Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups 9781501726699

Citation preview

HEALING IDENTITIES

A VOLUME 10: THE SERIES

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND SOCIAL THEORY, EDITED BY C. FRED ALFORD JAMES M. GLASS

A full list of titles in the series appears at the end of the book.

HEALING IDENTITIES BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT AND THE POLITICS OF GROUPS

CYNTHIA BURACK

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright© 2004 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 5I2 East State Street, Ithaca, New York I485o. First published 2004 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2004

Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burack, Cynthia. Healing identities : Black feminist thought and the politics of groups I Cynthia Burack. p. em. -(Psychoanalysis and social theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8oi4-4I46-3 (alk. paper) - ISBN o-8oi4-8937-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Pschoanalysis and feminism. 2. African American women -Psychology. 3· Group identity. I. Title. II. Series. BFI 75 +F45 B87 2oo4 I50.I9' 5'o82-dC22 2003024997 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing Paperback printing

IO

IO

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

2

I

2 I

FOR LAREE , WHO IS HOPEFU L

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

...

IX

I

I

Psychoanalysis, Race, and Racism

IO

2

From Psychoanalysis to Political Theory

3

Reparative Group Leadership

35 62

4

Conflict and Authenticity

89

5

Bonding and Solidarity

115

6

Coalitions and Reparative Politics .

142

Notes

169

Index

199

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In I 990, Evelyn Torton-Beck posed a question to me about the relative absence of theorizing about race in my first book on feminism and psychoanalysis. This book is my delayed response to that question. I thank Fred Alford, Mark Bracher, Jill Bystydziensky, Colleen Heenan, LeeJenkins,Jyl Josephson, Debra Walker King, Laree Martin, Steven Schacht, Victor Wolfenstein, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, and Diana Zoelle for reading and responding to the manuscript, in whole or in part. I am also grateful to Claudia Tate for her generous comments. Students of psychoanalysis and literary criticism will miss her unique perspective, and I am glad to have had the opportunity to work with her. For their intelligence, perseverance, and forthrightness, I recognize the members of my spring I 999 graduate seminar in Black Feminist Thought at the University of Florida. These women challenged me and one another to consider the ways in which class, sexual orientation, and racial identity, as well as gender, complicate and enrich experience and analysis. I wish them all good luck with their own academic endeavors. At Ohio State, I relied on the assistance of Melanie Mal try and Lu Zhang to prepare the manuscript for publication. I received support for this project in the form of summer research grants from the Department of Political Science and the Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research at the University of Florida, and in the form of a travel grant from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. I thank the members of the Women's Studies Program at The George Washington University for their generosity and collegiality during summer hiatuses. I am particularly grateful to Cynthia Harrison and Phyllis Palmer for extending friendship and for welcoming me to use their offices. An excerpt from chapter I was published previously as "Sexuality in Black and White." It is reprinted with permission from The Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, vol. 2, no. 1 (spring 1997). Copyright

X

ACKNOWlEDGMENTS

1997 by The Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved. An excerpt from chapter 2 appeared under the title "Re-Kleining Feminist Psychoanalysis" in a Special Feature of Feminism and Psychology, vol. 12, no. 1 (February 2002). Chapter 3 was published as "Crossing Boundaries: Black Feminism as Leadership Theory." Reprinted from Gender and Psychoanalysis, vol. 2, no. 3 Ouly 1997) by permission oflnternational Universities Press. Finally, an excerpt from chapter 6 appeared as "The Dream of Common Differences: Coalitions, Progressive Politics, and Black Feminist Thought," Contemporary Justice Review vol. 2, no. 2 (1999), http:// www.tandf.co.uk. That article also appears in Forging Radical Alliances across Difference: Coalition Politics for the New Millennium, ed. Jill Bystydziensky and Steven Schacht (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).

HEALING IDENTITIES

INTRODUCTION

A NOTE ABOUT POLITICS

No less a political observer than Henry Adams remarked in the early twentieth century that politics can be understood as the "systematic organization of hatreds." 1 In fact, hatreds are not always terribly well organized, but Adams's comment nonetheless captures a key reality of political life. Group hatred is "like a sturdy weed: you can weed several times a day and, in the morning, there it is again." 2 Groups matter, in part because of the vast harm those motivated by group identifications can do. Since the end of the cold war, political thinkers of many stripes have turned away from a perspective on world politics driven by a binary worldpower perspective and have paid increasing attention to a multiplicity of ethnic, racial, religious, and other identity groups. The relations among these groups constitute the complex fabric of politics as we know it today. 3 In many respects, the renewed interest among political thinkers in groups and in the relations between them is consistent with longstanding feminist commitments to social justice and a multicultural recognition of inequalities between groups. However, there are significant differences between feminist and mainstream political attention to groups. One difference is certainly the expectations-or perhaps the emphases-that generally attend group relations among feminist and mainstream scholars of politics. Feminists tend to stress the coalitional political and social justice opportunities created by groups, while mainstream political thinkers tend to stress the violent, dangerous, and unstable aspects of groups. All are right, of course; in group relations people can exhibit both extraordinary forms of cooperation and seemingly irrational forms of contentiousness. Implicitly and explicitly, many political observers' questions about groups concern the context in which specific, and usually unexpected, crises arise between antagonists. We may consult theories of group be-

2

INTRODUCTION

havior for the answers to these questions. Yet, as comprehensive and elegant as it may be, much of the general theory at our disposal might not help us to understand why this particular group turns against this specific foe at this historical moment. Or why that hatred simmers over time. Although our attempts to forge understanding from literal chaos will fail without it, such theory might not help us to grasp the ways in which the general and the particular characteristics of groups intersect and interact in culture and history. "To understand how and why identity can be manipulated and how and why threats to identity can evoke the most virulent and violent defenses of 'the self' necessitates an examination of the links between individual psychological constructions of identity and the mediating forces of culture, leadership, and history." 4 In this book, I acknowledge both cooperative and hostile aspects of groups by examining identity group discourse-the public "speech" that group members produce about their own and other groups. Identity group discourses give students of groups information about processes of group formation and the feelings that attend group membership. Group discourses constitute perhaps the most accessible source of information about the interplay of the political and the psychological in the identity groups to which people are committed in everyday social life. They also help make sense of the ways in which cultural contexts of group membership can vary enormously, creating seedbeds of hatred of or neutrality toward those outside one's own group. 5 If identity groups are key political actors, as even critics of identity politics would no doubt agree they are, the discourses created by these groups are political texts that can help us decipher what some might refer to in shorthand as the "mind" of the group. 6 Deciphering the dialectical creation and interpretation of discourse need not-indeed, should not-be reductive, either in attributing to individuals within a group particular psychic processes, thoughts, or desires or in ignoring that there are individual members within groups. 7 My goals in this book are several, and while they are not all primarily political goals, they are all political in the long run. I encourage feminists to consider psychoanalytic theories of groups for engaging the psychodynamics of collective intellectual and political works. I hope this book contributes to feminist and other sociopolitical thinking about the variations, as well as the regularities, of group dynamics. Groups and their discourses are not the same, even when they share predictable psychodynamic patterns and processes. Social and historical circumstances always differentiate identity groups, and these circumstances manifest themselves in group discourse. Finally, I want to bridge the disciplinary gulf that separates the study of groups from the studies of discourse most often found in literature, Ian-

INTRODUCTION

3

guage, theology, history, and cultural studies. Scholars in the humanistic disciplines increasingly apply poststructuralist and Lacanian modes of analysis to texts. Here, I apply a quite different tradition of psychoanalytic thought to a set of psychopolitical questions about groups. Depending upon the reader's perspective, this choice may seem either novel or regressive. The insights I highlight include the importance of language and the conviction that shared social contexts discursively shape the identities and belief systems of political actors. Both of these insights prevail throughout the psychoanalytic traditions and contemporary political thought. 8 Why study identity group discourse rather than group behavior? A focus on discourse assumes some relationship between what groups "say" and what they "do," and studies of group discourse reaffirm such a relationship in a variety of settings. Hostile group behavior is strongly correlated with group leaders and spokespersons wielding pugilistic "power" imagery. 9 Political polling demonstrates that political leaders can alter and redirect social agendas and concerns by engaging in the discourse of war, as President George W. Bush did leading up to the 2002 midterm elections. 10 Likewise, research in organizations suggests that discourse within organizational contexts can transform the nature of belief systems and group relations. 11 Whatever else talk is, it is not ineffectual. Identity group discourses awaken, relay, intensify, and otherwise construct our relations with the groups with which we identify. Leadership, conflict, solidarity, and other aspects of group life become emotionally meaningful dimensions of our political identities through discursive modes and processes, through speaking and being spoken to as members of groups.

IDENTITY

For nearly two decades I have read and taught the works of psychoanalysts, political theorists, and feminists. As a political theorist who uses psychoanalysis I am a minority among my peers. In the real world of groups, this particular minority status does me little harm. In fact, my position as an outsider to the psychological disciplines and a partial outsider to my own discipline of political science confers a certain freedom of expression that is difficult to attain when disciplinary groups are policing the boundaries of appropriate scholarship. My present location within women's studies is slightly vexed by my ambiguous location as a humanistically inclined social scientist or, alternatively, as a humanities scholar who often speaks for the perspectives of my near kin in the social sciences. As sociologists point out, we all belong not only to multiple groups but

4

INTRODUCTION

to different kinds of groups. From this perspective, identifications with disciplinary locations mark only one kind of group identity. Besides being an erstwhile political scientist, I am a white lesbian of Eastern and Western European descent and, through my family of origin, a working-class and "Christian-raised" American woman. 12 My regional identifications are weak; I grew up on a series of Army bases among those who share a complex military ethos that is at once proud, patriotic, bellicose, hierarchical, and suspicious of civil authority. Like many feminist scholars, I am often aware of the ways in which my identities and locations shape my intellectual interests. Because of my own multiple identities, questions about group identity and the relation of identity to likely sources of threat are not distant "philosophical" concerns. Like other women and queers of both sexes, I have considered these questions in the most practical ways possible at home, on city streets, and in the political realm in which I function as a citizen/"sexual stranger." 13 In this book, I bring together psychoanalysis, political theory, and black feminist thought. My attention to black feminist thought raises more compelling questions of group membership than either of my other disciplinary affiliations. Black feminist theorists are themselves often scholars in the humanities and social sciences. They write of their own struggles to reconcile their interest in the groups of which they are members with the disciplinary focuses and requirements of their roles. They often grapple with questions about the role of nonmembers who participate in group discourse, either as readers or as interpreters. They do not reject outright the possibility that non-group members can participate in group discourse as readers or interpreters. Rather, they hold that participation confers responsibilities: to listen respectfully to the voices of group members; to claim the grounds and consequences of one's own interests, methods, and perspectives; and to avoid Olympian forms of closure that end intellectual conversations. Of course, these same precepts might easily be understood to form the basis of good scholarly practice in any context. They are not demands that specifically constrain investigators who are researching "what they're not." 14 In the chapters that follow, I suggest one interpretation of psychoanalysis and black feminist theory. As important as clarifying what I do is clarifying what I do not do. This analysis of identity group discourse is not an attempt to study a group or to develop a political psychology of a group. Instead, on the one hand, I refine a set of theoretical uses of psychoanalysis for feminists and others interested in the social productions of groups. On the other hand, I build a case for a particular reading of black feminist thought as a reparative identity group discourse. Against those who are unfamiliar with black feminism because they assume it does not speak to

INTRODUCTION

5

their own identity or political concerns, I find a series of themes that are as old as political discourse itself. Against those who believe they understand the predictable psychological tropes and rhetoric of "identity politics," I find a fascinating reconceptualization of political speech and group relations. I come to this project with an abiding interest in the multiple intersections of political thought and psychology. My interest in political psychology is particularly keen with regard to the place of emotions, or passions, in political life and in political thought. While many social and political writers labor to expunge any trace of feeling from their work, passion is central to the work of black feminists. Black feminist scholars and writers address emotion directly in their writing, both through intellectual explorations of emotion and through discursive expressions of emotion. The emotional labor that is evident in black feminist thought has taught me much about processes of political theorizing. But black feminist thought also evokes emotion in many of its readers. I am convinced that, like much passion in political life, this emotion is defensive-an attempt to fend off guilt, self-examination, and genuine confrontation with otherness through rage, indignation, contempt, boredom, or idealization. Here is one way in which psychodynamic thinking can inform not only our readings of texts, but also the reading of our readings.

ORGANIZATION

In the chapters that follow, I construct a conversation between psychoanalytic theories of groups and black feminist thought. This conversation demonstrates the ways in which black feminist thought confounds many of the negative expectations about identity group discourses that circulate in work on groups and their political legacies. I use psychoanalysis as an interpretive tool, but I also interrogate the uses to which psychoanalysis is put in interpreting group discourses and behavior. This psychoanalytic part of the project commences in chapters I and 2, which introduce the theoretical literatures necessary to refine an understanding of reparative identity group discourse. Chapter I ("Psychoanalysis, Race, and Racism") critically analyzes the intersections between psychoanalysis and the subject of race in order both to show the wide variety of existing psychoanalytic incursions into raced discourse and to address skepticism about psychoanalytic interpositions into the field. In chapter 2 ("From Psychoanalysis to Political Theory") I offer an overview of the work of group psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic political theorists in the object relations/relational tradition. Here, psychoan-

6

INTRODUCTION

alytic political theorists are scholars trained as political theorists or as psychoanalysts who share a commitment to analyzing political events and issues from a psychoanalytic perspective. However, readers should keep in mind that these categories are not mutually exclusive; for example, in recent years a number of psychoanalytic clinicians have embarked upon studies of specific institutions, including a variety of workplace contexts, that have been useful to political theorists and that mediate analytically between face-to-face clinical groups and large social and national groups. Even though much in the literature of psychoanalytic political theory is of potential interest to feminists and vice versa, there has been little intersection between scholarship in feminism and the psychoanalytic study of groups. This is so in spite of the fact that psychoanalytic political theory and the clinical psychoanalytic group psychology from which it is drawn are theoretically indispensable to feminists and other political progressives and are open to reconceptualization. A conversation about group discourse between black feminist thought and group psychoanalysis informs both psychoanalytic and political thinking about groups. After surveying dimensions of psychoanalysis in the first two chapters, I bring together the psychoanalytic literatures and black feminist thought. Black feminist theory is both an academic and an identity group discourse that is produced by black women scholars and writers for a primary audience of women of color. 15 Like the producers of other identity group discourses, these black scholars and writers can be theorized as group leaders. Psychoanalytic political theory gives explicit attention to group leaders as central actors within groups and as interpreters of group phenomena. In chapter 3 ("Reparative Group Leadership") I consider the differences between the group psychoanalytic expectations associated with group leaders and the actual reparative group leadership that emerges in black feminist thought. From the analysis of black feminist group leadership I move in chapters 4 ("Conflict and Authenticity") and 5 ("Bonding and Solidarity") to more thorough analyses of political/theoretical dimensions of black feminist discourse. Groups negotiate power and inequality, conflict, community, and solidarity. In this respect, black feminist thought is like other identity group discourses: group leaders articulate, negotiate, and contingently resolve relational issues in a give-and-take between leaders and group members. These relational issues are also political issues with outcomes for group positioning, the distribution of resources, and, sometimes, survival. Black feminist theorists articulate and negotiate common group political issues in ways that are reparative, both to group members and to those outside the boundaries of the group. Whereas in chapters 3 through 5 I focus on what black feminist theory

INTRODUCTION

7

has to say about intragroup processes, in chapter 6 ("Coalitions and Reparative Politics") I turn to political relations between groups. Black feminist theorists speak to group relations in the abstract, but they also respond directly to the issues of the day. Sometimes, they do both at the same time, as in black feminist analyses of Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment and the hearings to which the charges gave rise. In responding to Hill and the effects of her testimony, black feminists demonstrate many aspects of a reparative group discourse that has the potential to transform the landscape of group ideology. In this final chapter, I bring psychoanalysis to bear on discursive processes that are often regarded as primarily, if not exclusively, political and comment politically on interpretations that are often rendered as primarily psychological. In the course of this book I set aside or unsettle a number of prominent dichotomies of recent political and feminist theorizing, including: identity politics versus post-identity politics, politics versus psychology, clinical versus interpretive uses of psychology, mainstream thought versus feminism and/or multiculturalism, intergroup versus intragroup relations, and academic versus popular or ideological literature. On the other hand, I employ other dichotomies because doing so may provide a fruitful purchase on particular issues of group discourse. Hence, readers will find object relations/relational psychoanalysis privileged over other psychoanalytic traditions; black feminist thought emphasized over a more diverse palette of multicultural feminisms; and a distinction that functions in some way as an ideal-type between reparative and regressive groups and group discourses. I do not apologize for these dichotomies so much as point them out as theoretical decisions. Like moments of essentialism, binary distinctions can serve specific purposes in theoretical inquiries, if only to provoke theoretical rigor and more nuanced analysis. 16

A NOTE ABOUT LANGUAGE

We often hear that we are living in "post-feminist" times. This locution would suggest that we have absorbed the social, political, and intellectual lessons of feminism and that, as a result, a didactic feminist movement is no longer necessary. Unfortunately, even if we restrict attention to our uses of language and their implications, our status as post-feminist subjects is in jeopardy. We still sometimes maintain the fiction of "genderneutral" masculine language, punctuated as it often is by occasional distinguishing references to biological females. And it remains true that much of the literature in political theory and group psychoanalysis upon which feminists may draw forecloses questions about the possible signifi-

8

INTRODUCTION

cance of gender and gender difference by using masculine terms indiscriminately to refer to individuals (the citizen, the group member, the leader) and to generalized entities and concepts such as the nature of "man" and the human. If difference matters in groups and in relations between groups, generalizations about "man" and "his" characteristics, dispositions, and emotional states become increasingly unstable and deceptive. Concerns about gender in language are not merely academic. Theorists construct accounts of selves or group members that provide foundations and rationales for conceptions of politics and social life consistent with such selves, within which persons so constituted would fit and function. These accounts obscure the fates of those who do not fit-those who are conceived of as marginal, whose unacknowledged labor sustains a desired form of social life, whose very existence seems to threaten notions of "the good," or whose patterns of interaction constitute ignored outliers of an otherwise elegant theory. Feminists demonstrate that such common locutions as "man" and "men" do not merely fail to satisfy some political standard of equal linguistic treatment, but also mystify the positioning of women in theoretical discourse. It is feminists who persistently point to the implications of the alternating, and always theoretically meaningful, appearance and disappearance of women in political and psychological thought. Attentiveness to language is an ongoing project because we are constantly building on and revising the knowledge of the past. But it also continues to be necessary because as language users we are always prone to forget or to misremember why we were so concerned about language in the first place (did we substitute female pronouns simply to be "politically correct?" And if so, should we not renounce such emasculating rules in the service of a vigorous assault on all pieties?). Many of the authors cited in this book employ masculine language to signify men in all-male groups, group members in general, and generalizations about human psychological responses. I do not comment on these usages individually, but I invite the reader to note these generalizations, to consider them in context, and to remain skeptical about them.

A NOTE ABOUT PSYCHOANALYSIS

The subject of psychoanalysis remains contentious among feminists, although mostly among white feminists. Black feminists are more likely to bypass than to debate psychoanalytic explanations. For skeptical readers I include here a brief apologia that will serve to introduce the argument. To the question whether psychoanalysis benefits black feminists or other

INTRODUCTION

9

feminists of color, some feminists of color will speak in the course of this book. The existence of growing numbers of black feminists who use psychoanalysis and theorize about its role in political and literary projects of emancipation clarifies that "black feminists" and "psychoanalytic theorists" are intersecting rather than mutually exclusive categories. Psychoanalysis is useful for the kind of feminist projects that involve examining the nature of groups and group-psychological phenomena, many of which are of direct interest to black feminists and others engaged in forms of social theorizing and identity politics. A number of points of theoretical contact, overlapping areas of concern, and resistances to reigning ideologies ground a relationship between psychoanalysis and the feminisms. First, there is the increased salience of identity groups as central to politics in a post-cold war world no longer organized around the singular relationship of two mutually hostile nationstates. The attention to the problems and possibilities of identity groups the world over is a challenge to feminists, multiculturalists, and psychoanalysts (among others) who must construct new ways of understanding groups and group relations. Another interconnection between psychoanalysis and the feminisms is the existence of still undertheorized affinities between these discourses. Both challenge nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses of humanism and modernism by challenging universal notions of the human at the same time that both are capable of reinstantiating alternative notions of the human unaware. More negatively, both have been challenged in their turn by postmodern dissolutions of theoretical verities. What is required of psychoanalysis and feminism after the postmodern turn is a mindfulness that theories and politics are not innocent. 17 Historicity, contingency, and will to power lie behind formulations of sex, gender, race, self, and group, as well as behind actions predicated on those formulations. Psychoanalysis need not purvey final answers to questions about groups; it need only suggest interesting questions about groups. Fortunately, it does.

1

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

LOCATING THE PSYCHOANALYTIC SUBJECT

Throughout much of its history, practitioners of psychoanalysis understood it as an intellectual tool that could deliver deep accounts of identity and subjectivity unattainable through other disciplines. Today, both specific challenges to psychoanalytic certainties and contemporary forms of epistemological skepticism vitiate such claims. What remain in place of the claim to psychoanalysis's superiority as a psychic or behavioral science are claims for its interpretive or heuristic practices. In this chapter, I examine psychoanalytic interventions into white racism and racial identities, the first step in using psychoanalysis to analyze the contents and orientations of identity group discourse. It is not surprising that members of many marginal social groups approach psychoanalysis with distrust or disinterest. Those who have suffered under regimes of psychological treatment or whose identities have been ignored, demeaned, or pathologized locate themselves in opposition to the knowledge/power of psychoanalytic interpretation. Indeed, in only partial mirroring of Freud's own predominantly European female clientele, the model of humanness constructed by most psychoanalytic theory has been that of the white/European-descended, heterosexual, financially comfortable male. 1 In spite of the existence of a median psychoanalytic individual, many women have found psychoanalysis intellectually stimulating or liberating as a profession. Other women, including many contemporary white feminists, are critics of psychoanalysis and of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. These critics reject the psychotherapeutic disciplines in favor of self-help, political organizing, and community philosophy and aid. 2 Since the I 96os, many white feminists and lesbians have raised their voices in criticism of psychoanalysis. Through its delineations of health, maturity, and development, psychoanalysis has defined the nature of uninflected categories

PSYCHOANAlYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

11

of"women" and "lesbians" -where both categories are racially unmarked and therefore presumed white-in harmful and punitive ways. Because people of color as a group have not been defined as explicitly and adamantly by psychoanalytic discourse as have "women" and "lesbians," 3 black feminist scholars tend not to generate lengthy and explicit critiques of psychoanalysis. Instead, psychoanalysis simply does not figure for most as a central and unavoidable social discourse. 4 There are, however, other reasons than psychoanalytic neglect for the lack of interest in psychoanalytic theorizing among African-American feminists. Feminists of color find psychoanalytic theory less than helpful in illuminating the history and status of people of African descent and in ameliorative enterprises in law, politics, and political economy. Claudia Tate notes that psychoanalysis does not facilitate the kinds of political activities-"demonstrations, sit-ins, and legal battles" 5 -that are connected to civil justice for African Americans. 6 As Hortense Spillers puts the same problem, "little or nothing in the intellectual history of Mrican Americans within the social and political context of the United States suggests the effectiveness of a psychoanalytic discourse, revised or classical, in illuminating the problematic of 'race' on an intersubjective field of play." 7 Such an observation can suggest a dichotomy between the critical projects of black and white women in which black feminists prefer to engage with "fields of social work, sociology, and ethics" and white women turn topsychology.8 The theologian Susan Thistlethwaite criticizes this white feminist turn, associating it with "interiority and social passivity." 9 Consistent with a feminist diagnosis of the shortcomings of psychoanalytic thought, if not a dichotomy of black and white feminist orientations toward psychoanalysis, are Victor Wolfenstein's critical comments on the failure of Freudian psychoanalysis to develop a critical political economy to supplement its analysis of emotionallife. 10 Wolfenstein surveys Freud against Marx in order to "construct a groundwork for a psychoanalytic-marxist theory,'' 11 but his is a telling point for the question of black feminist interest in psychoanalysis. If psychoanalysis can elucidate neither the history nor the material circumstances of black Americans, the purchase of psychoanalysis on black feminism would appear to be minimal. Nevertheless, scholars "productively complicate" the dichotomy between purported black and white feminist orientations toward psychoanalysis, suggesting to black feminism uses of psychoanalytic theory beyond direct application to political economy. 12 Besides its failure to account for the positioning of African Americans in the political economy, its critics wonder whether psychoanalysis can account for either the psychic roots of racism or its historic persistence. "Traditional therapy, mainstream psychoanalytical practices, often do not

12

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

consider 'race' an important issue, and as a result do not adequately address the mental-health dilemmas of black people." 13 Cultural theorist bell hooks believes these dilemmas will not find adequate answers until people of color train as analysts. 14 Psychoanalytic theory inscribes race and racial meaning in two ways. In her analysis of Freud's "negro" joke, Claudia Tate demonstrates how psychoanalytic discourse employs racial language in a way that deflects attention and understanding away from, rather than toward, the racial meaning and anxiety that underlies it. Alternatively, psychoanalytic theory inscribes race through its erasure in the manifest text, through an appearance of un-raced or de-raced universality. Jean Walton's critique of several analytic cases illustrates how putative racial universality is belied by the details of analytic case material. Responding to the concerns of critical and antiracist theorists about the usefulness of psychoanalytic thought requires attention to the history of psychoanalytic theorizing, but it also requires attention to the protean diversity and elasticity of psychoanalytic concepts and theories themselves. Psychoanalysis is not singular; what often goes under the rubric of psychoanalysis is actually a broad set of theories classed within a smaller number of traditions. Although the theories may share certain features, they often diverge radically in their conceptions of human nature, relationality, and psychic processesY Nonetheless, critics of psychoanalysis correctly perceive the relative inattentiveness to theorizing race and racism to be widely shared across psychoanalytic theories. Scholars of all ethnicities increasingly raise the subjects of racism; the structures of whiteness; and racializing thought, feeling, and discourse. Their investigations suggest that the encounters of psychoanalysis with "race" are increasingly fruitful, especially as they simultaneously subject psychoanalysis itself to critique and reconsideration.

THE RACIALIZING FOUNDATIONS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

Today, "race" is likely to be considered an empty signifier. 16 Many feminist scholars, black and white, reject the biologistic meanings attached to racializing discourse at the same time that they struggle to identify the ways in which skin color categorizations and their social, legal, economic, and political corollaries shape the lives of people in particular societies. 17 Patricia Williams calls race a "phantom-word," and this term is attractive for its simultaneous allusion to the lack of presence and to the frightening quality of that lack. 18 As a clinical and interpretive discourse, psychoanalysis has been remarkably resistant to theorizing the effects of both its own racializing and

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

13

its persistent universalizing. Even taking account of the differences in opinion among Mrican Americans on the usefulness of psychoanalysis for theorizing race and creating racially progressive politics, it is undeniable that until very recently there was a relative dearth of explicit psychoanalytic theorizing on race. This state of affairs is interesting in general, given the salience of race in academic writing and in American social life. It is more curious still in the light of two convictions of many psychoanalytically inclined scholars: first, that race is itself a constitutive subtext of psychoanalytic discourse, and second, that psychoanalysis can be a tool for understanding the psychic foundations of racism. Nonetheless, a number of scholars have recently probed the significance of race in the founding of psychoanalysis. Sometimes this goal and the goal of applying psychoanalysis to the problem of racism are closely related, as when Michael Rustin alludes to the Jewish identity of many early practitioners of psychoanalysis in the context of the European racialization of Jewishness and persecution of Jews. Rustin registers surprise that psychoanalysis has not had more to say on the subjects of race and racism. 19 But the most complete investigation of the racial origins and implications of psychoanalytic theory is work by Sander Gilman on the intersections of psychoanalysis, race, and gender. Gilman examines the founding and foundations of psychoanalysis from the perspective of the racializing discourses of Freud's nineteenth century.20 In Freud's Europe, the "Aryan male" group was not only the "primary group in power," but the figure against whose fantasized attributes the raced and gendered "others" were defined-even, unconsciously, by Freud himself. Gilman demonstrates Freud's efforts to grapple with the identifications of Jewish racialization through externalization onto Eastern Jews and women and through the unconsciously conceived construction of psychoanalytic theory itself. Physical "darkness," mental instability, degeneration, weakness, impurity, effeminacy, and disease, attributed as they were to (male) Jews, became for Freud, as for his gentile compatriots, marks of racial and sexual difference. Continually generated, such marks would differentiate Freud from the "others" in his midst and, thus, protect him from being "othered" himself. Claudia Tate extends Gilman's inquiry into the psychoanalytic disclaiming of race and racializing. She argues that "psychoanalysis reinforces its position in dominant U.S. culture by forgetting that it was born of racial conflict and, moreover, that many of the psychological conflicts of its patients also have roots in racial conflict. 21 In "Freud and His 'Negro': Psychoanalysis as an Ally and Enemy of Mrican Americans," Tate concedes the reasons why Mrican American scholars have shown little interest in psychoanalysis but argues that psychoanalysis provides tools to

14

PSYCHOANAlYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

subvert its own racism. Her example is a "joke," versions of which Freud is said to have told for several decades. In its early version it was merely Freud's reference to one American patient as "his negro," after the putative practice of referring to analytic patients as "negroes. " 22 After the I 886 publication of a cartoon in the humor magazine Fliegende Blatter depicting Freud as a yawning lion waiting for a "negro" to arrive ("Twelve o'clock and no negro," read the caption), Freud identified with the lion and began joking about "negroes ... turn[ing] up at the right time to still the lion's appetite." 23 Tate uses Freud's own insights about the unconscious meaningfulness of jokes against him. Her analysis of the joke suggests a continuum of unconscious identifications, primarily racial, by which Freud positions himself as the lion/master over the "negro"/slave. The analysis also suggests a reservoir of racial anxiety for which the joke serves as defense-a defense against Freud's own status as a Jew who, in the aggressively racist nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western imperialistic context, is himself "black in Europe." Such strategies of race-inscription and affirmation of whiteness are accompanied by strategies that inscribe and affirm heterosexuality, and, more accurately, heterosexual masculinity. As Tate suggests, racial meaning is inscribed in psychoanalytic discourse. In her analysis of Freud's "negro" joke the manifest text of psychoanalytic discourse employs racial language in a way that deflects attention and understanding away from, rather than toward, the racial meaning and anxiety that underlies it. Freud's reconfiguration of himself as the "lion" rather than the "negro" confirms the analyst's, and his own personal, position of power within psychoanalysis. As Tate puts it, "Freud's 1924 version of his 'negro' joke relies on a symbolic transaction that revises the power dynamics between himself, his patient, and the discourses of anti-Semitism on the one hand and white-black racism on the other." Contained within this "symbolic transaction" is a set of binary oppositions that position Freud, mollify his racial anxiety (hence his pleasure with the joke), and reconfirm the series of binaries that circulate through psychoanalytic theory. "Establishing the hierarchal binary relationships of doctor/patient, white/black, master/slave, and civilized/primitive, the joke situates Freud in the first position of each binary arrangement and reconfirms his status as doctor, white, master, and civilized." 24 The binary conceptual and linguistic structures of race, gender, and sexuality help to maintain regimes of power and purity that threaten those who are identified with the "non-normative" terms and categories. The consequences are many. First, racialized tropes, figurations, and identifications contain within them immanent sexualized meanings and so help to defer and deflect sexualized interpretation. Second, the understanding

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

15

that one axis of binary identity terms can be used to mask and defend against other, more disturbing, axes suggests that sex/ gender can be substituted for race in ways that make the racializing and racist assumptions of the discourse invisible. This substitution of sexual binary complementarity for racial difference is visible in some everyday political situations. 25 Finally, the binary construction of identities can conflate people of color with race, leaving open the possibility of white identities organized around multiple axes of sexuality, gender, and the like while foreclosing these possibilities for people of color. Analyses such as Gilman's and Tate's demonstrate that racializing discourse has been central to the creation of psychoanalytic meaning. Further, these analyses show that psychoanalysis can participate in and help to maintain the kinds of defensive maneuvers it is supposed to identify and bring to consciousness. Not surprisingly, the particular defenses that naturalize and camouflage white, heterosexual, male hegemony are less likely to be identified as symptoms of mental disease than are other defensive maneuvers. Thus is the normativity of white racial identity maintained through the authority of psychoanalytic theory itself. Surveying the history of psychoanalytic thought on race and racism, Amina Mama notes that among the various psychologies, psychoanalysis has theorized little about the nature of racial identities and has been less explicitly racist than many other theories. 26 Yet, as Mama acknowledges, psychoanalytic thinkers have been responsible for both some negative and some positive interventions on the question of race. This history of psychoanalytic racism is told in Racism and Psychiatry. 27 Thomas and Sill en point out that their foray into the history of American psychiatry is driven by the challenge to white racism mounted by black professionals in the mental health fields in the 196os. They detail the "long and ugly history" of white racism in the psychiatric profession and examine both psychodynamic contributions to an understanding of white racism and the psychodynamic constructions of black subjects. Carl]ung is legendary in psychoanalysis for the anti-Semitic beliefs he enunciated after his split with his mentor, Freud. 28 YetJung also held less widely circulated beliefs in black inferiority that endeared him to some white American clinicians. In the United States, analysts availed themselves of venues such as the prestigious Psychoanalytical Review to contribute to arguments for black inferiority. 29 Many of these contributions belong to the "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" school of thought, in which people of Mrican descent are positioned as representatives of an early stage of development of the human race. Another version of racist applications of psychoanalysis is the use of Freud's stage theory to describe black Americans stuck in or regressed to the "oral" stage of individual de-

16

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

velopment. Although not sanctioned by Freud himself, such uses of Freudian concepts to "explain the black psyche in terms of deviant child development" were not unusual at and before mid-century. 30 Another early twentieth-century application of psychoanalysis tells a story quite different fromJung's, however. Black Hamlet, WulfSachs's unorthodox ethno-psychoanalytic account of the black South African "witch doctor," John Chavafambira, was daring for its time, presuming as it didand setting out to demonstrate-Chavafambira's humanity by showing his essential emotional likeness to white men. 31 The study raises a host of issues for contemporary readers, including those surrounding Sachs's motives, representations (of himself and of Chavafambira), and analytic technique. With regard to the latter, Sachs's "wild psychoanalysis" is aimed not so much at treating his subject or alleviating distress as at stimulating political agency and activity of the sort that Sachs endorses. Jacquelyn Rose notes the ironic effect of this politicized psychoanalysis: Sachs's orientation toward Chavafambira's political subjectivity reveals a network of influence and authority of the white analyst over his black subject that easily might have prevailed in Freud's analytic relations had Freud acted to confirm the political agency of his patients as later feminists would have had him do. 32 Here, the analyst's active endorsement of a subject's "political emancipation" can be read as a political agenda to be resisted like the more obviously racist agendas of other, ostensibly nonpolitical analysts. Given that the uses of psychoanalytic theory with regard to racial identity appear to be many, some-whatever their shortcomings-recognizably progressive and others recognizably reactionary, is it appropriate to hope that psychoanalytic theory can provide any support for projects related to black feminism and antiracist politics? One response to this query lies in psychoanalytic work that interrogates racist structures of feeling, thought, and action.

