Although we might wish for them not to, racial enactments in psychoanalytic organizations can be observed to happen regularly, exposing schisms that are borne of personal, social, and structural elements. Now, in the wake of contemporary racial polarization and galvanizing instances of brutality, and in the ongoing context of widespread social division, upheaval, and international warfare, the psychoanalytic world is grappling with where we have been, where we are now, and where we are headed.

This presentation offers a framework for understanding the problems and promises of enactments involving race, culture, and other forms of divisive difference, placing awareness of safety and the need for openness at its center. It can be perpetually difficult to engage in dialogue across the borders of entrenched difference, and not infrequently, as in the case of enactment experience, communication can seem to break down when polarization overwhelms dialogic co-commitment. Through the consideration of vignettes involving racial (and other diversity-related) enactments, the obstacles to participants’ capacity for humility and receptive, “radical” openness will be explored. Attention to matters of safety and unsafety, for all those involved, will be seen as an essential component in the creation of new dialogic possibility.