Fear and loathing, love and othering: the legacy of early Oedipal struggles as manifest in racialised dynamics in the consulting room

ABSTRACT

This paper takes as its premise the idea that transferential phenomena emerge out of the endless interactions between the wider social context, including myriad social injustices, and the inter and intra psychic events psychoanalytic therapists are more familiar with thinking about. Freud’s was a neuro-psycho-social model of development, with the interrelationship between internal life and social practices carefully mapped in ‘Totem and Taboo’ (1913) and ‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’ (S. Freud, 1930). However, what Freud left undone, and is still only nascent in its development, is the work of mapping how this interaction between internal and external, between psycho and social, manifests in the consulting room. Focusing on race, as one aspect of identity that powerfully impacts transferential phenomena, the paper presents accounts of clinical events, one disguised, one fictionalised, to explore the meaning of the author’s own Whiteness in this context. Using a Kleinian and post-Kleinian understanding of very early Oedipal struggles, ‘Whiteness’ is formulated as an anti-developmental merger with the ideal breast.

KEYWORDS:

• Child psychotherapy
• racism
• Whiteness
• early Oedipal struggles
• othering

Introduction

In this paper I attempt to notice how my enculturation into White¹ supremacy manifests in my work as a child psychotherapist. I was brought up in a liberal household and attended inner-London state schools, and I don’t remember a time before I had a consciously anti-racist stance. What I want to explore is how the universal valency towards splitting and projection, towards othering, understood as the legacy of our earliest Oedipal struggles, seizes upon and perpetuates an unconscious belief in White supremacy. I address this paper to my fellow White colleagues as it is we who have work to do. As with our clinical work, this task starts with bringing into conscious awareness something that we want to avoid because it causes us pain or anxiety. This paper may also be of interest to people beyond the child psychotherapy field and to colleagues from Black and ethnic minority backgrounds. I am grateful to my Black and Asian colleagues and patients who have been patient and generous in their support of my attempts to do this work in various ways.

It might be helpful to start with a loose definition of the term ‘transferential phenomena’. As I am using it here, it describes all that is transferred onto the analytic relationship from previous relationships with real and phantasised objects. As clinicians, we hope our own analysis has helped us to notice when our countertransference is dominated by our transferences from our own past, which might confound our attempts to use our emotional responses to our patients as a source of information about what expectations they bring to this relationship, in this moment. What I want to explore in this paper, is the idea that transferential phenomena emerge out of the endless interactions between the wider social context, including myriad social injustices, and the inter and intra psychic events we are more familiar with thinking about. It is important to acknowledge that the word ‘race’ is also complicated. Race, as a biological fact, is literally only skin deep. As Diangelo (2019) describes: ‘The differences we see with our eyes, differences such as hair texture and eye colour – are superficial and emerged as adaptations to geography. Under the skin, there is no true biological race’ (2019, p. 15). However, as a social construct ‘race’ is loaded with a great deal of meaning. The impact of socially constructed categories is no less real than the impact of biological categories; in fact, the spurious misattributions to socially constructed racial categories are all the more potent because they are motivated.

I will argue that early Oedipal anxiety is a fear that the links between others exclude us and so threaten us because of our abject dependency on our carers for survival. Therefore, the legacy of early Oedipal struggles is that we are destined to be forever searching for an ideal object or in-group to identify with, a link that will make us feel safe, that will make us feel viable. Also, that nothing shores up this sense of in-group more than an out-group that is not afforded this link, a rival, that is forsaken so that we may survive. This paper will then pan out to include some of the ways in which this dynamic plays out within the wider social and political context.

The racialised unconscious

In South Africa, where a recent history of minority rule and apartheid insist that race and racism permeate every fibre of public and private life, psychoanalytic thinking has had to acknowledge this dynamic and apply itself. Knight (2013), a White South African psychotherapist, asks whether psychoanalysis is ready to make a:

shift to integrity based on acknowledging its whiteness and its othering of blackness? This would mean that, in incorporating race, psychoanalysis would open up a model for the examination of the racialised subjectivity and racialised unconscious of both therapist and client. (Knight, 2013, p. 94)

As ever, necessity is the mother of invention. What could not be avoided, in South Africa, has been formulated in the psychoanalytic literature there.

As early as 1967, Fanon set out a theory of the racialised unconscious. He described how colonisation and slavery required the construction of the Black person as a ‘Phobic Object’ – a receptacle for all the fearful and revolting aspects of White people. Thus, the internal conflict of the White person, the neurosis, is externalised into a relationship with ‘the other’, who is then feared and rejected. A false sense of internal integrity is achieved for the White person by externalising this conflict. Fanon also recognised that the phobic object must attract as well as repel, so the Black person, as symbol, is desired as well as denigrated, making for a complex and dangerous dynamic, particularly in relation to sexual exploitation. Fanon also set out the concept of the ‘Neurosis of Blackness’. He describes how impossible it is for Black people to avoid internalising racist cultural norms, at both conscious and unconscious levels, even while identifying and rejecting these ideas as morally wrong and false. White people, then, externalise our internal conflict, our neurosis, and burden Black people with a particularly pernicious internal conflict by setting up an impossible situation for the ego and super ego to navigate. In Fanon’s own words:

As I begin to recognize that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognize that I am a Negro … this [is a] neurotic situation in which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual situation fed on fantasies [that are] hostile and inhuman. (Fanon, 1986, p. 197)

A specialist literature has been developing out of this tradition, but it remains just that: a specialist, or arguably ghettoised, literature within the wider psychoanalytic community. However, a shift is taking place, at a wider societal level in response to the Black Lives Matter Movement and within child psychotherapy training schools in the UK. I am part of the course team running the pre-clinical observation course, M7, across England, Northern Ireland and in Italy. We are increasingly turning our psychoanalytic lens on to our own experience of one another as students and teachers, who are all socially situated in relation to race, class, gender, sexual orientation and many other aspects of identity. What we find is that we all have a racialised unconscious, my Whiteness thrums with shifting unconscious meanings for me and those I interact with. As we explore our unconscious relationship to these aspects of our identity within the teaching context, we note how fraught the exploration is with anxiety and feel ever more convinced of the absurdity that we have proceeded for so long as though psychoanalytic work might transcend such differences.