PSYCHOANALYTIC CHALLENGES TO RACISM

For many contemporary feminists, feminism occupies a unique intellectual position in the effort to correct the lack of attention to racism in modern discourses such as psychoanalysis. Some white psychoanalytic thinkers probe the psychic foundations of white racism. Unfortunately, these thinkers do not as frequently consider the effects of racism on its victims. In spite of this important silence, some white psychoanalysts contribute to antiracist scholarship by maintaining that the putative universality of psychoanalysis is not as complete as critics often claim. Psychoanalysis can account for contingent and particular modes of racist thought and action

PSYCHOANAlYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

17

and thereby contribute to their amelioration. Theorists such as Joel Kovel, Michael Rustin, E. Victor Wolfenstein, and Elisabeth YaungBruehl employ psychoanalysis in a variety of ways, from probing psychohistorical accounts of white racial identity to tracing the psychosocial grounds of contemporary racism. 33 In The Good Society and the Inner World, Michael Rustin attempts to theorize the components of a "good society" using Kleinian psychoanalysis. Rustin makes race and racism central subjects of such an analysis even though race is an empty signifier. By this term Rustin means that differences and characteristics usually attributed to "race" can be traced to sources such as culture, nationality, and socialization to oppression. So far, Rustin's analysis is consistent with other critical readings of the biologistic category of "race." Yet the emptiness of the racial category is psychologically meani.qgful; the very emptiness makes the racial category and group a ready container for feelings and amplifies the unconscious meanings associated with race. Intense, primitive, hostile feelings that bear some relation to psychotic states of mind find a target in the idea of the racial other. Rustin explicitly addresses the knotty problems associated with some popular forms of antiracist pedagogy and identifies three issues. First, he argues that antiracist pedagogies that define racism mainly as an "ideological formation" can have the paradoxical effect of rehashing and reinscribing discredited racist theories in an attempt to reinforce the correctness of an antiracist ideology. Second, he suggests that forms of antiracist pedagogy that rely upon guilt-inducing strategies, although they may enjoy some superficial and short-term success, are ineffective. "From a psychoanalytic point of view, persecution seems ill-advised as a technique for dealing with states of mind that are at the root paranoid and persecutory." 34 Finally, Rustin concludes that an effective antiracist strategy must confront and interpret the psychic roots of racism as they affect all social groups. 35 While Rustin concentrates narrowly on white racism with an eye toward the goal of advancing antiracist pedagogy, Joel Kovel undertakes the larger task of constructing an account of white racism in the United States that integrates the historical, cultural, and psychological dimensions of racism. In White Racism: A Psychohistory, Kovel uses a psychoanalytic method to unpack the "calculus of meanings" imbricated in racist cultural symbolism and belief systems. "No other approach seems to me as able to take into account the full range of human experience. I shall focus my discussion on the way psychoanalysis enables us to widen our semantic range, how it taps the unconscious meanings inherent in every thought or act, how it shows the imprint of past mental activity upon the present and explores the connections between the carnal and the sublime." 36 Kovel relies on a Marxist-inspired critique of modern history and psychodynamics

18

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

to explain the symbolic matrix of white racism. In particular, he depends upon Freud and ego-psychology to delineate the cultural significance of oral, anal, and genital stages of development as they have been organized and repressed among white Western people. Giving particular attention to the anal phase and its symbolism, Kovel, like Wolfenstein and Phyllis Palmer, accounts for white racism in part through articulating unconscious white fantasies that link blackness, sexuality, and "excrement." 37 Kovel also charts the historical movement from racism to what he calls "metaracism." For Kovel, metaracism is an ostensible movement away from racism that masks the universalizing and dehumanizing requirements of the state and consumer society. "Metaracism may be said to exist wherever the hand of the modern State reduces people to its own ends, and whenever it finds it expedient-not ethical, but useful-to eliminate race distinctions in the process." 38 Kovel notes that although the social movement from racism to metaracism effects some important changes in the condition of those who are its victims, it also leaves intact many racist foundations and consequences-"the underlying pattern of fantasies and symbols that nourish our culture." The rationalizations and abstractions of social development do not transform the unconscious defensive structures that form the basis for white racism. Further, these processes fail to provide the grounds for autonomy and dignity for blacks and whites alike. Social control and rationalization displace aggression away from some marginal social groups, but they do not eliminate social malignancy. 39 Sharing interests in psychoanalysis and liberatory political practices with Kovel, E. Victor Wolfenstein analyzes mass movements of racism and racial liberation. In The Victims of Democracy, first published in 1981, Wolfenstein addresses the subjective emotional and objective class meanings of white racist and black liberationist groups. Wolfenstein's analysis is as explicitly informed by Marxist economics as Kovel's is informed by Marxist cultural critique. He argues that white racism is "an irrational belief system and, in organizations like the KKK, an irrational form of collective activity." 40 Thus, for Wolfenstein, white racism is in need of a theory of emotional life that can explicate the processes through which common black and white working-class interests are subordinated to a form of racial hatred that separates those whose objective interests are aligned. This alternative theory is psychoanalysis, a paradigm that through its emphasis on irrational psychological functioning can "provide a possible solution to the problem of how class relationships are falsified in consciousness." 41 Wolfenstein continues to explore the thesis that "mass motives serve ruling class interests" in Psychoanalytic-Marxism: Groundwork. There, he analyzes the barriers to mutual recognition of the historical and psychic

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

19

legacies of black-white relations, the psychic implications of unequal social and political power, and the psychic defenses that constitute the foundation of white racism and "color blindness." In addition, Wolfenstein notes that the displacement and projection of unwanted parts of the self that characterize white racism is funded with sensual and sexual significance. Black women occupy a different location than do black men with regard to the intersecting statuses of class, race, and gender.42 In more recent work, Wolfenstein uses the work of black feminist theorists bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins to complicate the "masculinist conceptions of emancipation" identified with figures like Malcolm X. 43 He initiates a conversation between (white) feminist psychoanalysis and black feminist thought in order to elucidate what is at stake in fears and denunciations of black female strength and of apparent black feminist violations of black racial unity. Wolfenstein argues that defensive oedipal masculinity is evident in the black male patriarchal devaluation of black women even as often patriarchal constructions ofliberatory politics, such as Malcolm's, create some conceptual spaces for black female agency. 44 In spite of such spaces, however, he holds that progressive racial politics require a critique of masculinism within liberation movements and that psychoanalysis helps to articulate the strenuous resistances such critiques engender. In his view, it is the alliance of black feminism and feminist psychoanalysis that helps to illuminate both the problems and the possible solutions. Wolfenstein concentrates on the "binary discourse of white and black." In spite of this emphasis, he notes that racism does not conceptualize all of its targets and forms identically. "The language of white racism is a composite structure. It devalues Asians one way, Latinos another, Arabs yet another."45 This insight anticipates the research of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, who uses psychoanalysis to attempt to explain the differences that characterize diverse forms and objects of group hatred. Young-Bruehl's is a selfconsciously Freudian method that distinguishes between prejudices (or "ideologies of desire") by analyzing the character types of prejudiced people and the kinds of objects that can be correlated with these types. YaungBruehl argues that differentiating between obsessional, hysterical, and narcissistic character types helps to explain the divergent nature of prejudices themselves and of their objects. In this account, anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, and sexism cannot simply be classed together as "prejudice" because racism, a hysterical prejudice, does not select and devalue its victims in the same way that anti-Semitism, an obsessional prejudice, selects and devalues its victims. 46 The decoupling of racism and anti-Semitism may be particularly useful in light of widespread acknowledgment of the origins of psychoanalysis in a context of European "racism" against Jews. The use

20

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

of "race" and "racism," along with concepts of diaspora and genocide, can serve a pedagogical purpose and help to construct political affinities among marginalized social groups. But this language can also obscure important differences between European anti-Semitism and American white racism and can complicate intellectual genealogies. To the extent that psychoanalysis absorbs and reflects the prejudices of its social context it is vulnerable to deconstruction, critique, and transformative reexamination. Racially figured models, tropes, and identifications serve as unconscious signifiers of aspects of identity that can be used, especially by racially dominant individuals, to consolidate or disavow aspects of the self. Social theorists explicate the processes by which racial identities are formed and maintained, as well as the processes that affect the construction of racial self-identity of non-hegemonic groups. Further, as black feminists and womanists urge, scholars must theorize the intersecting nature of dimensions of identity for differently located social groups. Relational psychoanalysis contributes to these analyses.

(WHITE) FEMINIST PSYCHOANALYSIS

Feminism and psychoanalysis share a long history as well as an uneasy intimacy.47 The relationship might be said to have begun when Freud and other early male practitioners of psychoanalysis, most trained as physicians, encouraged many middle- to upper-class European women, most not similarly trained because of the professional prejudices and barriers of the day, to practice and contribute to the fledgling "science" of psychoanalysis.48 In this way, women such as Marie Bonaparte, Helene Deutsch, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Lou Andreas Salome, and Anna Freud, among others, became psychoanalysts and eventually came to scrutinize the work of male analysts. These women contributed much to psychoanalytic theory, writing about infancy and childhood, women's sexuality, and gender identity in ways that were incorporated into the history of psychoanalytic thought. This is not to suggest that the work of these and other early female psychoanalysts was "feminist" in our sense of that word. 49 It is to say that it is as legitimate to stress the openness of psychoanalysis as a discipline to the work and insights of women as it is to criticize the egregious failings of psychoanalysis in its theorizations and treatment of women. It is understandable that the latter of these two perspectives receives more attention from feminists. To underestimate the openness of psychoanalysis in comparison with other historical discourses is, nonetheless, to fail to appreciate the uses feminism has made and continues to make of psycho-

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

21

analysis. Psychoanalysis provides unique theoretical resources to certain varieties of feminist projects, including the interrogation and interpretation of group discourse. Feminism, in turn, works both to use and to transform aspects of psychoanalytic theory. There are as many areas of affinity between psychoanalysis and feminism as there are areas of contention. A lucid and witty portrait of the ways in which psychoanalysis could be either "friend or foe" to feminism is struck by Mari Jo Buhle in her recent monumental study Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis. This historical account traces the encounter between psychoanalysis and feminism, responding directly to feminist critics of psychoanalysis who have underestimated both the fluidity of psychoanalysis as a discipline and the ways in which feminists in the twentieth century have identified with and championed different, and sometimes conflicting, conceptions of female identity. Buhle's focus on the "conflict between motherhood and careers" -or the "competing notions of subjectivity" entailed by "production and reproduction" -constitutes a fruitful lens for a study that traces the sometimes unexpected engagements and disengagements between the two discourses. 5° Because of this focus, Buhle limits her consideration of race to the ways in which a story about feminized Mrican American men and "black matriarchy," with seeds in social psychology, sociology, and in the work of psychoanalysts Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey, provides the underpinnings for the "liberal" political interventions of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Christopher Lasch. A narrative on the theoretical convergence of psychoanalysis and feminism that focuses on more contemporary issues is Ilene Philipson's study of women and psychoanalysis. 51 Philipson argues that the "feminization of the field" of psychoanalysis is not simply, as many understand it, a function of the increasing numbers of women practicing as analysts. It is, rather, a theoretical recomposition that has altered the face of psychoanalysis. Philipson concurs with many other psychoanalytic commentators that psychoanalysis has undergone a transformation from a discourse that is primarily concerned with fathers and patriarchal authority to one that is primarily concerned with mothers and nurturance. This shift is accompanied by a change from a one-person to a two-person psychology and a change from a focus on individual mental structures to a focus on intersubjectivity. Philipson understands that the "feminization of the field" of psychoanalysis is in part a function of a changing audience for psychoanalysis. Female clinicians have an interest in a model that explicates internal life in particular ways, and their interests influence the direction and emphasis of psychoanalytic theory. Philipson notes that in spite of these theoretical de-

22

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

velopments, relational psychoanalysis disclaims both its attractiveness to and its affinities with feminist thought. Thus, in spite of their theoretical affinities, psychoanalysis and feminism maintain mostly distinct theoretical pathways. The audience whose presence and clinical activity helps to shape the emphasis of psychoanalytic theorizing does not include most feminist theorists in the humanities and social sciences who employ psychoanalytic modes of analysis. Like relational psychoanalysts, feminist theorists are concerned with theorizing the intersubjective construction of the self and especially the relational gendering of the self. More broadly, the concern of feminist theorists to develop explanations of the intersubjective development of social and political meaning is consistent with the concern of nonfeminist relational psychoanalysts to develop explanations of the effects of intimate relations and unconscious defenses on the self. Indeed, to cite but one example, feminists analyze the nature of relations of authority and the ways in which these are introjected and become constitutive aspects of female seHhood. 52 Theoretical affinities between relational psychoanalysis and feminism can be seen, in a more attenuated way, in political analysis. The emphasis of psychoanalytic feminists on understanding the unconscious effects of social and political, as well as intimate, subordination is tied in feminist work to political goals of undoing relations of subordination, not only "out there" in the world, but as these relations participate in helping to constitute political subjects. The "working through" of structured relations of subordination by political subjects is an extension of the "working through" toward which analysis with individuals strives. 53 There are clear affinities between feminist thought and relational psychoanalysis. But can feminists use psychoanalysis to try to illuminate aspects of group life and group discourse? Many white feminists argue that psychoanalysis cannot be useful to their projects, citing either the inherent flaws of psychoanalysis as an intellectual paradigm or its inadequacy to comprehend the specificity of women's identities. 54 On the other hand, recent feminist theorists also join the conversation about psychoanalysis in critical and provocative ways, reshaping and recreating psychoanalytic thought as they reveal its biases, limitations, and intellectual legacies.

CHODOROW'S PSYCHOANALYTIC FEMINISM

The familiar contemporary relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis began in the 1970s when feminist theorists, most notably Juliet Mitchell, Dorothy Dinnerstein, and Nancy Chodorow, began to critique

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

23

and use psychoanalysis on the way to more adequate feminist analyses of women's personality formation and social condition. The period that saw publication of Mitchell's Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur, and Chodorow's The Reproduction ofMothering is a watershed in the feminist relationship with psychoanalysis for two reasons.55 First, these works signaled a willingness among feminists to conceptualize psychoanalysis as more than the sum of its founder's failures, biases, and legacy; and second, they marked a willingness to suspend dismissive critique of a flawed paradigm in favor of receptiveness toward what that paradigm might have to offer feminist enterprises. 56 Although the work of all three scholars has been criticized extensively by feminists in the past twenty-five years, these works set the stage for the current feminist appropriation and transformation of psychoanalysis. It is difficult to characterize or systematize the modes and effects of the feminist appropriations of psychoanalysis. However, a significant part of the theoretical story of modalities and effects of the relationship of feminism and psychoanalysis can be told merely by examining the continuing work of Nancy Chodorow and the literature feminists have produced from the 1970s to the 1990s in critique of Chodorow's work. 57 The literature traces both a protean set of encounters between the two theoretical discourses and a cogent set of objections to and reframings of the questions and answers to which the theoretical encounters have given rise. A sociologist and psychoanalyst, Nancy Chodorow stands as the most popular and influential, as well as perhaps the most criticized, of AngloAmerican feminist psychoanalytic theorists. In her original formulation, Chodorow argues that female development is structured through identification with mother and the internalizations and sense of self that result. To be more precise, the female child's sense of self is constructed within a dense network of mutual identifications between mother and daughter. The mother's emotional embrace is the crucible of, among other things, the more flexible-some would say weak-ego boundaries the daughter will carry into adulthood. The consequence is a desire and capacity to affiliate and to experience continuity of self and other. Male development, on the other hand, is structured through differentiation from mother, the boy's rejection of identification with her, and her rejection of identification with him. Instead of identifying with mother, and in spite of the emotional bond between them, boys "dread" mother. Further, they strive to establish themselves as male by emulating abstract masculine role requirements rather than by identifying affectively with fathers and other males, who are usually emotionally, if not physically, absent. The consequence is a process of individuation in males that precludes affiliation as a basic aspect of the "sense of self."

24

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

Both the range of the uses and the range of critiques to which it has been subjected testify to the significance of Chodorow's feminist psychoanalytic explorations of identity. A perhaps unfortunate result is that, even today, feminist invocations of "Chodorow" are generally shorthand for The Reproduction of Mothering and not the significant body of work Chodorow has produced in the years since that publication. More than this, critiques of "Chodorow" are often used as the opening wedge for broader critiques of feminist psychoanalysis. Yet this is not the only reading to be made, either of feminist psychoanalysis or of "Chodorow." In fact, Chodorow's arguments in The Reproduction ofMothering continue to be important to the history of feminist theorizing and in terms of the unfolding of a rich set of ideas about gender and the interaction of psyche and social existence. At the same time, it is notable that feminists of color have not generally mounted sustained considerations or critiques of Chodorow's work. Given the attention Chodorow has received from white feminists, and even white feminists writing about the implications of race in her theory, this disparity invites inquiry. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins, a sociologist, comments briefly on Chodorow's early work. In both its brevity and its content, her comment is representative of other black feminist responses: the putative universality of Chodorow's theory of women's gender identity is thwarted by her reliance on a "white, middle-class sample." 58 As important as inclusion and representative samples are to social science research, the disinterest of many feminists of color with the work of Chodorow might be better accounted for by considering the theoretical provenance of her work as it has changed between the publication of The Reproduction of Mothering and her recent book The Power of Feelings. 59 Chodorow's early work is often taken by feminists as feminist psychoanalysis itself such that the short-hand "Chodorow" figures as a general signifier, for good or ill, of feminist psychoanalysis. But her theory of female gender identity and mothering is a particular kind of appropriation and transformation of psychoanalysis. 60 The psychoanalytic theory on which Chodorow draws in The Reproduction of Mothering is object-relations theory, and the primary objectrelations theorists on whom she draws are Donald Winnicott, Michael and Alice Balint, and John Bowlby. The choice of these four as paradigmatic object-relations theorists is consistent with the reliance of feminists of the 1970s and 198os on psychoanalytic theorists who emphasize, and valorize, bonding and affiliation against then-prevailing theories of separation/individuation, universal principles of justice, and rights-bearing (masculine) citizen-subjects. Donald Winnicott is widely understood as a theorist who qualifies and

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

25

minimizes the force and significance of the "disagreeable passions" on the self and who thus presents a sanguine perspective on psychic life, particularly when contrasted with the perspective offellow object-relations theorist Melanie Klein. Klein's emphasis on splitting and projection of good and bad images and feelings situates human subjects as aggressive, greedy, envious, and rapacious. Many feminists have regarded Klein ambivalently, either describing her as something other than an object-relations theorist or representing her as a troubling theorist whose emphasis on negative and destructive aspects of selfhood disqualifies her from feminist consideration.61 "American psychoanalytic feminism has found non-Kleinian object relations theory more congenial, in part because this tradition locates human destructiveness within the context of environmental failure."62 The distinction between especially Klein and Winnicott as exemplary figures is not just made by feminists. This distinction has been useful to many psychoanalytic theorists to navigate, and sometimes choose, between ostensibly conflicting versions of subjectivity and relationality. 63 Yet the contrast drawn between Klein and Winnicott has been a fateful one for feminist psychoanalysis. The wide gulf between a "good" (or affiliative) Winnicott and a "bad" (or hostile) Klein is a meaningful trope and theoretical tool that helps to position many feminists so that the more negative, recalcitrant, and disagreeable passions, both of individuals and of groups, become unavailable for analysis. If one consequence of theoretical reliance on Winnicott and other theorists of affiliation is a more congenial depiction of women's gender identity, such a depiction is, as numerous feminists have pointed out in the last twenty years, consistent with a perceived gender identity that is white and middle-class. Nor is it only academic commentators who hold this perception on race. When the editors of Essence and Ladies Home Journal brought black and white women together a few years ago to converse about "issues that still divide Black and White women," white women initially described black women as "strong" and "determined, with attitude." Black women initially described white women as "intelligent," "manipulative," and "privileged." However, the conversation between the two groups of women quickly became more visceral. The Essence author captures a predictable theme in white women's apprehensions of black women. "There it is. White fear of Black anger. Vague, free-floating, but always palpable, rising to the surface in the most ordinary of encounters between Blacks and Whites." 64 What is at stake in this interaction is black and white women's perceptions of one another. It is not an empirical claim about black women to point out that they are often identified in a white middle-class imaginary with

26

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

anger, harshness, and blunt confrontation. Yet women of color writing on relations between black and white women confirm that differences in subjectivity may underlie such images. Audre Lorde writes of the inability of women to deal with their own anger, but she is most incisive in pointing out the ways in which attempts at community-building are disrupted by white women's fears, anxieties, and discomfort with black women's anger. 65 Similarly, Julia Sudbury notes in her study of black women's politics in Britain that one key component of black women's political organizing has been its repudiation of the terms required for harmonious relations with white women: "Black women en masse refused to be integrated into feminist organizations on pre-defined terms. Their presence, their assumed and often real anger fundamentally disturbed the prevailing [white] feminist order."66 Anthropologist Leith Mullings focuses on cultural representations rather than politics, but her analysis is consistent with those ofLorde and Sudbury. Mullings argues that images of black women that emerge from American history illustrate the "underlying theme of defeminization" of black women in comparison to white women, especially middle-class white women. The image of black women as sexually aggressive predators is prominent among them. 67 Indeed, Mullings argues that even the ostensibly more feminine image of"Mammy" foreshadows the inappropriately aggressive and non-feminine "Matriarch" in the way in which her loving and servile ministrations to her white "family" are purchased at the price of severity toward and withdrawal of nurturance from her own family. 68 The writings of many women of color suggest that black women readers of The Reproduction of Mothering may not be attracted to images of relationality that arguably emphasize continuity over disruption and empathy over aggression. This is to say that Chodorow's early psychoanalytic theory of gender identity works to subtly reinscribe a genteel socially white conception of womanhood for readers. There is a poor fit between depictions of women as empathic and continuous with certain others, on the one hand, and the aggression that is intrinsic to discourse constructed by black women social critics, activists, and workers about injustices of race, class, gender, and sexuality, on the other. For Amina Mama, the emphasis within the Kleinian tradition on projective processes best accommodates the ways in which the multiple intersections of racism and sexism in the lives of black women are expressed in anxieties, unease, anger, contradictions, and psychic struggle, as well as in resistance and integration. 69 Although quite different in execution, Mama's seemingly paradoxical attraction to Klein as a theorist of racegender identity is consistent with the evolution of Chodorow's relational theory. First, Mama limns the ways in which the negative dimensions of Klein's thought lend theoretical purchase to analyses of black women's

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

27

identities. This project parallels Chodorow's increasing attention to emotions and processes that are central to Kleinian thinking such as "hatred, aggression, and envy. "70 Second, Mama seeks to individualize black women against the universalizing tendencies of even the most affirming of raceconscious psychologies. In The Power of Feelings, Chodorow deconstructs former categories of identity to explore the unique facets and processes of gendering. The perceptible lack of interest among black women in The Reproduction ofMothering does not testify primarily to sampling limitations, an issue Chodorow addresses directly as a clinician in The Power ofFeelings. Nor is the failure to consider explicitly the psychic effects of racializing practices and discourses paramount. The problem is not, as some critics have implied, that familial arrangements are distinct enough in all communities constituted by race and class that no general conclusions about thereproduction of gender identity can ever be drawn. Chodorow rightly rebukes such a priori anti-essentialisms in the preface to the second edition of The Reproduction ofMothering. 71 It is, rather, that Chodorow's early work, although often understood by feminists as either exhaustive or illustrative of feminist psychoanalysis or feminist object-relations theory, is merely one version, or reconstruction, of a feminist relational psychoanalysis. In fact, there is not a singular object-relations/relational theory or even a singular feminist object-relations/relational theory, but a proliferation of many theories and focuses within each of these categories. These theories construct subjectivity and interpersonal relations in meaningfully different ways. The lack of interest among black feminists in Chodorow's theory testifies to the ways in which the theory fails to provide some subjects with a recognizable account of their own identity and subjectivities. For black feminist theorizing, Chodorow's account of gender identity in Reproduction constitutes "the (white) female subject" in ways that conceal the operations and effects of race. 72 Ultimately, the difficulty with a feminist psychoanalytic theory such as Chodorow's is not merely that she fails to explicitly include black women, nor that she theorizes the psychodynamics of familial arrangements in such a way that white and black middleclass gender development is always and everywhere different. The difficulty is both more subtle and more tenacious: it persists at all levels of Chodorow's analysis in ways that would not be ameliorated merely by the addition of black women as research subjects. In the years since the publication of The Reproduction of Mothering, Chodorow and others have acknowledged the inadequacy of a strict binary model of gender development to explain relations of domination and subordination. 73 Chodorow herself addresses criticisms of her work by fore-

28

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

grounding and interrogating normative sexual identities and by theorizing the protean forms taken by gender identity. 74 Critiques of Chodorow suggest that psychoanalysis is a paradigm whose theoretical operations merely reinscribe universalizing accounts of identity. There is certainly merit in this account of psychoanalysis. Yet, the creative appropriations and transformations of psychoanalytic thought performed by psychoanalytic feminists demonstrate an important point: neither orthodox nor feminist psychoanalytic theories and practices necessarily exhaust the psychoanalytic possibilities. Creative transformations and interrogations of psychoanalysis suggest an elasticity to psychoanalytic theories themselves that is often presumed away in critiques of psychoanalysis. This elasticity can be seen in recent psychoanalytic critiques of white racial identity, most of which are carried out with an explicitly antiracist intellectual agenda by white theorists.

THEORIZING WHITENESS

As with non-psychoanalytic discussions of race and racism, white psychoanalytically inclined writers who seek to theorize race are unable to avoid the binary nature of racialized thinking. Indeed, these theorists sometimes reproduce the dichotomous structure of white/black social division in their own work, especially when addressing American history-a history which, while multiracial in significant ways, has also produced racial binaries in legal and political discourse and in the distribution of social goods. Yet white antiracist psychoanalytic theorists also inevitably challenge the binaries of racialized thinking and the ways in which psychoanalysis is implicated in producing, reproducing, or ignoring these binaries and the meanings that attach to them. The following examples, from Joel Kovel and Jean Walton, invoke different psychoanalytic traditions and suggest different strategies to unpack and problematize both the subjects of social and historical psychoanalytic analysis and psychoanalytic analysis itself. Joel Kovel judges two historical events to each constitute "the institutional origin of white racism." First, he argues that the American institution of enslavement was responsible for the unequivocal white identification of blacks with inferiority and dehumanization. But then Kovel concludes that the "true" origin of white racism is in fact the U.S. Constitution, which instantiated white (male) freedom in part by "confirm[ing] the loss of humanity" of nonwhite inhabitants of the nation. In making this argument, Kovel unwittingly echoes the claims about the founding of freedom and independence in American consciousness made by Toni Morrison in her work

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

29

of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark. 75 For Kovel, the institutionalization of racist consciousness "generat[es] and channel[s] persecutory hatred" ofblackAmericans "to a prodigious degree." 76 Kovel's "psychological economy of the West" is defined by physical segregation and, more importantly, by the fantasy of "segregated mental essences. "77 This dominant white psychological economy reflects the psychological consequences of institutional forms and events, but it is not exclusively a product of these forms and events. The white psychological economy is also reflected in the form and, inferentially, in the substance of orthodox psychoanalysis. Jean Walton offers such a reading of psychoanalysis by moving from using psychoanalysis to criticize the binary racial distinctions of American history to using it to read the racially mystifying binary categories of psychoanalysis. In "Re-Placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse," Walton traces the operation of sex as an unconscious mask and displacement of race, charting the emergence and psychoanalytic concealment of white female identity through the use of racialized fantasies in a set of clinical cases, including one by Melanie Klein. 78 Through her readings of these cases the reader (although, alas, not the analysts) can retrospectively chart the complex and anxiety-ridden emergence of white female identity at mid-century. Walton notes the peculiar flexibility and fungibility of certain dimensions of binary categories in the analytic responses to the patients' unconscious material. In one set of binaries, white, heterosexual, and male operate as the hegemonic terms of a binary opposition in which "black," "perverse" (i.e., homosexual), and "female" form the Other half. In this set of terms, all that threatens sexually to overrun white heterosexual masculine rational maturity is coded as non-hegemonic. Hence, the sexuality of fantasized black figures in the case studies she examines "exceed[s] or contradict[s] a clearly heterocentric model." 79 However, a second set of binaries problematizes this well-known equation. The second set of binaries reflects the disappearance of the term "black" into the hegemonic set of terms through the identification of "black" with "male." Such a collapsing of black and male becomes possible through the identification of black with "genital and libidinal," the active and permanent opposition to the maturely vaginal and passive female. Walton demonstrates the ways in which the "bracket[ing] off" of race in psychoanalytic investigations undermines projects in which the goal is to understand ostensibly "universal issues of gender and sexuality." For the process of becoming a subject in a particular social context is a process of becoming raced as well as gendered, and theorizations of those processes have often depended upon an "untheorized racial domain." By interro-

30

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

gating the binaries that are revealed in psychoanalytic case studies, Walton hopes to reclaim the importance of race and racial fantasy in the construction of especially white femininity, an importance that she demonstrates was overlooked by particular analysts at great cost not only to their women analysands, but also to our understanding of the place of race in the psychic life of cultures. 80 In spite of the perceptions of many contemporary observers of debates in feminism and psychoanalysis, it is good to remember that psychoanalytic interest in denaturalizing and examining white racial identity is not entirely attributable to feminist critique. Kovel's TVhite Racism is a product of the early 1970s- not known in many current feminist theoretical genealogies as a period in which white scholars were training critical attention on whiteness. In fact, race and racism have been topics of thoughtful debate among psychoanalytically oriented thinkers, even if inconsistently and infrequently, for more than thirty years. As challenges to mainstream psychoanalysis are pressed both from within the psychoanalytic establishment and from academic scholars who employ psychoanalysis in their projects, questions of race as well as intersections between race and sexual identity become increasingly integrated into psychoanalytic theory. 81 Psychoanalysis continues to take up the task of deconstructing whiteness in its complicity with other normative threads of social identity.

BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Many scholars rightly understand psychoanalysis as a white discourse whose explicit universality often masks an implicit valorization of white bourgeois identity and practices. Other scholars use psychoanalytic theory in spite of its historically racist and race-obfuscating dimensions. Of these, Frantz Fanon's use of psychoanalysis in the service of a liberatory black politics remains the most well-known. In Black Skin!TVhite Masks, Fanon synthesizes and transforms Hegelian dialectics, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and post-colonial critique to adumbrate the collective psychological consequences of white racism and colonialism for colonized Afro-Caribbean people. Fanon's text is political, although its politics is mediated through Fanon's concern with the colonization and "decolonization of the mind." 82 In fact, Fanon's reading of Freud, Lacan, Hegel, and Sartre through the lens of race, and especially his reading of the development of masculine racial relations and consciousness, operates as political theory. His work is a precursor and model of the kind of critique of post/ colonial power and consciousness that is common at the turn of the millennium with one exception. In his political theory F anon either

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

31

accommodates himself to the male-centered theorizing of his psychoanalytic and philosophical sources or transfigures male-coded representations and processes into racializing ones. 83 What Fanon does not do is theorize the place of black women in the psychosexual colonial economy. As one critic writes in response to the hope expressed by Henry Louis Gates Jr. that Black Skin/White Masks will be a "mirror" for black readers, "the extent to which this works for black women is questionable ... . This mirror is held up for men to gaze into whilst women look on .... In this model then, the black woman ... is written out of the scenario. She serves as the other of others without sufficient status to have an other of her own." 84 The unmistakable conclusion is that, despite the incisiveness ofFanon's psychoanalytic critique of colonialism, his failures to interrogate patriarchy and to specifically investigate black women's experience under colonialism undermine the usefulness of his work. If these failures were unique, rather than symptomatic, they would scarcely suggest anything about the usefulness of psychoanalysis to black feminism. However, in certain respects the crucial absences in Fanon's work are consistent with the fictive universalism of white male identities in psychoanalysis as a whole. For all his brilliant attempts to use psychoanalysis to illuminate the politics of racism and the brutal "laws" of racializing consciousness, Fanon does not entirely escape the universalizing logic of psychoanalysis itself. And this logic is nowhere more evident than in his construction of the "woman of color." Given such a famous, and flawed, psychoanalytic work by a black scholar, it is perhaps surprising that black feminists do employ dimensions of psychoanalytic theory, albeit critically. In fact, psychoanalytically informed works by women of color range from theory to clinical practice. All scholars of color who use psychoanalysis are sensitive to the criticism that theorists of color have in common with many scholars of other marginalized groups: that psychoanalysis posits a universal subject who is white and bourgeois. 85 Some critics further identify the psychoanalytic subject as sexually and developmentally male. 86 This criticism might be crudely understood as the idea that psychoanalysis is a "white" theory or discourse, an idea that suggests an exclusionary intellectual identity politics. Yet closer examinations of the contexts in which this view is expressed demonstrate that the actual criticism is of a fictively universal, hence "white," subject. Hortense Spillers's own recuperation of psychoanalysis for black cultural projects takes the form of replying to the charge that psychoanalysis merely adumbrates "bourgeois subjectivity" when black people need to be "talking about something else" that psychoanalysis already addresses that "something else." 87

32

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

What is the "something else" that psychoanalysis offers to intellectuals of color in spite of its fictively universal white subject? Black feminists suggest many possibilities. In The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Patricia Williams offers a rare work of legal theory that takes seriously a potential psychoanalytic contribution to legal thinking. Williams cites theorists as disparate as CarlJung,Jacques Lacan, and Alice Miller to inform the legal community's understanding of processes of identity construction and resistance to self-knowledge, as well as the effects of invisibility and harm on marginalized others. 88 Bell hooks explicitly calls for more Mrican Americans to enter the psychoanalytic profession to pursue projects of racial justice and to treat African Americans with knowledge and respect for the social worlds they inhabit and the particular injuries of racism. 89 And black feminist clinicians explore the benefits and complications of psychodynamic therapies with black women clients. 90 The legal theorist Angela Harris argues that the principal contributions of the thought of black women to feminism lie in the recognition of the "multiple and contradictory" nature of the self. 91 To the extent that psychoanalysis can be characterized as an intellectual discourse that theorizes the multiple and contradictory nature of the self, the possibility of an affinity between black feminism and psychoanalysis seems tantalizing. However, if black feminist thought is so successful at conceptualizing multiplicity, relationality, and ambivalence, why bring psychoanalysis and black feminist thought together? First, feminist as well as other scholars need models for analyzing discursive representations of power, authority, difference, homogeneity, and experience. Considering the relevance of group tasks, needs, and dangers from a group psychoanalytic perspective gives feminists who focus on diverse cultural and historical groups of women an additional theoretical perspective on which to draw for insights into intra- and intergroup processes. Indeed, if we understand multicultural feminists as engaged in tasks of investigating and subverting existing modes of group identity construction, psychoanalysis adds an interpretive tool to those available through disciplines such as sociology, history, political theory, and literary theory. Second, psychoanalysis can actually help to historicize group identities by examining the interplay between social formations and subjectivities. The benefits of such anti-totalizing moves may be widely distributed across identity groups even if identity groups are shifting and cross-cutting discursive entities. Indeed, white feminists who use relational psychoanalysis underscore its capacity to theorize changing identities and social relations even though relatively little of this kind of psychoanalytic theorizing has yet been done. 92 A third benefit of bringing together psychoanalysis and multicultural feminisms is to name the groups on whom theoretical light

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

33

is ostensibly being shed rather than cloaking differences in theoretical speculations about "groups." To the extent that assumptions of group conformity, volatility, and menace pervade ordinary social discourse as well as scholarly investigations about identity groups, those whose social and political interests are served by identity group politics are disadvantaged before processes of interest articulation and political activism even begin. Only those who prosper under the status quo-their own group identities mystified by dominant social ideology-are served by ignoring the historical differences in group positionings, discourses, and acts. Finally, when used as a theory of interpretation, psychoanalytic theories of groups do not attempt to specify, and hence to regulate, the development of group identities. This is not to say that the application of psychoanalytic modes of interpretation escapes disciplinary possibilities; it is only to say that these applications must be carefully scrutinized for their actual effects and not rejected out of hand. These are ultimately political questions, for they involve the ways in which group discourses generate, maintain, and mystify relations of power and resistance. Feminist theorists agree that analyzing these relations and their effects is a central task of feminist social critique. 93 In spite of psychoanalytic work on race and racism, and whatever the possibilities for an integration of psychoanalysis and black feminist thought, psychoanalytic theorists and clinicians still often fail to note the different effects of race on those who are already marginalized and harmed, rather than aggrandized, by racial feeling and fantasy. 94 If psychoanalysis often fails to contribute to such important theoretical goals, what is left of it for contemporary theorists of identity? The answer is that relational psychoanalysis can help us to analyze and articulate pivotal aspects of group life: the erotics of group membership, the psychodynamics of conflict, schism, and group fragmentation, and the construction of leadership and group boundaries. If this is so, psychoanalytic theory can serve as a means of critically engaging a black feminist discourse in which plural identities and group-related subjectivities are central. This is not to suggest that psychoanalysis can deliver a definitive account of sexed or raced identities. It is, rather, to suggest that relational psychoanalysis can give readers who value multicultural feminism a means of discursive interpretation that is not available from other theoretical sources. Spillers speaks for many feminists, not only feminists of color, when she takes a pragmatic perspective on psychoanalysis as a tool rather than a commitment. Asked in an interview whether her recommendation is to "reconfigure psychoanalytic discourse, problematize it, take what you want from it and leave behind what is not going to be useful," she responds, "yes, exactly right." 95

34

PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

One attractive aspect of psychoanalysis noted by theorists like Amina Mama and Claudia Tate is that in spite of its racializing foundations, psychoanalysis continues to produce possibilities for transformation and critical insight. By exposing the operations of racializing social, political, and cultural processes, psychoanalytic theorizing can help to disrupt the racializing terms within its own foundations to reveal the richness and complexity of identities that diverge from the (fantasized) white, Western, heterosexual, male model of humanness. 96 As it is continually retheorized, students of psychoanalysis push it to become more transparent to the forms of authority that are both embedded and ignored in its applications.

2

FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS TO POLITICAL THEORY

THE RELATIONAL TRADITION

Race and racism appear and disappear throughout the psychoanalytic corpus. In spite of this intermittent attention, psychoanalysis can help elucidate the formation of socially and historically shaped group identities and the social responses to those identities. And among the traditions of psychoanalytic theory, object relations is uniquely suited to theorizing the intersection and dialectic between social processes and the development of individual subjectivity. Whether the theoretical focus is on the formation of individual subjectivity or on group formations and dynamics, it is the very resistance of object relations theory to strict and essentialist representations of groups that makes it inviting as a theory of identity formation. Many of the same scholars-feminists, psychoanalysts, and political theorists-who use either individual or group versions of object relations to theorize identity formation also find that object relations can provide useful tools for the interpretation of identity group discourses. Political discourses that are so closely tied in production and reception to the formation of identity constitute a site of interpretation for psychoanalytic reading. Departing from standard references to the object relations tradition of psychoanalysis, in this book I use the term "relational" psychoanalysis except when referring to the earliest founding of object relations. 1 The relational psychoanalytic tradition is a rich one, and there are many theorist-clinicians on whom to rely. 2 As Melanie Klein is regarded as the founder of object relations/relational theory, Wilfred Bion is regarded as the founder and most important relational theorist of groups. Not only is Bion's work significantly influenced by Klein and Kleinians, but the influence now also operates in the other direction; "all Kleinians today regard their present practice and theory as having been significantly moulded by [Bion's] work." 3

36

F R0 M P S Y C H 0 AN A LY S I S T 0

P 0 Ll T I C A L T H E 0 R Y

The foundations of relational psychoanalysis can be traced to Freud. In spite of his well-known structural theory of mind as consisting of id, ego, and superego, Freud laid the groundwork for relational accounts of subjectivity by theorizing the role of intrapsychic defenses in psychic life. However, it was Melanie Klein and Donald \Vinnicott who developed the theoretical foundations for object relations/relational psychoanalysis, leading a "paradigm shift" in psychoanalytic theory that redefines "mind ... from a set of predetermined structures emerging from inside an individual organism to transactional patterns and internal structures derived from an interactive, interpersonal field." 4 Many scholars emphasize the differences between Klein and \Vinnicott, but significant similarities connect their work. A comment from \Vinnicott's biographer, Adam Phillips, tartly suggests the intellectual link between the two: "wherever he went he met a woman on her way back." 5 Melanie Klein's journey to psychoanalysis was unorthodox and significantly influenced by her gender. The daughter of a Polish-born physician, she aspired to study medicine in her-and Freud's-Vienna. Instead, she married, bore children, divorced, and in 1914 met Sandor Ferenczi, a follower and colleague of Freud's. Klein began consulting with Ferenczi for depression, but she quickly joined the intellectual circle of psychoanalysts and analytic aspirants and became a lay child analyst. After a few years in Berlin, in 1926 she accepted the invitation of prominent analysts to practice in England, and there she spent the remainder of her career. As one of its members, Klein wielded great influence over the British Psycho-Analytical Society. 6 One sign of her continuing influence is that the rivalry of the early 1940s between Klein and Anna Freud is perpetuated to this day in the structure and conventions of the society. Although Klein has received a great deal less attention in the United States than either Freud or Lacan, Kleinian analysis is influential in many parts of the world, including throughout South America and parts of Europe. Nonetheless, evidence for American interest in Klein includes the staging of Nicolas Wright's play "Mrs. Klein" and the publication and distribution of Introducing Melanie Klein, a text in a series that includes such figures as Marx and Freud. 7 Younger than Klein by a generation, Donald Winnicott followed a more orthodox path to psychoanalytic practice. \Vinnicott was born in England, where he became a pediatrician and practicing analyst. He was analyzed by Klein's colleague Joan Riviere, but he was never a partisan in debates over Kleinian thought, preferring instead to evade the split in the British Society between Klein and Anna Freud by leading a compromise ("B") group within the Society. \Vinnicott is more of a social theorist than Klein, analyzing juvenile delinquency, criminality, and the cultural sources

F R0 M P S Y C H 0 A N A LY S I S T 0

P 0 Ll T I CAL T H E 0 RY

37

of artistic creativity. 8 It is in part for this reason that many feminists have been more attracted to Winnicott than to Klein when they take up the psychological lineaments of women's social and political positioning. Nevertheless, the affinities between Winnicott and Klein make them "two most prominent founding figures" of object-relations thought. 9 While Klein's thought is summed up by her biographer as expressing the view that human psychic life is a "mosaic of turbulence," 10 Winnicott's work is "largely a softened version of Melanie Klein." 11 Recent relational theorists employ the work of theorists like Klein and Winnicott in ways that are indebted to early object relations even while building on these earlier versions to create new ideas and applications. Many who are indebted to Klein and others in the relational tradition are feminist theorists, although a number of issues continue to inhibit feminist considerations of object relations/relational psychoanalysis. Of these inhibiting issues, I note two. First, in spite of widespread interdisciplinary feminist interest in relationality, many feminists are uncomfortable with the nomenclature of"object relations," suggesting as it does the reduction of people to the status of"objects." 12 Although the term is undeniably reductive, this criticism may misunderstand the protean nature of the term "object" as self, other, fantasy, image, and representation. Second, descriptive dimensions of object-relations theory are sometimes mistaken as normative claims in ways that foreclose feminist interest. 13 Consider, for example, the overwhelming assumption of heterosexual orientation and even an understanding of unmarked sexuality as masculine in most psychoanalytic thought, including object relations. 14 Many feminists recognize the potential contribution of psychoanalysis to an emancipatory theory for women. These psychoanalytic feminists employ psychoanalysis to articulate some aspect of the coming-into-existence of gendered subjectivity. The construction of personality, the introjection of aspects of socially constructed dimensions of race and gender identity, the formation of sexuality and desire: these are the subjects of feminist psychoanalytic analysis at the level of the individual, and these are crucial dimensions of feminist social and political thought. Yet an individual-level analysis is not sufficient for all feminist purposes, for it leaves unaddressed much that is relevant to feminism as a sociopolitical practice and identity. The experience of group life is of great interest to feminists as social and political actors. Feminists continue to experience not only joy, nurturance, support, and bonding in identification with "feminist community," but also frustration, disillusionment, hope, and stubborn conflict. Nor is the mixed record of groups to satisfy the needs and demands of group members exclusively a feature of nonfeminist groups. 15 Psychoanalytic

38

FROM PSYCH OA N A LYSIS TO PO LIT I CAL THE 0 RY

political theorists focus on how groups act in threatening ways, toward outsiders and sometimes toward members themselves, in attempts to satisfy the psychological and political demands of group members. Another dimension of group life is the tendency of leaders to represent and encourage the most dangerous-indeed, the most psychologically primitive-aspects of groups. Psychoanalytic political theorists generally agree that for psychoanalytic theory to be an effective tool for the analysis of political discourse there must be a shift from a theory of individual development to a theory of groups. Such a shift reveals psychological operations that are veiled by a focus on individual development. In a liberal society that relies upon narrow configurations of individuality in every venue from law to popular culture, "the doctrine of narrowly bounded individual development serves as a defense against recognition of the fact of group psychology." 16 A "radical transposition" bridges the analytic gap between levels of analysis from individual to collectiveP Unfortunately, feminist theory is not particularly helpful in effecting this transposition, as little feminist theory has pondered the implications of group psychodynamics for feminist projects. 18 Even though psychoanalysis remains troubling for many feminists, relational psychoanalysis can help feminists inquire into the group dynamics of feminist thought and politics. OBJECT RELATIONS I RELATIONAL PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE BASICS

Relational psychoanalysis provides a wide conceptual vocabulary for representing and reconstructing the psychological processes of individuals and groups. Indeed, psychoanalytic political theories can captu1e quite distinct perspectives on the psychopoliticallives of groups by emphasizing different aspects of the rich text of relational thought. Central to many formulations is Klein's idea of developmental "positions" drawn from her analytic work with individuals, most of whom were children. Unlike many developmental theorists, Klein did not imagine the two positions she named as sequential and irreversible, even though in all human development she understood the initial entry into the depressive position as preceded ineluctably by the paranoid-schizoid organization of infantile psychic life. Rather, "position" refers to a complex constellation of perceptions, fantasies, emotions, and behaviors, some of which serve as defenses against forms of anxiety that are either "paranoid-schizoid" or "depressive" in origin. 19 In the paranoid-schizoid phase of development, the self experiences

F R0 M P S Y C H 0 AN A LY S I S T 0

P 0 LIT I C A L T H E 0 RY

39

fear of disintegration, splits its inchoate loving and hating feelings, and rigidly separates them. Neither the self nor others can be perceived realistically under the conditions of such radical splitting, thus no relation of love or concern for others is possible. Once a successful integration of these feelings begins to occur, a morality of concern-what Klein calls reparation-becomes possible. The integration oflove and hate initiates the depressive position, "and the result is an increased fear of loss, states akin to mourning and a strong feeling of guilt.... The very experience of depressive feelings in turn has the effect of further integrating the ego, because it makes for an increased understanding of psychic reality and better perception of the external world, as well as for a greater synthesis between inner and external situations."20 Positions are central to the capacity for self-esteem and relatedness; they are "manifestations of crucial attitudes towards the [internal and external] objects." 21 However, a discussion of Kleinian positions is incomplete unless it acknowledges the intrinsic moral dimension of Klein's categories. Klein links the positions, and the emotions and defenses characteristic and constitutive of them, with moral responsiveness and action in ways that would be quite startling to many readers of contemporary academic psychology. 22 She notes, for example, that "one consequence of a balanced development is integrity and strength of character. Such qualities have a far-reaching effect both on the individual's self-reliance and on his relations to the outside world .... Character is the foundation for all human achievement. The effect of a good character on others lies at the root of healthy social development." 23 Even in those passages where Klein is less didactic about the development of"character," she makes clear that the endpoint of the development that reaches through the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position is the capacity to appreciate, respect, and pursue "goodness." This capacity is not superficial behavioral conformity akin to Winnicott's notion of a false self.2 4 Rather, it is the precondition for relating to others (and to the self) in ways that minimize paranoia, punitive states of mind, and suffering and that promote tolerance, forgiveness, and-in intimate relations-love. Reparation is key to understanding the moral dimension of Klein's psychological theory. 25 For Klein, reparation "consists of the phantasy of putting right the effects of the aggressive components" of the self2 6 and describes the "processes by which the ego feels it undoes harm done in phantasy, restores, preserves, and revives objects." 27 In its reliance upon the human capacities of pity and remorse, Kleinian reparation does not diverge significantly from many philosophical, theological, and even political accounts of collective life. Yet relational theorists stress that repara-

40

F R0 M P S YC H 0 A N A l YS I S T0

P 0 ll T I C A l T H E0 RY

tion is not a psychoanalytic restatement of primordial human benevolence or care-giving. Rather, reparation refers to acts, and sometimes fantasies, that proceed from the realization of our capacities for destruction-our ability to damage ourselves and others with our hatred and aggression. Reparation is born in the guilt of the depressive position. In fact, Klein's perspective on guilt is unapologetic and suggests the recovery movement critique of Wendy Kaminer more than the pop psychology of many contemporary psychotherapists: "there's a name for people who lack guilt and shame: sociopaths. We ought to be grateful if guilt makes things like murder and moral corruption 'harder.' " 28 Yet, for Klein, there is more than a touch of melancholy in reparation and more than a small share of depressive anxiety that we will be unable to undo the effects of our own ill-fated intrapsychic lives. Klein argues that the depressive position situates individuals psychologically in such a way that they can begin to recognize themselves as harming needed others and can begin to take reparative actions to "make good" those harms. There are, however, certain dilemmas social-theoretical applications of reparation must confront, if not overcome. The first is the substitution of "mock" for "real" reparation. Mock, or "manic," reparation constitutes a defense against depressive knowledge-the knowledge of oneself as capable of harm-doing and destructiveness. Mock reparation may refuse depressive knowledge in two ways: first, by directing contempt at objects in order to avoid guilt and deny reliance on them; and second, by directing "reparative" actions, including fantasies and discourse, toward unrelated objects so as to avoid puncturing the illusion of wholeness and robustness of the harmed object itself. 29 In fact, the possibility of directing "reparative" actions toward unrelated objects reveals a second dilemma: Klein's own apparent insouciance about the rigors and consequences of reparation. In a surprising passage, Klein reflects on the ways in which aggression and reparation play out in the life span of individuals by invoking an "explorer" who "discover[s]" and occupies a "new country." Such an individual uses the "aggressive sexual desires, greed, [and] curiosity" of early psychic life for a later prosocial purpose. In the process, he inevitably stimulates guilt at having directed aggression toward the mother, on whom life depends, through her surrogate, the sensual world. Unfortunately, Klein herself suggests that "native populations" constitute part of the sensual world for European adventurers even as she rejects "ruthless cruelty" against these peoples. And she approvingly notes the possibility that colonizers can assuage guilt and practice reparation by "repopulating the country with people of their own nationality." 30 Klein resolves the colonizers' moral dilemma by means of a racist mea-

FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS TO POLITICAL THEORY

41

sure that denies the individuality and interiority of the dispossessed "natives." Despite her own theoretical preoccupation with the development of moral character, here she directs her clinical and theoretical concern toward a tidy resolution: removing the inconvenient indigenous population that is the source of the colonizers' guilt pangs. But it is important to see what else is omitted by this strategy. Klein is widely understood as a theorist who neglects the social dimension of intrapsychic life, even when that social dimension lies in the actual quality of relations within families. 31 And yet this social dimension, and especially the way a social matrix of action redounds to actors, is key to reparation. First, aggressive action is always laden with anxiety because it "cannot be insulated from the fear of retaliation." 32 Aggression stimulates persecutory anxiety, which is neither stilled nor finally resolved by the violent elimination of a foe. Second, although reparation does not seek to restore the status quo ante, particular instances of reparation are embedded in socially constructed value judgments of what constitutes "repair." 33 However useful the concept, it can never definitively settle the issues of what satisfies as a final endpoint and what measure of reparation is appropriate. Nor can reparation be completely disentangled from the value judgments of particular groups. A final problem with the concept of reparation is that it seems incapable of generating any sustained interest. This was so for Klein, who "seemed to lose interest" as she traced the developmental trajectory from paranoid-schizoid to depressive position, from "haunting inner world" to "harmonious inner environment." 34 It appears that for clinicians as well as for political theorists, human despair and destructiveness are strong intellectuallures. It is not only that justice, reconciliation, and reparation are hard work; sometimes it is a challenge even to turn our attention to these themes in spite of the excitement afforded by hostility and aggressiOn. As clinicians are concerned with their patients' capacities to love and repair, psychoanalytic political theorists explore the implications of reparation for relations between groups. Psychoanalytic political theorists largely agree with analysts of groups that, although as desirable for groups as for individuals, reparative affect, discourse, and behavior are complicated and rare in groups. The fixedness of groups at regressed, primary process, or paranoid-schizoid states of existence is a staple of psychoanalytic accounts of groups. One such account captures the general agreement in vivid prose, albeit in a way that leaves the impression that group membership itself is a form of pathology: "A group, like a gang, weakens the defences and strengthens the wishes of its members; it favours the pleasure principle over the reality principle; it is thus attractive to, for ex-

42

F R0 M P S Y C H 0 A N A LY S I S T 0

P 0 L I T I C A L T H E 0 RY

ample, lost souls, psychopaths, and the emotionally stunted. Others to whom it might be attractive include disturbed individuals at the limit of psychosis." 35 Others put the matter of groups and reparation less colorfully, suggesting that reparation is more rare for groups (i.e., for individuals as members of groups) than for individuals in personal relations. Unlike personal relations, group relations provide fewer opportunities for reality testing and heighten paranoid-schizoid anxieties. 36 Instead of positions, and the reparation that is linked to the depressive position, Klein's contemporary Winnicott writes of the more fluid "capacities" formed in a "stage of concern." In Winnicott's stage of concern, the child begins to recognize aspects of"ruthless" primitive love impulses as potentially harmful to the others who are simultaneously coming into existence as separate beings. In spite of his noted propensity to approach developmental issues in social or "environmental" terms, Winnicott holds that disagreeable passions not only proceed from primitive love, but are in large measure a consequence of the unavoidable frustration of desire. Maturity demands "an acceptance of responsibility for all the destructiveness that is bound up with living, with the instinctual life, and with anger at frustration." 37 For both Klein and Winnicott, we confront disagreeable passions in our intrapsychic and relational worlds in large measure because the mere project of living entails prodigious frustrations. Negotiating disagreeable passions is an unavoidable struggle and remains so throughout life. For psychoanalytic political theorists, one of the most attractive aspects of these relational conceptions of individual development is that they are stage theories that lack one element typical of stage theories: they do not specify stages as invariant. This distinction serves theorists of social life who seek to explain the more frightening forms of group transformation. The multicultural city that suddenly spawns murderous ethnic conflict and the ideological community that dissolves in factional infighting might be described as demonstrating vicissitudes of collective psychological functioning that can be addressed with some concept of positions. However, many psychoanalytic political theorists do not explicitly use relational concepts of "positions" or "stages." Instead, they may emphasize psychological processes that are inherent in the development of selfhood in a Kleinian account of positions. These processes-such as splitting, idealization, projection, and projective identification-are "normal" and ubiquitous as defenses against anxiety and as mechanisms in the evolution of self and of relations with others. The defenses are usually understood by clinicians as psychic processes employed by individuals in relation with others and in relations with the more threatening aspects of the self. But both psychoanalysts of groups and psychoanalytic political theorists focus

F R 0 M P S Y C H 0 A N A LY S I S T 0

P 0 L I T I C A L T H E 0 RY

43

on the ways in which group members mutually deploy such psychic defenses and processes. For theorists and clinicians in the relational tradition, splitting is the most basic of all psychological defenses both because it is understood to precede more sophisticated defenses and because other defenses are predicated upon its operation. In splitting, relational psychoanalysts find "one of the earliest ego-mechanisms and defences against [paranoid-schizoid] anxiety," 38 one that denotes a perception of objects as having either "unnaturally good natures or unnaturally bad ones." 39 Splitting is not entirely pathological; it is essential to preserve and protect the sense that goodness exists in the self and the world and for later integration of good and bad feelings, images, and representations. Idealization is often paired with splitting as a consequence and an ineluctable co-process. For Klein, idealization of what is perceived as perfectly good (including the self or parts of the self) is a defense against envy, persecutory anxiety, and destructive impulses. 40 Idealizing keeps the fantasy of a perfect object intact, even as it exaggerates that fantasy in an attempt to differentiate utterly between goodness and badness and the containers-for example, individuals, body parts, or groups-in which the good and bad are housed. Like splitting, idealization is adaptive in that it provides a precondition for loving relations, although excessive idealization can also be a sign of intense persecution and can vitiate the possibility of mature forms oflove and intimacy. In addition to splitting and idealization, relational theorists focus a great deal of attention on a class of psychic mechanisms and defenses that are often aggregated under the rubric of "projection," but that are sometimes distinguished from one another as projection and projective identification. In projection proper, one "attribute[s] certain states of mind to someone else." To use a common example, we might transform "I hate him" through unconscious projection into "he hates me," and then experience and act on the hatred we now perceive to emanate from the other. 41 Many contemporary relational thinkers besides Klein distinguish projective identification from projection proper by any of three characteristics: the projection of dimensions of self or personality that are broader than mere affects or images, the extent to which the projector seeks to merge with or control the recipient (and not just to rid herself of unwanted material), and the effects of the projection on its object. 42 In many respects, the most provocative of these distinctions is the last, in which an individual or group member who is the recipient of projective identification internalizes, in whole or in part, the ascription of traits, feelings, images, or motivations. Here, the object of projective identification not only comes to identify with projected fantasies or traits, but may find herself being influenced by feelings or attributions that feel alien, or may act upon

44

FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS TO POLITICAL THEORY

them as if they were her own. The woman who becomes increasingly helpless and dependent in the face of her partner's competence; the man who becomes convinced enough of the shamefulness of his same-sex desire that he abjures his sexuality and seeks out the reparative therapy his fellow congregants recommend-examples of projective identification abound in our relational life. Ordinary experiences in which an individual elicits feelings or reactions from an intimate may signal projective identification. 43 Projective processes serve many purposes. Included among these are learning about and communicating with the other, as well as more injurious purposes of control, manipulation, and self-purification. 44 As Klein stipulates, "the processes of splitting off parts of the self and projecting them into objects are thus of vital importance for normal development as well as for abnormal object relations." 45 Whether the attributions are positive or negative, however, projective identification "leads to a strong confusion between the self and the object, which also comes to stand for the self." 46 While projective identification may take place with either positive or negative attributions, the process in groups is more likely to involve negative attributions and attempts at control of the now negatively defined other. In groups, as in individuals, it is not an overstatement to say that projective processes "bind us ever more closely" to our enemies. 47 Before psychoanalytic inquiry can prove useful to the study of groups, certain questions arise. What is a "group?" And when is group psychology in operation? Can clinical data associated with individual and group psychoanalysis be applied to thinking about the artifacts of social and political group life, including identity group discourse? Without considering these questions it is impossible to understand how the tools and concepts of psychoanalysis migrate from the consulting room to the empirical observations and theoretical interpretations of psychoanalytic political theory.

RELATIONAL GROUP PSYCHOANALYSIS

Wilfred Bion is the most influential figure in the development of a relational psychoanalysis of groups. Like Winnicott's, Bion's career in psychoanalysis began in medicine; unlike Wir.nicott, Bion underwent a training analysis with Klein and eventually became the president of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Bion's life and career were shaped by military life in the world wars: he served in the British military in World War I and formed his most significant ideas about groups as a result of his analytic work with veterans in a military psychiatric hospital. Later, he ini-

FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS TO POLITICAL THEORY

45

tiated a form of group therapy called the Tavistock Model of Group Relations that is still widely used to investigate and instruct members about group psychodynamics. In the United States, the A. K. Rice Institute conducts workshops and group relations conferences using the Tavistock model, including many that focus on ethnic and racial diversity. One way to think about relational group psychoanalysis is that it is an extension of individual theory and an application of the concepts of individual analysis to groups. Psychoanalytic theorists of groups emphasize that group theory extends the study of individual psychic life to embrace the effects of what Bion calls "groupishness." These theorists do not conceptualize individuals either as independent beings or as beings embedded only in intimate relations. Rather, all individuals are ineluctably embedded in relations with larger groups, many of whose members may be distant and only imagined. Consistent with Bion's thought is the blunt assessment that "the group is the basic state of human existence." 48 Bion points to the ways in which human beings are always torn between strivings for individuality and desires for interpersonal connection. Relational group psychoanalysis studies interactions between groups, interactions between individuals as group members, and the psychic processes that arise from individuals' struggles with their own groupishness. The principal distinction between "individual" and "group" psychoanalysis thus lies in the group psychoanalytic attention to individuals as group members. As Bion succinctly describes the root assumption of group psychoanalytic theory: "no individual, however isolated in time and space, can be regarded as outside a group or lacking in active manifestations of group psychology." 49 Certainly, group affiliations are often latent and multiple, and they may change from time to time, but these vicissitudes do not mean that we do not imagine, feel, and act upon a conception of ourselves as, for example, patriots in times of national stress. As Hortense Spillers puts it, "you're always in relationship to others, even when you are a lone figure."50 Groups not only generate psychodynamic phenomena but also serve as arenas individual members use for their own psychological purposes. However individual in origin, these purposes are nonetheless widely shared and relationally recognizable. Taking seriously Bion's argument about the essential groupishness of human beings means attending to the ways in which group members contribute to a "group mentality" that consists of "anonymous" or disclaimed contributions to the group's psychodynamics. 51 Group psychoanalytic theorists agree that it is some part of essential human nature that because human life begins in helpless vulnerability and is lived out in a world of others, all human beings evince struggles with boundaries, separation, connection, conformity, sexuality, and authority.

