Abstract
“Maman, look, a Negro; I’m scared!” Scared! Scared! Now they were beginning to be scared of me. I wanted to kill myself laughing, but laughter had become out of the question.
Fanon is on a train, and there is the matter of where to sit. In a voice that is unmistakable––aghast is the word that comes to mind––he tells us, “I couldn’t take it any longer, for I already knew there were legends, stories, history. . . . As a result, the body schema, attacked in several places, collapsed, giving way to an epidermal racial schema” (1952, p. 92).
Fanon’s work, published mainly in two books over the course of his brief adult life, confronts the reader with the fact that he lives what he describes and theorizes, and that autobiography and sociography are coextensive; they are inextricably linked. The “psycho-affective” realm that Fanon writes about is neither subjective nor objective, but is a place of social and psychic mediation. This point, as we know, is not entirely foreign to psychoanalysts. Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Nancy Chodorow, and more recently Lynne Layton and Nancy Hollander (among others) have each ventured into the nexus of the effects of social structure, ideology, and power relations on the individual psyche. We might call these efforts, following Layton, “social psychoanalysis” (2020).
In truth, mainstream analysts, working in their offices and other clinical settings, have never comfortably embraced this work of social psychoanalysis. One finds a history of marginalization of both the ideas and the scholars who wrote in this vein (Erik Erikson comes immediately to mind). And yet the deep penetration of ideology, racism, and power relations into seemingly the most neutral notions of analytic theory and practice is a plain fact. Consider the psychosexual stages of development and the patently heteronormative biases that underwrite them. Or the appellative “homosexual.” Or the term “borderline.” Or think about the ubiquitously used adjective “primitive”––as in, for example, “primitive mental functioning”—that is now, finally, being seen as redolent of any number of biases, including its not so hidden colonialist and racist history. As analysts we know that words of significance carry history on their backs. We can see the dust and the dirt that a word like “primitive” carries with it as it makes its way from the distant past into the present moment.
That psychoanalysis, certainly in the United States, has been almost exclusively the province of white people is a fact that went unexamined for most of our history; now this state of affairs is front and center, staring us in the face. As with many painful and destructive aspects of our social world, analysts have often struggled to catch up to the urgency of the moment. We have been late to intervene, to make a statement, to grasp our role. As I’ve already suggested, sometimes unwittingly (and for that reason all the more concerningly), we have participated in the perpetuation of the suffering of the Other, whether the other is women (consider Freud’s theories of female psychology), queer-identified folks (the pathologizing of homosexuality), or those who are Black, indigenous, or people of color. The complexities here regarding how the constitution of analytic institutes, the training of candidates, and the daily routines of analytic practice contribute to something we claim to vehemently oppose (i.e., the marginalization and oppression of nondominant groups) are only recently being given the attention they deserve. We are trying to figure out not only the enduring, often hidden effects of systemic racism, misogyny, and homo/queer-phobia on us and our work, we are also trying to figure out what we have to say about these social facts (to invoke a useful term from Durkheim).
But it is important for us to consider that not all disturbing and oppressive social facts exert their force on the same level and to the same effect. Starting with Fanon, many have argued that anti-Black racism and white supremacy are foundational, are bedrock to the structuring of the Western symbolic order, and that all other practices of hatred of the other follow from these specific social facts. Cheryl Harris (1993) makes this argument from the point of view of U.S. legal history in her pathbreaking “Whiteness as Property,” required reading, in my estimation, for any psychoanalyst. And in Afropessimism, Frank Wilderson (2020) fashions a particularly strong version of this claim (which has met with mixed reactions; see, e.g., Mitchell 2020): We were the world’s grounding wire. We were the targets of rage that would otherwise be turned in on itself. Black people were the living, breathing contradistinction to life itself. And when we were too old . . . or were too young . . . to know what my mother knew, . . . we let our rage speak its truth: Human life is dependent on Black death for its existence and for its coherence [pp. 110–111].
At JAPA we are aware of our role in documenting the state of the field, where we are “at” as a discipline regarding important contemporary theoretical ideas and clinical practices. This effort at documenting is, at the same time, one of intervention, of contributing to a pushing forward into a future that is more honest about and more open to our embeddedness in the social, and our participation in it, for good or ill. This entire issue of JAPA, including the JAPA Review of Books, is our effort to contribute to this discussion on psychoanalysis, race, and racism. We hope that the writings you find here offer more than a little light on this most important of topics.
