psychoanalysis and racism: some further thoughts

Reich, W. (1946) The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Harmondsworth: Penguin,1975.

Richards, B. (ed.) (1989) Crises of the Self: Further Essays on Psychoanalysis andPolitics. London: Free Association Books.

Rodgers, T.C. (1960) The evolution of an active anti-Negro racist. PsychoanalyticalStudy of Society 1.

Rushdie, S. (1990) In good faith. In The Independent on Sunday, 4 February 1990.Rustin, M. (1991) Psychoanalysis, racism and anti-racism. In The Good Society and

the Inner World: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Culture. London: Verso.Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Sartre, J.P. (1948) Anti-Semite and Jew. New York: Schocken.Sherwood, R. (1980) The Psychodynamics of Race: Vicious and Benign Spirals.

Brighton: Harvester.Sivanandan, A. (1983) Challenging racism: strategies for the ’80s. Race and Class 25(2).Sivanandan, A. (1985) RAT and the degradation of black struggle. Race and Class

26(4).Sterba, R. (1947) Some psychological factors in Negro race-hatred and in anti-Negro

riots. In Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences (ed. G. Roheim).Ward, I. (1988) Introduction to Kovel, 1970.Wolfenstein, E.V. (1989) The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revol-

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PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RACISM:SOME FURTHER THOUGHTS

Events of the last 10 years or so since my original article was published canleave no doubt of the continuing power of racism, of the terrible conse-quences of treating people not just as different but as other to ourselves andless than human. They leave no doubt either as to how easy it seems to befor ordinary people, given the ‘right’ context, to slip into being not justbystanders to evil but active participants in it.

There is, I think, a certain naivety at work in my original article, a beliefthat psychoanalysis might help us to address this terrible problem. Sincewriting it I have moved a long way from such a position. Having started outtrying to use psychoanalytic ideas to think about social and political matters,I have come to accept a division between the world of the consulting roomand clinical practice and the political and social world. Whatever insightspsychoanalysis might have, whatever validity its theories may hold, these arenot to be applied to the world at large but are limited in application to theclinical encounter and to the immediate context of the individual.

Freud, it is often remarked, could be somewhat disdainful of clinical work,and his attempts to make a larger mark on the world through general theoriesof culture and society are understandable. But this does not mean we have toaccept them as true. Freud’s work moreover, it should be added, is oftentainted with its own racism, something I had not addressed in this paper.

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Freud and ‘the Savages’

Freud himself had nothing of substance to say on the subject of racism, eventhough he knew at first hand of the persecution of the Jews in centralEurope. Moreover, his own framework resorts at times to racial prejudice,ignorance and condescension. Frequently, Freud compares the adult‘neurotic’ not only to a child but to ‘primitive people’. What is perhaps hismajor ‘anthropological’ work, Totem and Taboo, published in 1913, is sub-titled ‘Some points of agreement between the mental lives of savages andneurotics’ (Freud 1913). Both groups, Freud claimed, believed in the‘omnipotence of thoughts’ and in magic, while in his ‘general theory ofneuroses’ he writes of ‘modern primitive peoples’ who, as a result of theirignorance and helplessness, are afraid of ‘every novelty and of many familiarthings which no longer cause us any anxiety today’ (Freud 1913, p. 406).Similarly, writing on the notion of some supposed ‘herd instinct’, involving‘a lack of emotional restraint, an incapacity for moderation and the inclina-tion to exceed every limit in the expression of emotion’, Freud declaredhimself ‘not surprised’ to find evidence for this among ‘savages’ (Freud 1921,p. 117).

At the same time, Freud would frequently employ the stereotype of the‘noble savage’. Thus Freud claims – one wonders on what basis he does so– that sexual inhibitions are less among ‘races at a low level of civilization. . . the lower strata of civilized races’, with the result that there are fewerneuroses. But what is given with one hand is more than taken away withthe other since the cost is ‘an extraordinary loss of the aptitude for culturalachievement’ (Freud 1921, p. 217).

One should note the dates of publication in each of these instances. Freudis writing all this well into the twentieth century. While the people at ‘higherlevels of civilization’ were slaughtering each other on the battlefields ofEurope, Freud was still writing about the supposed sexual inhibitions ofpeople he called ‘savages’ (Freud 1917, p. 198).

Freud in other words, the founder of psychoanalysis, despite his greatclaims to be a man of science, shared many of the unthinking prejudices ofhis time. It is not that such prejudices and stupidities vitiate the Freudianproject as such. Nevertheless, one must note that this aspect of Freud’sthinking has gone largely unremarked in the discourse of psychoanalysis. Aremarkable example of this to my mind can be found in the lecture byEdward Said on ‘Freud and the non-European’. One might have expectedsuch a great intellect and the scourge of what he called ‘orientalism’ – theprojection of Western values and prejudices on to the non-Western – to havesubjected Freud’s work to a reading from an anti-orientalist perspective, ashe had done with so many texts and discourses. But this is not what he does.Instead we find an examination of the idea of identity and, in particular,some thoughts around the notion that the founder of Judaism was not a Jew

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but an Egyptian. This is very interesting and it opens up the very notion of‘identity’ at a time when many would try to close it down, but it somehowfails to see the obvious in Freud’s treatment of the non-European (Said2003).