In every clinical encounter there will be similarities and differences between patient and clinician that invite f/phantasies, both conscious and unconscious, in us and our patients: social class, level of education, gender, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, regional identity, religion, attractiveness, to name but a few. These similarities and differences might be very subtle or quite stark, but each axis includes power differentials that inform the nature of the f/phantasies, that shape the therapeutic relationship.

As I write this my pulse quickens, I am imagining it being read. I’m anxious about whether my contribution is worthy of your time and attention, in the ordinary way, but more than that, I am scared because of the topic. What am I going to reveal about myself that I would prefer to gloss over? How will you feel about my invitation to explore this topic with me?

I first gave this paper in Syros last summer, to the Hellenic Psychoanalytic Society. There, I was a foreigner and dependent on the kindness of colleagues to help me where I was ignorant of the language and local knowledge. I felt a strong urge to cement my links to those colleagues, my dependency sharpened my possessiveness and jealousy, and made it hard to share my colleagues who had become a lifeline. Irrational though it was, the links between others made me feel threatened. In a state of dependency, being on the lonely corner of the triangle does not feel safe. I oscillated between paranoid schizoid and depressive positions. In fact, my internal responses were not dissimilar to those played out in video recordings of babies responding to their parents kissing each other. YouTube has a great number of these videos captured and uploaded by parents who find their infant’s responses charming and amusing. In some clips the baby becomes distressed in a collapsed, sad sort of way, with a quivering bottom lip and silent tears. In others, the baby becomes angry, demanding that it stop with a tone that apes the authority of adults. Others are angry and violent, lashing out at one or other parent, or physically interposing, getting between the parents. I have seen one where the infant responds by pointing and laughing manically, encouraging them to do it again and laughing louder and harder each time. You can search for the clip or, if accessing this paper digitally, follow the link below:

Baby Ella is jealous of kissing! (youtube.com)

Those of us working in the Kleinian tradition share an assumption that the legacy of early Oedipal struggles is always at play. Without the aid of YouTube, Klein observed that these are well under way in the first few months of life and that due to the absolute dependency on a carer for survival at this stage, the Oedipal dynamic has a life-or-death intensity. The sexual union between the parents is sensed from the very beginning and poses a double threat – it is a form of intimacy that the infant is excluded from, and it has the potential to produce rival babies. Both are experienced as an existential threat. I felt this very powerfully in Syros. When my Greek colleagues conversed with others in Greek, it was a connection I was excluded from, the potential product of those conversations could be a threat to me too – new, more interesting ideas might have emerged that could have caused them to forget about me.

Human infants are born immature and have a prolonged period of dependency, which was extended when our ancestors stood up on our hind legs, thus narrowing the birth canal. This was compounded by the development of a pre-frontal cortex that required a skull that would never get through that birth canal at full size. Unlike most animals, human infants are hugely resource dependent until around two years of age, when our brains reach full size. The horse foal takes its first faltering steps within minutes of birth but only those parts of our bodies that engage our carers, our eyes and mouth, can be effectively co-ordinated from birth for the human infant. Infants experience inattention as a threat to life, and they are right to. In hard times, when resources are scarce, meeting the needs of an infant might threaten the survival of the social group and abandonment of infants has been necessary in our evolutionary history (Williamson, 1978) and, of course, happens to this day. In Winnicottian (Winnicott, 1956/1984) term, the baby’s viability depends upon a degree of ‘primary maternal preoccupation’. We might say this is now true in the sense of psychical survival but from an evolutionary perspective, if the attachment figure for a resource-expensive infant became preoccupied with someone or something else, that infant may not have survived physically either. Babies are profoundly driven by the anxiety caused by an innate awareness of this absolute, even abject dependency. It is this life-or-death context that helps us to understand the startlingly primitive² ferocity with which early Oedipal anxieties bubble under the surface, even in a situation as cordial as a conference in Syros.

In this paper, I am going to focus on race and racism in the consulting room and how these link with early Oedipal struggles. If our most primitive anxieties are about rivals that might threaten our survival by monopolising our primary object, the good breast, then we seek assurance that we are the obvious and rightful beneficiaries of the good breast because of our goodness. To throw our goodness into relief we then need to create a bad object, an ‘other’ into which we then project our own badness, thus deepening the split and securing our belief in our goodness. Fear of abandonment leads us to create someone, or some group, to loathe and be forsaken so that we can feel secure in ourselves as the loved, the chosen. For this reason, even the most subtle differences will be seized upon as an excuse for othering, in the service of managing our early Oedipal anxieties.

I am going to describe some research done at ‘the baby lab’ at Yale University that illustrates this in action in infants around five months of age. There is also an address/link below to a video showing the basic method and findings, which I recommend:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=851_21Euh6c

The participants are infants, some as young as five months old. First, they are offered a choice of two breakfast cereals. The infant makes his or her choice and is then shown two puppets, one grey and one orange. One puppet chooses the same cereal the baby chose, and the other puppet chooses the other cereal. The child is then offered the two puppets. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most infants reach for the puppet that liked the same cereal as them. The next phase of the experiment has more disturbing results. The rejected puppet is then shown trying to open a box with a toy in, but struggling to get the lid up. A third and fourth puppet are introduced. The third puppet helps the rejected puppet to open the lid while the fourth deliberately thwarts him. The third and fourth puppets are then offered to the infant and 87% of the infants tested showed a preference for the puppet that treated the rejected puppet badly, even though it had only been rejected on the grounds that it liked a different breakfast cereal.