46

FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS TO POLITICAL THEORY

Individuals and group members will resolve these issues differently in ways influenced by culture, history, and early intimate associations. 5 2 In many respects, Bion's group psychoanalysis is different enough from anything found in Klein's writings that it is difficult to ascertain the connections between them. 5 3 Nevertheless, Bion and other group theorists have taken distinctive elements of Kleinian psychoanalysis, such as conceptualizations of individual defense mechanisms, and extended these to groups and group phenomena. More generally, Bion uses an "affect language" of love and hate that is found in Klein's work and that can be contrasted with the drive language of much orthodox psychoanalysis. 54 Many of Bion's unique contributions to the psychoanalysis of groups are contained in his most famous work, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, although later writings continue to be used today. 5 5 One difficulty in applying group psychoanalysis to the study of social groups is that group psychoanalytic theory is developed largely within the context of therapeutic groups. Hence, it is necessary to abstract clinical conclusions and insights about groups and their functioning to research questions that are not related to therapeutic ends. A central objection to this translation of political theory from clinical practice is the question of methodological individualism in the analytic group context. The clinician Alexander Wolf distinguishes between "group-as-a-whole" approaches to group psychoanalysis (associated with analysts like Bion) and his own "psychoanalysis in groups" approach. Wolf considers misguided any approach to group psychoanalysis that does not focus exclusively on analysis of the individuals who physically constitute the group. In this way, Wolf forecloses the possibility of translating group psychoanalysis from clinical setting to theory. Differences in therapeutic advantages to be gained from different kinds of clinical practices are beyond the scope of this study. However, theorists who have no clinical purposes must distinguish between therapeutic and theoretical arguments. Therapy and theory are very different sites of intellectual and emotional work, with different criteria for judging intellectual fruitfulness. 56 More general objections to the translation of practice into theory are also common. Freud meets the objection that issues raised by clinical patients could not be extrapolated to "normal" populations with the claim that the neurotic people who constituted the objects of psychoanalytic inquiry were just like "normal" people, only more so. This is to say that the exaggerations that could be perceived in the psychic lives of neurotics provided a clearer map of the psyches of non-neurotics than could be discovered by studying non-neurotics themselves. The archaic concept of neurosis aside, psychoanalytic political theorists argue that the descriptions of group processes provided by clinical psychoanalysis can be re-

FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS TO POLITICAL THEORY

47

markably accurate and useful when extrapolated to social and political group phenomena. "Are psychotherapy groups and political groups really comparable?" 57 Mark Ettin and his colleagues respond to this question by pointing out that there are many differences between the two kinds of groups. Political groups are more likely to deal directly in political interests, territory, and life-and-death decisions affecting group members' lives. Hence, distinguishing "understanding" from "action" illuminates the similarities between therapeutic and political groups. Besides having the often negative connotation within psychoanalysis of "acting out," action is associated with a social and political world in which decisions must be made, resources distributed, and citizens monitored, punished, and defended. "The immediate purpose of the therapeutic process involves the development of new and shared understandings of self and others rather than 'action.' ... 'Understanding' is entirely consistent with the purpose and process of psychotherapy, but 'action' is not." 58 Although most group psychodynamic theory emerges from clinical settings, clinicians have also developed psychoanalytic group theory outside the usual context of therapeutic groups. Bion worked with groups in the officer corps of the British army. From his armchair, Freud analyzed large groups such as the army and the church. Elliott Jacques applies relational psychoanalysis to corporate relations between labor and management, and Isabel Menzies Lyth applies relational psychoanalysis to the interactions of a nursing staff. 59 These psychoanalytic applications by clinicians, albeit in nonclinical settings, give support to psychoanalysis as a tool for the study of groups and group phenomena by social scientists beyond the consulting room. Bion argues that group processes are ubiquitous-that they do not depend for their existence on individuals actually being gathered together in a collectivity characterized by physical proximity. 60 He calls "political" an insight whose Aristotelian overtones are unmistakable: I do not consider it necessary for a number of people to be brought together-the individual cannot help being a member of a group even if his membership of it consists in behaving in such a way as to give reality to the idea that he does not belong to a group at all. 61 It is important that the group should come together so that the characteristics of the group and the individual in it should be demonstrable. I attach no intrinsic importance to the coming together of the group .... Now this congregation of the group in a particular place at a particular time is obviously very important for the purely mechanical reasons I have just given, but it has no significance whatsoever in the production of group phenomena.62

48

F R0 M P S Y C H 0 A N A LY S I S T 0

P 0 Ll T I C A L T H E 0 R Y

Bion's conviction that the gathering of collectivities displays group processes rather than creating them is central to this project. I focus not on how groups of people behave when they meet together, but rather on how group processes are always present in the life-worlds of those who understand themselves as group members. More, group processes are inscribed in discourses through which group leaders communicate with members and members communicate with one another.

DEFENDING THE RELATIONAL

What makes relational psychoanalytic group theory an appropriate paradigm for this project? Michele Barrett worries that feminists will conclude that the putatively "matricentric" focus in object relations/relational psychoanalysis makes this approach "intrinsically feminist." Barrett's warning to feminists not to embrace a psychoanalytic tradition based upon its capacity to be "mapped onto the politics of gender" is sound. 63 In fact, discounting the matricentric argument for the superiority of object relations over, for example, the more patriarchal theories of Freud and Lacan leaves several arguments for relational psychoanalysis. First, psychoanalysis minimizes the perils associated with fixed and ideologically driven conceptions of identity. Relational theorizing represents the variations of humanness that appear in shared social and political contexts. Second, relational psychoanalysis emerges from a diverse field of contenders as a psychoanalytic tradition that takes passion, and the ongoing intersubjectivity and vicissitudes of social life, seriously. Theorists in the relational tradition share a "common vision" of a struggle for relatedness and separateness: "We are portrayed not as a conglomeration of physically based urges, but as being shaped by and inevitably embedded within a matrix of relationships with other people, struggling both to maintain our ties to others and to differentiate ourselves from them." 64 However, there is considerable space within this vision for diverse readings of the processes in group life through which individuals are constituted as social subjects. Finally, relational thought remains an open arena of theoretical contestation that is less constrained than some other theoretical systems by deference to a founder's iconic wisdom. Indeed, feminists who develop some version of relational psychoanalysis rely for their foundations upon a variety of authors and texts. True, as an interpretive theory psychoanalysis must be used critically and with caution. In the absence of a critical social perspective, even relational psychoanalytic theories can abstract their subjects from the social contexts in which they are embedded. Psychoanalytic theories of groups

FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS TO POLITICAL THEORY

49

share the tendency, common to all of psychoanalytic thought, to dehistoricize the processes and symptoms they observe and theorize. Therefore, one task of feminist appropriations of relational group psychoanalysis is to create a rehistoricized and contextualized psychoanalysis that is capable of recognizing the differences, as well as the similarities, that mark social and political relations. One way of attending to these differences and similarities is consistent with feminist strategies for social change: to note and theorize the effects of identity in constituting what come to be understood as universal explanations of social, political, or psychological phenomena. Historically, most clinical groups from which interpretations about groups have been drawn have been either all (white) male or mixed (usually white) male and female groups. Yet there are many social, political, and clinical groups made up exclusively of women of color. In spite of their race and gender homogeneity, clinicians report that these groups function unconsciously in ways that are both similar to and different from other kinds of groups. Race and gender matter because internalized relationships and representations of self and other are brought into groups and affect transference relationships, the kinds of projections generated within the group, and the ways in which group members respond to leadership. A homogeneous racial group of African American women in a psychoana-

lytically oriented therapy group will experience homogeneity in terms of race. However, diversity exists for them in terms of skin color, hair texture, class background, sexual orientation, diagnosis, and racial identity-among other things. These aspects of diversity within a racial group may stimulate as much emotional intensity as feelings of racial difference in an interracial group. 65 Besides its tendency to flatten or ignore identity differences, we can evaluate other characteristics of psychoanalytic theory as possible obstacles to the usefulness of relational group psychoanalysis. When considering social trauma, psychoanalytic perspectives often limit attention to discrete individuals, and not to groups whose members share common political conditions. 66 Feminists have been particularly critical of this tendency of psychological discourse to abstract individuals from their political context for two reasons: first, this psychological tendency encourages the personalizing of problems whose origins are political; second, the tendency fails to challenge psychological notions of a normative individual that, like similar notions in political thought, discount or pathologize those who diverge. 67 A historicized and socially contextualized psychoanalytic theory of groups critically examines power relations in group discourses-their role

50

F R0 M P S Y C H 0 A N A LY S I S T 0

P0 LI T I C A L T H E 0 RY

in dissolving or reproducing coercive unities and their role in encouraging or silencing dissenting voices. This is, indeed, what many group psychoanalytic theorists do, even though from a feminist perspective much is omitted in these investigations. As in other areas of study, the application of theory to real problems of groups helps scholars to retheorize and reconceptualize broad principles of group psychoanalysis. As a paradigm, relational group psychoanalysis has its own intellectual history, one that began with Freud's speculations about group phenomena and with the attempt to understand and solve social group problems using what therapeutic groups reveal about the psychology of people in groups. Often, political theorists who turn to relational psychoanalysis do so to explain the destructiveness of groups in word and deed-war, genocide, terrorism, and sporadic violence, as well as expressions of paranoia, greed, envy, and hatred. Indeed, these kinds of group dispositions and acts are usually the focus of psychoanalytic political theory, which expects pernicious rather than cooperative and benign behavior from groups.

PSYCHOANALYTIC POLITICAL THEORY

Group psychoanalysis of the sort pioneered by Freud and pursued by other analysts such as Wilfred Bion, although developed and applied in clinical group settings, is also productive for thinking about many aspects of social identity groups. However, clinical group psychoanalysis is not a sufficient literature on which to predicate analysis of identity groups and their discourses. Indeed, one critique ofBion's psychoanalysis is its relative distance from social analysis, or interest in the interpenetration of the social and psychological. "Though Bion recognized that man is a group creature who is at war with his social nature, he did not elaborate on the rootedness of humans in their social structure .... This leads to a considerable limitation in applying his ideas to group life in general." Malcolm Pine's claim that "the individual is penetrated to the very core by culture" is directed to those analysts of groups whose diminution of the consequences of society and culture forecloses certain understandings of group life. 68 In recent years, psychoanalytic political theorists have used both individual and group versions of relational psychoanalysis to explicate the psychic implications of politics. John Cash's call for a "radical transposition" from an individual to a group level of political analysis is explicitly joined by other psychoanalytic political psychologists. C. Fred Alford executes just this kind of transposition when he extrapolates from Melanie Klein's individual psychoanalysis to a Klein-inspired group theory that can be used to interpret political and cultural narratives and phenomena. 69

FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS TO POLITICAL THEORY

51

Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, and other relational psychoanalytic theorists are prominent sources for psychoanalytic political theory. Certainly, differences emerge in the political theories that are built on relational foundations, but significant similarities emerge in these psychoanalytic political theories as well. First, virtually all psychoanalytic political theorists share a pessimism about the possibility of group members working through the dilemmas of social and political groups in ways that facilitate capacities for individuality in group members and inhibit harm-doing by groups. This is so even when theorists specify, as most do, what kinds of conditions, acts, and processes would enhance the likelihood of more desirable outcomes, however local, contingent, and rare those outcomes might be. Second, virtually all psychoanalytic political theorists who address the subject of group leadership are wary about the destructiveness of group leaders. Thus, these theorists explain the multiple ways in which styles, processes, characters, and tools of leadership can work to encourage and mobilize group destructiveness or, occasionally, to encourage and mobilize reparative group arrangements and processes. Psychoanalytic political theory employs the conceptual tools of relational psychoanalysis while theorizing new applications for them. They use psychodynamic defenses as a route to comprehend such psychopolitical realities as symbols, leadership, and group boundaries. The concept of positions, originally applied to individual development, is sometimes applied to groups and used as a heuristic tool to explain sites of social and (inter)national relations such as cold-war big-power competition, cultural conflict, and domestic U.S. debates over gender roles and sexuality.7° Using the idea of paranoid-schizoid or depressive positions (or some explicit variation thereof) to grasp the affective, behavioral, or ideological stance of social or political groups allows psychoanalytic political theorists to offer explanations for aspects of group behavior, such as enemy-construction, that are taken for granted even as they appear to be mysterious side effects of political mobilization. The concept of positions also helps theorists distinguish group life and group phenomena from personal life and phenomena so that stock figures such as the "Nazi who is also a good father" or the "polite terrorist" do not utter-ly confound attempts at explanation.71 Psychoanalytic political theory does not address individuals as individuals. It uses the conceptual language of groups to understand how group phenomena become apparent in the psychological worlds of group members and in the discourses they share with each other. Current political applications of relational psychoanalysis tell us much about the dynamics of different kinds of groups. However,.these works do not exhaust the discursive dynamics of identity groups whose existence is characterized by pervasive historical subordination to another group or

52

F R0 M P S Y C H 0 A N A LY S I S T 0

P 0 Ll TICAL T H E 0 RY

groups. Nor, with the exception of some writings by Wolfenstein, do they respond to gender-based group subordination. Hence, while the existing literature of psychoanalytic political theory can address much within the group life and discourse of subordinated identity groups, gaps persist in these accounts of group life. Like the psychoanalytic group theories that do not seek political applications, the work of psychoanalytic political theorists is frequently read as theory of group life itself, rather than as accounts of group life in the particular contexts of small groups, bureaucratic organizations, mutually hostile large ethnic/racial groups, or other kinds of groups. Further, psychoanalytic group theorists-political and clinical-do not discourage adequately such misreadings. Theorists tend to draw broad conclusions about "groups" and to illustrate these conclusions with particular examples in ways that lead students of political psychology to read the conclusions as axiomatic. In particular, mainstream psychoanalytic political theorists have a mixed record in acknowledging the existence and salience of subordinated groups, whether racial/ethnic or gender.7 2 It is undeniable that racial and gender gaps in the execution of political research are partially a function of the fact that most political research in the West is carried out by white male intellectuals, rather than a reflection of any reality of the political landscape. This observation does not suggest any inevitable or intractable link between identity and research interest. It merely acknowledges the strong empirical link that prevails between the two. In what ways do theorists fail to account for group and leadership dynamics of subordinated groups? In employing psychoanalytic theory to address political phenomena theorists may have a tendency to substitute psychology for politics in significant ways. It is easy to use psychoanalytic theory (or, indeed, any kind of psychology) to minimize differences between groups and to overlook relations of power and their effects between groups. Psychoanalytic theories tend to treat groups as the same (that is, manifesting similar psychological characteristics in their members) and, implicitly, as equal (that is, manifesting similar political positioning against one another). This assumption of equivalence is obvious in the many conversations in scholarly forums and in popular political discourse about what groups-or individuals-do to one another, a narrative about group life that suggests parity in positioning and the trading back and forth of advantage, one group over the other. There are many identity groups whose historical reality is clearly not accounted for by the "man is wolf to man" narrative. 73 The belief that actual groups exhibit similar and equal forms of group dynamics, and especially aggressiveness and competitive hostility-what

F R0 M PS Y C H 0 A N A l Y S I S T 0

P0 ll T I C A l T H E 0 RY

53

Leon Wiesel tier calls "fictions of parity" 74-raises empirical questions. To consider such empirical questions regarding particular groups, we must be cautious about the theoretical strategies through which we apply psychoanalytic theory to political thought. It is always important to pursue political analyses that differentiate groups from one another in behavior, leadership, and discursive ideological styles even as we acknowledge similarities between them.

POLITICAL THEORY AND IDEOLOGY

Psychoanalytic political theorists hold that identity group discourses, (high) political theories, and political ideology are all legitimate objects of psychoanalytic interpretation. Political theory is not an intellectual discourse whose objectivity and philosophical rigor place it beyond a group psychoanalytic interpretation, but is "itself a type of group-like entity." 75 As such, political theory may be read for its strategies of confrontation, evasion, denial, and "acting out" of group needs and issues. The ways in which modern mainstream, especially liberal, political theory has misunderstood and misrepresented the nature of individuality and "groupishness" is Alford's principal concern. He seeks to reveal the gaps, erasures, silences, and fictitious plots that recur in modern Western political thought. Hence, in his reading of political thought, central intellectual concepts such as the classical liberal "state of nature" can be mined for group psychological meaning. In the same vein, relational psychoanalysis can also be applied to identity group discourse and political ideology. John Cash's group psychoanalytic reading of Northern Irish Unionist ideology exemplifies this use of psychoanalysis. Cash regards political ideology as a "pre-eminently psychosocial concept," as a concept that centers on the "interplay of both social and psychic processes." 76 In addition, in spite of the situatedness of the study of ideology at the intersection of psychology and social theory, theorists too frequently privilege the cognitive dimension of ideology over the affective dimension. Cash corrects this problem of the study of ideology by applying group psychoanalysis to the study of Unionist discourse between 1962 and I975· We can read group psychological meaning in the linguistic expressions of both group leaders and group members, and these interpretations help scholars to understand the effects of group thought and feeling, including conflict, relations of power and authority, modes of leadership, and strategies of boundary maintenance. 77 Distinguishing these categories of discourse is not as important as noting that psychoanalytic political theorists use relational group theory to

54

F R0 M P S Y C H 0 A N A l Y S I S T 0

P 0 ll T I C A l T H E 0 RY

read a variety of "texts." Indeed, one virtue of relational psychoanalytic readings of theory, ideology, and group discourse is that they emerge not as distinct entities ordered in a hierarchical relationship oflegitimacy and cognitive complexity, but as social discourses of groups that are not mutually exclusive. The differences between the high theory, ideology, and group discourse are more a function of scholarly description and categorymaking than of any empirical distinctions between the objects of description. Modern conceptions of ideology borrow from Marxist critiques of hegemonic ideologies as mystifications of, and supports for, dominant economic and cultural systems. Mary Jackman, a sociologist, extends Marxist analyses by identifying ideological operations in cooperation and consensus between groups. For Jackman, ordinary relations of paternalism and benevolence between members of race, class, and gender groups routinely work to obscure the exploitative relations that prevail between dominant and subordinate groups. Eschewing a more typical "conflict perspective" on group relations, she demonstrates the ways in which principles and concepts, routine both in ordinary social life and in social and political theory, such as individualism, tolerance, division of labor, and the utility of sex roles, function to reinscribe and mystify ideologies of dominance and inequality. 7 8 "Ideology" should not assume a pejorative coloration as a description of an ill-informed, biased, or destructive world-view. Certainly ideologies can function in these ways. Rather, ideology is intrinsic to socially and politically located thought itself. In this sense, scholarship in the social sciences and humanities can be understood to have ideological dimensions. This conception of ideology is consistent with Gayatri Spivak's provocative claim that "academics are in the business of ideology production." 79 Spivak's point is not that academics, even the dominant western academics with whom she is concerned, are deliberate ideological exploiters and conspirators. She merely confronts the supposed neutrality of the hierarchies within which knowledge is created as well as the defensive functions for academics of identifying with particular theories or methods. The consequences, Spivak argues, of unawareness of one's own structural and, she implies, psychological positioning are quotidian forms of ideology that intellectual producers understand as "theory" or "pure science." Particularly in the last twenty years, scholars of color have illuminated the ideological dimensions of white scholarship by demonstrating the ways in which this scholarship is characterized by silences, caesuras, and interpretations that normalize white identities over those of people of color. The ideological dimensions of political theory are as meaningful for black feminist thought as they are for other varieties of identity group dis-

F R0 M PS Y C H 0 A N A LY S I S T 0

P0 L I T I C A L T H E 0 RY

55

course. If all socially and politically located discourse has ideological dimensions, then black feminist thought and black feminist critiques of white scholarship have ideological dimensions as well. E. Francis White acknowledges the role of black scholars, including black feminists, in ideology production, noting that it is necessary examine the ideological battles in which black people engage, exploring both the racist discourse that they struggle against and the oppositional language constructed in the process ofthis struggle. As a site of ideological battles, discourses intertwine with the material conditions of our lives. They help organize our social existence and social reproduction through the production of signs and practices that give meaning to our lives. 80 to

Recognizing the ideological dimension of black feminist thought does not foreclose categorizing black feminist thought as social or political theory. Black feminist thought operates simultaneously as high theory and as ideology.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND POLITICAL DISCOURSE

The study oflarge social groups, such as identity groups, is a difficult enterprise. Large groups cannot come into the consulting room or be brought into the laboratory. Their behavior cannot be observed in any kind of unmediated way, even by a close participant-observer. As a result of these empirical problems, many scholars choose to undertake the study of groups through discourse, including every medium from wartime posters to advertising and the artifacts of pop culture. 81 Many contemporary studies of a variety of styles of discourse are carried out using some version of psychodynamic theory. Psychoanalytic political theorists address the ways in which rhetoric, intragroup processes and organization, and tools ofleadership can work either to encourage and mobilize group destructiveness or to encourage and mobilize reparative arrangements and processes. Identity group discourses crafted and disseminated by group leaders often reinforce the association of identity groups with hostility, defensiveness, scapegoating, and idealization. Political theorists are particularly concerned with the role of demonizing "black and white" group discourses in initiating and bolstering extreme and destructive group practices, as well as in desensitizing their audiences to guilt and compassion for victims. However, a disciplinary distinction marks uses of psychoanalysis: discourse analysis in literary and cultural studies tends to employ Lacan or

56

F R 0 M P S Y C H 0 AN A LY S I S T 0

P 0 L I Tl C A L T H E 0 RY

theories influenced by Lacan, while discourse analysis in political theory tends to employ Freudian or relational theories. 82 This distinction is given little direct consideration in psychoanalytic theories of culture and politics, where scholars tend merely to employ their respective traditions and to ignore other theoretical possibilities. However, if psychoanalytic political theorists were explicitly to defend their choice of a relational psychoanalysis over a "subject-of-language" approach, 83 such a defense would no doubt turn on two issues. First is the ability of relational theories to conceptualize group dynamics as both producing and revealing certain kinds of psychic functioning not easily perceived in individual psychologies. Second is the way relational theories enable theorists to explore the protean psychic styles of groups as products of interactions with their social, political, and economic contexts. One psychoanalytic feminist argues that relational and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories are "mirror opposites in their premises about the nature of self, knowledge, and social relations." 84 Although he does not compare relational and Lacanian approaches, Stuart Hall notes that Lacan's reconstructions of early processes lend themselves to readings that freeze the construction of identity at key moments of infantile development (e.g., the "mirror phase"). Having cancelled the possibility of essentialist operations that for relational theorists characterize something of the continuous nature of the production of selfhood, theorists who take up the subject-of-language approach employ performativity as a way to theorize the taking up of identity/identifications over the life span. However, even the concept of performativity does not remedy the dearth of Lacaninspired theorizing that distinguishes group from individual psychology. Political discourses produced by identity groups are the focus of two provocative recent psychoanalytic studies: Amina Mama's Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity and Cash's Identity, Ideology and Conflict: The Structuration of Politics in Northern Ireland. Mama theorizes the intersections between modern psychologies, feminist theories, a neo-Marxist political sensibility, and a poststructuralist approach to studying black female "subjectivities." She focuses on politically active black British women by criticizing white feminist theories of identity and nonfeminist psychological theories. Although she substitutes the constitution of "subjectivity" for more familiar investigations of "identity," she does so specifically to reject conceptualizations of identity that split psychological and social spheres, or internal (psychological) from external (collective, political) realities.85 Recognizing that black women are often subsumed under the larger racial group and as often forgotten altogether by psychologists, Mama traces the history of psychological research and theorizing about people of African descent. The conclusion Mama draws from the exten-

F R0 M P S Y C H 0 A N A LY S I S T 0

P 0 L I T I C A L T H E 0 RY

57

sive history of theorizing by white and black male psychologists is that black people, including black women, have consistently been depicted in narrow and universalizing terms. Mama does not privilege the depictions of blacks created by black psychologists over those created by white psychologists. Depictions ofblacks as inferior, primitive, or univocally "damaged by racist society" and depictions that focus on Mrocentric psychology and racial pride share a conception of black subjects as unitary. Instead of these negative and positive depictions of black subjectivity, Mama calls for a psychological theory that can accommodate history, relationality, internal multiplicity, and the possibility of identity change. As Mama points out, orthodox psychoanalysis has contributed relatively little to demeaning and pathologizing thought about black people. As such, it is less historically implicated in the imputation of psychological qualities and characteristics to black women than are other psychologies. 86 More affirmative is the capacity of psychoanalysis to theorize identity without assuming that selves are "unitary, rational and fixed." "Psychoanalytic theory is ... a truly relational and social account of the history of the individual. The person is constructed in the course of relationships with other people." 87 Mama finds in Kleinian theory a version of psychoanalysis that is relational and can account for the mutual construction of "the individual and the social." She uses Kleinian psychoanalysis to read the discourse of her subjects as they come to terms with raced and gendered social positionings. Emphasizing black women's resistance to hegemonic and monolithic impositions of black femininity, Mama links the experience that is often understood to be encoded in discourse to the fact that "individuals take up and change positions in discourses." For her, "theorizing emanate[s] from the debates in which we [are] engaged." 88 While Klein's thought does not enable Mama to disaggregate the effects on identity of race and of gender, it does enable her to analyze the effects of social and cultural pressures and meanings on the construction of identity. Kleinian psychoanalysis conceptualizes individual defense mechanisms as operating in a sociohistorical context that participates in shaping the terms and resolutions of the defenses themselves. Defenses like splitting, denial, and projective identification are universal psychic processes, although their consequences are open-ended and diverse. Given the careful elaboration of psychological theories that precede the introduction ofKleinian psychoanalysis in the text, Mama gives Kleinian thought itself surprisingly little discussion. For example, she does not offer a complete account of how paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions are relevant to her study. Nor is she consistent in her application of Kleinian psychoanalysis throughout the text. In a chapter on "Black F em-

58

F R0 M P S Y C H 0 A N A LY S I S T 0

P 0 LIT I C A L T H E 0 RY

ininity" that focuses on black women and beauty standards, she does not apply her psychoanalytic method at all. Mama also does not attempt to translate her Klein into a group theory, even when she writes that the keys to understanding identity are collective. "The central concern ... is to theorise subjectivity as being constituted, socially and historically, out of collective experience." "In theorising subjectivity as discursive, the discourses I am concerned with here are those that embody the collective knowledges, attitudes, and beliefs of social groups." 89 In passages such as these, Mama acknowledges that groups produce discourses and in turn help to produce and reproduce group identity. In Identity, Ideology and Conflict, John Cash also employs Kleinian psychoanalysis in his reading of Protestant Unionist discourse in Northern Ireland. There are important differences between Cash's and Mama's psychoanalytic readings of identity group discourse. First, Cash's focus is predictably more political than psychological. Second, whereas Mama must devote several chapters to considering the history of psychological attentions to people of African descent, Cash's subjects do not have such a dubious representational history. Thus, Cash proceeds directly to the various theoretical conceptualizations of ideology and the unique amalgam of psychoanalytic and cognitive-developmental theory with which he will interpret Unionist political discourse. Cash argues that ideology must be understood as "a pre-eminently psychosocial concept; i.e., a concept which is at once concerned with the interplay of both social and psychic processes."90 In addition, Cash relies upon Anthony Giddens to develop a reworking of the concept of "structuration" that will simultaneously take seriously the unconscious dimensions of ideology and specify rules by which ideology is structured. Citing neglect of the affective dimensions of ideological discourse, Cash points out the need to analyze ideology using a "cognitive-affective method." This method employs both Klein's psychoanalysis and Lawrence Kohlberg's cognitive-developmentalism. Cash concludes that both kinds of analysis are essential to a complete reading of the meaning of ideological discourse. Cash's "structuration" theory of ideology has been criticized on two grounds. The first is that the theory itself is "cumbersome," involving as it does a complex interface between cognitive and affective dimensions of analysis. The second criticism is that the argument points toward a universal ethical theory that Cash explicitly rejects, hoping to situate and describe the particular group he studies rather than to outline a general theory of ethical thought and feeling. 91 My reading is consistent with these criticisms. I do not employ cognitive-developmental psychology,

F R0 M P S Y C H 0 A N A LY S I S T 0

P 0 Ll T I C A L T H E 0 R Y

59

and I do not attempt to analyze group discourse in terms of paranoidschizoid and depressive positions. This is due to the generally reparative nature of black feminist thought as compared to other identity group discourses. The discourse does not communicate the crude elements of paranoia, suspicion, and hostility that characterize much identity group discourse and that signal the paranoid-schizoid position. Finally, because I am concerned in this argument to use psychoanalytic theory in a groupspecific way, I try to be attentive to the interplay between universal and particular elements of group discourse-the ways in which group discourse is a product of both specific legacies and contexts and general psychodynamic dimensions of group life. My alternative to a primary emphasis on the movement of groups or group discourse back and forth between expressions of paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions is a reading of defenses as they are mobilized, communicated, and maintained by groups, largely "within," or consistent with, the depressive position. 92 I examine the internal dynamics of black feminist discourse for its own treatment of themes of power and authority, conflict, and solidarity. It is through these themes that identity groups clarify and communicate the character of their discourse. Thus, I concentrate on the generally reparative ways in which black feminist thought addresses political themes of authority, conflict, and community. Such a resolution of group dilemmas is little anticipated within the psychoanalytic political theory that has itself theorized reparative groups and group discourses.

A REPARATIVE IDEAL

I understand reparative groups to be those that collectively work through issues that routinely plague groups without giving in to the worst, most destructive, and unfortunately most common group possibilities. The term borrows from Melanie Klein's account of reparation in the depressive position, an account of the possibility of"repair" by an individual who has begun to integrate loving and hating feelings for others. For Klein, reparation is not simply equivalent to care, empathy, love, benign action, or the application of ethical principles. Rather, it represents the struggle toward ambivalence and integration, the attempt to "make good" damage done to others, and not a small measure of self-doubting anxiety, sadness, guilt, and loss. 93 Applied to individuals, the term suggests reversible but meaningful developmental achievement and the possibility of mature and creative relationships. Applied to groups, the term suggests a parallel ability of groups

60

FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS TO POLITICAL THEORY

to make good-"to give and to construct and to mend" -harms done or desired, possible or imagined, to other groups. 94 This feature of groups is certainly important, especially given the frequent harms performed in the name of groups, but it does not exhaust a reparative conception of groups. In social and political contexts, many identity groups may have little capacity to inflict harm even on those they regard as adversaries, much less "repair" that harm through group action. It is better to imagine groups as discursive creators of a complex narrative of group identity and meaning, in the context of which they collectively maintain images, representations, and emotional investments of self and other(s). Whatever their power to inflict actual damage on others, a group can be more or less reparative depending upon the willingness of its leaders and members to compose and maintain ambivalent accounts of both the identities they share and those they do not. Although they emphasize different dimensions of the concept, psychoanalytic political theorists share a normative interest in reparative politics. Psychoanalytic political theorists also use distinctions between reparative and other group formations to analyze the forms of group leadership. "Reparative" (or sometimes "progressive") should not be taken as a clinical synonym for adaptation or for some particular version of mental health. Nor is it intended to function as a synonym for a left-leaning political orientation, although many psychoanalytic political theorists would no doubt embrace some version of egalitarian democratic politics. Volkan defines the progressive group as one that "move[s] psychopolitically toward evolution and resolution of new social issues and toward the recapitulation or renewal of previous strengths." 95 Alford suggests that leaders should be concerned with the "classical ideal" of "improving the souls of citizens" and that the reparative group is a vehicle for such improvement.96 Of major group psychoanalytic political theorists, Wolfenstein is most concerned with progressive political economy, and he works to develop a Marxist psychoanalysis that can illuminate social issues of class and race. To be more specific, Wolfenstein designates as "progressive" those ideas that are "situationally rational" and that are focused toward the future for their realization. 97 Among psychoanalytic political theorists, Cash is in the minority when he tries to downplay value judgments on the life-world of the group he studies. Cash amply documents the destructive (often "dehumanizing") forms of thought and rhetoric that are intrinsic to Unionist ideology, but he is more interested in analyzing the internal operations of Unionist ideology than in decrying its perniciousness. "Through concentrating upon the unconscious rules of structuration of Unionist ideology I have attempted to get beyond any crude distinction between rationality

FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS TO POLITICAL THEORY

61

and irrationality by addressing different forms of rationality (or distinct rationalities) in a manner which can analyse their internal structure." 98 In spite of his reluctance to engage in explicitly normative theorizing about group outcomes, Cash demonstrates a clear preference for reparative group ideology and relations. It is merely that Cash does not allow normative preferences for particular group configurations to substitute for rigorous analysis of the group as it currently exists. Indeed, both Cash's use of Klein's distinction between paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions and his use of Kohl berg's developmental stages contain implicit value judgments about better and worse forms of group identity and intersubjectivity. Cash suggests the common scholarly interest in reparative groups when he wonders if there is for Northern Irish Unionists "at last, the real possibility of displacing exclusivist forms of identity and relations and instituting a new political imaginary." 99 Unlike clinicians, psychoanalytic political theorists are as concerned with "action" as with "understanding." They hope to theorize group processes in ways that suggest new understandings and new "political imaginaries" in place of old destructive ones. In the final analysis, what is at stake is group development, which does not so much mean literally bringing social groups into something like Klein's depressive position as it means enhancing the likelihood that group will act "in a developed fashion more often than not." 100 Group psychoanalysis provides a method of theorizing discourse as expressing defenses, emotions (such as fear, anxiety, guilt, love, and rage) and interpersonal issues (such as dependence, trust, trauma, vulnerability, mourning, conflict, and relations to authority) that are inscribed in group discourses. "Human nature" is an unacceptably totalizing concept, human psychology too variable, unstable, and contestable. But from this we need not conclude that nothing valid and productive can be said of human psychological processes. There is much to be learned from studies that apply relational psychoanalysis to differences between groups as well as to affinities and unities. Groups are both alike (the psychoanalytic intuition) and distinct (the social justice perspective). And group leadership is a crucial locus in which to investigate these similarities and differences between groups.

3

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

WHO'S A LEADER?

Modern political theorists often neglect leadership. Instead of focusing on leaders and the prerequisites of leadership, most theorists prefer to focus on citizenship, normative conceptions of the good society, or critiques of normative political philosophy. Unlike political theorists, however, political actors engaged in movements for social justice attend quite closely to the subject of leadership. Black feminist thought not only offers a conversation about leadership and leaders but also can be read as itself a kind of leadership, one that has the discursive force to both reflect and influence group processes and identity. Neither the feminist movement nor the Mrican American civil rights movement provides black women with a complete model for black women's leadership. Among feminists, white feminists remain ambivalent about leadership-its connotations of power and masculinity as well as its complicating effect on equality. Nor has ambivalence about power been sufficient to focus the critical attention of many white feminists on their own power in the movement and in institutions. As the scholar and activist Charlotte Bunch notes, "no issue has caused more pain and confusion among feminists than leadership." 1 On the other hand, activists in Mrican American social justice movements champion leadership but often have cast men in leading roles while consigning women, both practically and ideologically, to supporting roles. 2 As a result, black women construct their own leadership models that reflect specific historical conflicts, modes of agency, and strategies of resistance to disempowerment. Unlike many modern political theorists, psychoanalytic political theorists focus on leadership, theorizing the importance of group leaders, the mutual influences that operate between leaders and groups, and the kinds of leaders and leadership that frequently prevail in groups. In this chapter I use psychoanalytic political theory and black feminist thought to con-

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

63

struct an initial account of reparative discursive leadership. By discursive leadership I mean the authority of scholars, writers, and public intellectuals to speak to-and often for-identity groups and to shape ideas about group processes and group conceptions of identity. Psychoanalytic political theory contributes to our understanding of group leadership, including discursive leadership, by theorizing and examining the general dynamics of identity groups as they play out in social and political settings. Black feminist thought clarifies and refocuses the general dynamics of leadership, reminding group theorists that groups are always connected to particular intergroup histories and sociopolitical conditions. Within this framework, six tasks of reparative leadership emerge as useful conceptual tools for the study of leadership in identity groups: telling the group's story, managing boundaries, interpreting intragroup defenses, identifying threats, identifying strengths, and mourning losses. Before turning to these tasks, however, it is helpful to turn to group leadership in psychoanalytic political theory and to the history and representation of black women's leadership in the United States. Black women's group leadership has always been contested. But by the lights of relational psychoanalytic analyses ofleadership, black feminists are well positioned to offer reparative group leadership and to contribute to psychodynamic theory on the subject of group leadership.

