for disconnection. Shared action carries the potential for liberation as well as the potential for relational disruption, as challenging norms within and outside of one’s family and community can be experienced as too precarious a risk within a racialized society.
Yi (2023) also emphasizes the inaccurate mirroring of Asian American experiences. Bringing a trauma lens to Eng and Han’s (2000) conceptualization, she highlights the burden of immigrant parents’ premigration trauma on subsequent generations. She describes how ongoing traumatic events trigger dissociated memories and feelings connected with past collective traumas. Further, anxiety and shame are induced when a person cannot meet the expectations of the model minority stereotype (e.g., attain academic or financial success), implicating a false self-adaptation (Yi, 2023, in press). The internalization of the model minority stereotype reflects a defense that protects against the fear of annihilation in the immigrant context, and yet it is also a defense that diminishes access to and expression of a full range of subjectivity (Yi, 2023, in press; Tummala-Narra et al., 2019).
These seminal psychoanalytic contributions concerning the racial pain faced by Asian Americans (Eng & Han, 2000, 2024a; Yi, 2014, 2023) highlight the structural injustice that removes subjectivity and homogenizes Asian Americans, as well as the unconscious and conscious processes inherent to adapting to a racialized U.S. society, where distinct Asian American histories and culture are disavowed. Notably, the homogenization of racial and ethnic groups is a key mechanism underlying racist ideology. This pertains not only to perceptions of racial minorities but also to perceptions of Whiteness based on assumptions that all White people have the same cultural experiences or privilege. In the context of immigration, psychoanalytic scholars have detailed how identifying with Whiteness, specifically idealized notions of White or presumed “American” culture and social status, entails a defensive process by which many immigrants and their children adapt (Tummala-Narra, 2022; Yi, 2014). Efforts to minimize one’s racial or cultural difference and fit in within all White or predominantly White contexts can be rooted in the hope of warding off being homogenized, typically through stereotypes (e.g., being perceived as nerdy, smelly, passive). Often, these efforts are critical for one’s safety and sense of belonging. For example, my Indian American patient, Nikhil, shared a memory when he was in middle school. He learned that his classmate, an Indian American girl, had a crush on him. He subsequently avoided her as he was terrified that being seen with an Indian girl would make him stand out with his White peers who had already been ridiculing and bullying him. Looking back years later in therapy, he recalled feeling guilty for dismissing her feelings and for being “so insecure.” Nikhil was caught in an impossible cycle of anger, sadness, and guilt, and only in his adulthood would he come to understand that he was attempting to negotiate his invisibility and hypervisibility due to racism. In one of our sessions, he said, “I was so mean to her and they [White schoolmates] were so mean to me. We were both just screwed over by these kids and no one cared, like nobody at school.”
Nikhil’s experience of invisibility and hypervisibility reflects a lack of mentalization of Asian American experiences (Stephens, 2024; Vaughans & Harris, 2016). Drawing on Stephens’s conceptualization of the “unthought Asian American subject,” Eng and Han (2024b) state, “we are faced with the task of undoing a specific double disavowal: how to address the history of an unthought (Asian American) subject in the face of the subject of an untaught (Asian American) history” (p. 496). Asian American histories remain unknown to not only the broader public but also within Asian American communities. For example, most South Asian Americans are unaware of the “Dot Busters,” a White street gang that terrorized South Asian immigrants in New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania in the 1980s, through verbal harassment and physical violence. Such hate crimes receive little to no attention in the media, leading to the misconception that Asians do not face inequities and injustice. More recently, we have witnessed the apathy toward Asian Americans being spat on, harassed, beaten, and murdered amidst the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This minimization of racial violence against Asian Americans reinforces the notion that one must stay under the radar to secure survival and sustain the hope that someday subsequent generations (e.g., children, grandchildren) will truly belong in the United States (Akhtar, 2014).
Recent psychoanalytic literature concerning colonization and colonial mentality has further enriched understandings of both the invisibility and hypervisibility of Asian Americans. In prior writing (Tummala-Narra, 2022), I described how colonization aims to strip subjectivity and how colonized conceptualizations within psychoanalysis and in the mental health disciplines create distortions in how we imagine and approach the intrapsychic life of racial minorities. In particular, I emphasized the importance of therapists relating to the patients’ whole self, as relating to a partial object keeps therapists embedded in a colonial framework. Relating to partial objects is driven by stereotypes of Asian Americans as exotic, passive, terrorist, asexual, smart, and disease-carrying. Such stereotypes can shape our conceptions of each other, creating the potential for the reproduction of colonial thinking in our theories and practices.