I would argue that what we see at play here is primitive splitting and projection. When we are in the depressive position, we might be able to tolerate the reality of flawed but good-enough self and carers, which then makes it more possible to rely less on projection. But, when we are most vulnerable, functioning in the paranoid schizoid position, we are inevitably susceptible to the siren call of a phantasised merger with an ideal object, and its attendant fear of a vengeful and sadistic object that is out to get us – whether that object be a retaliating rival or a withholding bad breast. Again, this is born of those terrifying early existential anxieties and this, of course, impacts our unconscious experience and behaviour around sameness and difference – ‘you are either like/for me or against me’. You are either good breast or bad breast. What is also striking is how all this gets mobilised by such an apparently insignificant difference. As stated, this is a primitive need, and subtle differences will be seized upon to play it out – apparent homogeneity will not thwart it. If choice of cereal can mobilise these ingroup-outgroup dynamics, what subtle differences within an apparently homogenous social group might also be seized upon by primitive states of mind?

In ‘Turning a blind eye: the cover-up for Oedipus’, Steiner (1999) alerts us to evidence that each character in Sophocles’ tale colluded by turning a blind eye because of the gains for them in this denial.

I want to consider one such situation, namely that in which we seem to have access to reality but chose to ignore it because it proves convenient to do so. I refer to this mechanism as turning a blind eye because I think this conveys the right degree of ambiguity as to how conscious or unconscious the knowledge is. At one extreme we are dealing with simple fraud where all the facts are not only accessible but have led to a conclusion which is then knowingly evaded. More often, however, we are vaguely aware that we chose not to look at the facts without being conscious of what it is we are evading. (Steiner, 1999, p. 161)

Sophocles, in his story, captures three ideas that have become important in psychoanalysis. The first is the obvious eponymous Oedipus Complex; the second is the idea that we are powerfully compelled by forces that we can never be fully consciously aware of; and the third is that most of our suffering is caused not by our darkest wishes and passions themselves, but by all we do to avoid the anxiety they cause us. What we do to avoid feeling responsible for our true feelings, our destructiveness and our desires.

Margot Waddell (2018) makes the very important point that if the prophet had been ignored, and Oedipus raised by his parents, he might well have entertained fantasies about usurping his father and marrying his mother, but it is very unlikely they would ever have actually been enacted. Actual incest and patricide are quite rare, unlike the ubiquitous ph/fantasies around them. Indeed, if Jocasta and Laius had had a child psychotherapist to help contain their anxieties rather than a soothsayer to exacerbate them, things might have turned out very differently.

The lesson of the story seems to be that we need to have the courage to tolerate the anxiety that our conflicts and passions bring. Returning to love and hate in the consulting room, the very equanimity with which I approach clinical work is likely bolstered by my identifications with the social group that most benefits from many forms of social injustice. My level of education, and the affirmation of my intellect afforded through that, my social status as a professional, my sexual orientation and my ethnicity all endow me with a sense of superiority, even if I oppose such notions through my conscious political beliefs. I might like to think that I am magnanimous enough not to employ such splitting and projection to bolster my sense of self-worth, but, as psychoanalytic practitioners we learn through our analyses, that our primitive, abject self is never so far below the surface. Any anxiety, be it ordinary professional anxiety about one’s competence, and indeed depressive and persecutory anxiety around how much we might benefit from social injustices, throws us back on the need to feel good through identification with an idealised group. This, in turn, will undermine our conscious attempts to refrain from maintaining the status quo. But the more we can bear knowing this about ourselves, the more effective we might be in catching ourselves at it.

Clinical case one

I will, now, share some of my own attempts to ‘turn my good eye’ (Steiner, 1999) to my countertransference as I approached a clinical session³. This was the first appointment with the great aunt of an eight-year-old boy. Social Services had determined that the child’s biological parents were not able to offer adequate care, but fostering of the child by the state was not necessary as maternal great-aunt had come forward to claim him. Under the title of ‘Kinship Care’ this arrangement is formalised by the state – the legal responsibility is clearly delineated, but, unlike with fostering and adoption, there is little financial, social or psychological support offered after the Kinship Care Order is made.

The child’s behaviour was becoming increasingly challenging and great-aunt was feeling abandoned with the ‘problem’. She and the child were of Black British Caribbean heritage. I had a sense of foreboding. The situation was not fair, and I expected her to be angry about it. My belief she had every right to be, didn’t prevent me from experiencing powerful unease about that anger. Compounding the unfairness of this particular situation was the wider societal and historical context, one that I am implicated in and benefit from, even if I believe it to be wrong. I imagined that she would perceive me as a beneficiary of White privilege, who was going to offer too little too late. She would be right. I worried that if I tried to think with her about what she might do differently in her parenting, I would be experienced as blaming her for the situation, adding insult to injury. It is a dilemma for anyone in parent work – carers may feel ‘if I change what I’m doing and things improve, will that mean that my child’s difficulties were because of my parenting all along?’ However, within the wider context described, this ordinary dilemma feeds into my fantasy of a ‘White Saviour’ therapist who only wishes to confirm a belief in her own goodness by contrasting it with someone else’s inadequacy. This is a fantasy I am both repelled by, at a conscious and critical level, and, at some less conscious level, feel shored-up by. I imagine that this carer had a similarly complex relationship to the ‘White Saviour’ fantasy. Perhaps she too had a powerful distaste for it, while simultaneously and unconsciously, having internalised the racism. I also had a dilemma. If all this inhibited me from thinking with her about her parenting, I would be excluding her from important aspects of the treatment I am trained to offer. I would become a psychoanalytic practitioner gatekeeping and withholding what I could offer, on the basis of race, and the complexity emerging out of racial difference in the context of colonialism and racism.