INTERPRETING LEADERSHIP

The fascination with leaders has often led historians and other scholars to focus on these prominent individuals, their biographies, skills, and, of course, pathologies. The temptation to abstract leaders from their psychological surroundings in the group is understandable. Thinking of history as a procession of "great men" simplifies history while it nourishes fantasies of political salvation. Group psychoanalytic renditions ofleadership avoid this problem by theorizing the dialectics of groups in ways that lead away from the most reductive psycho biographies ofleaders. One difficulty with extending clinical theories of group leadership to the study of group discourse is extrapolating from the role of analyst-leaders in clinical groups to the role of leaders in diffuse social groups. There are three important differences between the two roles: power reduction versus power enhancement, interpretation versus heroic action, and talk versus acting out. First, in the therapy group, analyst-leaders are supposed to strive toreduce rather than augment their own power. Conversely, in social and political groups leaders too frequently seem to exist only to serve their own

64

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

self-interest rather than the needs or interests of the group they lead. 3 Even the most casual of political observers knows that in the absence of substantial checks and constraints on their uses of power, political leaders too frequently can be counted upon to entrench and enrich themselves at the expense of those they ostensibly "serve." As the founders of the American Republic understood, when it comes to leaders, structures and processes of balance and constraint are far more valuable than virtuous political actors. A second difference between clinical analyst-leaders and sociopolitical leaders is that analysts set into motion, observe, and interpret the proceedings of groups while political leaders are more embedded and invested in the behavior of the group. We often conclude that those who are the most immersed in collective events understand them best. But Hannah Arendt trenchantly notes how difficult it is for engaged political actors to contribute to the interpretation-the meaning-making-that groups seek. She argues, rather, that groups need "storytellers" or spectators, and that these more disengaged actors provide an antidote to the insularity and single-mindedness of heroic leaders. "Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants."4 . Finally, in comparison to analyst-client relations, "action-oriented" social and political leader-follower relations are more likely to be characterized by mutual acting out that is destructive or even deadly. 5 It would be obscenely reductive to read practices such as modern "ethnic cleansing" exclusively as acting out, but mass ethnic murder constitutes an extreme form of violent and militarized action that differentiates social group ideology and its fruits from the more benign consequences of fear and hatred in clinical groups. These differences suggest that useful insights about characteristics of leaders and leadership may be drawn from clinical psychoanalysis only with great care for the differences between the contexts from which they hail. Psychoanalytic political theorists draw inferences about leadership from group theory without relying on a one-to-one correspondence between the roles of analyst-leader and political! discursive leader. Instead, they focus on the processes, dangers, and predispositions associated with group membership and the ways in which feelings and dispositions toward leaders and authority help to structure the processes of groups. Psychoanalytic political theorists are generally pessimistic about the possibility of individuals working through the dilemmas of groupishness in ways that facilitate individual growth and inhibit harm-doing. These theorists find that it is often in a leader's immediate interest to encourage,

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

65

rather than to mitigate, the destructive tendencies of the group. Indeed, both group psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic students of politics note the ways in which groups often pressure their leaders to support and encourage the group's destructive tendencies and abandon and replace leaders who struggle against these group tendencies. Yet hopefulness also occasionally emerges in the work of both group psychoanalysts and their colleagues in political theory in the form of theoretical sketches of what reparative group leadership can look like. Vamik Volkan and C. Fred Alford both focus attention on group leadership. 6 Of the two, Volkan is more pessimistic, as is perhaps understandable given his focus on group creation of political enemies. Alford's analysis is somewhat more optimistic and provides more explicit direction for a theory of reparative political leadership. Volkan explores ethnic conflict in a variety of world sites to explicate the role of early object relations in the construction and use of enemies. The empiricism of his accounts notwithstanding, it is generally more difficult for psychoanalytic theory to incorporate group history than it is to analyze the relatively ahistorical processes of therapy groups. In fact, Alford makes this problem into an unavoidable fact of group life, if not a virtue, when he claims that there is no history in the group-that the psychodynamic processes of groups discourage awareness of individual and group pasts. He then argues that the worst danger to group members is posed by an individual's own group. 7 While empirical observation of discrete groups might easily suggest this conclusion, such observation does not take into account the interaction between persons as group members in historical social contexts. It is no contradiction to conclude that while all social groups pose some degree of danger to members in the form of depersonalization, dependence, demands for conformity, and threats of scapegoating or expulsion, members of some groups have a great deal more to fear from other groups than they do from their own. Both Volkan and Alford employ relational psychoanalysis to denote an ideal kind of "reparative" leadership. However, they disagree about the meaning of this term. For Volkan, the reparative leader is a kind of narcissistic leader who elevates and idealizes followers so that identification with them brings "him" gratification. 8 Reparative leadership is thus more desirable than that offered by other varieties of narcissistic leaders, but it has its own pitfalls. Conversely, for Alford the development of reparative-or "interpretive," as he sometimes calls it-leadership is a goal at which politics should ideally aim, even though the appearance of such leaders is apt to be rare. 9 "Who is a reparative leader? One for whom the opposition, no matter how intensely fought, remains part of a moral or ethical whole to which all people belong. As part of this whole, the oppo-

66

REPARATIVE GROUP lEADERSHIP

sition partakes of the good; it is not simply the evil other. Such a leader also recognizes that his own group's claim to goodness is incomplete." 10 However reparative leadership is defined, both psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic political theorists use the concept to measure actual leadership against an ideal. Implicit in Volkan's theory is a profound skepticism about the emergence of even goad-enough leaders. Alford is somewhat more hopeful about the possibility of good leadership, but his concern is not merely that good (reparative or interpretive) leaders appear infrequently. Rather, he worries that social theory ignores leadership and that political theory of all types-traditional, feminist, and postmodern-retreats into "philosophical abstraction" rather than trying to come to terms with the psychology of group life. 11 These failures of theory, he argues, stymie attempts to acknowledge and confront those aspects of the human social condition that are most intractable as well as most defended against. Nevertheless, there are two issues that complicate the view that contemporary political thought does not engage the psychology of groups: first, theory need not be explicitly psychological in its focus to contribute to psychological understanding of groups; and second, some theory has a dual function, serving both as an intellectual discourse about social and political life and as a discourse for and about identity groups. Black feminist theorists occupy a role that is both intellectual! discursive and political, mediating between realms of academic/scholarly life and social and political leadership. In addition, although black feminists infrequently raise psychology as an explicit issue, black feminist thought as a discourse negotiates issues of group life and group relations in ways that are sensitive to the psychodynamic needs, struggles, and challenges of groups. The discursive leadership of black feminists is exercised in the realm of ideas and their concrete forms of expression, yet discursive leadership raises questions of location and authority for black women. These questions, and the struggles they occasion in social institutions and political movements, are, in their turn, written into the group discourse that emerges.

RESISTANCE TO BLACK WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP

It is impossible to address black women's leadership without acknowledging the considerable resistances to that leadership in American history. These resistances have taken different forms in different contexts, and although they are less obvious today than they have been in the nation's past, many obstacles and resistances to black women's leadership remain. Also tenacious is the symbolism of that resistance, which is embedded in Amer-

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

67

ican consciousness and political discourse. The most potent symbol is the image of the black woman as matriarch. It is no coincidence that the only widely disseminated narrative about black women's leadership is a pernicious one-a story of sex-role reversal, unnatural power, and social pathology. Black feminist intellectuals define the political significance of the symbol of black woman as matriarch, and they return to this narrative again and again, examining its mythological dimensions and its negative effects on black women and black communities. The most famous articulation of black matriarchy is found in Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." In the report Moynihan traces the "tangle of pathology" in the black community to that community's "matriarchal structure." His diagnosis is explicit and is worth quoting at length: There is, presumably, no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement. However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating on one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another. This is the present situation of theN egro. Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it. A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage. 12

To Moynihan, the central problem of the black community, and the one that drives all others, is the fact that black women have too much power in a society that is constructed for male dominance in "private and public affairs." Having stated the properly gendered nature of leadership, Moynihan contradicts himself when he approvingly quotes scholars who claim that "the majority of white families" are egalitarian, while "the largest percentage of Negro families are dominated by the wife." 13 There have been many useful critiques of the Moynihan report, including those collected immediately after its release. 14 These critiques question Moynihan's methods and conclusions and explore the historical legacies for black families of the institution of enslavement. Black feminists criticized Moynihan quickly after the publication of the report. In an early essay titled "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves," Angela Davis rejects the insinuation implicit in arguments such as Moynihan's that black women colluded with white slaveholders to emasculate black men. 15 More recently, Patricia Hill Collins emphasizes the intersectional nature of the structure named in the report as "matriarchy" -the way the "image of the matriarch" deflects attention away from the class- as

68

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

well as gender- and race-based realities of many black women's lives in the United States. 16 For Collins, Moynihan's label mystifies the consequences of dispossession while assigning the effects of those consequences to family culture and to the maternal failures of black women. Unfortunately, the Moynihan Report's story of the black woman as matriarch has not been expunged from our shared public consciousness. It both cloaks and reveals a set of anxieties about black women and their power that is disproportionate and even fantastical. Politically, the matriarchy narrative and its popularizer have enjoyed increasing support in the 1990s debates over "ending welfare as we know it." 17 In addition, Rhetaugh Graves Dumas points out that the "mythical image of the strong, powerful, castrating black matriarch pervades contemporary organizations."18 Dumas suggests that the matriarch image functions in tandem with a "mammy" image of black women to create a split perception of black women as at once overwhelmingly powerful and asexually powerless and care-giving. Such images complicate the ability of black women to assume leadership in mixed groups. 19 But why should such an image of the matriarch function in this way among white women and among men of different races? The myth of black women as powerful matriarchs focuses attention on women's roles in families and households, but even Moynihan does not restrict his critique of black women to the "private" sphere. Wahneema Lubiano argues that implicit in the Report is a critique of black women's seizure of public leadership roles Moynihan identifies as masculine by the common consent of the dominant white society. Examining Clarence Thomas's 1991 Senate confirmation hearings, Lubiano finds in Anita Hill the exemplar of the overachieving "black lady." Hill's education, poise, and professional competence do not buttress her verisimilitude; rather, she is treated as the "flip side of [the Report's] pathology coin, the welfare queen's more articulate sister." 20 American society is awash in images of black women's inappropriate power that, while they comport poorly with many empirical indicators of black women's lives, reveal much about white fantasies. What is the significance of white fantasy endowing black women with power in every area of social life? One explanation is that white fear, anxiety, and guilt reveal the conviction that black women are so autonomous and powerful that they cannot be-nor have they ever been-harmed. Such an interpretation of white popular discourse about African-American women is consistent with mock reparation. Unfortunately, whether practiced by individuals or by groups, mock reparation denies not only the harm but also the humanity of those whom it stereotypically constructs. One function of the historically tenacious assault on black women as

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

69

"heads" of families is as an assault on black women's leadership. This is consistent with the disparagement and marginalization of black female leadership historically, both by white women, in the abolition and women's rights movements, and by black men, in the civil rights movement. 21 If this is so, it helps to clarify why it is so vital for black women to respond to these characterizations, even when they reside in a government report now more than three decades old. What is at issue is not merely (as though this would be a small issue) the response to a misguided, or even malevolent, characterization of black women. Rather, what is at issue is the fact that the charge of matriarchy substitutes for and evokes the whole range of black women's actual and possible claims to leadership. It is a powerful symbol of the usurpation of masculine rule and of the moral destitution of black community. It is not merely, as psychoanalytic political theorists would have it, that we all stand in an ambivalent relation to leadership and the authority it represents; rather, it is that leadership has a gendered, as well as a raced, face. A historical examination of African-American women's leadership vindicates the conclusions drawn by black feminists about the opportunities black women have enjoyed for leadership in the United States. The majority of black women who have exercised leadership in social, religious, and political contexts have done so in groups made up of black women and dedicated to the advancement of black women. Positions of authority in groups populated by white women and men, and even by black women and men, have been largely foreclosed to black women. 22 At the same time, throughout the long history of their struggles for justice and parity, black women have had to make common cause and work closely with others, especially white women and black men. This peculiar and historically stable context of black women's leadership has surely had an effect on the ways in which black women conceptualize authority and the way leadership is symbolized and interpreted in a discourse dedicated to black women as a group.

THE TRADITION OF BLACK WOMEN'S DISCURSIVE LEADERSHIP

Black feminists respond to the resistance to and erasure of black female leadership in two ways: by exposing the symbolism evoked by the charge of matriarchy and its origins in racial ideology and power politics, and by articulating their own historical and theoretical versions of black women as leaders even in circumstances of threat. Since the reconstruction era, the roles of teacher-intellectual and social/political leader have converged

70

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

for black women. The dual roles of African-American women as scholars/ teachers and as activists is part of the historical record of black women's struggles. 23 Patricia Hill Collins affirms that "Black women intellectuals provide unique leadership for Black women's empowerment and resistance."24 The linkage between scholarship and political activism has not been appreciated within institutions of higher learning, where academic culture disparages political advocacy. Moreover, academic research is traditionally judged by its status as "universal," its claim to speak to, for, and about all people. That universality usually translates as applicability to dominant interests, experiences, and aspirations is central to the feminist critique of the academy. Given the African-American cultural values simultaneously assigned to black women's educational attainment and work on behalf of social, political, and economic justice for black women, it is not surprising that the norms of the academic world and those of the social world collide. The combination of political advocacy and scholarship may not be respected within the academy, but this very combination places black women scholars in a unique position with regard to the development of literary and theoretical accounts of political leadership. Collins puts the relationship between black women's intellectual and political work this way: "Black women's intellectual work has fostered Black women's resistance and activism. This dialectic of oppression and activism, the tension between the suppression of black women's ideas and our intellectual activism in the face of that suppression, comprises the politics of Black feminist thought." 25 Collins's account ofleaders as participant-intellectuals is similar to one account of an exemplar of"interpretive" leadership, Vaclav Havel.2 6 The twin pursuits of scholarship and activism may not be a sufficient condition for the development of reparative accounts of group life. However, it may be that such a combination helps to correct the romance scholars often have with elegant, abstract theorizing. Black feminist theorists in many disciplines write not only as scholars under the normal pressures of academic discipline, but as social and political leaders. Indeed, some, like Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver, are in some circles better known for their political activism than for their scholarship. This kind of scholarship may be indigestible within the academy, yet reading it from the perspective of group psychoanalysis underscores its pragmatic dimension. Black feminist thought can be read as a discourse of group psychology from the perspective of discursive leaders. How can group psychoanalysis help to illuminate what black feminist thought teaches about the challenges of group membership and group leadership? For the remainder of this chapter I take up the question of what group leaders actually do, what tasks of group leadership they per-

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

71

form. I draw initial inspiration for this project from psychoanalytic political theory, but I construct my discussion so that the contributions of black feminists and psychoanalytic political theorists can intersect and so that black feminist theory can inform the conclusions of psychoanalytic theory on the nature and processes of reparative discursive leadership.

TASKS OF GROUP LEADERSHIP

Psychoanalytic political theorists sometimes outline tasks they associate with leadership, both positively and negatively. Although these task descriptions differ among theorists, I use them to develop a model set of psychoanalytic leadership tasks that are relevant to the study of discursive leadership. I present each task of leadership first through the literature of psychoanalytic political theory and then through black feminist thought. Such comparisons clarify the ways in which black feminist discourse can challenge the abstraction of psychoanalytic theories of groups and fashion a psychoanalytic theory that is more useful to identity group politics and concerns. TELLING THE STORY

Leaders of groups direct the narration of the group's story, helping the group to shape and tell the history of its ideals, trials, and triumphs. This role makes the leader not merely, or even principally, a pragmatic politician, but a historian who may serve a variety of purposes from relatively benign to destructive. Because Volkan is concerned with the empirical and psychodynamic nature of ethnic/national groups whose history is transmitted intergenerationally, he is particularly interested in this narrative aspect of leadership. But Alford also holds that "creat[ing] a story about the world" may be "the best that groups of people can do." By this he means that acting out, repetition, anxiety, and aggression may be checked by the mutual work of crafting and verbalizing a meaningful memoir. Leaders and members "tell each other stories about their fears, so as to give voice to them, while at the same time containing them in the relationships of the story itself, as well as the real relationship between storyteller and listener." 27 One analyst of groups sees leaders as "conductors" and suggests that to be a leader is not to be "the composer who wr[ites] the music but the conductor who interpret[s] it." 28 This interpreting function is difficult, as it demands that leaders confront the group's penchant for repetition, fragmentation, and drama. It is nonetheless essential to the development of a reparative group discourse.

72

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

This first leadership task, assisting the group in narrating the group's story and making explicit its values and ideas, is certainly the easiest to locate in the project of black feminist scholars. In spite of academic injunctions and mores, black feminist scholars speak and reply to the audience of diverse African-American women in ways that subvert traditional understandings of the scholarly role. The oral tradition of storytelling is present in the work of black feminist theorists. 29 Not only is the style of some black feminist theory closely related to the oral tradition, it is not uncommon to read in the work of black feminists searching reconstructions of ethical and spiritual aspirations. The academic community has no ready means of evaluating these kinds and styles of discourse. As Barbara Christian points out, people of color have always theorized-but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language .... How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity?30 Elucidating and exploring the values and ideals of diverse black women is a principal task of black feminist theory. At times black feminists identify these values with Mrocentrism, at times with feminism, and at times with both. Other sources of values, such as the traditions of black Christian worship or regional African-American cultures, are also represented as aspects of a precious intergenerational dialogue. In her germinal book Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins offers what she understands as the "core themes" of black women's story. She notes, first, that "all African-American women share the common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of Mrican descent." Related to this experience is a common "legacy of struggle." 31 Much of Collins's project is a reconstruction of the varied forms of the legacy of struggle-the way this legacy has been implicated in black women's activity and conscwusness. Central to this reconstruction of the effects of denigration and struggle is a concern with the transformative effects oflove, including self-love, and solidarity. Perhaps the most widely read of the essays of the late Audre Lorde is "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power." 32 Writing to black women, Lorde asserts the power of "the sharing of joy" as a means to knowledge and activism. Similarly, Collins and many others trace an ideology of mutual care, love, and connectedness back to African roots. 33 Perhaps the genealogy of this tradition is not as important as its narrative

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

73

force. The conviction of being valued by a supportive community furthers the possibility of creating nurturance and healing in the present. The task of narrating the story of the group takes on great urgency in the context of American political and social discourse. Mainstream political discourse suppresses the history and present circumstances of black men and women in favor of a valorized and mythic liberal individualism. Those who reproduce an abstract race- and genderless "meritocratic" account of the self remain unwilling to consider the ways in which this script reinforces existing hierarchies and technologies of control. Such circumstances increase the likelihood that groups will retreat into group anger and insularity. In the face of assertions of meritocratic individualism, black feminist theorists reassert the need for care of the self, for solidarities with black women, and for responsibility toward broader struggles for social, political, and economic justice. MANAGING BOUNDARIES

A second function of leaders consists in helping to delineate and manage the boundaries of the group, perhaps especially when the group is too large to be characterized by face-to-face interactions. As relational group psychoanalysis makes clear, visceral fears and prosaic anxieties about the line that separates "us" from "them" are endemic to groups. The inadequacies and ambiguities of group markers reinforce these anxieties. Volkan acknowledges the connection between group boundaries and the anxieties of group members when he notes that the boundaries denoted by ethnicity can be remarkably unstable. Not only do the definitions of ethnicity shift over time, becoming more or less elastic as group psychological or geopolitical needs require, but ethnic and other (sub)groups may combine in periods of crisis to protect the larger, national group. 34 Nevertheless, such labile boundaries do not generally mitigate destructive forms of group cohesiveness and narcissism. Rather, in the absence of differentiating physiological characteristics, group members display a "narcissism of minor differences." 35 In this way group members distinguish their own group from the enemy and project aggression away from the group. Important as well is the tendency of the group to sacrifice the individuality of its members: it is the foundation for the strong claim that individuals are most threatened by their own group. From Freud on, psychoanalytic theorists have noted that groups demand identification, conformity, and the de-differentiation of their members. The payoffs for group members include love, belonging, community, and the opportunity to share in the group's interpretation of reality. The irony is that by cod-

74

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

ifying the homogeneity of the group through language and practice, these rigid boundaries can intensify the need for the very defenses that most threaten those within. Those outside the group are in this way more easily identified not only as strangers, but also as enemies. The problems inherent in group boundary-making suggest that it is an intrinsically hazardous enterprise, perhaps best avoided in favor of a colorand gender-blind politics ofliberal individualism. 36 ln fact, this is themessage of much modern liberal democratic theory, that a psychologically sparse and defensive account of group life is preferable to a more realistic and threatening one. And yet the boundary-making of groups is not merely dangerous; it can also be rewarding. Groups can encourage identification, empathy, and regard for actual others. They can provide contexts for negotiating ambivalence and for formulating and articulating political interests. Group boundaries are crucial for these tasks as well as for those whose consequences are more ominous. To many observers of U.S. ethnic relations, intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike, the boundaries of the group of "black women" are a selfevident matter of skin color and biological sex. Yet on closer examination, even these criteria fail. The boundary defined by sex is permeable in both sexual/biological ambiguity and gender performance. 37 In addition, many black feminists have noted that women of African descent often have not been regarded by white men and women as "women" at all. The "defeminization" of black women-their ideologically constructed distinctiveness from white women-has "excluded [them] from the protections of womanhood, motherhood, and femininity" extended to white women by white men. 38 The boundary of color is itself a social construct that has been accompanied in the United States by great anxiety and attempts at social and legal definition. Both the practice of "passing," usually as white but under some circumstances as black, and the decision to self-identify as "black" demonstrate the absence of indisputable boundaries for a group for which such boundaries have often been not only assumed, but required. 39 In addition, biracial and multiracial identifications raise issues for group definition and boundaries that might be expected by many psychoanalytic theorists to capitulate groups into anxiety and prolix forms of group defensiveness.40 Indeed, racial identities of these sorts have had just such an effect in American history, where legal and political criteria of membership in white society were effects of white anxieties about group purity and the maintenance of group boundaries. Black feminists do not respond to these boundary "problems" with anxiety and criteria of admission to the group. Even in making arguments that situate a black feminist perspective in black women's common experiences

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

75

and history, theorists explicitly challenge the category of "black women" as a biologistic natural category. 41 Processes of group boundary-making are both inclusive and exclusive; they are concerned not only with constructing gross categories of "us" and "them," but also with making finer distinctions among "us" that identify and eject those whose characteristics or affinities might disrupt the group. As group psychoanalytic theorists point out, such processes are particularly stimulated when groups are in crisis. Black feminist theorists as a group do not avoid the subject of group definition; on the contrary, theorists insist upon the porous nature of group boundaries at the same time that they explicitly address black women as an audience. The simultaneous concern for inclusiveness and particularity is illustrated in one of the more widely read essays on women's movement politics. Bernice Johnson Reagan's essay, "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century," is a rumination on boundaries. "We've pretty much come to the end of the time when you can have a space that is 'yours only' -just for the people you want to be there .... We have just finished with that kind of isolating. There is no hiding place. There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. It's over. Give it up. "42 Reagon imagines a group as a metaphoric "barred room," to which people go to escape oppression and to be comforted and nurtured by others of their kind. The problem, as she wryly notes, is that the room comes to be taken for "the world" by those who seek to reside in it. This stance denies the existence and claims of those outside the group who are different. It also denies the differences of those who reside within, those whose differences, when revealed, come to threaten the security of group members whose own safety depends upon separating, as she puts it, the "X's" from the "Y's" and "Z's." Reagon concludes that all groups incorporate difference, that the choice members must make is how to confront difference, not whether difference will be permitted. More meaningful, perhaps, is Reagan's explication of the consequences of group definition for those whose identities become marked and excluded through such characteristics as class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or belief. All these differences, she suggests, cause discomfort in groups. However, demands for security and likeness are ultimately destructive of common political goals. The "barred room" is a "womb" -safe but infantilizing. Other efforts to disturb the idea of settled ethnic group boundaries are common. Black feminist theorists craft sensitive accounts of black women's identities as historical effects of chosen and unchosen relations with those of different racial and ethnic groups. Thus, "black women" denotes a social and historical category, in which a complex history operates and constructs all aspects of identity. In her essay "In the Closet of the

76

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

Soul," Alice Walker reminds her readers that black Americans "are not only the descendants of slaves, but ... are also the descendants of slave owners." Her recommendation? "Just as we have had to struggle to rid ourselves of slavish behavior, we must as ruthlessly eradicate any desire to be mistress or 'master.' "43 Addressing criticisms of her construction of the character "Mister" in the popular Color Purple, Walker also makes clear that such relations of domination are not exclusive to people whose European descent implicates them in brutal racial political histories. Patricia Williams, a legal theorist, reveals the flip side of this social "inheritance" after her mother reminds her that due to the rape of Williams's greatgreat-grandmother by her lawyer slave-owner, Williams herself need not be anxious about pursuing a legal career. "You have it in your blood" is the way Williams's mother expresses the social significance of even this undesirable ancestry. 44 Although black feminists do not express their task in terms of boundary-defining, they execute that task by insisting upon the widest possible definition of "black women" and on the principle of self-naming that permits entrance for those who might otherwise be excluded. Many black feminists also explicitly counter racially and sexually essentializing discourses by rejecting notions of a "core" group identity or group authenticity and by insisting, instead, on what Julia Sudbury calls "building an identity." Sudbury's account of the ambiguity of identity focuses on the role of group discourse in creating conceptual spaces for different "narratives of self." 45 Through their writing, theorists such as Sudbury help to redefine group identity, providing discursive space for revised narratives of self and interpretations that comment persuasively on the outlines of these narratives. Finally, black feminists and womanists insist that group discourse be available to members of other groups, including other men and women of color and political allies of all varieties. INTERPRETING DEFENSES

Third, leaders must be prepared to negotiate and manage the intragroup defenses of group members so that group members are able to confront and work through anxieties aroused, intensified, or merely revealed by membership in the group. The task of interpreting defenses includes the willingness of leaders to serve as containers for the projections of group members, to interpret projective identification, and to tolerate positive and negative transferences. Leaders who are able to tolerate and interpret these forms of intragroup relations diminish the fears and anxieties of group members and enhance possibilities for working through negative feelings. Psychoanalytic political theorists argue that it is rare in actual so-

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

77

cial and political experience for groups to work through the disagreeable passions endemic to group life. Most psychoanalytic political theorists, concerned with the effects of negative passions for human life and political stability, focus on the feelings of rage, anxiety, and fear and their escalation into violence and other harm. There is, for example, general agreement that leaders should confront and interpret these feelings in groups in hopes of mitigating some of the intractable barriers to emotional learning. Recognizable forms of disagreeable passion are not the only danger for groups, however. Positive transferences with leaders and idealization of leaders, both of which attribute goodness or perfection to another, are endemic in groups. Unfortunately, these processes can operate in groups to defend against rage and anxieties, helping disguise the feelings that would otherwise threaten to engulf the group. The appearance of these defenses increases the likelihood that group members will surrender authority and responsibility to a group leader and discourages emotional learning in the group. 46 Reparative leaders work to free the group from conformity and demands for authenticity by encouraging and facilitating criticism ofleadership. This orientation toward the group on the part of reparative leaders does not guarantee that rage and other disagreeable passions will be ameliorated in the group, but it significantly enhances the prospects for amelioration. Feelings and defenses against feeling help to construct the nature of groups. Alford and Volkan share a well-founded concern that group feelings, especially those associated with aggression, are generated or focused by groups and then turned outward toward other groups. Volkan refers to these other groups who come to suffer the consequences of group projective defenses as "suitable targets of externalization." 47 For psychoanalytic political theorists, most leaders respond to groups' demands for suitable targets of externalization by furnishing targets in the form of other groups or, occasionally, individuals. Much of the black feminist project consists of a refusal to deny or intellectualize raw, painful feelings in ways that would accord with the norms of theoretical discourse. This refusal does not signal that black feminists abandon theory, but it does mark a distinctive orientation toward theory. Patricia Williams illustrates this distinctive orientation in a story about the reception given a paper she delivered to an audience of legal scholars. The paper, an analysis of the congruities between "private" and "social contract," uses the story of Williams's enslaved ancestor as a means of reflecting upon the social "strategies of evasion and control" present in American notions of market freedom and contract. After the talk, "the response is generally warm, but a friend of mine tells me that in the men's

78

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

room he heard some of them laughing disparagingly: 'All this emotional stuff just leaves me cold.' "48 One of the salient features of black feminist thought, especially to many white readers, is the way black feminists express anger in their writings. But it is important to consider how black feminists interpret the rage of black women. This, after all, and not the suppression of rage, is critical to the development of reparative group discourse. Black feminist theorists do not reconcile negative feelings and differences to present a unified and pacific group. The mutual fears and angers of black women constitute an important dimension of black feminist dialogue with those outside the group as well as those within. In fact, white readers of black feminist discourse often miss how frequently black feminists address black women's contradictory relations with one another. In her essay "Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger," Audre Lorde dissects the anger in the mutual gaze of black women in order to interpret its meanings back to the group. She argues that black women have been the recipients of so much hatred-"what other human being absorbs so much virulent hostility and still nmctions?"-that relations with themselves and each other are "scarred."49 Lorde vividly describes the effects of projective identification on black women in the form of what many theorists call "internalized racism" and "internalized sexism." She documents the consequences for black women historically of acting as recipients of fear, disgust, hatred, exotic curiosity, depersonalization, and sexual devaluation by white women and men. Certainly, neither black women nor members of other disparaged groups internalize and transform all of these disagreeable passions into perceived dimensions of the self. Nonetheless, members of socially disparaged groups do internalize and identify with many disagreeable passions and attributions of dominant group members. Besides acknowledging this painful group reality, theorists note that for disparaged groups, such passions cannot be reciprocated through projection because of structural social and political relations of inequality. If internalized hatred is one source of disagreeable passions of black women for one another, there is another source. Rage can also function as a defense against despair and mourning, as members look to the group for nurturance and healing from terrible loss. 50 Lorde acknowledges these uses of rage when she concedes that the "middle depth of relationship more usually possible between Black and white women ... is less threatening than the tangle of unexplored needs and furies that face any two Black women who seek to engage each other directly, emotionally, no matter what the context of their relationship may be." 51 In spite of the feelings evoked in the twin pursuits of individual fulfillment and group support, Lorde remains hopeful about the group's potential to foster in-

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

79

dividual development. In exercising discursive leadership by interpreting dynamics in groups and examining, rather than denying, anger within the group, theorists like Lorde contribute to the development of a reparative group. Although black feminist leaders work to discern and manifest implicit feelings and defenses of group members, relations between leaders and group members themselves require interpretation. According to group theorists, the tendency of group members to submit to leadership, or to demand leaders who permit such submission, is a recurrent problem. Cornel West criticizes models of leadership in black community that suffer from a similar kind of paternalism and calls for the development of "new models of leadership." Far from permitting obeisance to the judgment of leaders, West argues that these new models would diagnose social and political harms, facilitate "collective ... critical consciousness [and] moral commitment," and accommodate criticisms ofleaders' own blind spots. 5 2 What facilitates such criticism and debate? Black feminists sometimes tell stories in which their leadership is held up to scrutiny by other group members, often close friends, sisters, mothers, or students. 5 3 Such stories enact a dialogue that emphasizes responsibility, humility, accountability, and connection with those who are presumed to constitute the membership of the group. Theorists also interrogate their own claims to leadership and potential for self-idealization by encouraging critique of their own works and those of other black women. Bell hooks is one theorist who insists that students practice critical thinking as a necessary foundation to being in black community. Analyzing and criticizing the ideas of black women develops critical abilities, contributes to resistance against "divas," and facilitates recognition that critical fame and attention can accrue to those whose work promotes comfort rather than political thought and action. IDENTIFYING THREATS