The Collapsing and Reclaiming of Subjectivity
Each Asian American ethnic group has its own unique history with regard to pre- and postmigration contexts, circumstances, and waves of migration, and specific stereotypes and racist ideologies projected toward them. As such, inquiry into the histories and circumstances of migration provides important context for understanding individual subjectivity. For example, in the case of Indian Americans, British colonization in India may shape not only how a colonial mentality is internalized (David & Nadal, 2013; Inman & Tummala-Narra, 2024) but also how individual and collective subjectivity can be reclaimed beyond the confines of colonization. The impact of colonization on Indian immigrant experiences is worth exploring further to illustrate the collapsing and reclaiming of subjectivity.
The history of coloniality in psychoanalysis has been detailed by several scholars. For example, Salman Akhtar and I (Akhtar & Tummala-Narra, 2005) have documented how the Bose-Freud correspondence, which lasted between 1921 and 1937, reflects a polite exchange, but one where Freud diminishes the cultural particulars that Bose proposes. Girindrasekhar Bose was the first psychoanalyst in British occupied India, and had proposed the theory of opposite wishes, in which all wishes have counterparts in the psyche (e.g., the wish to hate is accompanied by a wish to be hated). Bose’s theory, based on Indian and Hindu philosophy, was largely dismissed by Freud who was more interested in a universal conception of the psyche (Akhtar & Tummala-Narra, 2005).
Yet, Indian psychoanalysis would go on to develop a robust theory that reclaimed indigenous perspectives, resisting colonial oppression. In fact, recently, Haq, a psychoanalytic psychologist in India and colleagues, in their overview of psychoanalysis in South Asia, described Indian resistance to British colonialism, stating, While the British Raj influenced cultural life and education through colonial structures and institutions, the Indian psychoanalytic community distanced itself from the colonial masters by expressing pride in its native languages, cultural heritage, philosophical thought, and scientific traditions. The anti-colonial pursuit critical of European hegemony is not a tendency of the past. On the contrary, it can be argued that the ideational kernel of psychoanalytic writings from South Asia remains committed to dissenting and decentering psychoanalysis towards a pluralistic imagination. (Haq, Siddiqui, & Shukla, 2024, p. 471)
One such example of pluralistic imagination within psychoanalysis in India has been provided by Kakar, who described how inner life involves a complex interaction of culture, family, and individual needs and fantasies. Kakar (2024) notes, “none of these constituting inner worlds (mental representations of the body, family, and culture) are ‘primary’ or ‘deeper’; all flow into the same river that we call the psyche” (p. 387). As such, history and culture and their complex interactions with individual conscious and unconscious life have always been an integral part of psychoanalytic theory in India, even while contemporary psychoanalytic treatment remains largely inaccessible to socially and economically marginalized communities.
Collapsing of Subjectivity in Contemporary U.S. Context: Asian Indian Americans
Within the contemporary U.S. context, a discomfort with multiplicity and hybridity of subjective experience is pervasive. For instance, psychoanalytic scholars (Brewster, 2024; Crane, 2013; Shah, 2022; Tummala-Narra & Inman, 2025) have highlighted how individual and structural racism lie at the heart of dismissing and pathologizing mixed race, interracial, and intercultural experience. Shah (2022), referring to antimiscegenation laws, stereotypes and internalized racism, states, Breathing in daily the air of these defensive collective fantasies of racial purity and assumptions of white privilege and coping chronically with the culture’s disengagement with racial multiplicity, individuals of mixed race can easily feel a threat to their sense of racial existence. In response, they can find themselves in a melancholic, ghost-like state. (p. 586)
Brewster (2024), drawing on Stephens, described the experiences of a mixt child when the child’s racial identity is devalued by parents or extended family. She states, “It is through a failure of mentalization and emotional containment by the parent, the family, and our racialized society, that the mixt person becomes the ‘unthought subject’” (p. 736). These authors speak to the dissociative processes, compartmentalization, and fragmentation that are a consequence of the inability of family and society to bear the possibility of racial and cultural pluralism.