As I entered the waiting room, scanning for someone who might fit what I had known from the referral, my eyes settled on an attractive, slim Black woman, probably of a similar age to me, in smart, fashionable clothes. She looked self-possessed, probably a professional. I felt relief that she didn’t look obviously in a state of collapse, reassured that she would be able to manage her child, with help, but also my apprehension about how she might experience me increased slightly. Perhaps I had made an assumption that as a professional woman she would not be shy about challenging me. Then she looked up and in turning the angle of her head revealed a side parting. I felt my anxiety lessen slightly.

I was vaguely aware of what had just happened in my mind and it was not something I really wanted to get hold of. I had originally thought that her hair was very short all over. Actually, she had long, straightened hair, tied back neatly at the nape of her neck. The former, I realised, I associate with an assertive celebration of the beauty of Blackness. The side parting on straightened hair I associate with conforming to White aesthetics. These are my associations, of course, and aren’t likely to be reflective of how other people understand these differences, but here what matters is that I felt relief because I made a prediction that she would be less angry with me based on her hair style. I had reached for the trope of an ‘angry Black woman’. More than that, I then wanted continued power differentials to rescue me from the discomfort of being the recipient of that anger. When I forced myself to interrogate this, I realised that I harboured a hope that in straightening her hair she was signalling that she might want to appease rather than challenge White oppression. Again, I stress that I don’t claim that that was her intention in choosing a hairstyle, but it is how I perceived it, just within my own conscious awareness, if I forced myself to look closely.

If all this happened in my mind, then I am certain it happens on interview panels, and in shops and restaurants, all over the place and all of the time. There must, then, be advantages to conforming to White aesthetics and I was hoping to be protected by that dynamic. This set of thoughts and associations is a source of shame to me, but my purpose is not to confess and be absolved – well, maybe I do hope for that too – but, my conscious purpose is to include myself in the field of enquiry – if I don’t scrutinise my countertransference to what (Ghosh Ippen, 2019, in Biseo, 2023) has termed these ‘ghosts in society’, then what might I enact in the countertransference?

To return to that waiting room: I have no doubt that as our eyes met and I smiled, my eyes betrayed all the complex and pained, shameful and strained work I was trying to do to be ready to meet her, that is to meet who she actually was, rather than all this that I had projected onto the idea of her. I then had to hope that she would have the resilience and forbearance to be patient with me, because I clearly had so much work to do in myself before I could be helpful to her. Of course, every encounter is ladened with projections and unconscious expectations and assumptions, but where stark power differentials are at play, the stakes are higher, and it behoves us to pay attention in a different way.

We perpetuate tropes like ‘angry Black woman’ through stereotyping and social learning, but this doesn’t explain why we do it. There are always beneficiaries, where there are inequities. Those of us with privilege will be powerfully motivated to hold on to that privilege, even when we are consciously and politically opposed to it. Also, we will want to avoid awareness of our privilege and the ways we might hold on to it, because of the guilt and shame associated with such awareness. To be the change we, consciously, want to see, we need to be able to interrogate this aspect of ourselves. I am arguing that at root this is a paranoid schizoid mechanism, a defence against acute and primitive anxiety.

Othering and triangulation

This is not about looking for excuses or a way to explain away our behaviour, but I do believe that understanding the universal and primitive psychological imperative that drives this behaviour can help us to bring it into conscious awareness, which might lessen our acting on it. Of course, in this description I have left out other identifications, including my identification with this woman as a woman, and as a professional, as someone who went to a state school in South London. Perhaps I imagined that she and I shared both pride and a lingering sense of inadequacy, at times, in relation to each of these aspects of our identity? We might all have multiple and contradictory identifications as perpetrators and victims on many axes of identity all at once but, as Freud taught us, they don’t cancel each other out and I feel most compelled to ‘turn my good eye’ (Steiner, 1999) to where I am party to the most gross social injustices. Where I live and work, racism is definitely one of these, so that is my focus here, but I hope my learning might be applied more widely to other contexts where there are other inequalities that need to be attended to in our work.

Winnicott asserted in his famous phrase that ‘there is no such thing as an infant’ (1965). From the moment of birth, the cord is cut, and every instinct is that mother and infant should close the gap again. They must reconnect for baby’s survival, her mouth must find the nipple, a new link to replace that of the umbilical cord. But, of course, development needs a connection between the eyes, a connection across space, getting to know one another through looking and noticing that each can respond to the other. And for this to happen a little space will be needed. Without a gap there is nothing to bridge, and the spur to communicative development is the gap that opens and needs bridging. As we know, sometimes the remerged twosome might need a gentle nudge from another to help them create a little space, in the service of the baby’s development. Both baby and primary carer may resist what can be experienced as an intrusion by the third – as the YouTube videos remind us, we don’t always welcome this gift of triangulation, which can easily be perceived as an attack on the lifeline – the link between infant and primary carer. The question we need to ask ourselves is: can we embrace the ‘other,’ as a potential developmental object – offering new perspectives and opening up our horizons? Or are we stuck with a greedy and possessive relationship to an ideal breast?

In his 2004 paper, ‘Subjectivity, objectivity, and triangular space’, Ronald Britton sets out his theory that our capacity for self-reflection is the hard-won reward of our early Oedipal struggles:

The acknowledgement by the child of the parents’ relationship with each other unites his psychic world, limiting it to one world shared with his two parents in which different object relationships can exist. The closure of the oedipal triangle by the recognition of the link joining the parents provides a limiting boundary for the internal world. It creates what I call a ‘triangular space’—i.e., a space bounded by the three persons of the oedipal situation and all their potential relationships. It includes, therefore, the possibility of being a participant in a relationship and observed by a third person as well as being an observer of a relationship between two people … This provides us with a capacity for seeing ourselves in interaction with others, for entertaining another point of view while retaining our own, for reflecting on ourselves while being ourselves. (Britton, 2004, p. 86)

Recognition of the difference between the relationship between parents as distinct from the relationship between parent and child: the parents’ relationship is genital and procreative; the parents-child relationship is not. This recognition produces a sense of loss and envy, which, if not tolerated, may become a sense of grievance or self denigration. (Britton, 2004, p. 87)

This is clearly what the babies on YouTube are struggling with: some become angry and attack – a grievance response, others become completely collapsed by the distress, which might lead to self-denigration, others laugh manically, perhaps headed towards manic defences?