The fourth task ofleadership is to identify threats to the group. A primary anxiety about groups is that leaders tend to exploit opportunities to demonize those perceived to pose a threat to the group. In politics and social life, group leaders constantly test the reality of perceived threats and engage in the task of encouraging or discouraging the anxieties of group members with regard to enemies. So common are these functions that political partisans may bewail the absence ofleaders who are able to perform them unapologetically, as when a liberal pundit noted in the aftermath of the 2002 congressional election that American voters are "naturally drawn" to presidents who are willing to characterize "the enemy in clear, moralistic terms." 54

80

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

Naturally, the pressure on leaders to name enemies, to direct the group's aggression, and to authorize the group's innocence is great. Leaders may perform these functions aware of the ease with which identifications of threat may evolve into group-sanctioned splitting, paranoia, and persecution. 5 5 This means that beyond carefully delineating the dangers posed by enemies, and the extent of culpability, reparative leaders should strive to test attributions of harm that exceed reasonable appraisals. Certainly, identifying threats is neither a simple task nor one in which accurate judgments easily trump defenses. However, reparative leaders are aware of the extraordinary authority invested in them by group members to identify enemies, to invest those enemies with negative qualities, and to lead crusades against them. Political scientists focus on identifying actual (often political or military) threats while overlooking psychological effects that can amplify threats, demonize those designated as "other," and externalize unwanted aspects of the self or group. It is not uncommon for academic psychologists to focus on perceptions, attitudes, and emotions associated with threat while excluding legacies of victimization that might vindicate them. Meanwhile, a full understanding of the place of threats and enemies requires an integration of these concerns, recognizing that individuals function as members of multiple social groups whose experiences construct complex and sometimes internally contradictory histories of victimization and culpability. Historically, black feminists work to identify the threats to black women in their multiple social positions. Collins identifies the exercise of leadership of black women with "creative acts of resistance." 56 Although theresistance and the threats they are meant to counter can be conceptualized in diverse ways, there is much broad agreement on historical threats to black women. The history of violence and coercion against black female bodies in U.S. history has no parallel in any other social group, primarily because of the juxtaposition of enslavement with sexual victimization. White male agents of this victimization protected themselves by passing laws designed to decriminalize sexual violence against black women and by cooperating with white women in social and familial norms. 57 Especially in Western settings with histories of enslavement, colonization, and racial apartheid, black women can identify legacies of threat and oppression, particularly from white men invested with formal or customary authority and the means of coercive force. However, conceptualizing threats to the group becomes more vexing as we move from threats that can be personified to threats that resist personification for any of a number of reasons: the scale of atrocities, their historical distance, or the difficulty of distinguishing hierarchies of participation and responsibility. In

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

81

the face of these legacies, black feminists consistently resist putting a face on danger that is easily vilified. In the place of conspiracy theories and protestations of moral purity, black feminist theorists attempt to carefully reconstruct the history of relations between black women and black men, black women and white women, and black women and white men. The refusal, for example, to ignore sexism and violence perpetrated by black men against black women has sometimes been a volatile issue between black women and black men. 58 Black feminists and their black male allies connect violence committed by black men against black women (and violence committed by black men against other black men) to broader social problems but do not exculpate those who engage in it. 59 Black women's refusal to deny racism on the part of white women in the women's movement has often strained relations between these putative allies. 60 That black feminist claims against the racism of white feminists have frequently resulted in white feminist reactions of idealization is an indictment not of the claims themselves, but of the difficulties white women may have with relating through conflict and coming to terms with the fragmentation of fantasized political unities. In addition to patient efforts to reconstruct the history of external threats to black women, black feminist theorists do not isolate threats safely outside the boundaries of the group. Rather, theorists address the ways in which black women can be dangerous to one another. Self-hatred reverberates in groups as hatred of members for one another and separates those who should be connected by a sense of shared history and attribution of identity. Hatred and fear of lesbians and other anxious responses to nonconformity similarly pose a threat to the group's capacity to foster individual development in its members. It is clear in the literature of identity groups that while it is easier and more satisfying to identify people-and especially whole categories of people-as agents of harm, this is often inaccurate and dangerous. Covert and overt varieties of racism are practiced by individuals and groups, who are accordingly responsible for them. But not all race-based injustice is perpetrated in this way. Critical theorists often identify continuing social, political, and economic injustice as an unintended side effect of social norms, institutionalized privilege, and even some forms of formally equal treatment. Accruing to members of some groups and not to others in consistent patterns, such forms of privilege as access to education, nutrition, economic assets, social standing and networks, medical care, and information are in American society heavily influenced by race and ethnicity. Just as psychoanalytic political theory might predict, groups are frequently partial when they reconstruct and relate stories about their own victimization and assign responsibility for that victimization. On the other

82

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

hand, such a useful generalization need not contradict the evidence of group leaders' attempts to realistically document, interpret, and disseminate historical, cultural, and political evidence of threat. Discursive group leaders, like other leaders, are often under strong pressures within groups to select enduring enemies against which groups' intellectual, emotional, moral, and (frequently) physical and financial resources will be pitted. Resisting these pressures is an important component of reparative leadership. Black feminist thought offers a compelling example of such resistance coupled with a commitment to a responsible accounting for historical threats to black women. IDENTIFYING STRENGTHS

The leadership task of identifying the strengths of the group while acting to minimize the group's tendency to idealize itself is closely related to the task of identifying threats to the group. It is quite common for group theorists to warn about the dangers of idealization present in groups. To assist group members in defending themselves against anxiety, group discourses facilitate the splitting of the world into good and evil, idealizing their own group and identifying others as targets for aggression. Leaders who would be reparative must confront idealization in the group. However, merely identifying idealization is not sufficient. In addition to avoiding idealization, groups must retain a sense that the group deserves to have and experience goodness. Alford links the importance of group strengths to the group's capacity to withstand depressive anxiety over the realization that the world of groups is not neatly divisible into the good "us" and the evil "them."61 The assumption that groups are their own worst enemy remains, but an emphasis on protecting goodness in the group is added: "the main enemies are fear and despair, the depressive anxiety that we are not good enough or strong enough or adult enough to face reality and change it. It is in the face of this anxiety that corruption, of ourselves, our leaders, and our relationships, seems the only alternative." 62 The tasks of identifying threats and identifying strengths enhance one another. A group whose leaders strive to realistically identify dangers will also turn to examination of its own characteristics. Such leaders will encourage the group to see not only differences between itself and other groups but also similarities. There is a common intuitive assumption that members of oppressed groups have a "natural" empathy with the harmed and dispossessed. Ifleft unchallenged such a belief operates automatically to relieve groups of the burden of examining their own capacity for harm-doing and their own potential as bystanders to injustice. 63 Deborah Gray White exposes as falla-

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

83

cious the idea that "because of racism and sexism, [black women] have been more sensitive to injustice and more tolerant of difference among people than have other groups. "64 White's observation suggests that black women must struggle with tolerance, respect, fear, antipathy, and misunderstanding just as others must. Thus, it is in black (and white) women's interest to disclaim these attributions of natural empathy and to assert them as the consequences of ethical and political labor. In fact, black women in the United States have a long history of struggling against social injustice, a history that is largely, and often deliberately, unknown to people of European descent. Contemporary black women can learn about, and identify with, their forebears' work in support of antislavery, suffrage, education, anti-lynching legislation, and labor rights, among other concerns. Unfortunately, it is not only white Americans who remain unaware of much of this history. As many black feminists have pointed out, the suppression and disuse of the history of black women denies girls and women a usable past out of which to fashion a sense of identity and promise. Given these circumstances it is no surprise that theorists expend much energy retelling black women's history of resilience and progress to new generations. However, group theorists point out that the consequence of a group's effort to embrace and nurture its own strengths is often an unrealistic and pernicious idealization. One way to judge the presence of an idealizing discourse in black feminist theory is to examine theorists' responses to idealization that originates outside the group. A paradoxical result of the history of the racialized relations of the United States in general, and the contemporary women's movement in particular, is white feminist guilt. Many black feminists argue that recognition of racial oppression has produced guilty relations between black and white women that subvert rather than encourage communication, learning, and the pursuit of shared goals. These theorists maintain that it is essential for black women to recognize and reject .the idealization of black women by white women, because such idealization is not a rejection of, but merely an easier defense against, the dehumanizing treatment of black women. Certainly white feminists incur a cost in their own understanding when they romanticize, rather than engage, black feminists. 65 In their turn, black feminists express a concern that settling for white approbation deters women of color from engaging in social critique and political dissent. 66 MOURNING

As individuals suffer losses that must be mourned, so do groups. Leaders direct processes of mourning for losses associated with group membership

84

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

and the unique history of the group. Perhaps because of his historical focus, Volkan is concerned with the necessity for group grieving and with the ways in which this grieving can go awry. 67 Volkan notes that the stages that accompany individual mourning apply as well to groups, with a few important differences. If members are unable gradually to come to terms with losses that constitute narcissistic injuries for the group, the likelihood increases that rage will complicate social and political relations with other groups. This is so even if the losses are not experienced equally by all members of the group-or not experienced at all by some. 68 In addition, Volkan's treatment of mourning is significant because of his conviction that groups must mourn not only for themselves and their own losses, but also for the "enemy" group and the losses that enemy has sustained at their hands. 69 This is the essential corollary to the need of groups to have their losses recognized by the "opponent" who inflicted them. Such a mutual acknowledgment can help to promote successful mourning; it can also help mitigate the need for groups to sustain a sense of victimization in less appropriate circumstances. Volkan examines mutually adversarial ethnic relations. It is not clear how group mourning might be theorized in a situation of identity group conflict characterized by a grossly differential history of victimization. Neither is it clear how we might theorize mourning in the face of a history of resistance to remorse and expiation. Leaders must function in contexts in which there are not only historical legacies of loss but also continuing circumstances of injury and only inconsistent attempts at reconstruction and repair. Emphasizing memory and mourning brings leaders back to telling the group's story. Inextricable from the narrative of survival, resistance, and progress for many groups is a narrative of dehumanization, dispossession, and despair. Many black feminists employ concepts such as diaspora, holocaust, and genocide to describe the African experience. These conceptualizations have two goals. The first is to induce white contemporaries to acknowledge the vastness of terror, violence, dispossession, and disregard that has been perpetrated by people of European descent against people of African descent. The second (but not secondary) goal is to deliver adequate historical information and validation to people of African descent to facilitate pride in survival, the reality of historical contributions against great odds, and the recognition and mourning oflosses. Much of the writing of black feminists resonates with memory and memorializing as black feminist theorists seek to decipher the complex effects of the past in the present. However, the goal of mourning losses-of life and health, of a coherent and usable history, of culture, of forgone possibilities-is com-

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

85

plica ted by continuing trauma and loss combined with the failure of other groups to acknowledge complicity. One black feminist who has written persuasively on the subject of memory and mourning is the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. Particularly striking is Morrison's concept of "rememory," which is significant to the plot of her novel Beloved. Beloved is an infant who, murdered by the mother who will not allow her to be returned to slavery, reappears years later as a young woman who demands the maternal love denied her by death. 70 Morrison reminds readers that ravaged souls do not go gently, and that the past "comes back whether we want it to or not." 71 In her most vivid dialogue on the theme of memory she suggests that trauma remains in the places where it is experienced-"not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world." Thus, others who walk in those places can "bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else." 72 Memories are not just individual possessions, to be confronted in private; they and their consequences are widely shared by all those who walk in the same places. Because these memories cannot be escaped they must be confronted, and the adult incarnation of Beloved permits this confrontation and reconciliation. As one critic puts it, In the presence of the baby daughter whom she sacrificed in order to save, Sethe retastes and "rememories" the traumas of both motherhood and slave heritage. The slain daughter who returns to her family simultaneously suggests the haunting memories of a past which, like the beloved dead child, must be recognized, embraced, and openly mourned but finally laid to rest before the living can understand the present and proceed with the future. 73

Through the novel, Morrison acknowledges that successful mourning comes at a high cost to all involved. She also makes clear that bearing that cost does not necessitate forgetting those who have been the agents of pain. Continued wariness and continued suffering are also costs, and they complicate the mourning of the oppressed. As psychoanalytic political theorists suggest will be true of reparative leaders, black feminists ratify the suffering of members of other groups. On the other hand, Volkan's analysis of mutual enmity and victimization is not appropriate to describe the relations between black women and white women or men in nations that have been marked by white racism and racial apartheid. This is an important difference between the work of most psychoanalytic political theorists, whose theorizing focuses on groups that have experienced historical vicissitudes of advantage and disadvantage, and black feminists, whose theorizing is specific to a group that historically has not been advantaged in its relations with other groups.

86

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

DISCURSIVE LEADERS OR DISCURSIVE ELITISM?

The discursive leadership offered by black feminist intellectuals does not replace forms of social and political leadership found in a variety of venues. Writing of traditional political leaders, Bette Dickerson notes that having the "power to influence behavior" is not an explicit goal of black women leaders. Instead, such leaders talk of facilitating "collective responsibility" and "empower[ing] others." 74 Black feminists support Dickerson's argument, yet such a definitive contrast between influence and responsibility/ empowerment might be unnecessary. As group leaders, black feminist scholars and intellectuals do influence group members. Further, as with relations between leaders and group members in many spheres of social life, there is no reason to believe the influence moves exclusively in one direction. The question of influence and its effects is central to one work on leadership by a black feminist. In Transcending the Talented Tenth, Joy James interrogates and criticizes the individualization, elitism, assimilation, and apolitical orientation she finds characteristic of many black feminist scholars. Using bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins as prominent examples of "discursive elitism," she argues that black feminists indulge in a kind of "elite race leadership" that reflects the co-opting and individualizing effects of academic institutions.7 5 Separated from communities in which radical political activism is practiced and writing in a discourse "inaccessible to nonelites," James holds that black feminists such as hooks and Collins betray black women by substituting bourgeois ideals of privacy, literary production, and intellectual upward mobility for material forms of social justice. One central irony in James's argument about the role of discursive leaders/ elites speaks to the relationship of political thought to political activism: James presents her exemplary "heroic intellectual" as having received her early political education from the works of Marx and Engels. Charlene Mitchell's Marxist politics are not a spontaneous expression from the bottom, as James suggests in her analysis of the politics of "nonelite blacks," but rather, a creative application of Marxist ideology, principles, and goals to an existing social and economic situation. Reliance on any historical political thinker does not invalidate the activism that goes under the thinker's name, but such reliance does not support James's position that elite-and even elitist-intellectuals are dispensable to the work of organizing political resistance. Most organized political activity is strongly influenced not only by previous and contemporary political actors but also, for better and worse, by historical theorists and scholars whose own engagement with political action may range from intense to nonexistent.

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

87

In spite of many differences between my argument and James's treatment of black feminist thought, her critique of discursive elites is consistent with my reading of black feminism in two ways. First, her critique of black feminist and other black community leaders testifies to the continual openness and intellectual exchange that characterizes black feminist thought as a discourse. In this sense, James herself acts as a discursive leader, challenging the forms of leadership exercised by academic black feminists as threats to the group while being attentive to the needs, interests, and ideas of the black women to whom she writes. Her preferred politics, which emerges in the text as democratic and Marxist, constitutes one set of positions in a continuum that ranges from unreconstructed black nationalism on the right through a centrist liberalism to a revolutionary Marxism on the left. 76 That James is critical of those who either do not share her political commitments or who share but do not act on them is apparent. Yet, even as she notes the diversity of political positionings, her own understanding of politics is too narrow to take account of this diversity. James's argument is also consistent with my case for the reparativeness of black feminist discursive leadership around the issue of influence of leaders on group members. There are no reliable empirical ways to assess the influence of black feminist theorists on black women as a group, but it is important that what drives James's critique of black feminist discursive elites seems to be not the absence of perceived influence on nonelite black women but, at least in part, the pernicious presence of such an influence. James worries that black feminist theorists eclipse black women activists and minimize the material effects of political work. But her text also suggests her concern that black women will succumb to the definitions of politics and intellectualism ostensibly held out to them by hooks and Collins, finally coming to mistake symbolic interventions for political actions. In effect, James concedes through her concern about the effects of intellectual production that black feminist theorists do influence black women, albeit in ways she urges black women to struggle against. As discursive leaders, black feminist theorists are sensitive to the interaction of black women's multiple social and political locations and more universal dilemmas of group life. Few black feminist theorists make the case against the universalizing tendencies within psychoanalysis that they make against the universalizing accounts of "women" constructed by white feminists, but the logic of these arguments is the same. An adequate psychoanalytic political theory would integrate the circumstances in which members of particular groups produce intellectual and ideological work that explicates, memorializes, and transmits these experiences. This would include common political and academic experiences, concerns, and

88

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

battles. Psychoanalysts whose enterprise has been the development of group theory for use in therapy are understandably less interested in these dimensions of theory creation than social theorists should be. Nevertheless, a more historical and political awareness tempers and corrects tendencies to ignore the undeniable psychic and theoretical consequences of unequal power relations. Groups do not function in the abstract context of universal psychological mechanisms of defense, but in social and political settings. Groups that are situated differently with regard to material resources, culture, history and consciousness of oppression, or group-related trauma will display both general tendencies of groups and specific group configurations. Likewise, leadership tasks have both abstract dimensions that relate to the general dilemmas and challenges of group life and more singular dimensions that relate to particular historical effects and challenges of a group. Leaders of all identity groups can be expected to confront the six tasks of leadership, but the ways in which they confront and negotiate these tasks will vary from group to group. Certain systematic pressures and dilemmas help to shape the issues that groups, including identity groups, confront and communicate. However they encounter and negotiate them, political issues such as conflict and solidarity determine much ofwhatwill be understood as the nature of a group; the ways that a group deals with them shape, and are shaped by, the psychodynamics of the group. Both psychoanalytic political theorists and black feminist theorists are concerned with reparative resolutions of processes of conflict and solidarity. What is revealing is the ways in which both discourses interrupt and challenge the usual negative valence of conflict and the positive valence of solidarity. They demonstrate that reparative groups require openness about conflict and skepticism about solidarity.

4

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

CONFLICT ACROSS DISCIPLINES

For better or worse, social theorists are drawn to the most destructive forms of group behavior. Often, as in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the Middle East, South Asia, Northern Ireland, and numerous other places around the globe, groups whose rhetoric and behavior attract the interest of social theorists define themselves in terms of shared identity. As a result of the huge costs of political conflict, groups whose discourse is less destructive, or more reparative, are likely to receive relatively little attention from social theorists. Even so, cooperation and reparative forms of group discourse and action teach crucial lessons about forms of organization, communication, and other group practices. And discursive practices play a large role in inciting or discouraging destructive tendencies of groups. Conflict is a ubiquitous topic in political and in psychoanalytic theories. So central is the study of conflict between groups to political theories that such theories are often characterized by their approach to conflict: the extent to which it is fore grounded or marginalized, the extent to which it is seen as historically inevitable or potentially eradicable, fruitful or pernicious. Political theorists have often been charged with, or accepted the burden of; explaining the roots of recurring forms of social or political conflicts. As a result, they have often developed general theories of conflict that would illuminate laws or principles of war, revolution, social unrest, or cultural or other "identity" conflicts. One vigorous debate among political scientists revolves around definitions of"cultural" groups and conflicts and whether conflicts that have often been characterized as ethnic or racial would more accurately be characterized as cultural. 1 While it would be accurate to do so, I do not characterize black feminist thought using the rubric of culture, as feminists of color usually explicitly consider their own social and political positioning in race and gender,

90

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

rather than exclusively cultural, terms. It is also important to bear in mind that in domestic American politics, the translation of racial into cultural categories has abetted a conservative discourse that enacts subtle forms of racism by identifying racially coded "cultures" with behavioral dysfunction.2 Grand theorizing is out of fashion among skeptical contemporary political theorists, but throughout the history of political thought many thinkers have tried to specify forms of social or political organization that would preclude conflict or significantly ameliorate its effects. Today, aside from occasional triumphalist visions that foresee the "end of history," "the end of ideology," or a "consilience" between political, moral, and natural/ biological laws, such grand harmonizing remains on the margins of contemporary political thought. 3 In psychoanalysis, the ways in which conflict, whether intrapsychic or interpersonal, is theorized help to differentiate psychoanalytic traditions from one another in much the same way that approaches to conflict help to differentiate political traditions. As it was first practiced by Freud and his circle, psychoanalysis was conceptualized as the science whose task it was to explicate intrapsychic conflict-not to heal it once and for all, but merely to replace misery with ordinary unhappiness. The assumption that underlay analysis was that although the most intractable and disabling of intrapsychic conflicts might be resolved by such means as the talking cure, more conflict would always remain; there could be no such thing as a perfectly analyzed human subject. As long as psychoanalysts concentrate primarily on conflicts of the self/subject with herself, conflict is generally conceptualized as unavoidable. In addition, conflict is also, and perhaps ideally, understood as a rich source of information and productive resolution, both for individuals and for the production of insights into the human condition. Psychoanalytic theories give close attention to conflict as an inevitable feature of the life of both individuals and groups, but they treat conflict in individuals and groups quite differently. This is so for group psychoanalysts as well as for psychoanalytic political theorists. Psychoanalytic theories of groups are generally not optimistic about group conflict and its outcomes. Whereas psychoanalytic theorists conceive of internal individual conflict as an opportunity for empathic interpretation and emotional working through, group conflict, with its implications of instability and violence, does not offer such hope. To be sure, psychoanalytic political theorists see group conflict not only as an ineradicable feature of the social and political landscape, but also as an opportunity for emotional learning and enhanced responsibility. However, psychoanalytic political theorists point out that groups are unlikely to confront and resolve conflict in pro-

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

91

ductive and reparative ways. Group conflict remains a spontaneously threatening feature of social and political life. Reflecting on the usefulness of psychoanalysis for feminism, Jean Baker Miller notes that "[intrapsychic] conflict is inevitable, the source of all growth, and an absolute necessity if one is to stay alive." Further, she makes the strong claim that "psychoanalysis found ... the secret of conflict itself." 4 This accolade by a feminist notwithstanding, a variety of observers find in feminism a contradictory relation to conflict. Feminists find themselves at times accused of causing or exacerbating conflict between the sexes, at times encouraging forms of resistance against order and authority at all levels of society, and at times shrinking from conflicts, especially among women. Of the many forms of feminist theory and politics, cultural feminism has been most often identified as anticonflictual, but lesbians and feminists of color identify what might be called a "will to harmony" in many varieties of feminist thought and practice. Feminists of color understand the politics of white middle-class American or Western feminists as particularly apt to deny conflicts of interests, goals, and perspectives of differently situated women and to assert similarities that obscure different social and political positionings. Black feminist thought addresses and theorizes a variety of both sources of conflict and methods of conflict resolution. Here, I examine the accounts of intra- and intergroup conflict that recur in black feminist thought. To theorize conflict I turn to three of the most frequently theorized sources, or levels, of conflict that are common to literatures of black feminism and psychoanalysis: conflict within individuals, conflict within groups, and conflict between groups. The motif of conflict demonstrates how interpreting identity group discourses in psychological terms can capture both regularities and differences between them.

CONFLICT WITHIN THE SELF

Psychoanalysts of groups are concerned with more than just macro-phenomena in groups, whether conflict among group members or conflict between groups. Group analysts examine the ways in which group membership itself threatens individuals with intrapsychic conflict. From this perspective, group membership or identification helps to ameliorate states of anxiety, despair, guilt, shame, and fear. One of the primary cohesive elements binding individuals into institutionalized human association is that of defence against psychotic anxiety. In this sense, individuals may be thought of as externalizing those impulses and in-

92

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

ternal objects that would otherwise give rise to psychotic anxiety, and pooling them in the life of the social institutions in which they associate. 5

The example of virulent group discourse and political action that Europeans had closest at hand in the post-World War II period was National Socialism. Scrutinizing Nazi racial ideology and persecution, James Glass finds German psychotic anxieties regarding "poison," "corrosion," and "infection" mediated through institutional ideals, principles, and practices. Once institutionalized, anxieties no longer appear as psychotic, or even as particularly sadistic or unrealistic. To the contrary, the commitment of the professions-biological science, engineering, medicine, management, and statistics, as well as the nascent profession of computer science-to the extermination of all European Jews disguises the nature of the fantasy of annihilation. 6 Glass gives empirical content to Jaques's general understanding of the path from anxiety through defense to institutional enactment: "The unconscious fantasy emerges in specific social and political practices, and in the case of the Third Reich, in the practices of the professions. The fantasy penetrates action, defines value, and molds perceptions .... It exists inside as fear and rage, and outside as ideology and professional practice." 7 Relational psychoanalytic accounts of group formation do not necessarily insist upon the proto-psychotic features of associative impulses. However, all address "groupishness" to some extent in terms of denied, disavowed, or projected aspects of subjectivity-aspects that, were they to be acknowledged, would be difficult and painful for individuals to incorporate into their sense of self. Many theorists emphasize linkages between group identification and "primitive" subjective processes and feelings that may be given shape, content, and focus by group discourses, encouraging individuals to encounter their feelings and states of mind safely outside themselves and, often, outside the group. Psychoanalytic political theorists amplify such discussions of defenses in a language of groups whose political significance is more familiar. Since operations that take place within subjects are less apparent to a political lens, we would expect political theorists to downplay intrapsychic issues and concentrate on the ways group members function as psychologically opaque "black boxes" in the group context. Such a perspective seems virtually necessary in order to proceed with cogent analyses oflarge-scale social phenomena. However, psychoanalytic political theorists stress the functional connections within and between subjects in reconstructing group life and feeling. Indeed, psychoanalytic perspectives on groups are the only ones that take seriously the psychological vicissitudes of group members, even if many of these analyses rely on heuristics that seem dis-

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

93

tressingly speculative in comparison with more behavioral social science methods. Unlike most group psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic political theorists, feminists usually theorize the painful aspects of group situatedness as a less ambiguous function of social oppression and harm to individuals. The theme of internalization of social prejudice, fear, and hatred has always been a central aspect of feminist social critiques. Feminists argue that the oppressive features of social and political life are reflected in the painful splits and contradictions in the attitudes and affect of subordinated group members. \Vhile feminists have often been critical of psychoanalytic explanations of social phenomena, concepts of internalized racism, sexism, and sexual bias are indebted to psychodynamic psychology, andespecially to such defense mechanisms as splitting, identification, and projective identification. Many feminists, having rejected the salience of psychology for feminism, employ psychological concepts like internalization without explicitly linking them with any particular psychology. 8 This theoretical move makes concepts available for political purposes at the cost of foreclosing both critique of and possible benefit from the psychodynamic meanings of these concepts. Yet while black feminist and womanist theorists largely forgo psychodynamic modes of analysis, black feminist uses of internalization are generally complex and nuanced enough to avoid the problem of political didacticism. Such deployments can be informed by and, in turn, help to inform psychoanalytic conceptualizations of group phenomena. Internalized oppression is a key theme in the work of Audre Lorde and bell hooks. In her classic Sister/Outsider, Lorde addresses both white racism and the effects of black identity construction in the context of racist (sexist, and heterosexist) beliefs and institutions. Lorde theorizes the connection between group-based hatreds and the ways in which "echoes of [these hatreds] return as cruelty and anger in our dealings with each other. "9 For her, the "paradox" of black women's inner conflict is the reality of black women's "tradition of bonding and mutual support" and the fact that internalized self-hatred creates anger, suspicion, and danger among black women. 1 Clearly, the demonstrable practices of black women's familial and social bonding neither eclipse nor eradicate the dangerous effects of internalized hatred on the self and on relations between self and other. Bell hooks also concentrates on internalized racism and sexism and their effects in intrapsychic conflict for marginal group members. One example is an effect hooks calls the "dream of racial equality," in which some African American women may identify "freedom" with "conventional sexist gender roles" that reinscribe forms of inequality and hierarchy. However

°

94

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

much they are desired, the effects of such identifications are also painful to subjects who live their contradictions. 11 For hooks, "radical black female subjectivity" requires connection to a historical feminist movement. In the absence of such connection individual black women must take on the task of struggling individually against the circumstances of their individuallives, but they must also struggle against themselves-against their own conflicting interests and desires. In their accounts of internalization, Lorde and hooks share two features that are consistent with psychoanalytic explications of internalization and intrapsychic conflict. First, unlike many accounts of the internalization of pernicious social messages, images, and representations produced by white feminists, those of black feminists may be understood as melancholy, mixing outrage about psychological wounding with a sense that damage to disparaged subjects is never entirely undone. Second, black feminists consistently express not only the wounding, but also the empowering dimensions of resistance to internalized racism, sexism, and homophobia. In relational psychoanalysis, "working through" aspects of intrapsychic conflict rather than merely denying pain and attributing harmful impulses, thoughts, and feelings to others is necessary for realizing individuality and for encouraging reparative group functioning. Working through can be detected in group discourses in the ways a group negotiates the costs of internalized oppression and the "benefits," however unwanted, of resistances to internalized oppression. Unfortunately, this conception of empowerment in the face of a subjectivity forged in part through internalization of harmful messages and representations often appears as an image of black women's superhuman strength. Black feminists engage this image of the "strong black woman" as one that both carries historical resonances and perpetuates injuries. The pernicious effects of the image constitute, for example, a common motif in a recent volume on black women and psychotherapy. 12 Patricia Williams parodies the assumption of black female strength in her satirical account of Anita Hill's appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, referring generically to the "tribe of Black Witches" and to Hill as an "unruly Black Witch." 13 With the exception of some feminist and "radical" theories, most applications of relational psychoanalysis do not acknowledge that the burden of intrapsychic conflict is significantly enhanced for those who, because of their marked identities, already function as socially sanctioned repositories of the disclaimed impulses and feelings of their fellow citizens.14 In this case, reading group psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic political theories using black feminist thought challenges psychoanalytic thinkers to consider the ways in which social and cultural positionings of

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

95

groups help to shape the particularities of group dynamics and discourse. This kind of interplay between general precepts and specific configurations is evident as well in the ways group members discursively negotiate conflict within groups.

CONFLICT WITHIN THE GROUP

Psychoanalytic political theorists share with one another the understanding that groups, including identity groups, are not safe havens in a dangerous social world. These theorists articulate the ways in which oppressive group psychodynamics take place not only between groups, but also within groups, as groups create intragroup processes that manage threats, maintain authority, test the identities of members, and secure group boundaries. The viewpoint that "the gravest threat to the member's safety stems from the group itself" is an extreme statement of this general insight. 15 Groups exact costs from and inflict injuries on their members that members may bear as the cost of belonging. Psychoanalytic political theorists acknowledge that external stresses on groups tend to increase the virulence of internal group dynamics. Volkan's concept of"suitable targets of externalization" addresses these kinds of internal group dynamics. 16 In stabilizing "targets," group members unconsciously coordinate intricate patterns of dress, behavior, belief, or imagery, a choreography that not only grounds collective passion and action against enemies but also subjects group members themselves to sanctions and to some share of the aggressive response visited upon enemies. The outcome that emerges from numerous theoretical and empirical studies in psychoanalytic political theory is that oppressed or outcast groups may call on their members (or members of such groups may call upon one another and themselves) to conform to ever more stringent standards of thought, behavior, and comportment. Unfortunately, psychoanalytic political theorists who observe such processes often use accounts of specific groups and discourses as illustrations of general group practices, processes, and psychodynamics. Such theorizing may elide differences of emphasis and process within groups and the discourses they create and foster. Psychoanalytic political theorists expect identity group discourses to demonstrate predictable patterns of communication regarding group threats from other groups, leadership and authority, authenticity, and boundaries that challenge and subordinate the individuality of group members and deny conflict and differences within the group. I challenge this expectation of psychoanalytic political theorists by examining two dimensions of black feminist discussions of intragroup issues: the safety of

96

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

segregated "sites of resistance" and the challenge to black feminist theory and politics of cross-cutting identities, or "intersectionality," within the category of black woman/ feminist. 17 Like members of many groups that suffer social discrimination, black feminist theorists write of the ways in which groups, sometimes of black people and sometimes of black women, serve as "sites of resistance" against oppression in a social world dominated by other groups. 18 Nonetheless, accounts of even these sites of resistance reveal perspicuous critiques of the ways in which retrenchment to segregated spaces provokes ambivalence in black women. Throughout her essays, Audre Lorde writes of how white racism, sexism, and fear of and bias against lesbians constructs relations among black women. Like Alford, Lorde argues that group members direct most of their anger at members of their own group rather than at outsiders, but she argues that these relations result from group members' internalization of hatred directed toward marginalized people. 19 I moved in a fen of unexplained anger that encircled me and spilled out against whomever was closest that shared those hated selves .... We have become to each other unmentionably dear and immeasurably dangerous .... That middle depth of relationship more usually possible between Black and white women, however ... is less threatening than the tangle of unexplored needs and furies that face any two Black women who seek to engage each other directly, emotionally, no matter what the context of their relationship may be. 20

Lorde diverges from psychoanalytic political theorists who note the dangers of group membership only in her interpretation of painful and destructive practices of group members toward their own. Other black feminist theorists are more directly concerned with issues of group conformity, or "authenticity," and the rage groups may turn on their own members. What is important about Lorde's account of relations among group members is her acknowledgment of the often hurtful nature of those relations and her explicit challenge to group members to identify and work through those relations. Hooks's voluminous writings provide many examples of the contradictions and ambivalences offered by sites of resistance. 21 In her essays hooks describes sites of resistance outward from the intimacy of "homeplaces" founded in family relations to larger-and frequently imagined-"spaces" of race, gender, and other affinities. In each of the sites of resistance she describes, hooks locates harmony, affection, and affiliation as well as strife, ambivalence, and hostility. An interesting feature of

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

97

hooks's treatment of these themes is that she frequently separates harmony and strife discursively, locating discussion of good aspects of a group-related site in one essay and bad, or painful, aspects in another. Hence, in "Homeplace: A Site of Resistance" hooks addresses the ways in which home and family function for Mrican Americans as spaces for the care and shelter of the body and also as spaces in which "dignity [and] integrity of being" are fostered. In "Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness," hooks discusses the hurtful aspects of her own family life. 22 Not all readers are aware of this discursive pattern. In her essay "House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme" Iris Young notes hooks's revaluing of"home," but Young's understanding of hooks as "express[ing] a positive meaning of home for feminism" does not acknowledge hooks's ambivalence about "home." 23 We may read hooks's discursive separation of positive group experience from negative as an example of what psychoanalytic theorists in the relational tradition understand as a predictable tendency of both individuals and groups to keep apart good from bad feelings, images, and experience. For group psychoanalysts, however, separating good from bad is only the first step in a complex set of processes aimed at protecting the "good" group from incursions of "bad" otherness. Yet hooks's strategy of discursively containing goodness and badness neither denies the existence of painful, hurtful dynamics within segregated sites of resistance nor scapegoats those inside or outside the group who might be identified as culprits to be excised for the good(ness) of the group. Like Lorde's account of internalized oppression, hooks's acknowledgment of the complicated nature of sites of resistance suggests a more reparative engagement with the dynamics of identity groups than group psychoanalysis predicts. 24 The second dimension of intragroup conflict, and a common theme within black feminist thought, is cross-cutting differences among black women that disrupt the homogeneity of any group founded on race and gender. Taking up the theme of intragroup difference, hooks does not ignore or decry the existence of differences among Mrican-American women. Instead, she argues that social and political conflict may serve useful purposes. For hooks, conflict is not only a strategic source of balance between groups or, in the social movement tradition, a way of redressing inequalities and oppressive institutions. Rather, she argues that dissent and resistance are necessary within liberation movements as well as between subordinate and dominant groups. 25 For hooks, conflict can take many forms and issue from many sources, including: hierarchies of color in black community, competition for white recognition and favor among black women, commodification of black women's sexuality, denial of the meaningfulness of socioeconomic class among culturally dominant blacks,

98

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

black women's complicity with male domination, and individual political choices between collective action and self-interest. Conflict within any particular group may be welcomed or proscribed. And leaders set the tone with which groups confront internal dissenters and those who complicate a homogeneous group identity. Conflict within groups is neither painless nor risk-free, but the risks of intragroup conflict may also constitute opportunities for emotional learning, individual development, and reparative political change.