The discomfort with multiplicity in broader U.S. society is compounded by the discomfort concerning difference within a racial, ethnic, or religious community. Developing ethnic and religious pride can be critical for warding off racism and ethnic and religious discrimination in the United States, and yet this essential sense of pride can rest on a requirement of sameness. Homogenization is often a necessary sacrifice for self-protection and for securing a sense of power within immigrant communities. For instance, my patient, Adya, a second generation Indian American woman, shared with me that she has never stopped feeling different in her Indian community for choosing a spouse who is Jamaican American. While her parents eventually came to accept her husband, Adya struggles with not only how others in her Indian community perceive her and her husband, but also with questioning how Indian she really is. When I asked her to tell me what would indicate to her that she really is Indian, she responded, I don’t even know really. Maybe cook Indian food and go to the gurudwara (Sikh place of worship), just be around other Indian people. But that’s not really what I want to do all the time either. I don’t know why I do this to myself.
For Adya, marrying someone who is not Indian poses a risk to her connection with her family and community. Importantly, the implicit and explicit demands to marry within the community reflect a community’s collective defense against acknowledging that there is no single way to be an Indian (or Sikh). Rather than recognizing the heterogeneity of cultural experience within a family and community, past and anticipatory loss and anxiety incurred in the separation from one’s heritage culture and country are managed by relating through sameness. In other words, individual differences regarding experiences of a shared culture can be terrifying and threatening to a cohesive collective identity felt to be necessary to survive and thrive within a racialized immigrant context. Notably, a collective identity is not only critical in the immigrant context for mourning losses and thwarting the traumatic effects of discrimination, but also for developing a healthy attachment to one’s heritage culture, religion, and language. However, when there is a lack of recognition and acceptance of heterogeneity within a community, there is a risk of what Brandchaft (2007) described as pathological accommodation rooted in traumatic developmental experiences. Specifically, within group differences, such as in the choice to marry someone of a different sociocultural background, mark relational disruption and separation from one’s culture and community. Such collapsing of subjectivity locates pathology within an individual perceived to be a disruptor, rather than within a community’s challenges of reckoning with its own pluralism. For Adya, she contends that she is the one with a problem of “not being Indian enough.”
In the case of Asian Indian Americans, as with immigrant communities more generally, it is important to consider racial and ethnic socialization in the United States. Using focus group methodology, my colleagues and I (Inman et al., 2015; Tummala-Narra et al., 2024) examined racial and ethnic socialization and experiences of racism among 1st-, 1.5th-, and 2nd-generation Indian Americans. These studies revealed how the 1st generation’s (those who arrive to the United States as adults) conceptualizations and approaches to racism in the United States were shaped by their premigration experiences, including legacies of colonization and the caste system (Inman et al., 2015). Specifically, the 1st generation approached racism through an internalization of the model minority stereotype and attempted to stay under the radar as a way of warding off discrimination. They also expressed the hope that their children would face less discrimination than them, due to children adjusting more seamlessly in school and work and having advantages such as speaking with an American accent and being familiar with U.S. mainstream norms (Inman et al., 2015).
Yet, our 1.5th-generation (those who arrived to the United States prior to adolescence) and 2nd-generation (those born and raised in the United States) Indian Americans reported experiencing racism from a very young age, often starting in early elementary school, ranging from verbal teasing to physical violence. These 1.5th- and 2nd-generation participants spoke about the contradictory messages they received from their parents about fitting in U.S. society by associating with White privilege but not becoming too White and losing their identifications with Indian culture (Tummala-Narra et al., 2024). They both internalized and resisted the model minority stereotype, expressing anger and frustration with the racism that they experienced and the discriminatory messages they heard from their families and communities regarding other racial minorities. They were both expected to and wished to form and retain a close connection with their Indian families and communities as a way of securing their Indian identity.