It is also interesting to me that in ‘turning a blind eye’ as Steiner describes it, when we don’t want to notice how we participate in and perpetuate social injustices, we are attacking our self-reflective capacities, we are turning away from our continuing Oedipal struggles, as set out by Britton. Klein (1946) recognised that the gradual move from paranoid schizoid functioning to increasing depressive position functioning, is supported by the infant’s growing capacity to integrate the m/other into a whole who is recognised as simultaneously in relationship with others as well as the self. As Klein stressed, this is frequently lost and re-established again, as we oscillate throughout life between the depressive and paranoid schizoid positions.

If we can acknowledge that we will fall back on paranoid schizoid functioning, then it seems obvious that all forms of sameness will fuel phantasies of idealised merger and all forms of difference will spur splitting and projection. Gender, sexual orientation, neurodiversity and disability, choice in breakfast cereals(!) and many, many more differences are likely to be utilised by these primitive defences, because, by definition, they function below conscious awareness, and so escape our moral censor. The implications, in terms of how-deep rooted our valency towards oppression of out groups is, has been widely acknowledged.

What is at issue is the apparent incapacity to constitute oneself as oneself without excluding the other, coupled with the apparent inability to exclude the other without devaluing and, ultimately, hating them. (Castoriadis, 1992, cited in Gordon, 2004, p. 1)

Or, as the novelist James Baldwin (1963) (in Gordon) describes:

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed. (Gordon, 2004, p. 73)

Here Baldwin seems to be getting right to the nub of the problem. Racism is a White problem. It is a symptom of our historical and current overuse of splitting and projection, as enacted through colonialism and the slave trade, that has hampered the development of depressive position functioning. That is, our collective failure to learn how to accept and love ourselves, and our objects, as flawed and good enough.

In Klein’s ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ (Klein, 1946) she stresses that these mechanisms are attempts to avoid feelings of frustration and persecution:

Here I am particularly concerned with the connection between splitting, idealization and denial. As regards splitting of the object, we have to remember that in states of gratification love-feelings turn towards the gratifying breast, while in states of frustration, hatred and persecutory anxiety attach themselves to the frustrating breast.

Idealization is bound up with the splitting of the object, for the good aspects of the breast are exaggerated as a safeguard against the fear of the persecuting breast. While idealization is thus the corollary of persecutory fear, it also springs from the power of the instinctual desires which aim at unlimited gratification and therefore create the picture of an inexhaustible and always bountiful breast – an ideal breast. (Klein, 1946, pp. 6–7)

Whiteness, as an idea, functions as a phantasy of merger with an idealised breast – ‘inexhaustible and always bountiful’. The economic exploitation, both historical and ongoing, of Black people by White people concretises the experience, but also compounds the persecutory anxiety that the splitting and idealisation were originally trying to keep at bay. We may be careful to avoid being exploitative in specific situations where we might be able to act independently, but we cannot extricate ourselves from being beneficiaries of the wider power differentials, and this stirs persecutory anxiety. All of this, this external and internal context, will be present in the consulting room whether we ‘turn our good eye’ to it or not.

At the societal level, merger with the ideal breast, as flight from suffering, can be seen in extreme nationalism, which relies on a denigrated bad breast to receive all the projections of our disavowed parts. In my own country, an idealised England relies on the notion of persecuting invader immigrants who want to strip us of our resources (wherever did we get that idea as an ex-colonial empire!). This was the fantasy that fuelled Brexit. We had a referendum, and the people chose to leave the European Union. Our choice has left us with the reality of our diminished position on the world stage, unbuffered by our membership of the EU, we are exposed. We are an ex-colonial empire of diminishing wealth and influence. It is much documented that these political ideas take hold when and where resources are scarce, and anxiety is high. Indeed, it was likely our collective dawning awareness of our diminished position that precipitated this maladaptive defensive act of self-sabotage. On the individual level, we know that those who have experienced trauma, are more likely to rely on schizoid mechanisms and so are more vulnerable to psychotic disorders. In England, it has been shown that people of colour are also more vulnerable to psychotic disorders and some wonder if this is because of the trauma of living with all the subtle and stark manifestations of being othered, exploited and denigrated by the dominant racial group (Degruy-Leary, 2017). There is also some evidence that people of colour in the UK are more likely to be diagnosed with severe mental illness than their White counterparts with similar presentations. According to a NHS Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (2014), people from Black and Minority Ethnic groups living in the UK are more likely be diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, attend A&E in a crisis situation and then be admitted, rather than receive preventative care in the community; experience poor outcome from treatment and disengage from mainstream mental health services.

At a societal level Karl Marx (1844) famously described religion as the ‘opium of the masses’. Many religions do share with heroin a particular experience of being ‘at one’ with one’s god or the universe, where there is no distinction between self and the source of goodness. We might recognise this as the oceanic oneness of primary narcissism (Freud, 1926) a denial of the caesura of birth (Bion, 1977) and a phantasised return to umbilical connection – the Nirvana, in fact, that the idealised breast would deliver us to.

