WRITING & SCHOLARSHIP

My writing explores the psychological conditions that make human experience knowable, meaningful, and real. Across diverse topics—including race, culture, trauma, migration, identity, and belonging—I have been interested in how individuals come to recognize themselves and be recognized by others.

Many forms of suffering arise when important aspects of experience remain unseen, unspoken, or unintelligible within one's family, community, or culture. Experiences of exclusion, racialization, migration, trauma, and loss can leave individuals feeling disconnected from themselves and from others. My work seeks to understand how such experiences shape psychological life and how meaning, recognition, and a sense of belonging may be restored.

While much of my scholarship focuses on Asian American experience, race, and culture, these concerns are situated within broader questions of subjectivity, relationality, and human development: How does a person become psychologically real? What happens when one's experiences cannot be recognized? How do individuals create a sense of home in themselves and in the world?

Drawing upon contemporary psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and nearly four decades of clinical experience, my writing examines the emotional realities that underlie personal and collective life.

Featured Project

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The Psychoanalytic Exploration of Asian American Experiences
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2025).
Guest Editor (w/ Pratyusha Tummala-Narra)
This landmark special issue brings together psychoanalytic reflections on race, culture,trauma, migraiton, identity, gender, and belonging. The collection explores the complexity of Asian American psychic life and contributes to the growing body of psychoanalytic scholarship on race and culture.

CENTRAL QUESTIONS

Becoming Psychologically Real

How do Individuals develop a sense of self that feels authentic, coherent, and alive?

Recognition and

Invisibility

What happens when important aspects of experience remain unseen, denied, or unintelligible?

Race, Culture, and

Belonging

How do racialization, migration, trauma, and cultural difference shape identity and emotional life?

Home and

Diaspora

What does it mean to feel at home in oneself, one's culture, and one's relationships?

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

The Illusion of Inclusion and the Model Minority Stereotype (2023)

An exploration of the paradoxical position occupied by Asian Americans in contemporary society. While often portrayed as successful and integrated, many Asian Americans remain vulnerable to experiences of invisibility, exclusion, and racialized otherness. The paper examines the psychological consequences of the model minority stereotype and the illusion of belonging it creates. Read Article

Model Minority and Its Discontents (2025)

Explores unresolved intergenerational traumas transmitted from immigrants to their children in the

making of the model minority psyche . Read Article

From No Name Woman to the Birth of an Integrated Identity (2014)

Drawing upon psychoanalytic theory, literature, and clinical experience, this paper explores the developmental challenges involved in integrating disparate cultural identities and creating a coherent sense of self across multiple worlds. Read Article

Transference and Race: An Intersubjective Conceptualization (1998)

An examination of race within the analytic relationship, emphasizing the mutual and relational dimensions of racial experience and the ways race enters the therapeutic encounter. Read Article

Collective Trauma and Splitting (2024)

A reflection on the psychological consequences of collective trauma, polarization, and social fragmentation, examining the defensive processes through which individuals and groups manage vulnerability, uncertainty, and loss. Read Article

CURRENT PROJECTS

Beyond the Model Minority: The Psychic Lives and Work of Asian American Analytic Clinicians

Guest editor of a special issue exploring the emergence of contemporary Asian American psychoanalytic thought.

Home, Diaspora, and Internal Homelessness

A study of the experience of not feeling at home in one's culture of origin, one's adopted culture, or within oneself.

Racism, Vulnerability, and the Denial of Mortality

An investigation of racism as a defense against vulnerability, dependency, fragility, and human finitude.

Language, Recognition, and Racial Injury

Current work examining racial slurs, psychoanalytic discourse, and the role of language in recognition, exclusion, and psychic reality.