RACISM: BEING IDEAL

Abstract

‘Race’ is both an empty category and one of the most destructive and powerful forms of social categorization. How is this paradox to be explained and how are its negative consequences for human lives to be resisted? (Rustin 1991 : 57).

Psychoanalysis is limited in what it can say about social categories. It can say something in general about the process of categorizing. Categorizing is a ubiquitous process, which is both a powerful tool for civilization and also one of the most destructive forces of oppression. The way social categories are used is a social phenomenon. However, in considering race as one example of these destructive forms of stereotyping, I shall argue that the organization of the individual mind is a basis on which the organization of social categories necessarily depends. I shall detail the model of racism which Freud hinted at, and then use racism as one example of the destructive and narcissistic form of stereotyping.

Notes

1. This might be thought to be merely a model of social role‐playing, but it is more than this. Psychoanalytically, the ideal role model is an unconscious representation of a significant individual, a loved one, kept safe, and deriving from the past.

2. Freud said it was an identification with the father’s ideal, rather than the father’s actual behaviour.

3. This of course changed with Freud’s structural model in 1923, when although derived from the external authority figures, his theory of the super‐ego was on an internal dynamic structure. I shall not go into the conceptual connections between the ego‐ideal and the super‐ego, but stick to Freud’s descriptions of it in relation to his group psychology.

4. This also fits with an object‐relations model of psychoanalysis, which of course derived to a major extent from these ideas. Melanie Klein took her notion of ‘internal objects’ from this kind of introjective process to which Freud gave considerable weight at this time.

5. Although Turquet (1975) regarded a loss of individuality as a threat to anyone in a large group, the threat is probably particularly a specific feature of these kinds of unstructured primitive groups.

6. Whereas in ‘Totem and taboo’, Freud was more interested in the guilt about crowd behaviour, and how group patricide led to the invention of restraints and civilization, in 1921 he was more interested in the way a person could change in a crowd to become amoral.

7. This is the kind of leader who can allow his followers to have their own skill and to bring it out of them without having to compete and to be as good or better.

8. These kinds of description resonate with Bion’s work group and basic assumption groups, but in a different conceptual key. I would argue that I am re‐translating a lot of Bion’s (1961) observations back into the historical language that Freud used.

9. It is probably some such process which realized the kind of coercion and group conformity which Asch (1952) and Milgram (1964) described .

10. The need to accept reality is necessary not only in working groups but also in social or leisure groups in order for people to get on. Even if they do not have a prescribed task, other than to enjoy getting along, reality, time, individuality and so on must be accepted.

11. Jaques (1955) also tried to distinguish two kinds of identification in groups. He used the distinction between introjective and projective forms of identification, and believed that Freud had already described such a difference without naming it. However, I think the process is more complex than Jaques assumed, and although his model maybe easier, it is, in my view, less accurate.

12. The fuller accounts will be published in another paper on ‘Tolerance and intolerance’.

13. I am not considering here the even more complex racial identities that are based on an apparent inferiority. That is to do with the space I have here; it is also because I have no usefully illustrative, clinical experience with patients from such ethnic groups.