COMING TO TERMS WITH CONFLICT WITHIN THE GROUP

It is inevitable that identity groups with a history of pejorative representations and social and political discrimination are tempted either to deny intragroup differences or, more strategically yet, to deny that differences translate into meaningful forms of intragroup conflict. Hooks argues that although there may be many reasons for an identity group to try to diminish the appearance of infighting and intragroup conflict, the consequences of ignoring conflict are worse for groups than is conflict itself. As sources of conflict among black women are multiple, ways of confronting conflict are also multiple, including refusing to keep secrets within the group and being deterred from conflict because intragroup conflict may comfort the group's adversaries. 26 Far from ignoring or colluding with demands for authenticity, hooks concludes that any progressive political movement grows and matures only to the degree that it passionately welcomes and encourages, in theory and practice, diversity of opinion, new ideas, critical exchange, and dissent. Hooks's own discursive practices about group conflict are consistent with this conviction. 27 Julia Sudbury builds upon earlier black feminist discussions of intragroup conflict with her empirical and theoretical study of black women's political organizations in Britain. Like hooks, Sudbury is untroubled by open discussion of the divisions and conflicts among black women and within black women's organizations. Sudbury's own research focuses on political organizations of women of color in Britain from the 1970s to the 1990s. Her principal goal is to demonstrate black women's agency in political groups built and run by women of color. She is thus concerned with the political scope and goals of the organizations, as well as with their sources of funding, political strategies, and philosophies. Central to her study is an account of the internal functioning of these organizations, including the relationships, narratives of solidarity, and sources of division within them. In examining the importance of perspectives on conflict for black women,

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

99

Sudbury both interprets the reminiscences of members of black women's political organizations and criticizes theoretical accounts of black women's social and political lives in the work of other black feminists. The axes of conflict Sudbury finds within black women's organizations through the narratives of group members include: conflicts between rural and urban women, 28 class- or education-based conflicts over philosophy and strategy, conflicts between lesbians and heterosexual women (or, to be more exact, between factions tolerant oflesbian identity and those whose traditional perspectives on race, religion, or family life render tolerance of sexual diversity difficult), conflicts between feminist-identified women of color and women of color who eschew feminism as a white women's movement, and conflicts over black women's attitudes about black men and masculinity. In her own discursive treatment of conflict Sudbury singles out Patricia Hill Collins's theoretical account of differences among African-American women, charging that Collins minimizes the "contestation ... within the category of 'black women.' "29 For many readers of Black Feminist Thought and Fighting Words, Collins's interest in avoiding seductive narratives of homogeneity is obvious. 30 It is, for example, Collins who criticizes practices of"surveillance" and "mutual policing" within black community that are driven by racism against group members and who notes that requirements of a "united front" of racial solidarity foreclose dissent and independent thinking. 31 Even though Collins explicitly advocates for recognition of dissent and difference, Sudbury argues that the theoretical framework of black feminist standpoint itself is antithetical to recognition of difference and conflict: "The concept of authority inherent in standpoint theories undermines [their] democratic goal. Standpoint theories implicitly valorise the authentic marginalised voice. But as the marginalised is moved to the centre, new margins are created." 32 Sudbury's concern is that Collins's articulation of "black feminist standpoint theory" cannot avoid the essentialist dilemma of a homogenized identity for black women. This is not a new criticism of"standpoint," a concept critics have associated with unappealing and inaccurately homogeneous notions of the fantasized category of "women" when employed by white women and of "black women" when employed by theorists such as Collins. 33 In addition to her use of standpoint theory, some black feminists criticize Collins for her attempt to reconcile feminism and Afrocentrism. E. Francis White welcomes Collins's interest in defining an Mrocentrism that does not assume either a biological essence of African femaleness, a static and harmonious Mrican past, or a rigid sexual complementarity in people of Mrican descent. However, White charges that Collins is unable to accomplish two necessary tasks: she neither consistently attends to the

100

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

multiple class locations black women inhabit nor theorizes the antiracist and conservative aspects of black nationalist ideology. 34 These two problems are related to one another in White's analysis of pro-African antiracist "counter discourse." Like Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham after her, White turns a critical eye on the denial of intragroup difference and conflict that results from the way "African-Americans in the late twentieth century construct and reconstruct collective political memories of African culture to build a cohesive group that can shield them from racist ideology and oppression." 35 For White, the need for such counter discourses, precipitated by racist treatment and discourse, presents a dilemma for black feminists who may affirm an antiracist nationalism only to find their interests in gender and sexual autonomy ignored. With regard to class, consistently acknowledging class differences and interests among black women may threaten to destabilize or undermine a unifying narrative of material exploitation and black women's interests in particular kinds of masculine or state action. Black feminist theorists do not suggest that the answer to fantasies of group closure is retrenchment to a liberal individualism that denies the political salience of multiple identities. Nor do they discursively repress contentions and conflicts of interest that characterize group process. Predictably, then, black feminists are skeptical and explicitly critical of tendencies toward authenticity that they, like critics of identity politics, identify with group membership and the social and psychic dynamics of groups.

REREADING THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY

When it is adopted by feminist and postmodern critics of identity politics, "authenticity" is a term of opprobrium. Psychoanalytic political theorists do not use this terminology to address the tendencies of groups to discipline the identities of their members and to impose narratives of conformity and homogeneity. Nonetheless, analyzing these tendencies of groups is a central task of group psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic political theorists. Psychodynamic accounts of group life identify the problem of authenticity as a corollary of processes of bonding and defending against real and imagined threats to the self/subject in groups. Group members frequently substitute for their own ego ideals the ideal of the group as a whole or of the leader. This substitution constitutes an attempt to defend against the loss of individual identity, especially in large groups or non-face-toface identity-based encounters. Indeed, psychoanalysts of groups maintain that for a group to exist, some level of transfer of individual psychic

CONFliCT AND AUTHENTICITY

101

processes to the group must take place: "If the individual did not project on to the group, the result would be a mere aggregate of individuals, not a group." 36 By what processes do individuals in groups sacrifice aspects of individual identity in order to defend shared identity? For group psychoanalytic theorists there seem to be two principal mechanisms whereby such a sacrifice occurs and group members embrace a simplified, nonconflictual, "authentic" group identity. The first is that individuals, overwhelmed by the impossibility of relating to other individuals in the group as individuals-that is, with the impossibility that individual processes of projection and reality-testing will yield reliable information about the many others that populate the group-withdraw from personal relations with group members. This withdrawal sets the stage for a relationship with a group now experienced by group members as "uncannily alive," as a powerful subject in its own right. The second mechanism that favors requirements of narrow authenticity in groups is the weakening of the ego and realitytesting that attends processes of projection either with individuals in the group (in a vain attempt to "know" the individual members) or with the group itself (in an attempt to "know" or communicate with the group, to use the group as a receptacle of unwanted aspects of the self, or to devolve responsibility for individual acts to the group, among many possibilities). 3 7 Here it helps to understand projection not as the spatial movement of "parts" of the self/ subject, but as fantasies of the location of attributes or faculties whose effects can be behaviorally and discursively mapped in groups. 38 One consequence of these processes is the inability of group members to tolerate individual differences within the group. This is a generalization, but it is nonetheless useful to see how such a broad characterization maps onto such different groups as the contemporary Bible-believing Christian Right and the Black Panthers of the late r96os and early 1970s. Those who tell the story of these movements marvel at the extent to which discursive practices can be employed to minimize ideological and behavioral differences and to construct a relatively uncontested group identity. 39 Group psychoanalysts push this insight even further, suggesting that it may be difficult for group members even to tolerate their own simultaneous status as group members and differentiated individuals. The result of defensive processes of group members is that members feel cognitively and affectively depleted vis-a-vis the group and that, in the worst case, group members experience themselves and others as less real and as relatively undifferentiated in comparison with the group. 40 One group psychoanalyst calls this a process of"homogenisation," but critics of identity groups will recognize a description of the politics of authenticity. "Ho-

102

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

mogenisation is a pure survival mechanism: its creative powers are nil. To be creative in the large group requires standing to be counted, which implies from the point of view of other members idiosyncrasy of self-expression or self-assertion. "41 Unfortunately, such self-expression is as difficult to achieve as it is to tolerate in identity groups, psychoanalysts argue. Psychoanalytic political theorists are even more pessimistic about the possibilities for group members reclaiming projected or disclaimed aspects of their own faculties and subjectivities, arguing that dispersed social and political groups with which citizens identify do not provide the mechanisms for working through the psychodynamic challenges of group membership. Further, those to whom members of social and political groups look for leadership frequently encourage the worst, least reparative forms of group thought, feeling, and action. Although they are largely uninformed by psychoanalytic critiques of groups, critics of identity politics appear today on both the political Left and the political Right. Like group psychoanalysts, critics of identity politics focus on the exclusive, homogenizing, stultifying, punitive, disciplinary face of demands for authenticity. But critics can be guilty of assuming the relentlessness of authenticity within identity groups and discourses, of ignoring or discounting group members' own challenges to the homogenizing tendencies of groups, and of undervaluing the critical inquiries into politics of authenticity found in some identity group discourses. In effect, many critics of identity groups who identify conformity and the demand for authenticity as fatal and unavoidable symptoms of identity politics themselves inscribe a homogenizing logic onto identity groups and their political discourses. Wendy Brown offers a particularly incisive critique of contemporary identity politics, or what she calls "politicized identity." For Brown, identity groups are the particular form taken by "identity's desire for recognition" in the contemporary West. She "consider[s] politicized identity as both a production and a contestation of the political terms of liberalism, disciplinary-bureaucratic regimes, certain forces of global capitalism, and the demographic flows of postcoloniality that together might be taken as constitutive of the contemporary North American political condition." 42 Brown explicitly rejects the claim that "shared identity" has a psychological ground as well as political utility. 43 However, in historicizing the particular identity categories she finds in contemporary politicallife-"Islamic [and] deaf, indigenous [and] Gypsy, Serbian [and] queer" -she fails to consider two crucial arguments concerning identity groups and identity politics. First, she sets aside the possibility that psychological needs for what Bion calls "groupishness" are nested within and shaped by-rather

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

103

than brought into existence by-historical sociopolitical forces and institutional arrangements. Second, she precludes the possibility that there may be, as group psychoanalysts often argue, positive or reparative dimensions for individuals of confronting the challenges of identification with groups, an identification that analysts argue is, in any case, unavoidable. Instead, Brown seems to make a case for imagined subjects who transcend such putative needs. A better account of the observable phenomenon of contemporary dissolutions and reformulations of group identity is suggested by Franke Wilmer in her empirical and theoretical study of the brutal fragmentation of Yugoslavia in the 199os. Wilmer turns to the "emotional side" of collective life that is neglected in much political science in order to better understand the "intersection between our psychic and social lives." 44 Commenting on a now recognizably nai"ve presumption that functional forms of national identity would displace ethnic and other group identities, Wilmer notes that "citizens who 'find themselves' in a particular state do not simply abandon or suppress other forms or sources of group identity, nor do they relinquish the emotional bond between individual and group created by noncivic identities." Wilmer does not directly speculate about the transcendence of group identity urged upon us by critics of identity politics, but she opens her book with a series of violent vignettes of identity group conflict that reach back to the European conquest of North America and then forward through the Holocaust to contemporary "hate crimes." However, she gives no comfort to the idea that modernity itself precipitates identity group formation. Instead, she offers a series of lessons for thinking through war and peace among identity groups that assume group identities, the "capacity to do harm," and the yearning for peaceful communities. 45 I do not mean to reject all the implications of Brown's critique of contemporary modes of identification, including her account of the ironic consequences of assertions of difference, pain, and victimization, and her application to contemporary identity politics of a Nietzschean ressentiment. Indeed, Brown's challenge to other critics of identity politics is implied in the way her own wide-ranging list of contemporary group identities challenges the view put forward by some current queer theorists that the more protean and performative label "queer" can be understood to supersede more antiquated forms of "gay" and/ or "lesbian" identification. For Brown, these forms of group identity all have common sources. Thus, although she does not seem to agree with queer theorists that fluid, "postmodern" forms of identification definitively improve on an earlier model of same-sex sexual identity, Brown nevertheless does not consider the possibility that these forms of identity share common psychological

104

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

roots and are shaped by similar psychodynamics. 46 In contrast, Patricia Williams turns to an explanation for both group identification and the distrust of identity politics in which larger social dynamics shape the psychological but do not supplant it. For her, bonds of group identity are intuitively comprehensible as conduits to relational security: "the ties that bind, that make family [and] connection." The mistrust of benign identity politics, on the other hand, is a sign of "quite irrational fears" that Williams suspects are rooted in American anxieties about lower-class ethnic-hence parochial and shameful-origins. 47 Many black feminist theorists are reflective about critiques of identity politics, particular those from political allies on the Left. Pratibha Parmar asserts in response to postmodern critiques of identity politics that to "organise self-consciously as black women was and continues to be important; that form of organisation is not arbitrary." 48 Yet it is not only in response to such critiques that black feminists explore the problem of authenticity. Rather, black feminists challenge politics of authenticity proactively, not only citing the dangers of group requirements of authenticity but analyzing the processes, effects, and alternatives of these requirements. Simultaneously with her support of identity politics, Parmar warns that group members must actively resist the logic of authenticity. The failure to do so sets in motion a politics of "closure which is both retrogressive and sometimes spine-chilling."49 Some internal critiques of group authenticity focus specifically on leadership and the role of leaders in resisting homogenizing group logics. Critics link intragroup hierarchies with demands for black racial authenticity and point out that purportedly "natural" differences and hierarchies can require and facilitate women's subordination to men in mixed-sex groups. 5° Patricia Williams is specific in linking the divisive racial politics of black leaders like Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton to the constraint and domination of women-even of women they ostensibly champion and protect. 51 Other black feminists, such as hooks and Collins, indict political and cultural versions of black nationalism for, at the least, its neglect of sexism within black community and, at most, its ideological demand of patriarchy and female subordination. 52 Using psychoanalysis to theorize black women's identity, Amina Mama points out that conflict is not simply organized around empirical or observable differences of, for example, color, class, or sexuality. Rather, psychodynamic processes within an oppressed group are likely to construct differences that mimic empirical hierarchies in the social and political realm outside the group but that rely upon fluid fantasized transliterations of the meanings of racial and, presumably, other forms of identity. Mama argues that as a result of white "racist discourses" black people are likely

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

105

to invest some members of the group with the status of"surrogate whites." These surrogates "can be used to serve as vehicles for every other black person's projections of th[e] unacceptable 'white' parts of themselves." 53 This insight recalls Alice Walker's response to the negative reception among black men of her book The Color Purple. Both Mama and Walker interrogate the role of genealogical images of"whiteness" in constructing the nature of black identity in the United States. Yet Mama extends Walker's understanding of the meaning of white and black identities, deepening an appreciation of the ways in which historical understanding functions as a basis for continual reevaluations of the purity and authenticity of group members. Critics of identity politics are correct in identifying authenticity as a persistent obstacle both to democratic politics and to the realization of individuality. However, critics too often seek to transcend homogenizing logics using subjects whose group identifications are too shallow and protean to mire them in identity politics or with subjects whose self-awareness is too hip, ironic, or globally self-conscious to be-or to understand themselves as-identified with groups. These analyses ignore the ways in which identifications with groups can operate outside consciousness and shape identity through repressions, foreclosures, and melancholic relations with groups of others. 54 The (post)modern West did not invent identity politics. This is not to say that many forms of putatively "ancient" group identifications and hatreds are not significantly shaped by postmodern forces of technology, mass media, and shifting political ideologies. Indeed, as many have pointed out, "ancient" identifications with religious, national, or ethnic groups can be not only manipulated for particular purposes but produced wholesale with accompanying legitimizing genealogies. 5 5 What group psychoanalysts and their colleagues in political theory address is how group identifications encourage systematic, if not utterly predictable, forms of group dynamics and discourse. They also respond, theoretically and empirically, to the challenge of suggesting ways groups might mitigate the most destructive group tendencies.

CONFLICT BETWEEN GROUPS

Relational group theorists are less voluble about relations between groups than are psychoanalytic political theorists because of the clinical context in which most data about group processes are gathered. In the clinical setting, a single group is available for study, and the emphasis is on intrapsychic and intragroup relations. This is not to say, however, that relational psychoanalysts are silent about the nature of relations between groups.

106

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

Both clinicians and theorists of groups extrapolate to intergroup relations from their studies of single clinical groups and analyze the effects of the absence of intergroup processes on the internal dynamics of groups under study. For them, the group's threat to the individuality of its members and the members' vulnerability to this unstated threat is a central theme. Group theorists note the propensity of groups for violence and the pervasive fear among group members of violence. They note that "violence" refers to a range of activities from the production of outright physical suffering (a relatively rare occurrence) to more subtle forms of emotional threat that include ridicule, stereotyping, dehumanization, isolation, and ejection. Group theorists speak of the ways in which groups mobilize violence and fears of loneliness and loss of identity; psychoanalytic political theorists investigate in more detail the consequences of such fears and mobilizations for intergroup relations. The conflicts with which psychoanalytic political theorists are most concerned are those in which groups are locked in escalating rhetoric and behavior that might be characterized as paranoid-schizoid. The vivid danger in such confrontations lies in the fact that for groups in this "position," as for individuals, there is a "basic fear of persecuting objects." 56 Contemporary psychoanalytic theorists note that in the original Kleinian account, paranoid anxiety is linked with a "death instinct" that has been theoretically and empirically troublesome ever since it was formulated by Freud. 5 7 But others simply read paranoid anxiety, and Klein, through the lens of the passions of love and hate with which both individuals and groups are amply endowed. 5 8 In this reading, the paranoid-schizoid position is the state in which hatred is projected onto other groups, returning as paranoid anxiety that must be combated with aggression. As Richard Wollheim points out, aggression is never simple; rather, it is the "structure of aggression" to "desire to inflict pain or destruction upon a figure perceived to be aggressive." Aggressive actors are always imagining their victim-aggressors, and these imaginings include attributions of the wish to retaliate as well as fears of the magical workings of retaliation. 5 9 When political scientists today look at conflict at home or abroad they are often dealing with intense, aggressive conflicts between identity groups. In an environment of such conflicts, psychoanalytic political theorists often assume a critical distance, but many also attempt to mitigate conflict, between nations and between identity groups, through unofficial "track two" diplomacy. 60 This macro perspective on group conflict is the most likely one for social scientists to adopt, especially given the ways in which groups act out obvious forms of socially disruptive injustice and injury. Of course, intergroup conflict is not only found in actual social and political acts; it is also

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

107

evident in the ways in which any particular group discourse narrates the group's own goals, fears, demands, social locations, and character as well as those of its allies and enemies. One complicating factor in any group's narration of hopes, fears, and what the group takes to be its defining features is that discourse can sometimes disguise the actual orientations of the group toward members and others just as it can reveal these orientations. In the United States, the New Right propagates a discourse about Christian love toward those who are socially defined by same-sex desire and sexuality. But this discourse of love for the sexualized other mystifies the disgust and anxieties of contamination that drive political action and that may even influence the construction of theological commitments. 61 Such doubleness in discourse may be a sign that a group is shielding itself from expressions that would call into question a conception of itself as well-intentioned rather than malign, or as centrist rather than extreme. 62 But it can also be a sign of emotion a group cannot bear to entertain, either because it subjects the group to a sense of collective despair and helplessness or because it identifies the group's impulses as hateful and aggressive. One example of such an emotion is mourning, a "sophisticated emotion" that is difficult for large diffuse social groups to achieve. 63 In order to defend against the melancholy of irreparable loss, individuals may deny loss and "revolt" against mourning. 64 In much the same way, groups can come to share a defense against irreparable loss by directing rage against collective others, mobilizing against those perceived either as aggressors or as in some way responsible for the original injury. The post-World War I doctrine that Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by internal enemies, namely the Jews, is one version of this defense. The post-September I I, zoo I claim that Americans' toleration of pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, and lesbians is responsible for calling down the wrath of God on Christian America is another. 65 Here, rage and aggression substitute for, and constitute defenses against, collective mourning. One caution, however: it may be difficult to interpret the substitution of rage for mourning in group discourse. Two important clues to this substitution would be that the mourning of great historical loss is missing from group discourse and that articulations of rage cannot be linked to legacies of specific forms of domination and exploitation. 66 Knowing that groups may substitute defense for a more mature process, students of political discourse must always dig deeply into discourse, acquainting themselves with the contradictions that consistently emerge when groups either communicate conflicting feelings and designs or engage in "niche marketing" to different constituencies or audiences. 67

108

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

As a social and political discourse, black feminist thought has much to say about relations between black women and members of other groups, especially black men and white women. 68 In fact, so attentive are black feminist theorists to intergroup relations that popular white conceptions of black women as angry at least in part reflect the idea that a primary function of these leaders is articulating discontent with other groups. The conception shared by many white women of black women in general, and black feminists in particular, as angry, frightening, or aggressive certainly suggests the paranoid-schizoid group positioning that psychoanalytic political theorists so often investigate. The problem with this conclusion is that black feminist discourse does not bear it out. Another way of saying this is that while black feminists express anger and name both perpetrators and those who benefit from historical forms of domination, they do not frame either aggression, persecution, or the threat of retaliation in terms that would signal a shared paranoid-schizoid worldview. The difference between, for example, Cash's Northern Irish Unionism and black feminist thought could not be more stark. As Collins points out, black women's intellectual traditions cannot be understood "without sustained attention to the status of Black women as a group in power relations." 69 What is meaningful, however, is not only the attentiveness of black feminists to intergroup relations, nor even the kinds of affects that can be discerned in black feminist thought by readers of different groups. Rather, what is meaningful is the way black feminists deploy both affect and analysis to investigate the history of relations between black women and members of other groups-particularly members of groups with whom black women may be understood to have a political affinity that grows from shared identity. Black feminists acknowledge that they negotiate different kinds of alliances-personal, social, and political-with many groups and that these alliances are fraught with pleasure, frustration, and danger. Alliances with black men are regarded as virtually natural in two senses: in the sense of a shared, if not identical, history as victims of racism and in the sense of shared family and intimate relations. From Lorde's essay on rearing her son to hooks's reflections on what black women seek in intimate relationships with men, black feminist scholars both assume and critically reflect upon relations with black men. 70 Black women develop and maintain social and political solidarities with black men in resisting the consequences of racism. At the same time, these theorists expose and analyze the ways in which sexist assumptions harm black girls and women, directly and indirectly-through derogation, constrained opportunities, emotional and physical violence, and the enforcement of patriarchal political practices and institutions.

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

109

WOMEN AND MEN IN BLACK COMMUNITY

Historical accounts of African-American women emphasize the ways in which enslavement and, later, institutionalized practices of segregation, race-baiting, lynching, dispossession, and denial of citizenship encouraged forms of solidarity and mutual interest between black women and men at the same time that they undermined intimate and familial relations. The myth of the black rapist that emerged in the American South in the aftermath of the Civil War legitimated racist violence against black men through the propagation of new representations of them as inherently prone to violate white women. But the myth and other incipient images of black people also brought women and men together as social and political actors who confronted a common threat. Angela Davis explains: However irrational the myth may be, it was not a spontaneous aberration. On the contrary, the myth of the Black rapist was a distinctly political invention .... The political function of mob murders was uncamouflaged. Lynching was undisguised counterinsurgency, a guarantee that Black people would not be able to achieve their goals of citizenship and economic equality. 71 Yet black women were not only implicated in lynching through their personal and political relations with black men. As a category of racist violence carried out by white communities, lynching was not specific to black men; black women were also victims of lynching, although this aspect of U.S. history is suppressed and largely forgotten among whites and even among many Mrican Americans. As a result of the loss of this history, memories of lynching assaults on black women are less likely to provide a foundation for solidarity between black women and men than are assaults perpetrated against black men. Indeed, during the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, the trope of lynching was deployed against a black woman even though, as Elsa Barkley Brown and many others note, "no Black man was ever lynched for attacking a Black woman. " 72 The confrontation between Thomas and Anita Hill, orchestrated as it was by the all-white and male Senate Judiciary Committee in October I 99 I, constituted a kind of watershed moment in public discussion of sexism and the differential strategies and effects of racism in relations between black women and men. At the same time that many white feminists minimized or ignored the significance of race in the political spectacle that surrounded Hill's accusations, many African-American women-particularly those who could not identify with Hill's education and professional success-repudiated her. 73 As many black feminist scholars argued at the

110

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

time of the hearings and in their aftermath, black women's reluctance to recognize the continuities between Hill's claims and their own ordinary experiences of sexism and sexual harassment helped to legitimate the triumph of a conservative political actor and agenda. This is no accident. As Lubiano suggests, the creation of "black patriarchs," whether in the form of Thomas, Louis Farrakhan, Colin Powell, or the Million-Man March, relies upon the "valorization of black male self-reassertion predicated on the silencing of women [and] of black gay males." 74 Black women have always found black male allies in social and political struggles, including prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass and WE. B. Du Bois. 75 Today, black feminists carry on a continuing conversation with black male scholars like Cornel West and Manning Marable, 76 who write at times in an explicitly "pro feminist" vein. 77 On the other hand are disagreements with scholars whose ideas, especially on the "embodiedness of race," 78 black feminists perceive to have deleterious effects on black women's strivings for equal citizenship and social status. Perhaps the most famous of these intellectual debates is one that took place in the midI 98os in the pages of the journal New Literary History between literary critics Joyce A. Joyce, Houston A. Baker Jr., and Henry Louis Gates Jr. 79 Margaret Homans argues that what is at issue in Joyce's rejection-and Baker's and Gates's embrace-of racial identity as metaphor is the use of gender as a "ground" against which masculine "figuration" is played out in literary texts. The ultimate effect of unlinking race from the body may be the disappearance of race from evocations of masculinity and, thereby, the de facto identification of black men with the social power position occupied by white men. Whether acknowledged or not, gender and power are at stake in debates over depictions of "the [racialized] body." 80 In her turn, Deborah McDowell suggests that the significance of the New Literary History debate is broader still. It is that black feminists, painted as "conservative" in comparison to male theorists, represent the "practice" /"politics" side of a theory/practice binary. Yet such a "conservative" identity politics underwrites black women's specificity as a social group and, with it, black feminists' ability authoritatively to articulate knowledge about black women's social positions. 81 Black feminists urgently insist on recognizing black women's intersectional positioning as social and political actors. Thus, they analyze particular forms of racism in the public life of government bureaucracies, workplaces, and political organizations as well as in ordinary social relations. In addition, they confront sexism in contexts as diverse as public institutions and as intimate as home and family life. Moving between these contexts, bell hooks argues that there is an ur-

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

111

gent need in black community, as there is in the larger majority white U.S. culture, to "reconceptualize" or even "reconstruct" masculinity. Hooks begins her critique of "phallocentrism" in "Reconstructing Black Masculinity" by citing men of her own acquaintance who refused to enact the dominant patriarchal narrative. 82 Although these men were often punished or dismissed by other black men, she notes that they gave the lie to dominant characterizations of male nature in white society and carved out spaces for alternative masculinities. But she moves from these refusals to criticize the cultural politics of male supremacy and the misogyny of black men who deny sexism and insist upon gender hierarchy in black community. Black male critics of black feminists, she notes, often "forget that it is possible for black women to love black men and yet unequivocally challenge and oppose sexism, male domination, and phallocentrism." 83 Reparative intergroup relations need not ignore unequal genealogies of harm-doing between groups. Neither does reparation require groups to rank oppressions and subordinate their own demands for justice and recognition to the priority of other groups with which they might have undeniable ties of history, culture, or familial intimacy. Black feminists acknowledge and probe the history of unequal relations in which they are implicated, recognizing that hatred and oppression are forms of relation that affect all who are touched by them and that unequal relations of power breed legacies of harm both between and within groups. Whether examined in political or psychological terms, relations with the self, within the group, and across groups are mutually constituted and mutually influencing.

A NOTE ON LEVELS OF ANALYSIS

One of the pervasive themes in the literature of application of psychoanalysis to social thought concerns the mutual effects of the interaction of individual psyche and group, or the interrelatedness of levels of psychological analysis. This theme is central to Erich Fromm's study of the rise and consolidation of National Socialism as well as to much of the work of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. 84 In fact, much psychoanalytic political theory assumes and elucidates the interrelatedness-or, to use a more sociological term, the mutual constructedness-of self and group. The proposition of interrelatedness suggests that the focus on intergroup relations always contains within it the possibility of reflecting on the intrapsychic (as well as on relations within the group). The distinctions between levels of analysis are functional and conceptual; in order to direct

112

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

their attention to one level at any particular moment theorists and clinicians must screen out the information about other levels of analysis that is suggested by the observations and interpretations at hand. A vivid example of interrelatedness of levels of analysis as well as of choice of intellectual engagement with a particular level is Demetrios Julius's work on aggression in international relations. Julius writes not as a clinician of either individuals or groups but as a scholar concerned with large-scale political dynamics-"the psychodynamics of international relations." Julius argues that three concepts are central to the study and understanding of aggression in domestic and international politics: historical enmity, dehumanization, and victimization. However, he presents these well-known features of intergroup conflict as "first and foremost intrapsychic processes. "85 This focus on the intrapsychic meaning of what are often rendered more as sociological than as psychological concepts rewards us with a brief glimpse into the psychic processes that belong to individual group members even as they are organized and conducted by groups. Julius's explication of "dehumanization," for example, suggests that this quotidian dimension of group behavior represents the end result of multiple individual defenses of"isolation, depersonalization, repression, compartmentalization, projection, and rationalization" rather than a single conscious or unconscious intention. 86 Similar is John Mack's psychopolitical conceptualization of what he terms the "enemy system." Writing of "individual-group linkages," Mack argues that "the central problem in efforts to understand enmity between ethno-national groups is the location of the source of the hatred or antagonism .... How do powerful negative human impulses and emotions, including the desire to avoid personal responsibility for unwelcome feelings and impulses, play themselves out at a political level?" 87 Like Volkan, Mack incorporates the work of child analysts to show how "systems" or "ideologies of enmity" develop in groups using childhood states of thought and feeling as raw material. Dualistic fantasies of good and bad, the need to disown threatening thoughts and feelings, and the differentiation of friends from strangers-all these normal processes of mind are fodder for enmity-producing processes in groups. S. H. Foulkes sums up the likely outcome of this relation of individual to group processes: "I do not mean that we live in a mad world, which, though true enough, is not a very meaningful statement. I mean rather that we share with our culture some totally mad assumptions that pass as normal. "88 In addition to interrelatedness oflevels of psychological analysis, a psychoanalytic perspective on groups reveals another kind of interrelatedness. Group behavior and discourse concerning intra- and intergroup

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

113

relations and processes are also mutually interactive and constitutive. To put this proposition another way, discourse about intragroup relations can reveal a group's likely posture and orientation toward other groups through material that is not directly formulated as information about another group. This is why a group's demands for authenticity of identity matter. It is true that the requirement of an authentic group identity punishes group members for deviations of behavior, thought, and affect. This kind of group behavior ignores the pluralism of individual subjectivity and harms individuals in palpable ways. Yet it is also true that a group's demands for authenticity, transmitted through discourse about appropriate forms of behavior, thought, and affect, reflect and reinforce forms of intergroup relations that are less reparative and more conducive to various forms of harm. The converse is also true: groups that transmit forms of intragroup relations that respect and value individuality are likely more able to be reparative in intergroup relations. Theorists document the continuing struggles of identity groups in locations around the world, giving particular attention to the ways group leaders and group members use one another to avoid confronting painful aspects of individual psychic needs, group life, and oppression in the larger social world. Conflicts and confrontations within subjects, and within and between identity groups, are accompanied by negotiation of the terms of conflict in group discourses. In studying groups and the public discourses of groups, psychoanalytic political theorists identify persistent forms of negotiation of group dynamics and psychosocial issues that are reflected in the dialogue of leaders with members and members with one another. Psychoanalytic political theorists identify and theorize common psychological processes and motifs that emerge in group discourse. On the basis of theoretical and empirical investigations, these theorists set out what they understand as predictable terms of identity group behavior and discourse, both within and between groups. Much of the work on identity groups in psychoanalytic political theory is deeply, albeit reasonably, pessimistic about the possibilities for individuals working through the dilemmas posed by human needs and desires for group membership and individuality in reparative ways. As group members, all individuals confront issues of group identity, power, authority, leadership, boundaries, and conflict. However, members of some groups must engage these issues in ways that are complicated by social and psychic legacies of disparagement, dispossession, insecurity, and resistance. Identity group discourses reflect both psychological processes that are common across groups and the ways in which disparate effects of oppression affect group processes. Psychoanalytic theories of groups and the political theories derived from them contribute much to our understanding

114

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

of the persistent themes and issues to be negotiated in identity group discourses. As these psychoanalytic theories of groups engage the discourses of reparative identity groups we will understand better the variety of discursive processes that either promote or discourage nondestructive forms of group action.