Those of us who do not take refuge in extremist ideologies, hard drugs or even fall prey to psychotic breakdown, are made of the same stuff as those who do. We use the same schizoid mechanisms to avoid anxiety. However, the succour we take from merger with an idealised breast is more subtle. In her book ‘The work of Whiteness’ (Morgan, 2021), Helen Morgan teases out and illuminates some of the ways we tend to perpetuate the status quo, and why, particularly when this is in conflict with our consciously held ideals. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants help in getting to know a part of themselves that is likely to be limiting their work and indeed, their own personal development. As Morgan writes in her preface when explaining why she has engaged in this work:

It is neither altruistic nor, I believe, neurotic, but comes from a need to investigate a part mostly hidden from myself. Its inevitability is supported and conspired with by a global system of power relations which brings much material privilege and freedom from discrimination, but it does me harm and acts as a block to my own path of individuation. (Morgan, 2021, p. xiii)

When I read this passage from Morgan’s book, I had an association to a novel by the African American author Toni Morrison. In Sula (Morrison, 1973) an otherwise reasonable, if traumatised, middle-aged woman murders her Vietnam veteran, heroin-addicted son. He is high, in a blissed-out stupor. She describes him as ‘being helpless and thinking baby thoughts and dreaming baby dreams and messing up his pants again and smiling all the time’. The only explanation she gives for his murder is that they couldn’t go on with him trying to crawl back up inside her womb. She does add ‘But I held him close first, real close. Sweet Plumb. My Baby Boy’ (Morrison, 1973, p. 71).

It was a moment of visceral recognition, for me, because of powerful identifications between aspects of myself and these two characters. The anti-developmental part of me, the part kept in a sort of stupor by my privilege, identified with the smiling man-baby, enjoying the freedoms of his arrested development. But I also felt repulsed by him and identified with the mother who understands she needs to put a stop to it. Her act is brutal but without cruelty. She holds him close, there is no contempt for the infantile in him, but she will not tolerate his staying stuck, or worse, regressing further to an intrauterine illusion. My hope is that I can show the same tough love to my own infantile parts, that I will not yield to the siren call of primary narcissism. It is time for my ‘gentle disillusionment’ as Winnicott (1965) termed this work of individuation. This is about personal growth and also a moral issue, in relation to our role as citizens and as members of our communities, but it has a very particular bearing on our clinical roles.

If we can’t own and take back our projections, then our countertransference is in danger of acting as a saboteur of the work, rather than an essential tool in it, whenever there are power differentials at play. We need to be writing about our clinical experiences of social forces as they play out in the transference relationship. There is an inbuilt power imbalance between therapist and patient. It is not helpful to deny this but we are responsible for staying alert to the ways in which this interacts with other power differentials. An excellent example of such writing is Michela Biseo’s ‘Mixed heritage, mixed feelings: psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy during the coronavirus pandemic’ (2023). Biseo explores her countertransference to a mother, focusing on the racialised aspects of this. The referral includes the information that the mother is ‘of dual heritage, very clever, has requested help and has a successful career in a professional environment’. On their first meeting, the mother tells her therapist that the baby has been ‘a little pain today’. The therapist mishears and thinks mother is telling her she is in pain today. Biseo reflects:

After this powerful meeting I had to work on my own countertransference, as I wondered if I had deliberately misheard Ms D’s opening remark. I recognised that defensively I had been drawn instead to hearing the mother’s pain, and not the anger, or even possible hatred, towards her baby. I began to reflect on the unconscious processes at work in me – not wanting to accept this hostile negative attribution from a Black mother onto her baby, perhaps? I wondered if my own ‘racialised unconscious’, as Knight (2013) calls it, was at work in my disavowal of what I had heard. It was possible that I was defending against my own racist stereotype of seeing her as an ‘angry Black woman’; that perhaps I was unconsciously wanting to be a ‘good and open-minded’ White therapist who did not see my patient in this way. This was a complex but fruitful beginning to my own internal dialogue, as I had much work to do to unpack my relationship with otherness, as, it became clear, did she. Perhaps the gratefulness I had unconsciously anticipated was part of my own projection of the racialised power dynamic between Black patient and White therapist, and maybe in my own pre -transference to her, I had expected a ‘clever, successful and keen patient’, not a hostile one with whom I felt wrongfooted. (Biseo, 2023, p. 10)

What Biseo so helpfully draws our attention to, is that it is not just our racism, conscious and unconscious, but also our anxiety and defensive thinking around race and racism that inhibits our clinical potency.

Reading this paper took me back to some very uncomfortable feelings around work I did many years ago with a girl of Black British/African heritage who I will call Ayotunde. Her mother had a physical disability, and so Ayotunde took on a caring role, apparently very proud of her precocious domestic skills, frying a full English breakfast by the age of six. In time it became apparent that Ayotunde was severely emotionally as well as physically neglected in ways that were not to do with her mother’s disability, and the thinness of her identification as a carer became increasingly apparent. It was when she started to scratch the skin of her arms, leaving wide pale pink marks, that I became more insistent about my concerns with her social worker. Eventually she was removed into foster care, where she thrived. My discomfort comes from the fact that in supervision I was invited to be curious about the specific meaning for her of exposing pink skin under her dark brown skin and putting her arm next to mine as we sat together at the table while she drew pictures. At the time I thought she was letting me know about how desperate she was, how unbearable home life had become and that she was turning her rage about the situation in on herself. I did not want to see that in sitting close enough to me to line up our arms, she might be wanting me to notice that, under the surface, her skin was pale like mine. I did not want to be in touch with the idea that she might have hoped that if she could show me that she was ‘like’ me, I might adopt her as my own. Again, my anxiety around the idea of myself as a ‘White Saviour’, my anxiety around being the one with the desired skin tone, the one with care to offer, prevented me from receiving her communication. My anxiety around my privilege and my position in relation to power differentials blunted my clinical work and, despite my supervisor’s best efforts, my patient lost out.