Fanon and Psychoanalysis

From time to time one hears it claimed that the revolutionary psychiatristFrantz Fanon, whom I mention in my original paper, is the example of howto approach racism psychoanalytically, of the value of a psychoanalytic‘reading’ of racism. While it is true that Fanon wrote in the introduction tohis classic text that only a psychoanalytic interpretation of ‘the blackproblem’ could account for the structure of the complex, it has to be stressedthat Fanon’s psychoanalysis is a highly idiosyncratic one. It is poetic,informed by philosophy, particularly phenomenology, critically self-reflexive, turned upon itself. At one point Fanon dismisses Freud’s notionof a universal Oedipus complex: ‘It would be relatively easy for me to show’,he says, ‘that in the French Antilles 97 per cent of families cannot produceone oedipal neurosis.’ Researchers, he comments, are so imbued with thecomplexes of their own society that they feel compelled to find them dupli-cated in the people they study. Fanon, in other words, is very far from beingan orthodox follower of psychoanalysis. In his hands, psychoanalysisbecomes something altogether different from the dogma that prevailedeither when he was alive or now. It is strange, therefore, to witness attemptsat the incorporation and accommodation of this radical spirit and revolu-tionary man into a psychoanalytic canon, even an ‘alternative’ one. (For afine intellectual biography of Fanon, see Macey 2000.)

Psychoanalysis and Anti-racism

In recent years psychoanalysis (or a version of it) has been brought to bearin trying to develop strategies for changing racism, particularly among youngpeople. This approach is most often associated with the work of Phil Cohenat the University of East London. I have written at length about this kindof approach elsewhere (Gordon 2001). Here I want to summarize myargument.

Drawing heavily on post-Kleinian developments and the idea of race asan ‘empty category’ put forward by Michael Rustin, the crux of Cohen’s(and others’) position seems to be this: racism does not become unconsciousbecause it is institutionalized; rather, racism becomes institutionalizedbecause it operates unconsciously, ‘behind the backs’ of the subjects whichit positions within these impersonal structures of power. The problem withsuch a schema is that racism is taken out of society and material reality andlodged very firmly in the minds, the unconscious minds, of individualsubjects. In this regard, this kind of thinking is very much in line with the



most orthodox of psychoanalysis which claims to find ‘inside’ individuals(whatever that might mean – the notion of an ‘internal world’ is always takenfor granted and never really put into question) what actually belongs insociety, in what psychoanalysis calls ‘the external world’. In the same veinand particularly germane to the present discussion, the refusal of psycho-analysis to acknowledge social and political reality, to see what is in front ofit, can be seen in the following story.

Like many analysts of her time, Melanie Klein carried out analyses of herown children. She began her son Erich’s analysis in Budapest in 1920 whenhe was 5 and continued it when she separated from her husband and movedto Berlin. There, Erich developed a phobia about going outside. Klein‘explained’ to Erich that his anxiety was due to his fantasies about havingsexual intercourse with his mother. Erich told his mother of a street that wasparticularly frightening to him because it filled with young ‘toughs’ whotormented him. Klein ignored this and, recalling that the street was filledwith large trees, interpreted these as phalluses and evidence of his continueddesire for his mother and of his fear of castration as a punishment. Yearslater, Erich’s elder brother Hans, also an analysand of his mother, told Erichthat the gang had in fact been a anti-Semitic gang that routinely attackedJewish children. Erich had never been told by his mother that he was Jewish.As the historian of psychotherapy Philip Cushman comments: ‘It is difficultto know what is more remarkable in this incident with Erich: Klein’sdismissal of, her almost phobic denial of, the “external” social realm, or herremarkable self-centredness’ (Cushman 1995). Klein, in other words, placedin the mind of her son that which fully belonged in the material world.Objective reality became a ‘state of mind’. Exactly the same criticism canbe levelled at those who today place racism inside the unconscious minds ofindividuals.

The question is not whether or not racism operates at an unconsciouslevel. There is clearly too much evidence to deny this. The question is ratherhow important is this unconscious working? Should it be, can it be, thefocus of anti-racist strategy? For many of today’s theorists, however, theunconscious has become all; nothing else really matters. Here we havereached the site of a psychoanalytic determinism, a fatalism which holdsthat we are not at all rational thinking beings, that we are, rather, driven allthe time by forces beyond our control. Our attachment to a belief or anideal, our cultural preferences – all these are to be explained by somesupposed psychoanalytic interpretation. There is no hope, then, except inthe form of psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic treatment. Anything else –political and social action – is doomed. It is this defeatism which is sodisempowering.

Paul Gordon

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References

Cushman, P. (1995) Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural Historyof Psychotherapy. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

Freud, S. (1913) Totem and Taboo. In SE, vol. 13. London: Hogarth Press.Freud, S. (1917) The taboo of virginity. In SE, vol. 11. London: Hogarth Press.Freud, S. (1921) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In SE, vol. 18.

London: Hogarth Press.Freud, S. (1921) The Question of Lay Analysis. In SE, vol. 20. London: Hogarth

Press.Gordon, P. (2001) Psychoanalysis and racism: the politics of defeat. Race and Class

42(4): 17–34.Macey, D. (2000) Frantz Fanon: A Life. London: Granta.Said, E. (2003) Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso.



psychoanalysis and racism: some further thoughts

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