While prior psychoanalytic scholarship has emphasized the role of collective trauma and racism in the disavowal of the subjectivity of Asian Americans, an area that needs further theoretical development has to do with relational connection. Specifically, for the participants in our studies (Inman et al., 2015; Tummala-Narra et al., 2024), maintaining a connection with their communities and families was predicated on not becoming too American and internalizing, accepting, or tolerating negative attitudes toward other groups, including Indians from other regions of India and caste, linguistic, or religious backgrounds. Importantly, in the process of becoming Indian and American, our participants, like many of my Indian American patients contended with a lack of authenticity in different cultural contexts. Consequently, they were left with a dual sense of self and dissociated self-states (Bromberg, 1998; Roland, 1996; Tummala-Narra et al., 2024; Yi, 2023, in press).
Relational psychoanalytic perspectives (Brandchaft, 2007; Bromberg, 1998; Mitchell, 1988; Stolorow, Orange, & Atwood, 2001; Yi, 2014, in press) are especially relevant here when considering how traumatic aspects of immigration (e.g., loss, separation, discrimination), often intergenerational in nature, shape individuals’ anticipatory anxiety about relationships across multiple cultural contexts (e.g., family, ethnic community, broader U.S. society). Within the therapeutic relationship, accessing and authentically discussing cultural, racial and religious experiences can be challenging for both patients and therapists, as typically, these topics have traumatic roots, with the potential for dysregulation and relational disruption or disconnection. As such, enactments may be inevitable but necessary to engage with (Yi, 2014, in press).
Navigating Discrimination Within and Outside of Indian American Communities
Relational connection is further relevant to the internalization and transmission of discriminatory attitudes and behavior within and outside of racial, ethnic, and religious communities. Negative, prejudiced attitudes, such as those concerning gender, sexual orientation, caste, and darker skin tones (colorism) are widely tolerated within many Indian American communities. Compounding these attitudes are traumatic experiences, such as physical and sexual violence and emotional abuse which are often stigmatized and silenced (Tummala-Narra et al., 2019). The pressure to adhere to a certain set of implicit and explicit rules regarding what can and what cannot be discussed guides interpersonal relationships within communities. Sadly, these norms can facilitate a greater sense of connection, while sacrificing individual subjectivities and a collective recognition of intersectional identities and social locations. For example, my Indian American patient, Rajan, expresses his frustration with the unwillingness of his parents to talk about his financial struggles with anyone outside their home. He states, You always have to act like everything is perfect and that no one has any problems. They want me to act like I have all this money, that we are some wealthy family, and actually it’s the opposite. Literally, everyone in my family is struggling. I’m sure people know it, you know, outsiders, but we can’t say it. No one can say it out loud.
Notably, issues such as loss, trauma, financial struggles, disabilities, divorce, marital problems, sexual orientation, gender, colorism, and violence, tend not to be discussed within Indian American communities, for the sake of both self-protection and relational connection.
Tiwari (2022) has written about how public discourse too reflects misinformation regarding Indian Americans, pointing out that few people are aware that 15% of Indian Americans live in relative poverty with 22% of foreign-born Asian Indians who have been living in the United States for under 5 years meet the criteria of “working poor,” and that approximately 725,000 people of Indian descent were unauthorized as of 2022 (the third largest group of unauthorized migrants after those from Mexico and El Salvador) (Pew Research Center, 2025b). Misinformation is also pervasive among academics and practitioners. For example, in my own career, I have been questioned for conducting research with Indian Americans. In one incident, a senior researcher, upon learning of my research interests concerning South Asian American psychology, stated, “Aren’t Indians privileged though? How does your work advance social justice?” Such assumptions are based on homogenized notions of Indian Americans, which leave many of us (Indian American and South Asian American scholars) wondering whether our work will be seen as valid or worthy of time and resources. This problematic dynamic is yet another reproduction of the in-between position of Indian Americans (and Asian Americans) in a postcolonial society (Eng & Han, 2024a; Tummala-Narra, 2022).
A recent ethnographic study (Tiwari, 2022) offers important insights into the complexity of racial minority communities collectively navigating discrimination. Tiwari (2022) explored the experiences of Indian American parents and youth (ages 10–14 years), and teachers in Broad Plains, Wisconsin, during an annual teacher appreciation event, called Guru Vandana. The event, organized by the Indian American community, is conducted in public spaces, such as parks, community centers, and libraries. Guru Vandana features Indian cultural performances, such as dance, music, and yoga, and aims to bridge the Indian American community with the predominantly White community in Broad Plains by raising awareness of Indian culture. Notably, these public events were efforts to counter stereotypes about India and Indians, such as those reified by teachers’ behaviors in classrooms (e.g., teachers showing videos on poverty in India).