I hope that I am more able to tolerate the discomfort of such dynamics now and explore with patients their relationship to our racial differences, while working hard to explore my relationship to these differences, in parallel, in my own mind or in supervision. In my teaching and supervision of others, I am increasingly doing this exploration of my own limitations in this area more openly, with students and supervisees. I feel strongly that we need to model being able to tolerate these aspects of ourselves as clinicians. While it seems inevitable that some feelings of shame will be stirred when we do see ourselves clearly, if the shame is felt to be intolerable, our courage and curiosity will be curbed as we shrink from looking closely.

Case study two

A little later in my career, in parent work with a mother of Asian descent, whom I will call Sarika, I found myself having to work quite hard to make sense of race and racism as it was manifesting in the transferential relationship. As you will see, my capacity to work with this is still very limited, but I think it is important to notice what happens and share our nascent understanding of this phenomena with one another.⁴

There was scant information in the referral about Sarika’s background and when I met a pleasant, slightly self-effacing, middle aged woman, I felt on familiar territory, having made some fairly gross assumptions based on the trope of a self-deprecating British Asian woman. I felt protective of her and looked forward to helping her to stand up for herself more. I cringe to notice that I was enjoying my own discomfort around her deferential manner and how it made me feel big, big and magnanimous enough, in fact, to decline her deference, which is, in itself, a sort of privilege. In the first session, I thought she seemed anxious. I brought her water, and she nodded her head effusively in thanks. I returned the nod, but more slowly, owning my confidence, perhaps underscoring my power in this situation. She had come to university in the UK and later met her husband during post-graduate studies. He had died very recently, and she showed me a photo of him at university. She was clearly proud that he went to Oxford, and I wondered if she was also proud that he was White. She had made a casual reference to the fact that she didn’t ‘play the race card’ like some did. I had felt her pause to see what I would do with this. I neither commented nor offered any change of expression. She moved on, to say dismissively that, of course, there was some racism to be endured in the UK, but on balance this country had given her great opportunities, which she had the sense to be grateful for. I had felt invited to gang up with a part of her that was dismissive and unsympathetic about how hurtful racism could be. There seemed to be an idea that those who complain about racism are rather pathetic and that I was being invited to admire her for rising above such trifles, and perhaps to feel some gratitude for being let off the hook as a White person by this upbeat attitude. I did not feel able to address any of this so early in our work together and so the moment passed.

At some point in the next session, she was describing how hard she was finding it to advocate for herself and her son after the loss of her husband because, she felt, it would dishonour his commitment to appeasement and the avoidance of conflict. In an admiring tone, she gave examples of the many ways in which he had conceded and compromised in disputes so that conflict with neighbours and colleagues was avoided and amicable arrangements were come to. I suddenly had a powerful conviction that she was, in fact, an assertive woman, with much grit and that I had got her completely wrong. I heard myself challenge her in quite a direct way pointing out that he had picked her, presumably, because she was a fighter and perhaps because this was a quality he lacked. She looked me directly in the eye, with a piercing, almost aggressive intelligence and a wry smile and proceeded to tell me the story of her girlhood.

What she told me was a harrowing tale of life under the tyranny of a sadistically and violently abusive father. Of her siblings, she had been the one to defy and deceive him and, in so doing, got an education and got out. She was self-taught to A level standard, making great use of her intelligence. In the telling of this story, I also discovered that her family had been Kenyan Asians. I had my own speculations around the social structure, imposed by the colonising British, where Indians and other South-East Asians were invited to African countries by the British, to rule the local African population on behalf of the British. There seemed to be something significant about the position of Kenyan Asians and the need to identify with the colonising British Oxbridge educated elite. I wondered whether there had been a pull to turn a blind eye to one’s own experience of subjugation and project this part of oneself into those at the bottom of the heap. Yet, I also wondered if she was frightened by her ordinary sadism. She did not identify with her father as the aggressor (A. Freud, 1937), but I believe that her courage and assertiveness put her in touch with that potential in her, which despite being no more developed than in most of us, felt more risky for her as her father’s daughter. Her choice of husband might have been related to this in some way. He seemed to represent an ideal where the absence of aggression did not equate to vulnerability: an escape from the perpetrator or victim trap.

As our work progressed, I started to show curiosity about how race might be a factor in the stories she told me about day-to-day life. She was more able, as time went on, to acknowledge the hurt and the anger she felt on a regular basis because of assumptions made about her as an ‘Asian Woman’. The kinds of assumptions, in fact, that I had made, and that at the start, she had encouraged me to make through her demeanour. As well as beginning to acknowledge the hurtfulness of the racism she experienced, she also started to convey her contempt for those who underestimated her intelligence based on a racial stereotype, as I had done. I wondered what it meant to her to be playing into the stereotype, thus inviting others to show their ‘race’ cards, as it were. This seemed to be both an act of appeasement and a subversion of the racialised and racist structure. While Sarika was clear that she wanted to support me to publish this paper, I felt she also would have preferred not to have had to read about the unpleasant realities of my racism in relation to her. It was not, I think, that she was surprised that it existed. She gave her consent very clearly and unambiguously but said that she also wanted to tell me about the crows and the eagle. She explained that sometimes crows will mob an eagle, though they are far less powerful individually. The eagle can counter the attack when it happens but instead, they soar higher and higher until the crows drop off because they can’t handle the altitude. I had the sense that in asking her to read this, I was dragging her down. She had had to rise above the racism she knew would be inherent in our relationship, in order to make use of me. I felt it was irksome and an indignity to her to have to stay low in order to engage with my racism at my level. I am learning that in trying to take responsibility for the harm we do, as White people, we can inadvertently do more harm. All I can do now is offer my sincere gratitude for her generosity towards my learning.

