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

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Addendum

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexandra de Rementeria

Alexandra de Rementeria is Principal 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.