Psychoanalysis and Racism: The Politics of Defeat

1 Perry Anderson , ‘Components of the national culture’ in Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn (eds), Student Power: problems, diagnosis, action (Harmonds-worth, Penguin, 1969), p. 259-259.

2 Terry Eagleton , Literary Theory: an introduction (Oxford, Blackwell, 1983), p. 123-123.

3 ‘Claims of psychoanalysis to the interest of non-psychological sciences’, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (S.E.) Vol. XIII (London, The Hogarth Press, 1913).

4 Sigmund Freud, ‘On narcissism: an introduction’, S.E. Vol. XIV, 1914, p. 75.

5 Sigmund Freud, S.E. Vol. XVI, 1916, p. 406.

6 Sigmund Freud, ‘Group psychology’, S.E. Vol. XVIII, 1921, p. 117.

7 Sigmund Freud, ‘The question of lay analysis’, S.E. Vol. XX, 1921, p. 217.

8 Sigmund Freud, ‘The taboo of virginity’, S.E. Vol. XI, 1917, p. 198. A few years later, Freud’s close follower and later biographer, Ernest Jones, would rehearse the standard psychoanalytic claims about ‘ignorant savages’ who were again likened to children and neurotics in his own paper, ‘Mother-right and the sexual ignorance of savages’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (Vol. VI, no. 2, April 1925).

9 Farhad Dalal , ‘The racism of Jung’, Race & Class (Vol. 29, no. 3, 1988). Dalal’s argument notwithstanding, it may be argued that Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious at least recognises the existence of a psychological or emotional unit other than the individual which has primacy in Freudian theory.

10 Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents, S.E. Vol. XXI.

11 Sudhir Kakar , ‘Psychoanalysis and non-Western cultures’, International Review of Psychoanalysis (Vol. 12, 1985), pp. 441-442.

12 Geza Roheim , Psychoanalysis and Anthropology: culture, personality and the unconscious (New York, International Universities Press, 1950).

13 Ibid., p. 13.

14 Ibid., emphasis in original.

15 Ibid. p. 491.

16 O. Mannoni , Prospero and Caliban: the psychology of colonisation (London, Methuen, 1956). The English translation carried a largely laudatory foreword by another former colonial administrator, Philip Mason, later to be Director of the Institute of Race Relations.

17 Ibid., pp. vi-vii.

18 Frantz Fanon , Black Skin, White Masks (London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1968).

19 Ibid., p. 65, emphasis in original.

20 Ibid., p. 9.

21 Ibid., pp. 107-8.

22 For example, the psychoanalyst Fakhry Davids writes, ‘Had this approach [British object-relations] been known to Fanon … I have no doubt he would have recognised it as a natural home for his psychological project’. (‘Frantz Fanon: the struggle for inner freedom’, Free Associations (Vol. 6, no. 2, 1996), p. 225-225). For a more balanced account of Fanon’s relationship to psychoanalysis, see David Macey, Frantz Fanon: a life (London, Granta Books, 2000), pp. 192-8.

23 See my ‘Souls in armour: thoughts on psychoanalysis and racism’, British Journal of Psychotherapy (Vol. 10, no. 3, 1991), for a discussion of these.

24 The spelling is that commonly used by Kleinians and others to denote an unconscious functioning as distinct from the conscious fantasy of day-dreaming, and so on.

25 J. Chasseguet-Smirgel , ‘Reflections of a psychoanalyst upon the Nazi biocracy and genocide’, International Review of Psycho-Analysis (no. 14, 1990).

26 Joel Kovel , White Racism: a psychohistory (London, Free Association Books, 1988).

27 Ibid., p. xcvi.

28 The aims were described as ‘developing programmes of research, education and community arts examining issues of race and ethnicity in both a local and a global context’. The Centre is particularly important in drawing in a wide number of academics, both from within Britain and from outside, and in self-consciously seeking to develop a practice outside the academy, through projects in the local community and with people working in education.

29 Philip Cohen and Harwant S. Bains (eds), Multi-racist Britain (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1988).

30 Philip Cohen, ‘The perversions of inheritance: studies in the making of multi-racist Britain’, in ibid., pp. 9-118; p. 12.

31 Ibid., p. 46.

32 M. Rustin , ‘Psychoanalysis, racism and anti-racism’, in The Good Society and the Inner World: psychoanalysis, politics and culture (London, Verso, 1991), p. 68-68.

33 ‘The perversions of inheritance’, op. cit., p. 88.

34 Philip Cohen , ‘Laboring under whiteness’, in Ruth Frankenberg (ed.), Displacing Whiteness: essays in social and cultural criticism (Durham, NC and London, Duke University Press, 1997), p. 247-247.

