In most of my psychoanalytic work on gender, race, sexuality, class, and their intersections within particular regimes of power, I have argued that taking up a position in relation to a culture or subculture’s normative way of configuring social categories generally requires one to engage in splitting processes. The categories themselves tend to be conceived in binary relation: male/female; masculine/feminine; Black/white; straight/gay. And these binaries are not merely defined as “different;” rather, they exist in hierarchic relation: one is good, encompassing all that the culture or subculture deems valuable, and the other is bad and/or of lesser cultural value (which is precisely why diversity initiatives are not the same as antiracist initiatives).
What I’ve generally argued is that when you look at how the categories operate, you find that they tend to legislate ways of being human, ways of expressing emotion, and ways of relating to other humans. In exchange for being loved and socially legible, we tend to take up, consciously or unconsciously, identification with the way power hierarchies define the class, race, gender, and sexuality norms “proper” to where we are socially located. In so doing, we are encouraged to split off other ways of being, feeling, and relating. The split binary structures become narcissistic mirror images of each other, deprived of the full range of human possibility. Culturally ideal norms of, for example, masculinity and femininity were (and sadly still mostly are) monstrous distortions of human possibility. Thus, to take up an identification with the category of “nonbinary,” as so many younger people are doing, seems to me to be at least in part a refusal to be restricted to the ways of being and relating that are culturally sanctioned as “proper” for cisgender men and women. The category “Mixt” does similar facilitating work for those who cannot and do not wish to locate themselves in the Black/white binary that haunts U.S. history and everyday life.
Many of the identity categories that rest on splitting are conditioned, at their core, by a split fundamental to our neoliberal US social reality: a version of autonomy that splits off/disavows its roots in dependency, a defensive autonomy whose split off binary is a despised version of dependency conceived of as having no autonomy/agency. As defensive autonomy, once idealized only for white straight men, became the social ideal demanded of ever greater segments of the population, dependency, vulnerability, and relationship have been increasingly devalued and rendered shameful. Even our COVID experience barely changed that dynamic, and it is significant that the part of the Biden legislative agenda that did not pass was the part focused on care. Happily, some of our theorists have begun to challenge clinical technique that shores up the sovereign, entrepreneurial neoliberal subject at the expense of locating subjectivity within the larger context of social structures and inequalities.
In my description above of the split fundamental to neoliberalism, I slipped in the concept “disavowal.” To be honest, I am not quite sure how to define the difference between disavowal and splitting, except insofar as the latter, in its classical Kleinian definition, always involves keeping the good separate from the bad, whereas what is disavowed and banished from consciousness can be anything that has simply been too painful to know. Then, of course, there is the Sullivanian concept of “dissociation” – good-me, bad-me, not-me – which perhaps mixes splitting (good/bad) and disavowal (not-me). Not to mention the Bionian concept of attacks on linking, which I have drawn on to critique the way that most psychoanalytic schools split off the social world from theory and practice.
For me, the confusion between splitting and these other concepts is most present in thinking about how racism operates in individuals and institutions, because, for example, what is too painful to know often involves not wanting to know how capable one is of doing harm, of BEING destructive and bad. Bad me? Not me? And then, of course, the reverse: when we split off/dissociate/disavow and project the badness outward, we become afraid that the other will destroy us, what Davoine and Gaudillière have called “kill or be killed” and Jessica Benjamin has called “only one shall live.” This dynamic, which we might also call backlash (against the threat of catastrophic change? Against the loss of the power to define what psychoanalysis is?), pervades psychoanalytic institutions that have been trying to take up antiracism work in the past few years.
In Look! A White!, George Yancy calls on white people to practice double consciousness, by which he means consciously to become other to ourselves, to develop the capacity to see ourselves as Black people see us. This requires countering the splitting processes that render Whites as superior and Blacks as inferior (or worse, as non-human/not-me in relation to the normative White human subject). Because, however, whiteness is not an add-on to white subjectivity but rather constitutive of it, that is, because unconscious splitting processes, disavowals, dissociations, attacks on linking are at the very heart of BECOMING white, double consciousness also requires reckoning with the fact that much of what white people do, how we live, most of our social policies, unconsciously replicate and fortify individual and systemic racism, reinforce dominant split Black/white binary relations. We ought not sidestep the aggression that is part of all these versions of splitting: the process of becoming white is violent. As I have turned my psychoanalytic attention toward group, institutional, and political life these past few years, I have found that large group disavowals – which promote a perverse, lying relation to reality along with intersubjective splitting processes in which one group is “good” and the other “bad” – perhaps most aptly describes our current microscopic and macroscopic world.