In an effort to reclaim and author their own cultural narrative, the Indian American community in Broad Plains created a program that shared only certain aspects of Indian culture with the public. For example, the leadership of the society which organizes the Guru Vandana is Brahmin (highest among the four major castes in Hinduism), and as such, there was an upper caste influence on the programming (e.g., classical or Bharatnatyam dance). Teachers, all of whom are White, middle-class women, when asked by the Tiwari to make meaning of their students’ Indian culture at the event, referenced their students’ high test scores, good behavior in the classroom, and enrollment in academic programs outside of school, stating that Indian culture values education. Tiwari (2022) pointed out, Guru Vandana did not make the teachers see differently, and the event made sense only insofar as that it matched what they already believed they knew: that Indian children, writ large, were “serious” students because they possessed cultural values that rendered them so; that it was cultural because their parents were wealthy and had advanced degrees—and nothing else. (p. 44)
Tiwari also observes the parents’ desire for the teachers to know that they cared about values such as respect, gratitude, humility, and determination through the performances. However, none of the teachers identified these values in their experiences of the event. Nevertheless, many of the Indian American youth indicated that they developed a sense of public pride through the Guru Vandana. Tiwari’s study underscores how racial and ethnic minority communities strive for not only belonging but even more fundamentally a sense of being humanized in the United States (Akhtar, 2014). The study’s findings also bring to the foreground a dilemma inherent in navigating discrimination. Specifically, how does an individual or community publicly reclaim subjectivity, that is, which part of oneself and one’s culture does one present to others to be understood and accepted?
The Indian American journalist Prachi Gupta (2023), in her book They Called Us Exceptional, describes her experience of myths about Indian Americans: Myths imbue the ordinary and mundane with celestial meaning. But this is also what makes them so dangerous: They do not reveal truths. Rather, they obscure any part of our realities that do not conform to the fantastical narrative. The myth creates a strict role play: Those who project the right image are more likely to be tolerated. Anyone who fails to meet the expectations set forth by white America risks being ignored, overlooked, dismissed, forgotten, abandoned. (p. 9)
Gupta’s and Tiwari’s (2022) observations are critical to understanding how homogenization becomes a mechanism through which racial minorities manage White people’s impressions of them.
Interestingly, homogenization within communities relies on racial and ethnic socialization where only select components of a heritage culture are viewed as ideal and acceptable.
Specifically, in the United States, many Indian immigrants, due to defensive idealization and anxiety rooted in loss and discrimination, carry forth and socialize children to internalize only certain aspects of Indian culture and religion, most often those closely associated with social power, success, and religious purity (Akhtar, in press; Tummala-Narra et al., 2024). One interesting example of the selective idealization of culture concerns diet and yoga. I have found it interesting that even some Hindu, Indian immigrants who grew up in nonvegetarian homes in India assimilate to the notion that vegetarianism is morally superior. This shift in ideology often occurs due to the desire to form a connection within and belong to a community. Yet, Hindus in India and across the world have diverse dietary preferences and practices. Similarly, yoga is not a practice that is very common across homes in India, and yet, in the United States, yoga has been idealized as a common Indian, Hindu practice. In the immigrant context, norms concerning who is a real or ideal Hindu are determined by members of the community holding the most social, economic, or political power (Greene, 2013). The nostalgia of an idealized fantasy of India or Hinduism, reinforced through family and community relationships and marginalization in broader U.S. society, is transferred to the psychic lives of children, disrupting the possibility of a range of different cultural and religious identifications for the 1.5th and 2nd generations. Importantly, the 1.5th and 2nd generations contend with the risk of losing their connections to people they love and to heritage culture when they make choices that diverge from what may in fact be a mythical, nostalgic notion of India and Indian culture. As such, these children of immigrants may be unable to either experience a sense of choice or freely explore their choices concerning their bicultural identity (Brandchaft, 2007; Tummala-Narra, 2020; Winnicott, 1971).
