Abstract
The untold and unrecognized stories which socioculturally subjugated Americans live become embedded in their psyche-soma, disallowing them the status of full personhood and leading to what Fanny Brewster calls participation mystique. Oppression, trauma and the violence of colonialism, mundane as well as transgenerationally transmitted, spawn terror, fragmentation, despair, and chronic devaluation. Psychoanalysis has partaken and colluded in perpetuating, enacting and remaining silent around what critical race theory delineates as majoritarian stories, which are sovereign societal myths structurally cemented into the American caste system. Accompaniment and witnessing in the consulting room may return voice, power and integration to our societally subordinated patients, whereby they may claim and speak the truths of their personal counterstories. In order to help these patients become whole, this paper extends a bid for psychoanalysis to courageously undertake the personal work of recognizing its own socioculturally generated pain, shame and guilt, along with engaging in a mourning process. Psychic accessibility to witnessing necessarily must include recognition of patients’ cultural suffering in tandem with exquisitely experiencing the harsh realities of a society which has organized itself in unconscionable ways.