The Child Outside the Door: Primal Scene, Caesura, and the Primary Trauma of Race

ABSTRACT

We are supposedly a “postracial” America, yet we cannot contain our own excess, cannot keep the unmetabolized beta elements of our racial history out of the bedroom or let race stay in the bedroom so the mature genital couple can do what it pleases. Not only do we surveil, police, and monitor race’s own primal scene but also we continuously break and enter into its most intimate chambers, guns drawn, tanks crashing in, in order to prevent the primal scene from ever taking place. This article explores the idea of race in America as denied its own primal scene and the ways in which, contrary to the importance to Bion (1991) of preventing “someone who KNOWS from filling the empty space” (p. 578), we cannot allow race to hold open its own empty space, find its own manifestations of O. I draw from the work of Wilfred Bion, Fred Moten, Jean Laplanche, and others to attempt to theorize the complexities of “postracial” America’s relationship with race vis-à-vis the primal scene.

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Kim Rosenfield

Kim Rosenfield, L.C.S.W., is a poet and psychoanalytically oriented licensed clinical social worker in private practice in New York City.