The efforts to secure and stabilize connection within communities can further involve internalizing myths (e.g., stereotypes) about other communities. The wish to fulfill or realize the 1st generation’s (parents’) fantasies and dreams of belonging in the United States lies at the core of internal life for many 1.5th- and 2nd-generation Indian Americans. Yet, this wish carries considerable stress typically managed in isolation (Inman & Tummala-Narra, 2024; Tummala-Narra, 2016).
Relational Stress and Crisis of Self
What then happens for an Indian American who is neither interested in vegetarianism or yoga? How about a person who is exploring their bisexuality? Or someone who is a survivor of sexual violence? How does one secure a relational life with more wholeness and authenticity? Yi (2014) has described the problem of cultural dissociation resulting from multiple marginalization occurring within Asian American communities and families and broader U.S. society. Cultural dissociation leads to relational conflicts where the individual faces an impossible challenge of not being fully accepted in any single context, with profound impacts on the self (Yi, 2014, in press). As such, various defenses are used to cope with the potential for relational loss.
Kerr (2024) recently provided a personal account of her internal crisis when a group of East Asian passengers joined a bus in the United Kingdom which she and her White British partner were seated. She recalls her anger toward these passengers as they spoke loudly to each other, becoming self-conscious and wondering if she, an Asian woman, would be associated with them. Kerr further notes feeling as though she was responsible for getting them to be quiet. She vividly describes her “crisis of identity,” where her anti-racist and anti-colonialist commitment sat alongside her racially driven contempt. She decided to move to another side of the bus and recalled her feelings of shame: I cannot shed my yellow skin, no matter where I relocate. . . . In this moment, the derogatory cliché of rowdy and unruly Chinese tourists so often evoked in media portrayals loomed large. Feeling isolated, I was alarmed by the prospect that, to get up and move away from them, my fellow yellow people, now would send a clear message of betrayal that I, one who looked just like them, had kowtowed to the Western production of harmful stereotypes. What would they think of me and say about me that I could not help but understand in my mother tongue? (p. 3)
Kerr draws on Fairbairn’s (1952) endopsychic structure, the concept that personality is shaped by social relationships, to understand her dissociative adaptation to the crisis of meeting two separate sets of demands. Fairbairn referred to the “unsatisfactory” or bad object as one that is experienced as unresponsive. Kerr (2024) extends Fairbairn’s theory by proposing that the United Kingdom’s hostility toward non-White people is the bad object that immigrants and racial minorities must adapt to. She states, “When the object relations mirror social relations, hostility trumps empathy. The anti-libidinal ego persists in its indifference toward the moment of racial suffering. . . . It perceives vulnerability as weakness; contempt and rejection as power” (p. 12). Here, Kerr emphasizes how our relational life is deeply embedded in social and political climate. The bad objects or the social and political contexts “become part of us: what goes on outside becomes recreated inside so that what divides a society, divides the self” (p. 12).
Liu (2021) describes paranoia as a relational position rather than an internal problem, emphasizing how paranoia has “the capacity to act as a preemptive affect for the sake of self-protection as well as a heightened state of social awareness” (p. 611). In considering the process of reparation from a Kleinian perspective, Liu writes, “Not only are the two positions- the paranoid and the schizoid- inseparable, but reparation only comes from developing a capacity to accept both positions as a complete object” (p. 617). Therefore, paranoia is an expected, inevitable condition of living in a racialized society. Relatedly, Akhtar (2014) underscores a figure-ground discord experienced by racial minorities, taking a psychic toll on a sense of coherence and continuity of self-perception: “Trying to fit in, one loses oneself. Holding on to oneself, one gets ruptured from the surround. One is either more aware or less aware of oneself than one needs to be” (p. 142). Akhtar references the “chronic unease felt by minorities” (p. 150) rooted in such figure-ground discord and the experience of dehumanization.
Psychotherapy offers the potential for discovering and reclaiming complex feelings concerning race, culture, and immigration, including those rooted in family, community, and broader society. The intersubjective position explicated by Stolorow et al. (2001, p. 16) is especially relevant as it “contextualizes the intrapsychic,” where it is critical for the therapist to be self-reflexive and attend closely to their own contribution to the patient’s experience in therapy. In describing therapeutic impasse, they state, “When the process gets stuck, we do not think ‘the patient is resisting’; instead, we wonder how analyst and patient have co-constructed this logjam” (p. 23). The following case vignette illustrates how the homogenization of Asian American experiences impedes the discovery of subjectivity and contributes to such “logjam” in the therapeutic relationship.
