Mixed Feelings: Asian Mirrors in the Analytic Dyad

Abstract

This paper traces how the author’s mixed-race Asian American identity actively enters and transforms the analytic encounter. Drawing from two treatments with Asian patients – one a Chinese woman struggling to form a coherent sense of self, the other a Korean American man whose creative identity collapsed when a cherished origin story unraveled – the author follows how personal history, racialized experience, and the remnants of a lost artistic life shaped the therapeutic field in both treatments. Psychoanalytic theory emerges not as abstraction but as something discovered experientially through the work itself. Drawing from relational theory and work on racial melancholia, the paper proposes a clinical navigation between proximity and distance, empathy and inquiry, sameness and difference – an oscillation that mirrors the fluidity of mixed-race identity itself. The mixed-race analyst emerges not simply as a witness but as an instrument: one whose vulnerabilities, when recognized and metabolized, become the very medium through which recognition and repair can occur.