In the mid-nineties, David Eng was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, and Shinhee Han, a psychotherapist, worked for the school’s counselling and psychological services. After a seemingly popular Korean-American undergraduate at Columbia committed suicide, Eng and Han got to talking about what seemed, to them, like a wave of depression afflicting the school’s Asian-American students, and about how unsettling they found it that so few of their colleagues had attended the student’s funeral. There were many Asian-American students at Columbia, but Eng and Han had noticed that these students often spoke, in the classroom and at the clinic, of feeling invisible, as if their inner lives were of little concern to those outside their immediate community.

The category of “Asian-American” was created in the late nineteen-sixties. At the time, the term, for those who adopted it, was a way of consolidating the political energies of various immigrant communities. The category crosses ethnic divisions and class lines, encompassing refugees from Southeast Asia struggling to adapt to the American hustle, multigenerational American families with only an abstract connection to their ancestral homelands, and the children of transnational Chinese élites who have been sent to America for schooling, among others. (In recent years, Asian-Americans have become the most economically divided ethnic or racial group in the United States.) Education has traditionally been one of the shared interests that binds these disparate constituencies together. Another has been a reluctance to acknowledge any difficulties with mental health: studies show that Asian-Americans are less likely than the general population to seek out counselling. Eng and Han wanted to understand what Asian-American students had in common, drawing on the perspectives of culture, history, and social class, which Eng had studied, and seeing how these forces played out in the therapist’s office, where Han spent her time.

“Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans,” which was published earlier this year, is the result of their collaboration. Eng now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania; Han works as a psychotherapist at the New School and in private practice. Their book, which is built on psychoanalytic theory, readings of classic Asian-American literature, and Han’s case studies, attempts to shade in the broader contexts that help produce, or amplify, individual feelings of waywardness, alienation, and loss. The title echoes the work of the scholar Anne Anlin Cheng, whose book “The Melancholy of Race,” published in 2000, offers a theoretical framework for considering grief and mourning as defining vectors of the racial experience. One isn’t melancholy simply because of the experience of racism, Cheng suggests; melancholy, and its dynamics of loss and recovery, are the foundations for racial identity.

These terms descend, in part, from Freud, who described mourning as a conscious process in which we deal with the grief of losing someone or something we can identify. Melancholy, for Freud, involves a kind of grieving, too, only we are at pains to identify what we have lost. Our inability to comprehend the reason for our melancholia pushes us further into our subconscious depths, and manifests as a kind of permanent mourning. To Eng and Han, this phenomenon seemed akin to the “interminable sadness” of many of their students. Perhaps the dislocations of immigration and assimilation had something to do with their inability to identify what they had lost.

Psychoanalysis examines the texture of individual experience, but its theories often presume a universal subject who is white by default, and therapeutic approaches tend to privilege private realms above collectively experienced public ones. “Psychoanalysis is focused on the mother but rarely considers the motherland; it is attuned to family dynamics but rarely thinks about the family of nations,” Eng and Han write. Literary analysis, meanwhile, often relies on generalization and abstraction, turning fictional characters into representative figures rather than treating them as specific individuals. By merging the approaches of their respective disciplines, Eng and Han felt that they could sketch a fuller picture of the forces guiding their students’ lives.

One of Han’s patients, a woman she calls Elaine, speaks of the pressure she puts on herself because of her parents, whom she believes would have been much “happier” had they remained in Korea. The sense of loss that her parents feel is “transferred onto and incorporated by Elaine for her to work out and to repair,” Han writes. Elaine’s life becomes a way of fulfilling, or justifying, her parents’ sacrifice—though she doesn’t consciously realize that she is seeking an impossible kind of comeuppance on their behalf. It’s a familiar story line in many immigrant households. It is also, Eng and Han show, a constant theme in Asian-American literature, from Maxine Hong Kingston’s “China Men” to Gish Jen’s “Typical American.” But, Eng and Han wonder, “Are Asian American parents as completely selfless as the theme of sacrifice and ideals of Confucian filial tradition suggest, or is this idea a compensatory gesture that attaches itself to losses, disappointments, and failures associated with immigration?” In other words, is the narrative of sacrifice a way of retrospectively turning the first generation’s dashed hopes into a comprehensible and redemptive story? “In turn,” Eng and Han continue, “do children of immigrants ‘repay’ this sacrifice only by repeating and perpetuating its melancholic logic—by berating and sacrificing themselves?” What Eng and Han suggest is that this cycle of unhappiness, attributed to a “pathologized Asian culture,” is the product, rather, of the false promise of meritocracy.

Within a racial paradigm that positions black and white as opposing poles, those who, like Asian-Americans, don’t fit on either side occupy a state of flux—they can be recast as “good” or “bad” depending on the political mood, becoming an alien threat one moment and a model minority the next. The students of my generation, people who were born in the seventies and eighties, came of age at a reverential distance from the civil-rights era and in the shadow of the Cold War; many of us wanted to figure out how our family’s experiences fit within broader stories of racial struggle. According to Eng and Han, today’s young people have a markedly different relationship to racism, sexism, and xenophobia. In the second half of the book, they focus on recent Asian immigrants, many of them “parachute kids” from wealthy families, whose parents sent them to America for schooling. These more well-to-do students, reared in a relatively inclusive and legally “colorblind” era of globalization and multiculturalism, have fewer hangups about their identities than those who came before them—yet they still experience a feeling of otherness that they have difficulty articulating. Eng and Han describe their experience as one of “racial dissociation,” because the conceptual frameworks they have learned, which downplay or ignore the realities of racism, do not adequately reflect the actual world they live in. These subjects live under a kind of historical amnesia, making it even more challenging to locate their sense of loss, which has become “dispersed,” ambient. Rather than sharp pangs of guilt there is simply constant anxiety. They feel “psychically ‘nowhere,’ ” ill-equipped to deal with the subtler yet still existing barriers to assimilation.

What unites both generations, Eng and Han suggest, is a kind of linguistic lack, a missing vocabulary—a paucity of stories that they might tell themselves about where they are going, and what it would mean to feel whole.