The Impulse for Homogenization in Psychotherapy: Case of Maxine
The tendency for homogenization of Asian Americans is evident in psychotherapy, as transference and countertransference are at times shaped through stereotypes and the wish for connection through projections of sameness. Clinical dilemmas concerning conceptualizations of race and culture often center on collective or shared racial, cultural, and religious experiences and how these experiences co-exist or conflict with individual subjectivity. The following case vignette illustrates these tensions for the client and the therapist.
Maxine is a 35-year-old Chinese American cisgender woman who was born and raised in the United States. When I met her, she was engaged to be married to her fiancé who is also Chinese American. She felt deeply anxious at her workplace and insecure about whether her work was being recognized by her supervisor, and this anxiety deepened as she sought a promotion in the ensuing months. Maxine was born in the United States to parents who emigrated to the United States from China to join family who had settled here. She expressed, early on in our work together, that she wasn’t sure that therapy could help her but that she was in a crisis where she needed help to feel calmer at work and in her relationship with her husband.
In several sessions, she commented on her connection with her Chinese community which centered primarily around her church and Christian faith. As she spoke about the importance of her religious faith, she looked at me as if to see whether I understood and appreciated this aspect of her life. I responded by letting her know that I wanted to learn more about her family and her church community. At times, she would say, “I figure you would know since you are Indian. I mean I don’t know what religion you might be, but I thought that you would understand also being Asian and everything.” I shared with her that I am Hindu, and yes, Indian, and that I came to the United States when I was very young. She expressed relief in feeling as though I might understand something about being an immigrant and bicultural. Weeks later, she revealed that she was unsure that a therapist would take her religion seriously but she felt as though I likely believe in God.
In our sessions, Maxine made efforts to better understand the sources of her anxiety, including feeling as though she had to be perfect at her childhood home, school, work, and now in her relationship with her husband, Eric. She was continually concerned that someone would become angry with her if she did not conduct herself perfectly, which meant that she had to meet their demands and not cause any discomfort to others. Maxine is deeply connected to her cultural values of family harmony and respect for elders as well as her own desires and wishes to be herself. When her own desires conflict with those of others, she defensively engages with people in her life, where she quite literally stops listening to them. For example, she will “tune out” when Eric is upset with her and asks her why she didn’t follow through with something that he had asked her to do. Subsequently, she finds herself confused as to why she didn’t listen more carefully to him. She then berates herself for not working harder in her relationship. As our work has progressed, she understands this conflict as rooted in her ambivalence about her early relationship with her father who became enraged in arguments with her until she “gave up.” Maxine stated that her father knew how to “break my will.” She grew increasingly disconnected from her father over the years. Her dilemmas about perfection also reflected conflicting cultural identifications, including what it means to be a good spouse in her Christian faith while also wanting to express what she really thinks and feels.
In a session in our second year of working together, she posed a question, I feel like I have to be a certain way because I’m Asian. You know what I mean, like don’t get too angry or upset, but then I end up feeling sad and frustrated. I know you must get this too being Indian.
Indeed, I resonated with Maxine’s experience of wanting to express anger but feeling as though my anger would only be heard if I chose the right words and conveyed these words in a way that is comfortable for other people, both with people in my family, my Indian community, and in broader society. And yet, Maxine’s experience is distinct and unique. Her challenges with anger are related to a particular set of early object relations, her marital relationship, Chinese and Chinese American contexts, and Christian values. My struggles are rooted in a unique context as well, and yet, Maxine needs me to resonate with her as a fellow Asian American woman. I responded to Maxine, “I think I understand some of your experience since it’s also not culturally acceptable for Indian women to express their anger directly in many cases, but I know you have your own experience that I want to understand better.” Maxine stated, “I can see that, but I’m just glad that you’re Asian.” She repeated this sentiment that she is glad or relieved that I am Asian in subsequent sessions. In such moments, I was often left both wanting to join her as an Asian American and being aware that this may not be entirely genuine as I view myself more as an Indian American. It was clear that Maxine and I were both grappling with how authentic we could be in the presence of each other.
