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

Abstract

This paper examines the problem of white liberal guilt from a Kleinian perspective, considering both the reparative potential of guilt in the depressive position, as well as the ways in which racial guilt can become diverted to an internal experience focused more on the self than on the harmed other, inspiring ways of thinking and acting that have little to do with repair. Drawing especially from the Kleinian concept of persecutory guilt, which describes the form guilt can take “when reparation is felt to be impossible”, I examine the consequences of white liberal guilt as expressed in the United States today. In particular, I argue that white liberal self-idealization and self-reproach – positions summarized as “this is not who we are” and “this is all that we are” – can function as two sides of a coin, grounded in splitting and in divergent yet related forms of exceptionalism. As an alternative, I propose thinking about reparation within the realm of the ordinary, and consider what this might entail.

This article is referred to by:

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

Giving In, Giving Up, and Being Blown to Smithereens: A Discussion of “‘When Reparation Is Felt to Be Impossible’: Persecutory Guilt and Breakdowns in Thinking and Dialogue about Race”

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

Notes

¹ This is my country of origin and the context I am most familiar with in terms of history and dynamics around race and racism, but I hope aspects of the ideas here may also resonate with colleagues from other parts of the world.

² While I am using these terms (liberal and progressive) somewhat interchangeably for the purposes of this paper, I do not mean this to obscure the real political differences they imply.

³ Mitchell was not writing about race or white guilt here, but about “guiltiness” more generally. Harris (2012) later used his concept of “guiltiness” to reflect on the more problematic aspects of white guilt.

⁴ While a detailed discussion of white shame is beyond the scope of this paper, I believe there is some overlap between shame and persecutory guilt, in the sense that both can be evoked in moments of exposure that threaten an idealized sense of self. See (Watkins, 2018; Grand, 2018), for more extended discussions of shame in the context of whiteness.

⁵ For example, the cost of reparations for slavery in the United States has been estimated at between 5.9 and 14.2 trillion dollars (Craemer, 2015), and the racial wealth gap continues to grow (Chetty et al., 2020).

⁶ As many writers and activists of color have argued, sometimes reparation may also involve ceding aspects of our own power and privilege in order for others who have been marginalized to lead.

⁷ This is a composite of my experiences at a number of psychoanalytic events on the topic of racism.

⁸ Recent work by Lynne Layton and others aimed at involving American psychoanalysts in dialogue and activism related to reparations for slavery serves as one meaningful example.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jane Caflisch

Jane Caflisch, Ph.D., is a candidate at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where she is a member of the Committee for Ethnicity, Race, Culture, Class and Language (CERCCL), ForAll, and the Intersectional Task Force. She is a former fellow of the American Psychoanalytic Association and of the Melanie Klein Trust, has written and presented on issues related to sexuality, gender, race, and whiteness, and is in private practice in New York.