35 Philip Cohen , ‘Home rules: some reflections on racism and nationalism in everyday life’ (London, University of East London New Ethnicities Unit, 1993), p. 10-10.

36 ‘Laboring under whiteness’, op. cit., p. 248.

37 ‘Home rules’, op. cit., p. 44.

38 ‘Laboring under whiteness’, op. cit., p. 247.

39 Philip Cohen , ‘Beyond the community romance’, Soundings (no. 5, spring 1997). p. 46-46.

40 ‘Laboring under whiteness’, op. cit., p. 251.

41 ‘Home rules’, op. cit., p. 19.

42 ‘The perversions of inheritance’, op. cit., p. 62.

43 Philip Cohen , ‘Reason, racism and the popular monster’, in Barry Richards (ed.), Crises of the Self: further essays on psychoanalysis and politics (London, Free Association Books, 1989), p. 245-245.

44 Rustin, op. cit., pp. 71-9.

45 V. N. Volosinov , Freudianism: a critical sketch, trans. I. R. Titunik (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 24-24.

46 Philip Cushman , Constructing the Self, Constructing America: a cultural history of psychotherapy (Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley, 1995), pp. 201-202.

47 Michael Ignatieff , The Warrior’s Honour: ethnic war and the modern conscience (London, Vintage, 1998), pp. 168-169.

48 ‘The perversions of inheritance’, op. cit., p. 94.

49 ‘Laboring under whiteness’, op. cit., p. 264.

50 A similar posture is taken up by another educator, Roger Hewitt of the International Centre for Intercultural Studies at the University of London’s Institute of Education. In his report for Greenwich Council, he places great emphasis on the notion of ‘unfairness to whites’ resulting from anti-racist policies and, in the accompanying video, several interviewees are allowed to make completely unchallenged and uncontextualised claims to the effect that white people are now the victims - of anti-racism. See Roger Hewitt, Routes of Racism: the social basis of racist action (Stoke-on-Trent, Trentham Books, 1996). For a critique of Hewitt’s report, see ‘Getting through? New aproaches to tackling youth racism’, in CARF (October/November 1997).

51 Rustin, op. cit.

52 ‘The perversions of inheritance’, op. cit., p. 25, emphasis in original.

53 Ibid.

54 ‘Reason, racism and the popular monster’, op. cit., p. 248.

55 NIMBYism refers to opposition by people to a particular development or project taking place in their locality; not on grounds of principle but because they don’t want it near where they live.

56 ‘Home rules’, op. cit., p. 45.

57 The idea that racism, and in particular the Nazi genocide, is a logical consequence of the Enlightenment and modernity is also a crucial aspect of Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis set out in Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1989).

58 A. Sivanandan , ‘La trahison des clercs’, Race & Class (Vol. 37, no. 3, 1996), pp. 65-70, p. 68-68.

59 Marshall Berman , All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: the experience of modernity (London, Verso, 1982), pp. 34-35. Cohen manages to find the prison even in the climbing frame of a school playground: ‘A play frame that has become a maximum security prison is magically turned back into a potential space of imaginative freedom, associated with the power of surveillance.’‘Forbidden Games: race, gender and class conflicts in playground culture’ (London, Centre for New Ethnicities Research, 1997), p. 38.

60 It is worth noting, I think, that this not what Benedict Anderson who coined the term ‘imagined communities’ meant. In the book of that title, he writes: ‘In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.’ (Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London, Verso, 1983)), p. 15-15.

61 ‘Beyond the community romance’, op. cit., p. 39. All this is very much in keeping with much orthodox psychoanalytic politics which, while claiming a special insight or truth, in fact are so often nothing other than deeply reactionary positions. Three brief examples may suffice to make the point. The respected psychoanalysts Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel and Bela Grunberger in their critique of Reichian currents in psychoanalysis dismiss the very idea of fundamental social change as an illusion and even liken political ideology to the fantasy of schizophrenics. In 1968, at the height of the student rebellions in France and elsewhere, Lacan told students at the Sorbonne that ‘You need a Master.’ And, in a recent collection of essays, a respected psychoanalytic organisational consultant, Eric Miller, speaks of the 1984-85 miners’ strike in Britain as a ‘national soap opera’ which allowed ‘wonderful support for our schizoid defences’.

62 That there was really only one ‘grand narrative’ being jettisoned - Marxism - was made clear by the originator of the term, Jean-Francë ois Lyotard. See Perry Anderson , The Origins of Post-Modernism (London, Verso, 1999), pp. 29-31.