The following year, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, she was reluctant to talk about the racism she experienced and the fear that she carried as she took the train to work, until I asked her in a session, “Are you feeling safe on the train?” She said, “I actually don’t. I’m nervous. I’m scared. Thank you for asking. I didn’t know if you picked up on what was going on with the negative talk about Asians, especially Chinese people.” This was a critical moment in our work, as Maxine, for the first time, was able to name a difference between us, as rooted in two distinct experiences lumped under this broad Asian American label. I told her that I think about her safety a great deal and that I’m sad and I’m angry that she has had to live in fear. Since this conversation, I noticed Maxine’s willingness to talk about our cultural and religious differences, including racism she has faced from an Indian classmate in high school and racist comments about Indians she had heard while growing up.
The growing differentiation between us didn’t feel disconnecting. Rather, she began to express her frustration and her anger about the injustice she has felt in her life, with her father, her church, and her husband, all of whom she deeply loves. And in fact, it is true that expressing her anger carries the potential for losing her relationships, as she has observed her father’s hostile reactions and those of others in her community, characterized by an unwillingness to hear her perspective. Still, in therapy, we started to imagine the possibility that anger may not always be destructive. Perhaps even more poignantly, something was awakened, enlivened in each of us as we more honestly recognize our sameness and difference. We each began to feel more fully like ourselves in our relationship.
Concluding thoughts: Imagining Complex Subjectivity in Psychotherapy
Relational dilemmas, such as those faced by Maxine, are a source of deep psychic pain for many Asian Americans, as family, community, and culture are essential to a sense of identity and belonging in a racialized society. Kakar (2024) underscored the critical role of culture in our psyche: The cultural imagination is disseminated through myths and legends, proverbs and metaphors, iconic artworks, and the stories its members tell each other. It is enacted in rituals, conveyed through tales told to children, given a modern veneer in movies, and equally glimpsed in the admonitions of parents, in the future vistas they hold out to their children, indeed even in the way its children are touched and fed and carried about. If the ego is a skin ego, dependent upon the physical body to find its mental representation, then the early life of skin—shaped after all by culture—impacts how the ego gets constructed in different cultural contexts. (p. 386)
The cultural imagination that Kakar describes takes unique forms for Asian Americans, as culture itself is elusive. In the immigrant context, one can only partially enjoy their heritage culture because fully immersing in this culture is not possible and, in fact, a potential liability to one’s survival. Further, what becomes valued, idealized, and devalued in the heritage culture and in broader U.S. society is driven by relational demands in multiple cultural contexts. Therefore, in the case of immigration, cultural imagination is both a source of strength and a source of distress, due to impingements from within and outside of one’s family and community.
In psychotherapy, therapists and clients have the opportunity to recognize and grieve the psychic pain and loss incurred in immigration and racialization and imagine a new self and new ways of relating. In our studies with Indian Americans of different generations, my colleagues and I heard from 1.5th- and 2nd-generation parents a longing for greater freedom for their children (Inman et al., 2015; Tummala-Narra et al., 2024). In contrast to their 1st-generation parents, the 1.5th and 2nd generations wished to prepare their children for effectively challenging racism and to talk openly with them about stigmatized topics such as violence and abuse (Tummala-Narra et al., 2019, 2024). This new way of relating entails cultivating both social equality and psychic freedom, where children have a real choice in their subjectivity and its expressions in all racial and cultural contexts.
The lack of mentalization of Asian American experiences (Eng & Han, 2024a; Stephens, 2024; Yi, 2023) can be challenged by revealing the complex subjectivities of Asian Americans. Notably, within and beyond psychotherapy, it is important to not only grieve multigenerational losses incurred in immigration and acculturation but also to experience dignity, aliveness, and fulfillment. Kakar (2024) expands on this possibility: With the focus of much of contemporary psychoanalysis on attenuating psychic pain—fear, guilt, anxiety, depression, the sustained engagement with loss and mourning—we tend to forget that the feeling of aliveness in the full flow of eros is the destination (if not always reached) of the analytic journey after the many sites of psychic pain have been negotiated. (p. 388)
Such movement toward aliveness rests on our collective willingness to engage with a more complete subjectivity of Asian American experiences.
