Sigmund Freud: German “Negro”; H.S. Sullivan: Northern American “White”: Psychoanalysis and “The Fierce Urgency of Now”^*

Abstract

The arc of psychoanalytic theorizing and practice has spanned the earth’s physical/geographical boundaries. Although historically we might be inclined to dissociate, and thus erase the contexts of its unfolding, the trajectory of psychoanalytic thought has been—and continues to be—embedded in the historical context of its moment. Sigmund Freud, himself, was a victim of the socially constructed concepts of the time, discarded into the realms of Otherness because he was first and foremost a Jew; Freud was, therefore, under the hateful racializing, Nazi, White supremacist gaze, rendered “Black.” Harry Stack Sullivan, a “White” American, experienced his own share of being Othered for, among other things, his ethnic Irish heritage. Sullivan was aware, too, of the curse that America’s overt and implicit insistence on cultural racism¹ visited upon the lives of Black Americans. As a White northerner, he was able to take a birds-eye view of the horrors of racism. In fact, he lived for a time in the South, in a deliberate attempt to grasp the psychology of the racist and to comprehend the experience of recipients of racism’s projected hatred. Yet, Neither Freud nor Sullivan attributed his theoretical formulations to the explicitly racist socio-political contexts in which they “grew up” professionally. Did America’s charged cultural divisions—particularly in relation to race—exert influence on Sullivan’s “me,” “not me” theorizing? And what of Freud? What was lost in his inability to court “Blackness”? If nothing else, America’s Presidential election of 2016 and the current COVID-19 pandemic that has seized our imagination and our collective sense of freedom, have thrust psychoanalytic thinking and practice to the forefront of recognizing and illuminating human frailty. How do you stand? As psychoanalysts, can we now internalize Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s declaration that, “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now” (1963, 1967)? I propose that psychoanalysis is not only our theory and practice, but also our lived experience in the now of our lives: the now that confronts us, the now in which we are deeply, urgently, embedded.

Keywords:

• psychoanalysis
• racism
• erasure
• Othering
• psychoanalytic institute
• “The fierce urgency of now,” COVID-19

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Notes on contributors

Cleonie White

Cleonie White, Ph.D., is a Fellow, Faculty member, and Supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology. She is an Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor at New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and is a Supervisor on the Faculty of the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. Dr. White is a member of the Editorial Board of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and is an Associate Board member of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Her interests and writing are in the areas of trauma and dissociation, race, class, the immigrant/foreigner Other, identity, and creativity in psychoanalysis. She maintains a private practice in New York City.