Political manifestations

While not strictly concerned with transferential phenomena, it is helpful to think about some of the ways in which psychoanalytic ideas have been used to make sense of phenomena beyond the consulting room. The infinitely complex interaction between intrapsychic, interpsychic and social phenomena is helpfully rendered when we do this. In turn, we are reminded that the consulting room is not set apart, but situated within that matrix and can only be used to its full potential when this is acknowledged. Writers like David Bell (2018) and Stephen Frosh (2018) have shown us that psychoanalysis, as a body of thought, cannot but be political, in that it is a critical study of the behaviour of groups.

An excellent example of this is Frank Lowe’s analysis of the 2011 riots across the UK in a chapter of his book ‘Thinking Space’ (Lowe, 2014). Lowe invites us to notice the failures of containment at the very top in relation to the riots of 2011. Exploring the causes of the riots, Lowe starts with the explanation offered by our Prime Minister at the time, Cameron, who blamed ‘pockets of our society that are not only broken but frankly sick’. Where Cameron attempted to split off and denigrate a part of Britain, using the subverted term ‘sick’ to convey disgust rather than concern, Lowe re-subverts the term arguing that, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the riots can be understood as ‘an unconscious request for recognition, understanding and thoughtful containment (of a malaise)’ (p. 212). Lowe shows us that when a whole society is ‘sick’ a riot can be helpfully thought of as a symptom of that sickness.

Lowe enumerates the various failings in important institutions and their impact that came to light just before the riots: Parliamentary scandals; a greed driven financial crisis; widening income inequality; deterioration of ‘equality of opportunity’ where improvements had been promised; a peak in child poverty and unemployment in the areas where rioting took place and resignations over police corruption. Lowe ends his paper thus:

There is an African saying ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, a saying that seems increasingly to be quoted in Britain, I think with good reason because the riots are not just about the people who took part in the riots, it also says something about the village. (Lowe, 2014, p. 228)

What he argues is that these actions are most helpfully understood as unthought thoughts and needs that require formulating by minds that are not overwhelmed or too defensive to receive and digest the projections.

Lowe also acknowledges that these projected beta elements are, in turn, second hand, as it were. When a mind, a group or a society splits off parts of itself, this is in order to project out and denigrate disavowed aspects of itself. The rioters, he argues, have been carrying all of our denigrated parts and are pushed to ‘act out’ the impulses that we wish to disown and further distance ourselves from through judgement of them in the other.

Containment is not just ‘thinking about’ someone else’s difficult feelings but actually letting those feelings resonate in us, rock our boat and see how it feels, so that we might come to understand from experience what the other feels because we feel it too. This is only safe to do if we are not going to be overwhelmed by those feelings. But what happens when those feelings, those beta elements, are, at some level, recognised as our own disavowed unruly impulses that those of us who don’t riot don’t want to own? We, those with privilege and power, can become convex containers, instead of offering fellow feeling and thinking we can bounce it back and spout more of our own ‘sick’ selves into those who are communicating a need for help, their need for help and ours.

Concluding comments

Beyond consciousness we project our disavowed selves into a construct of other, a construct we tell ourselves was created by those racists out there, thus projecting even our own racism out. Racism is an economic, social and political reality that needs to be challenged in all those arenas, but it also feeds on unresolved Oedipal anxieties and the paranoid schizoid functioning we are all prey to. It is dangerously naïve to imagine that racism, and many other forms of social injustice, are not present in the transference relationship. However, we can take courage from the fact that we do have the tools in our psychoanalytic theory and our observational skills to tease out and bring into consciousness even our most pernicious participation in, and preservation of, the status quo.

I want to end by returning to Baldwin’s quote. His observation that racism will not go away until White people learn to love ourselves, is incredibly important. What we need is a capacity to accept and embrace our flawed selves, including the aspects of ourselves that frighten and revolt us. He prescribes love, without need of idealisation. If we, White people, can take heed and take responsibility for our racism, without it becoming performative self-flagellation, which is still bound up in a tussle with an ego ideal, then we might begin to mitigate the harm done. We must also accept that alongside our anti-racist endeavours, we will inevitably continue to enact racism. As described, othering alleviates a primitive and powerful anxiety, so we cannot expect to desist all at once because we consciously choose to. It will be the work of a lifetime to notice and acknowledge when we do it, and gently self-correct, particularly when it happens in the consulting room or in supervision.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexandra de Rementeria

Alexandra de Rementeria is Principle Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist at Lambeth CAMHS and Assessment and Liaison Tutor for the Master’s in ‘Perinatal, Child, Adolescent and Family Work: A Psychoanalytic Observational Approach’ (M7) at the Tavistock.

Notes

1. Capitalisation of the words ‘Black’ and ‘White’ will be used following the APA guidelines (2022) designating racial and ethnic groups as proper nouns.

2. Freud and Jung cited in Dalal (1988), borrowing from their contemporaries in the field of anthropology, incorrectly equated non-Western contemporary cultures that were alien to them with the ‘primitive’ cultures of all our ancestors. Primitive actually means early, not yet developed. To my mind, the parallel between the development of a complex topographically organised psyche and our evolution from apes to modern human can be quite helpful and is supported by neuroscience. The erroneous, racist part was to imagine that any contemporary peoples were in some way less evolved and more like our shared ancestors. The term ‘primitive’ now carries this offensive notion within it, which leads to the argument to stop using it. However, I think that it’s more constructive to reclaim the word, making clear what it does mean and what it doesn’t and acknowledge the historical misuse of it. However, I am very aware that I don’t know what it feels like to be Black and hear the word ‘primitive’ used with all its history and would welcome help to think about the best way forward.

3. This is a fictionalised amalgamation of a number of clinical encounters – a composite case.

4. This is a real case and informed consent was given by Sarika. She read the paper and offered some comments, which I share below, and gave her consent to publish this disguised account of her and our work together.