Psychoanalysis and black lives

ABSTRACT

This paper suggests that being black in a white majority world attracts powerful racist projections whose cumulative effect can be deeply traumatising, a problem that has not received due attention in mainstream psychoanalysis. This theme is developed through a description of how this difficulty, and the patient's inner response to it, came to light at the beginning of an analysis. The patient, who grew up as the only brown-skinned child in his white family and community, and without a father, suffered from a lifelong preoccupation with men's genitals. On the couch he experienced extreme bodily discomfort that he sought to relieve through violent sexual thrusting; the paper describes how the stance of negative capability was employed to investigate the dynamics underpinning this. This brought to light the patient's experience of racist projection and intolerance on the part of his objects, as well as his identification with them. The importance of recognising and naming these experiences, gradually and as evidence permits, are seen as central in engaging him. The paper ends by discussing how the analyst's blackness may have facilitated this development, and underlines the urgency of addressing the neglect of these matters in the mainstream of our largely white profession.

KEYWORDS:

• Blackness
• racist projection
• internal racism

Notes

1 Already during the colonial era, Fanon observed that the policeman brings violence into the lives of “colonized” black persons.

2 I use the term generically to refer to members of disempowered non-white groups in majority white settings. Such groups are not homogeneous – there are also differences between them (see Hall 1992).

3 The Talk, Channel 4, currently available in the UK at https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-talk/on-demand/71609-001 (15 August 2020). The programme was made as part of the Black Lives Matter campaign.

4 For a troubling glimpse of black children’s responses in the doll studies, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZryE2bqwdk.

5 After Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, Gaslight, in which a husband manipulates his wife into believing she is going mad by gradually turning down the gas and then insisting that her perception of the light dimming is a figment of her imagination.