This paper turns toward silence in racial dialogue, not as an absence, but as something affectively alive within the intersubjective field. It explores how silence can hold and organise responses to racial trauma, often shaped by disavowed affects such as anxiety, guilt, shame, and fear. Drawing on lived encounters, the paper distinguishes between dissociated silence, which withdraws and protects against overwhelm, and attuned silence, which remains present, engaged, and potentially transformative. Rather than positioning silence as something to be overcome, the paper asks: What is happening in silence? What is being protected? And what becomes possible if we are able to remain at the threshold between silence and speech? It is within this tension that intersubjective vulnerability is required, and where the possibility of mutual recognition and deeper relational connection may begin to emerge.
Thato Letsatsi, MA
Thato Letsatsi, MA is a Clinical Psychologist in private practice in South Africa. She trained at the University of Cape Town. She currently teaches medical students in Psychiatry and provides psychotherapy supervision to psychiatrists and psychologists-in-training.
She is co-chair of the Cape Town Psychoanalytic Self Psychology Group and co-chairs the Complexities of Identity interest group within the International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology (IAPSP).
Her work sits at the intersection of contemporary self psychology, intersubjective theory, and decolonial thought, focusing on racialised experience, affect, and the complexities of engaging difference. She is the author of The Complexity of My Blackness (2025), which continues to inform her engagement with race, subjectivity, and relational practice.
Jayati Kalra
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