Model Minority and Its Discontents: Understanding the Asian American Experience
This presentation offers a psychoanalytic exploration of the Asian American experience.? Asian Americans comprise 7% of the total US population; yet, they remain largely invisible and unknown to Americans and American psychoanalysis, except for being perceived as a Model Minority. ?The Model Minority myth leads to the illusion that Asian Americans are successfully folded into the American national fabric.?

We will examine how this illusion of inclusion obscures the othering of Asian Americans and explore the psychological effects of dissociating from experiences of othering.

We will discuss the trauma origins of the Model Minority position, from anti-Asian racism, past and present (i.e.,?the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese American individuals during WWII), to the unresolved historical and cultural traumas (i.e., genocides, wars, poverty, authoritarian governments) carried by immigrants from Asia and intergenerationally transmitted to their Asian American children. Some immigrants unconsciously attempt to resolve their historic traumas carried from Asia by a manic pursuit of the American Dream.?

The presentation concludes with a discussion of the legacy of cultural dissociation among the psychoanalytic founders on contemporary racial minority patients, including Asian Americans.

Kris Yi, PhD, PsyD is a psychoanalyst and a clinical psychologist in Pasadena, California, with over thirty years of clinical, teaching, and supervisory experience. She is a faculty member and training/supervising analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Newport Psychoanalytic Institute. Her scholarship focuses on the intersections of psychoanalysis, race, and culture, with particular attention to Asian American subjectivity and racial trauma. Dr. Yi is a frequently invited speaker at national conferences and a committed advocate for culturally responsive psychoanalysis. She serves as an Associate Editor of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA). Under her initiative, JAPA is publishing a special issue on Asian American experiences, due out in December of 2025. As a Korean American who immigrated to America in her teens, she is pleased to be part of an emerging discourse in Asian American experiences within American psychoanalysis.

Discussant:
Tina Nguyen, MD is currently an Advanced Clinical Associate at the New Center for Psychoanalysis. Graduating from Temple University at the early age of 18, she continued at Temple University School of Medicine to obtain her medical degree. Dr. Nguyen completed residency in General Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Beth Israel in New York City, where she was actively involved in research, receiving state-wide recognition for her work as a resident. She then completed her Child & Adolescent Psychiatry fellowship at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY, and had the honor of serving as a chief resident. Dr. Nguyen has had faculty appointments at 2 academic institutions, including Mount Sinai Beth Israel and USC Keck School of Medicine.