What Happens When We Talk to Each Other: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Race and Other Difficult Conversations

Abstract

Political, racial, cultural, religious: disagreements abound. From one-on-one to groups, from government officials to entire nations, differences of opinion cause arguments, differences of opinion cause wars. How might we look psychoanalytically at the ever-increasing difficulty of facing one another to speak of that which touches us at the core of who we are?

Keywords:

• racism
• “Parasitic Whiteness,” anti-Semitism
• controversy
• trust
• tolerance

Introduction

Nothing could be more timely now, as unfortunate as that is, than a consideration of how people interact with each other, enter into dialogue with each other, when the topic is exceedingly painful, polarizing, communal, and ongoing. On October 11, 2022, a Scientific Program at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYSPI) took place in which Drs. Leon Hoffman and Paula Christian-Kliger considered just how such dialogue tends to take place, in what contexts, to what good versus what detriment, both within and without the psychoanalytic community. The specific foci were racism and the variable meanings of “anti-racism,” “Whiteness,” “othering,” and the like. And their discussion took into account key components of these focal points, components such as history, trust, tolerance, essentialism, the making of meaning, and more.

Why this topic? Why this format? Why these particular speakers? On January 14, 2020, Dr. Donald Moss presented a paper at NYPSI entitled “On Having Whiteness” which was subsequently published in JAPA (Moss, 2021), a paper in which the notion of “Parasitic Whiteness” was explored. Distinguishing this notion from that of whiteness (lower case) as used to reference a racial identity, Moss spoke of “an acquired multidimensional condition: (1) a way of being, (2) a mode of identity, (3) a way of knowing and sorting the objects constituting one’s human surround” (p. 356). Ascribing the condition to those—White people, generally speaking—having “malignant,” “voracious,” “perverse” inclinations to “target nonwhite peoples” (p. 355), Moss spoke of the chronicity of this incurable state from its however modest inception to its full-blown opportunistic expansion. In so doing, he incited an extraordinarily dichotomous and intense response from his listeners—however subdued it may have been the evening of the presentation itself—that took the form of prolonged controversy both live and published. This, in part, provoked my own proposal to the Program Committee of NYPSI that a series of Scientific Programs, as our meetings are called, be devoted not to the Moss controversy per se, but to the kind of divisiveness it encapsulated, the deeply acrimonious discord infiltrating so many arenas from the societal to the academic and psychoanalytic. In October, November, and December of 2021, such a series took place which included three meetings entitled “Truth and Reconciliation,” “Of Fear and Strangers,” and “Racism and Anti-Semitism: Psychoanalytic Reflections on ‘De-ghettoizing.’” Among the participants of the third of these meetings was one who had felt sufficiently disturbed by Moss’ phrase “Parasitic Whiteness” to publish a Letter to the Editor of JAPA (Hoffman et al., 2022), in which he differentiated between that term, not unlike the denigrating phrase “Jewish parasite” historically used to justify the persecution of Jews, and another of a different, not similarly degrading, kind: “White supremacy.”

Indeed, Leon Hoffman had long been exceedingly interested in divisiveness (political, racial, or other) and he had written a great deal on populism as on the history of racism in the Western world, as well as on the contributions of psychoanalysis to our understanding of social issues. And in writing of his response to Moss’ article, he was studying the dangers of an unconscious pervasive antisemitism in our society. It struck me that his way of thinking about degradation and exclusion was interesting not only for its content, but for its dissimilarity from that of another analyst known to me from a series of weekly online meetings organized over a period of some months by Gilbert Kliman: Paula Christian-Kliger. My great admiration of and deep respect for Dr. Christian-Kliger, her way of speaking about controversy, seemed to provide an excellent opportunity for two very distinct approaches to the issues at hand—group polarization, racism and anti-racism in the context of psychoanalysis, and exclusion of all sorts—to be brought to the fore.

I was aware of the work of Jon Mills, of the University of Essex in the UK and the Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University, in the United States, who had come out strongly in recent years about what he sees as a very troubling turn in psychoanalysis. Situating this turn “as drenched in woke ideology” (Mills, 2023, para. 3), citing the results of ApsaA and Division 39 studies that conclude “the entire field of psychoanalysis in America is systemically racist” (Mills, 2023, para. 1), Mills has disputed the findings of these studies referring to their “ideological contamination,” claiming the former “based on fallacious premises” and “severely methodologically flawed” and the latter “partisan, ungeneralizable, and [lacking in] scientific merit” (Mills, 2023, para. 2). Arguing that “the two largest American psychoanalytic organizations just blew a quarter of a million dollars as a diversity, equity, and inclusion ruse designed to placate political correctness and earn brownie points” (Mills, 2023), Mills claimed that the studies attribute White supremacy “to all whites regardless of class” and “clumsily [lump them] into the same sociopolitical category as white supremacist fringe groups and white nationalists” (Mills, 2023). “[I]f you question the conclusion that is treated as an unquestioned proposition […],” Mills has written, “then you are simply smeared as a white supremacist as proof for asking the question in the first place” (Mills, 2023, para. 3).

In this era of extraordinary violence, both in this country and internationally, in this time of unfathomable school shootings and other mass murders, terrorism and war in the Middle East and elsewhere abroad, Hoffman’s use of the compelling words “we don’t trust you” ring loud and clear. We recognize the movement against discrimination as an emblematic call for equality on all fronts. We recognize the racist/antiracist dichotomy as expressive of the struggle—on multiple levels of function and dysfunction extending from the narrowest interpersonal to the broadest intercontinental—for power and supreme recognition, on the one hand, and for egalitarianism, impartiality, and justice, on the other. And therein lay the ultimate prize of this meeting: Not only the content, but the very tenor of the discussion itself displayed the essence of all that is so difficult to attain in so volatile a frame. Rather than exhibiting any kind of argumentation, any kind of aggression in tone or in matter, Drs. Hoffman and Christian-Kliger demonstrated a level of collegiality, a degree of respect, that elicited soon after a great many calls for more—more such meetings, more understanding of how such a discursive tone was achieved, of just what preempted any volatility, any aggressive forms of disagreement (overt or discrete) before they might have taken hold. This is certainly not to say that everyone in attendance agreed with all that was said or that the speakers themselves agreed at all times with each other. And one cannot but doubt that every reader of the two articles that follow will be in accord with everything they will now read. But it is to say that how the ideas are explored, the manner in which they are investigated, already takes one to a place very far from where so many have been and are at this time. And from this, as well as from all else that lies herein, one is likely to conclude that a great deal is gained.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lois Oppenheim

Lois Oppenheim, Ph.D., is University Distinguished Scholar and Chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Montclair State University. She is Scholar Associate Member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and Honorary Member of the Psychoanalytic Society of the William Alanson White Institute. She has authored or edited fifteen books, including For Want of Ambiguity: Order and Chaos in Art, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (co-authored) and Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion, awarded the Courage to Dream Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association. Other titles include A Curious Intimacy: Art and Neuro-Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalysis and the Artistic Endeavor.