Collective memory is most frequently theorized in accordance with a particular community, nation, or tribe and either their maintenance of memory or the erasure of memory by state narratives. Yet how is racial memory negotiated at an interpersonal level? How do we see couples negotiate the politics of memory within their relationships? This paper will be working with a 2019 broadway play written and originally directed by Jeremy O’Harries titled Slave Play. The play follows three Black/white interracial couples, struggling with connection and a dissipated sexual life, who are undergoing a new and experimental “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy”. The first act follows the couples as they collectively imagine and enact a sexual fantasy set on a plantation, after which the talk therapy portion begins and the couples unpack the contents and dynamics within a group therapy setting. While the play follows three couples, this paper will be focused specifically on Phillip and Alana. Phillip is a biracial man in his late 20s/early 30s and his partner, Alana is a white woman of around the same age. Through an analysis of Slave Play, this paper investigates how racial histories and memory inform the types of dreaming Phillip and Alana collectively engage in, and how the play folds time and space through racial channels. While I will be utilizing the original screenplay written by Jeremy O’Harris, I also attended Slave Play in October of 2025 in Toronto, which was directed by Jordan Laffrenier. This paper will address the conference theme of trust by explicating how race and racial histories inform how we are able to bond with and trust one another, where trust deteriorates while haunted by specters of racial memory, and the types of engagements that are necessary to contend with uncomfortable, painful, and distrustful interracial collective memory.

Modernity requires systemic trust, based on individuals' expectations for order and stability in interactions. However, trust involves risk. Thus, certainty about others is elusive. Negotiating trust and mistrust in Iran is challenging. People see God and Satan as symbols of good and evil, indicating the projection of trust and mistrust into two separate objects. Many face a state of "trust or mistrust" rather than "trust and mistrust." This results from a collective fixation in a paranoid-schizoid position. Examining group dynamics with basic assumptions reveals that projecting mistrust onto opposing groups permits violence against the other.

This proposal offers a psychosocial perspective that nurtures ambivalence regarding trust within the therapeutic alliance. Clinical observations indicate that at the beginning of the psychoanalytic process, some patients, influenced by their social conditions, employ defenses of idealization and devaluation. To the extent that members of radical groups dehumanize others with extremist Shiite-political or monarchist readings, which has unfortunately led to the deaths of many Iranian citizens.Contemporary psychoanalytic treatments can address trust-building alongside mistrust as a dynamic process involving rupture and repair by utilizing a clear therapeutic contract, identifying red flags, ensuring transparency and accountability, balancing power between analyst and analysand, promoting epistemic adaptation and mentalization, and encouraging social learning outside therapy. Hope emerges after the stage of trust versus mistrust between analyst and analysand. The hope developing at the psychosocial level manifests as a movement toward democracy. This movement is not based on absolute trust or mistrust but on listening to diverse societal voices, indicating a shift toward depressive positioning.

Discussing mistrust does not moralize it; rather, it offers a humanistic perspective on the fundamental capacity for self-care and caring for others.

Entering a client’s subjective world within the therapeutic space is fraught with challenges. Before entering the therapeutic relationship, clients assess whether the therapist’s qualifications and skills fit their needs, but what happens when such information is limited, and the stigma surrounding mental health continues to exist? This question becomes noteworthy especially when mental health services are predominantly availed by women, who continue to be marginalized and socially vulnerable, further compounded at a time when religious polarization is on the rise in India.

This paper reflectively demonstrates that the therapist’s name facilitates trust in the therapeutic relationship even before the client enters the room, as they mistakenly interpret that the therapist shares the same religious identity as them. Drawing on clinical experience, the paper explores how disadvantaged women, whose only support often comes from religion, meaningfully derive their trust and resonance with an unknown individual through the only information available to them, their name. Through this initial sense of familiarity, clients make meaning of the worlds they are presented with, serving a protective response in contexts riddled with uncertainty and disempowerment, and encouraging them to seek help.

The paper highlights how therapists need to be aware of the social nuances that permeate spaces beyond the therapy room, and trustworthy therapeutic relationships are sometimes built prior to direct therapeutic contact. Identities and social locations of therapists may assist in building therapeutic trust, aspects perhaps invisible to practitioners, but which can be deeply real and tangible for clients. Being attuned to these aspects can help cultivate sensitivity and empathy towards clients in building relational experiences, facilitating effective therapeutic practice. This presentation is in tune with the conference theme, because truth is linked to trust yes, and perhaps our names can be the only markers that clients can trust in a socially divided world.

Anxiety is defined as kind of image by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He writes of a particular fable in which a person awakes to find themselves wearing a mask, unsure of who they are, staring at a reflection of themself in the eye of a giant praying mantis standing over them. ‘I couldn’t see my own image,’ the person says. White anxiety attaches a racial dimension to this image of anxiety, in which white people fear their “true” identity is being erased. We can see this in the current “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which now informs anti-migration policies that seek to limit the number of Black and Brown people migrating from the Global South to the Global North, supposedly praying on the resources of “white nations”. In this refusal to share with their fellow humans, some white people instead feel their image and their “culture” is being erased. Referring to images by Hank Willis Thomas and Ingrid Pollard, I will discuss photographs as metaphors for white anxiety, consider the meaning of whiteness as a visual phenomenon, and suggest that it may be necessary for white people to see much less of themselves, both internally, and in the world around them, in order that we might overcome our various anxieties, reach some kind of stability and live out our dreams.