A Discussion of “‘When Reparation Is Felt to Be Impossible’: Persecutory Guilt and Breakdowns in Thinking and Dialogue about Race”

Abstract

Jane Caflisch’s discussion (this issue) of white liberal guilt is recognized as a bold and ground-breaking exploration of how the Kleinian concepts of paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions may shed light on the question of reparation for racial injustice. I suggest that, in addition to persecutory and depressive guilt, melancholic guilt also operates in racist mind-sets, and constitutes the more serious obstacle to reparation. Guilt of this sort prompts defensive repetition, thereby perpetuating racist mind-sets and acts and taking one further and further from the possibility of reparation. On the other hand, the more normal interplay between persecutory and depressive guilt, which is illustrated through a clinical vignette, is seen as opening up a path to reparation. Brief vignettes are offered illustrating points about melancholic guilt and how a culture of facing rather than evading persecutory guilt enabled an opportunity for reparation to be recognized and used.

This article refers to:

“When Reparation Is Felt to Be Impossible”: Persecutory Guilt and Breakdowns in Thinking and Dialogue about Race

View responses to this article:

Who Are “We” – At the Limits of Rupture and Repair: Reply to Cyrus, Davids, and Swartz

Notes

¹ I say loosely because, although its depiction as racism works readily when discussing white guilt as an aspect of white-on-Black racism, the model of internal racism attempts to account more generally for the inner dynamics between members of any in-group and its corresponding out-group. In some instances of this dyad, the term may be misleading (e.g., when the out-group is of a different social class or gender orientation), but I retain it because I think the term racist interchange captures a range of object relationships, which we are familiar with in its incarnation as racism, that characterizes the range of relationships involved.

² The Afrikaner Nationalist Party conceived of, implemented and enforced the apartheid system in South Africa.

³ The National Party was not in power then.

⁴ The themes of persecution and despair both appeared in Wednesday’s session.

⁵ I am grateful to my German colleague, Dr Veronika Grüneisen, for introducing me to Halberstadt-Freud’s ideas.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

M. Fakhry Davids

M. Fakhry Davids, M.Sc. (Clin Psych), is a psychoanalyst in full-time clinical practice. He is a Fellow and Training Analyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society, Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London, Visiting Fellow in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, and Visiting Lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic. He is the author of Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)