5

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

GETTING TOGETHER IN GROUPS

Since the beginning of the second wave of feminism, feminists have celebrated women's groups as a means for establishing solidarity and common consciousness, as a bulwark against the oppressiveness of the larger society, and as a base from which to launch political activity. 1 In spite of the many collective acts that make up the social and political legacy of feminism since the 196os, the course of sisterhood does not run smooth, or at least as smooth as many feminists would like. 2 Nevertheless, the internecine battles and challenges of feminist thought and politics have not turned feminists away from a hopefulness about groups and the forms of solidarity that make progressive political victories possible. Solidarity among black women has been complicated by many challenges, including the diasporic issues occasioned by cultural differences and national borders and the need to act with black men against racism. It is possible to find black feminists and womanists lauding the bonds that connect black women as well as skeptically analyzing the terrain of black women's relations and communities. Indeed, black feminists whose theoretical preoccupations focus on the differences among women of color are most incisive at problematizing solidarity. Hortense Spillers argues that "avoiding the interior" -avoiding analysis of internal relations in black community-discourages interpretations of gendered community practices and ideology. But Spillers's criticism is of a larger black community whose institutional and discursive leaders do not always theorize intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. 3 As a group discourse, black feminist thought looks inward as well as outward at relations between black women and members of other identity groups. Because identification, cohesiveness, and shared purposes can be constructive or destructive, both to group members and to nonmembers, relational group psychoanalytic theory suggests many costs and benefits of

116

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

group bonding. Indeed, theorists of groups maintain a critical perspective on bonding and solidarity, while black feminists discursively work through quite distinct reparative and regressive dimensions of solidarity.

BONDING IN GROUP PSYCHOANALYSIS

What is often spoken of as "solidarity" in social and political groups and movements psychoanalysts render as "bonding," "attachment," "libidinal ties," or "identification." This distinction is more than just a matter of terminology. Solidarity is cognitive, intentional, and driven by the weighing of shared interests. "Solidarity is knowledge of, respect for, and unity with persons whose identities are in certain essential ways common with one's own." 4 On the other hand, bonding, attachment, and identification are largely, if not entirely, unconscious maneuvers with emotional dimensions that may confound and embarrass the ostensibly rational political actor. Of course, these differences of perspective reflect divergent disciplinary agendas. But the failure of much political science and feminist thought to theorize the unconscious emotional functions and implications of political solidarity leaves a conceptual deficit in the study of social and political "groupishness." Clinicians and theorists in the relational tradition focus on the human need for interpersonal connection and group identification. Indeed, that human beings are "object seeking," and not simply drive-invested, is the basic essentialist assumption of relational theory. 5 John Bowlby elucidates the human need for "attachment" by turning to ethology, noting similarities between the biological needs of human beings and animals and the irresistible pursuit of attachment for thriving. 6 For group analysts, the tendency toward attachment can only be measured or perceived indirectly through the efforts and responsiveness of individual members to various group discourses and configurations. Yet the search for emotional connection-the need for love and identification as well as "the need to hang on, to be held and carried" -is a major theme of clinical and theoretical writings on groups.l Psychoanalysis employs two perspectives to think through the issue of group solidarity. The first is Freud's method for conceptualizing group bonding, which is largely in terms of vertical ties between group members and a leader. In Freud's psychology, the most significant psychic process that takes place in, and creates, the group is group members' identification with the group leader. Members abdicate to the leader both central aspects of their own psychic functioning and the status of "individual." 8 The second perspective, associated with a broad variety of analysts, is to

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

117

include leaders in a more horizontal perspective that also takes into account the psychic acts of group members with one another. It is in this second perspective that we find Bion's work with groups and the work of group analysts influenced by him. Their clinical investigations yield three major themes related to solidarity: unconscious forms of group organization shared by group members; the significance of shared projection systems; and the holding, or containing, function of groups. Bion introduces a distinction between two different kinds of groups in terms of unconscious forms of group organization: the work group and the basic assumption group (for which Bion uses the abbreviation "ba"). By this distinction, Bion does not mean that some groups are work groups and others are organized in terms of basic assumptions; rather, he means that groups are labile in their organization-liable to function in different ways at different times. In fact, Bion and others argue that many groups simultaneously include features of work and basic assumption functioning, with the work group checking and modifYing unconscious basic assumptions group members share. Bion's typology of group functions refers to the small face-to-face groups he facilitated and studied. Contemporary theorists of groups extrapolate the typology to large diffuse social and political groups, and they continue to find it valuable to political thinking. The work group, which Bion also calls the "sophisticated group," is the group that "meets for a specific task." 9 A small group that is functioning as a work group usually displays a number of components, including an agenda, administrative procedures for conducting the group, clearly designated leadership, and a capacity for and interest in cooperation on the part of group members. These facets of work group functioning are so common as to appear trivial. However, it is in the relationship of the work group to the ba group that Bion's account of group functions becomes interesting, for Bion characterizes work group functioning as a "struggle" against the basic assumptions that always threaten to engulf group members. Basic assumptions help group members defend against the anxiety, frustration, disillusionment, and despair that are an inevitable dimension not just of concrete membership in a group but of human groupishness itself. The work group does not simply triumph over basic assumptions; work group functioning is in tension with the basic assumptions and may be overwhelmed by them under some circumstances. "Organization and structure are weapons of the work group," but the work group is not, as it appears, simply a vehicle for getting things done. 10 It is, rather, a form of defense against the always-feared incursion of"psychotic anxieties." For Bion, basic assumptions are "archaic" "affective states" around which small groups unconsciously organize themselves 11 -a set of "psy-

118

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

chotic premise[s] on which ... group[s] function." 12 The basic assumptions named by Bion are: pairing (in which a couple emerges whose intense interactions with one another are experienced by group members as sexual and suggest a "messianic hope" for salvation of the group), fightflight (in which group members induct a leader for the purpose of securing the cohesion and survival of the group), and dependence (in which "one person is always felt to be in a position to supply the needs of the group"). 13 One key feature of the ba group is that it normalizes regressive states of mind that in individuals would be considered a sign of illness but that in groups are more easily taken as sane social or political diagnosis. Examples include assumptions that enemy groups are undifferentiated, evil, inhuman, omnipotent, or "weak and ineffectual." 14 In his classic study of small group policy-making, Irving Janis expands the usual catalogue of enemy stereotypes to include irrational attributions of both strength and weakness, noting that during the cold war, American policy makers often attributed extraordinary power to the Soviet Union while assuming China's impotence. 15 In order for such stereotypes to be widely believed, disconfirming evidence must often be discounted or ignored. It is a short step from Bion's ba groups to versions of large group psychology that emphasize relations between group members-the creation of psychic ties or entanglements that, while they may not mirror Bion's categories precisely, nonetheless emphasize unconscious defenses as vehicles for communication between group members. One of the most common ways for analysts of groups to 'talk about human relations from couples to large social groups is as "projection systems." In popular culture, projection is understood as the human tendency to attribute hated or feared qualities of the self to others in an attempt to disown them; as such, it has a negative connotation. On the other hand, psychoanalytic theorists acknowledge how ubiquitous and central projection is to the development of human relations of all sorts. Psychoanalysts in the relational tradition stress the importance of projection for learning about the , other-for exploring similarities and differences between self and other through arduous processes of claiming and disclaiming projections. 16 In small-scale interactions, this process of claiming and disclaiming projections, or reality-testing, can be carried out in a way that, over time, permits individual learning about the other, even though such learning is never complete and may be interrupted by other psychological dilemmas and conflicts. However, it is precisely projection and subsequent reality-testing, so crucial to work group functioning, that are typically disrupted and derailed within groups. Group psychoanalysts agree that "malignant" projection, the disruption of reality testing and unchecked, even "psychotic

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

119

anxiety" are common features of group psychology. 17 Indeed, they hold that the primary fear of group members is the fear of loss of individual identity in and to the group. This fear is driven not only by the size and anonymity of the group, but also by the outcome of processes of projection necessary to try to know and be known by other group members. Solitary subjects always sense that anonymous groups threaten to overwhelm the helpless individual. It is perhaps something of this fear that is at the heart of the attempt of many black, Latino, and gay "multicultural conservatives" to differentiate themselves as individuals from what they perceive as a suffocating identity group of origin. The effort to achieve "freedom from group consciousness" is paradoxical, however, as Angela Dillard notes; those who flee the stifling orthodoxies of identity groups often end up pledging themselves to ideological groups that value them precisely for their minority-group affiliations. 18 In attempts to learn about and therefore become less frightened of others, group members project onto other members aspects of their own preferences, capacities, impulses, ideals, and conflicts. The result is the common "chain reaction" -often referred to as "emotional contagion"that Hinshelwood calls the "unconscious linking-up process." 19 However, in groups, even large clinical groups, it is virtually impossible for group members to test and respond adequately to the many projections that abound in the group. Under these circumstances, reality-testing cannot occur. "It is not merely that in the large group the singleton is subjected to a continuous bombardment of responses-'there is so much noise I cannot hear myself think' -and that responses come from all directions, near and far, but also that the quality of the responses offered is poor." 20 Group members feel depleted by the imagined loss of positive qualities and capacities-including the capacity for judgment. They are left feeling disabled by the receipt through projective identification of qualities that are experienced as foreign, confusing, and sometimes malignant. Projective overload results in depersonalization, intellectual torpor, the impoverishment of individual ego processes, the delegation of judgment, and a retreat into fusion with the group. "The group," this single invented object, however fictive, no matter how much endowed with projected properties, has an important defensive value for the individual-it allows escape from the danger of being frustrated and overwhelmed by the variety of half-tested interacting others. The simplification allows him to relate to one simplified object-"the group"; to study "it," to formulate general laws and expectations about "it" and to make remarks to "it" and about "it." Now he need not think about the many others, nor risk becoming so invaded, occupied and confused by them, that contact with the self might be lost. 21

120

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

When it proves impossible to test the reality of individuals through normal relational processes of projection, "the group" as a psychological entity is born. However, projection systems do not operate only within the boundaries of the group. Projections across group boundaries are both inevitable and inextricably related to the projections that operate inside the group. Because of their preoccupation with relations between groups, psychoanalytic political theorists are more concerned with what happens when projective processes give birth to the group and the group responds in the social field it shares with other groups. Nonetheless, theorists of large clinical groups outline the basic elements of the imagined points of contact and friction between groups. Simply put, the group provides a site in which positive and negative projections can be sorted out and assigned to different objects and in which the group equates itself with the good and the other with the bad. Such an equation fixes and stabilizes the perception of intragroup and intergroup realities that allay anxieties, particularly paranoid-schizoid anxieties that are either personal in their etiology or arise from membership in the group itself. "The group helps the individual defend against both [personal and group] kinds of anxiety. By transforming private anxieties into shared ones, the group helps the individual project his anxiety outward, where it may be confronted as an objective threat to the goodness of the group." 22 It is obvious from this brief account of the projection of negative attributions outside the group that boundaries are crucial to group bonding and the maintenance of group goodness. This boundary or "skin" is marked by great vulnerability, demarcating as it does the imagined membrane between two quite different worlds. "Should the boundary between the group and its external environment break, the [individual group member] sees himself as precipitated into outer space or at least into a cold, harsh, and unfriendly outside world-in part the creation of his own projections and so created in his own hostile image." 23 Most accounts of projective processes in social and political groups stress the regressive dynamics at the heart of group coherence. Yet it is also possible to conceptualize group dynamics in a way that suggests affirmative (as well as destructive) possibilities. One such perspective identifies processes of "holding" or "containing" in the group or between group leaders and members. Such processes bind group members together and are vital, for example, to the "development of citizenship."24 Depending upon how they are performed, holding and containing may lend themselves to reparative group discourse and action. The concepts of holding and containing are drawn respectively from Winnicott's and Bion's psychoanalytic theories. For Winnicott, the hold-

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

121

ing function is associated with the performance of a good-enough mother or, sometimes more generally, with a "facilitating environment." 25 Holding occurs when one individual (a mother, therapist, or anyone in a relationship) takes in or "introjects" the feelings of another, and is able to tolerate and respond to them in a way that is neither anxious nor retaliatory. Winnicott understands maternal holding as negotiating between "unintegration" and integration on behalf of the cognitively undeveloped child. 26 Likewise, Bion conceptualizes the maternal containing functions and emphasizes the communicative function of the expulsion of feelings as well as the need to have feelings taken in, modified, and "detoxified." 27 Is it legitimate to apply psychic functions usually conceptualized as occurring between infant and care-giver to what transpires in adult groups? For Winnicott, holding begins in the physical relationship between infant and care-giver, and certainly there are few, if any, analogues for this relation in the large social group. However, both Winnicott's and Bion's notions also describe an emotional and symbolic relation in which the principal outcome is the mutual production of meaning. Group analysts make use of this second sense of holding and containing as useful metaphors for the functions that groups may provide as leaders and group members listen to, tolerate, acknowledge, and interpret the feelings of other members in a group context that does not threaten aggression or retaliation.28 In addition, in groups of strangers-or in groups in which members will never come together in any complete and concrete collectivity-members may be "held" by a "familiar slogan or saying."29 Certainly, the holding and containing functions of groups are not assured; even in small face-to-face groups the functions can be superseded by other psychodynamics. But holding and containing remain possibilities clinicians pursue in their work with groups. With such psychodynamic group issues as unconscious organization, projection systems, and holding, students of group dynamics confront an important problem: the literature of group psychoanalysis can sometimes leave the impression that the real issue that divides reparative from regressive groups is the triumph of rationality over emotion. Certainly, writing of rational deliberative processes in work groups and of groups that base their worldview upon psychotic premises may suggest that groups, and the individuals that constitute them, can and must split reason from passion and "master" passion. Both empirical and normative hazards follow from this reading of group psychoanalysis. The first, empirical hazard is that psychoanalysts endorse the possibility that reason and passion can be divided from one another, either conceptually or biologically, in different structures of the mind or brain. This proposition has wide support, both in Western philosophy and in ordinary

122

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

American conceptions of mastery, maturity, rationality, and masculinity. Nonetheless, a wide range of neurological and psychological research contradicts the idea that reason and passion can be radically compartmentalized.30 The second, normative hazard, which can operate even for those who do not fully hold the empirical view of the possibility of separating reason and passion, is the view that as members of groups, individuals should seek to engage only in rational processes while checking their emotions at the door. In fact, analysts of groups are careful to delineate the ways in which the most important split to be negotiated in groups is not between reason (symbolized by the work group) and passion (symbolized by the ba group) but between depressive learning and acting out. Judith White confirms this important distinction in her claim that one criterion of development in black female groups is the group's ability to work through defensive good/bad splitting. 31 Psychoanalytic political theorists detail the social and political consequences that ensue when groups act out paranoidschizoid processes as well as the value for group members and those outside group boundaries when groups learn from and work through their aggressive possibilities.

BONDING IN PSYCHOANALYTIC POLITICAL THEORY

Like the political conservatives and reactionaries against whom they define themselves, feminists and other progressives frequently do not question the attribution of rightness and wrongness, goodness and badness, to politically oriented groups. 32 Indeed, groups with political agendas distinguish themselves from one another by staking ethical and political claims to goodness or, to put it another way, by denying that such claims are in any way psychological, as well as political, acts. "All progressive social movements work to place the 'bad' back onto the oppressors in reclaiming the goodness and creative power of the group. Rallying slogans such as 'sisterhood is powerful' and 'black is beautiful' facilitate this necessary reclamation of an idealized goodness from under the shadow of the oppressor." 33 As Janice Haaken suggests, politically progressive groups, like their reactionary foes, may display a tendency to constitute themselves in opposition to the existence or ideology of other groups and may reap benefits and costs internal to the group from doing so. A cinematic representation of such parallel processes of identity- and ideology-constitution is Alexander Payne's Citizen Ruth, a film that uses caricature and black comedy to satirize both sides of the U.S. abortion debate. Rejecting both a sympathetic heroine and moral favoritism toward either side, Payne

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

123

evades a clear political argument while suggesting a strategic and psychodynamic critique of political groups. 34 One important benefit of solidarity is the ability to manage potential conflict within the group-to create group solidarity by mobilizing against a group of enemies and directing aggression outward from the group. One cost of this psychological strategy, however, is that groups may "defensively distort their perceptions" of real enemies, leading groups to battle increasingly fantastical foes in ways that bear a diminishing relation to the realities of group positioning. 35 This insight is key in psychoanalytic political theory. Groups engage in intricate balancing acts to protect themselves not only from material threats but from threats associated with depressive knowledge and self-understanding. Recognizing that one's own group does not monopolize goodness and that disparately positioned groups share elements of good and malign motives, wishes, and sometimes acts may persuade group leaders and members to avoid defensive distortions that impair reality-testing. Implicit within many psychoanalytic-political accounts of groups, and explicit in some, is Bion's distinction between the work group and the basic assumption group. This distinction often emerges as a way of pointing to the capacities of groups to engage in deliberation and collective reality-testing or to the ability of groups to move from less to more developed psychodynamic processes. Psychoanalytic political theorists transmute Bion's face-to-face work group into the social group whose members are capable of appraisal of their common situation, mutual deliberation about strategies and outcomes, joint effort on behalf of shared goals, toleration of dissent and individuality, and appropriate expression of emotions such as grief and mourning. Such a group, they contend, is a rare phenomenon. The work group, when it appears, is usually fleeting; in its place remains what Bion calls the ba group but which psychoanalytic political theorists identify in an array of configurations as a group defensively organized at the cost of group and individual development. 36 Psychoanalytic political theorists also theorize the dynamics and consequences of projection systems in ways that are quite similar to the work of clinicians in small and large therapy groups. For clinicians, a key "therapeutic task" is "for group members to be helped to take back and own split-off parts of the self." 37 Political theorists are not in the business of helping individuals own split-off and projected parts of themselves. But they are in the business of identifying the kinds of group processes that either help or hinder the production of specific social and political outcomes. Psychoanalytic political theorists note that actual conflict between identity groups often does not consist of isolated collective acts of rhetorical and physical aggression but rather cycles of victimization that repeat

124

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

over long periods of time. 38 Such cycles depend upon collective projection of disclaimed aspects of selfhood, maintained over time through the discursive production of representations of self and other: patriotic and seditious, pious and heretical, self-disciplined and licentious. After September I I, President George W. Bush relies upon the historical existence of discourses of American virtue and exceptionalism when he consistently describes Americans and their political enterprises as the "good" arrayed against evil foes. Such common locutions facilitate "transgenerational" cycles of projection that undermine political stability. 39 Following and expanding upon the insights of group analysts, psychoanalytic political theorists sometimes employ concepts of holding and containing to describe the internal life-world of groups. Most accounts of holding/containing focus on the role ofleaders in groups, and more particularly the role of leaders in validating or generating for members symbols, ideologies, ideals, and enemies, many of which emerge historically or psychologically from the group or political milieu itself. Symbols, ideologies, and the like function in large social groups as interpretations do in small clinical groups, providing and sanctioning meaning for group members. Like clinical interpretation, "interpretation" in the large social group "mitigates ... anxiety, rendering it less overwhelming, less prone to disintegrate the self, and hence more manageable." 40 What this social group approach suggests is that holding/ containing can perform a similar psychic function for group members while being either positive or negative in its social and political consequences, depending upon the ideological content of the material expressed in the group. Compare two statements: the first is an excerpt from Pat Buchanan's widely quoted statement at the I992 Republican Convention. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself-for this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Clinton are on the one side; and George Bush is on our side (applause).41

The second is a passage from the writing of bell hooks. I think it important that we remember that forgiveness does not mean that we cease to assertively identify wrongs, hold others to account, and demand justice. It is because we can practice "forgiveness" and be transformed that we have the compassion and insight to see that the same is true for those who might appear to be "enemies." This is the true realization of justicethat we want what is peaceful and life-sustaining for all and not just for ourselves.42

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

125

For all their differences, these passages constitute an attempt to persuade group members of some orientation toward perceived enemies, albeit in ways that are as diametrically opposed as rhetoric on a common theme can be. Court Reporting Services, Inc. helpfully notes the enthusiasm at the Republican National Convention to Buchanan's divisive words, shared perhaps even by members of the crowd who did not already identify themselves with the virtually exclusively white and disproportionately male constituency denoted by the label "Buchanan brigades." Hooks's words were not delivered in a partisan public setting, and the salience of her rhetoric for group members is not easy to assess. Nonetheless, to the extent that interpretations of these sorts represent reality and render "anxiety less overwhelming," they may fulfill a containing function, regardless of the reparativeness of the message. Clearly, psychoanalytic political theory takes a different perspective on holding than does clinical group analysis. This is so because of a feature that divides clinical from social groups: the action orientation of social and political groups versus the therapeutic orientation of clinical groups. The action orientation of social groups matters because immediate rewards may accompany the translation of aggression and unmediated negative images of the other into policy and political practice. "Moderate and moderating" leaders hold groups by being receptive to raw psychic content and ideas within a group, moderating their content, and delivering them back to the group in a more realistic and integrated form. "More immature, 'bad' " leaders use the projections that emanate from the group to "whip up polarization, intolerance, extremism, and aggressive behavior."43 Yet, however uncommon moderate and moderating holding is in political practice, the capacities of leaders to tolerate archaic feelings and thoughts and risk reality-testing and interpretation remain essential to the creation of reparative groups. One way to think about holding/containing is that all other tasks of reparative leadership-telling the group's story, managing boundaries, interpreting defenses, identifying threats and group strengths, and mourning-partake of it and would be impossible without it.

SOLIDARITY IN BLACK FEMINISM: THE BASICS

The willingness of black feminists to engage disagreeable passions (of rage, hate, and grief) as well as more agreeable ones (of empathy, love, and compassion) positions students of black feminism to grapple with "the interior" of identity group relations. There is an irony to this insight: many students of the social and political thought of black women generally understand the discourse to react to and comment upon relations between

126

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

black women and others. Its significance for those outside the group is usually understood to be pedagogical in the sense of encouraging transformation of institutions and social practices whose consequences are borne more heavily by black women than by members of other groups. It is unusual to focus on the emotional modalities of discourse for what they communicate and may teach about intragroup relations. Commentators often note that black feminist thought stands out in its passionate approach to theorizing. 44 Feminists have always been passionate in their response to injustice. However, even the majority of theorists of the early second wave women's movement concentrated-perhaps unavoidably-on the state, on relations between women and men, or on other apparatuses of women's oppression and not on the ambivalences and emotional complexities of women's relations with one another within the precincts of political movements. In most formulations, disagreeable passions arise as effects of oppression and there is a correspondence between the precipitating circumstance and the emotional effect. 45 The pithy women's movement phrase "women aren't mad, they're angry" reflects this hydraulic and vindicating perspective on women's rage. Black women have often remarked on the contingent and contextual nature of black identity, if not black female identity. Perhaps the most famous is Zora Neale Hurston's famous comment that being "thrown against a sharp white background" creates for her the black identity that she is presumed to possess as a fact of nature. Moved from Eatonville to Jacksonville, Florida as a child, Hurston notes that she "suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County anymore, I was now a little colored girl." 46 Angela Harris explains that "Hurston ... insists on a conception of identity as a construction, not an essence-something made of fragments of experience, not discovered in one's body or unveiled after male domination is eliminated." 47 In one of many such recent conceptualizations, Carole Boyce Davies argues that black women writers share a group identity that is relational and provisional-one that owes much to the necessity to assert a counter-identity against a naturalized white dominance. The danger is that such a group identity will itself become naturalized and function as a set of essences. 48 Patricia Hill Collins's more political analysis of the problem targets the strategy of "breaking silence" within identity groups. She points out that political rebellion predicated on arguments about experience that are meant to interrupt dominant ideologies about group members can easily be reinscribed as yet another form of essentialized "difference."49 Some feminists concede that merely exposing the workings of racializing practices and ideas risks rehearsing the tropes and stereotypes of race. 50 However, in her analysis of the role of race in grounding the pu-

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

127

tatively raceless canonical works of American literature, Toni Morrison suggests that there is greater risk in ignoring the workings of racializing practices and colluding in the pervasive disclaiming of racial meaning in texts, as well as in social practices and institutions. 5 1 Black feminists confront this risk by soliciting genealogies of whiteness to displace the more common inquiry into black identity. 5 2 Some black feminists rely heavily on historical legacies to define and accomplish present solidarity-take for instance Patricia Hill Collins's emphasis on a "legacy of struggle" as one of many "core themes of a Black women's standpoint." 53 Particularly in her recent work, Collins is careful not to suggest that all black women will experience any particular "theme" or that they will experience it in the same way. "Mrican-American women from quite diverse backgrounds report similar treatment in stores. Not every individual black woman consumer need experience being followed in a store as a potential shoplifter, ignored while others are waited on first, or seated near restaurant kitchens and rest rooms, for African-American women as a collectivity to recognize that differential group treatment is operating." 54 In spite of individual variations, Collins connects the present social and political positionality of black women to themes in black women's history in ways that are intended to evoke, and in some cases even to construct, recognition and identification. Bell hooks takes up this theme of solidarity via experience through a critique of postmodern decenterings of identity. She begins her response to postmodern theory by noting the virtual absence of black women in its constructions of "difference and otherness." 55 And yet her critique of postmodernism is in the service of a more subtle objective than merely contrasting materialist and linguistic forms of critical theory. 56 Hooks acknowledges the skepticism about postmodern forms of analysis among many African Americans in order to explore the ways in which both postmodern theorists and black feminists may share a common goal of identifying and critiquing notions of universal group essence. For "essence," linked as it is to racism and other forms of subordination, hooks substitutes "experience." But her experience is discursively constructed in a way that invites "the construction of empathy-ties that would promote recognition of common commitments and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition." 57 Like Collins, hooks refuses to embrace thoroughgoing skepticism about group social "experience," not only because discernible patterns of social and political events and effects characterize black history as a whole, but because a narrative that yields completely to difference produces little possibility of solidarity and "collective bonding." 58 Both theorists understand that such bonding is an effect of discourse and not a preexisting

128

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

relation in which individuals stand to one another. Both are sensitive to the ways in which assertions of commonality easily deteriorate into black women's confinement in a "narrow box of authenticity." 59 At the same time that many black feminists appeal to a discursively constructed group experience as a basis for solidarity, others emphasize the multiplicity within the unstable category of "black/African American women." Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham theorizes the ambivalent effects of a "metalanguage of race" on black thought and politics. Race can profitably be understood as a metalanguage in the sense that it functions ideologically to "impregnate" all manner of signs and symbols with racialized meaning. In this way, the myriad beliefs and material practices that constitute racism rely upon a metalanguage of race. But so, too, do group discourses that appeal to longings for recuperated and unified group representation; race is a "double-voiced discourse." Higginbotham concedes that the discursive narrative of unity is a strategy that authorizes political speech and action historically denied to black women. More important for her is how such a narrative is also the consequence of a deeply felt need to "counter images of physical and psychical rupture." 60 Unfortunately, the longing to "capture transcendent threads of racial 'oneness,' " expressed historically in a succession of ideologies and representations such as negritude and Afrocentrism, carries its own costs for black women and in black community. This is because any single narrative of group identity must repress differences based on "different economic and regional backgrounds ... skin tones and sexual orientations ... symbols and norms, public behavior, coping strategies, and ... micropolitical acts of resistance to structures of domination." 61 Black feminist and womanist theories emphasize common and co-constructed histories, narratives, and experiences even as they interrogate the metalanguage of black, or black female, homogeneity and essential identity. Group psychological work by, with, and about black women also disrupts a narrative of black female identity and untroubled solidarity, even when clinicians concede that black women often seek all-black female groups because of the desire to be understood. 62 Mixed, mostly white groups led by black women remain unusual enough to arouse clinical curiosity and specific resistances, 63 while all-black female groups led by black women inspire inquiries about psychodynamic effectiveness. 64 In spite of their race and gender homogeneity, however, clinicians report that these latter groups function unconsciously in ways that are both similar to and different from other kinds of clinical groups. Race and gender matter because individuals bring internalized relationships and representations of self and other into groups and affect transference relationships, the kinds

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

129

of projections that are generated within the group, and the ways in which group members respond to the clinician's leadership. 65 Remember: A homogeneous racial group of African American women in a psychoanalytically oriented therapy group will experience homogeneity in terms of race. However, diversity exists for them in terms of skin color, hair texture, class background, sexual orientation, diagnosis, and racial identity-among other things. These aspects of diversity within a racial group may stimulate as much emotional intensity as feelings of racial difference in an interracial group.66

Judith White confesses her own initial fantasy that the all-black female therapeutic group would provide her a more positive group experience because of its homogeneity, a fantasy that is disappointed by the group's "outpouring of aggression." 67 She concludes that even in the context of black women's therapy groups, where assumptions oflikeness may prevail both consciously and unconsciously, the goal is for participants to tell their "unique stories." Confronting and interrogating unique stories gives group participants and leaders the emotional and intellectual tools to resist unconscious assumptions and seductive narratives of both essential likeness and its corollary-goodness.

SOLIDARITY IN BLACK FEMINISM: GETTING SPECIFIC

Getting specific about solidarity requires exploring its promise as well as its pitfalls. Some explorations of black women's solidarity are historical. Scholars and writers relate the ways in which black women have committed themselves to work together to confront racism; educate themselves and other members of black community; end practices such as segregation, discrimination, and lynching; and agitate for economic and political rights. These narratives recount the activities of black women leaders such as Ida B. Wells and Fannie Lou Hamer, but they also focus on the activities of relatively unknown black women who came together to form such organizations as the suffrage group Colored Women's Progressive Association and the more recent activist group Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD). However, there is also in such accounts a broader story of black women's solidarity that is not contingent on leadership of, or membership in, particular organizations. This broader story addresses themes of identification, belonging, safety, boundaries, and trust, not necessarily in organizations that are formed for particular purposes, but in black women's ideational lives.

130

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

How should solidarity be built? Many black feminists reject the construction of solidarity through such shared psychological operations as splitting and projection. They accomplish this rejection in three ways: by complicating assumptions of likeness and natural affiliation, by complicating assumptions about the characteristics that distinguish group members from others, and by declining to name consistent enemies for the group. The first of these operations is evident in Pratibha Parmar's reflections on the "politics of articulation" in black feminist thought. Parmar begins by noting that the multiplicity of black women's subjectivities and their locations in world diasporas belie simplistic notions of identity politics driven by static conceptions of gender, race, and sexual identities. She briefly traces the political organizing among black British women in the 197os and 198os to emphasize the ways in which black women's sense of collective identity was in part a function of "collective self-confidence" forged in political activity. 68 Ironically, the racist politics of Britain during this period provided a crucible for political struggle and for the consolidation of social identity. 69 To elucidate the question of collective identity, Parmar turns to a conversation she carried on with June Jordan in 1987. In the transcript of this conversation, Parmar notes that assumptions about shared identity often are contradicted and transformed in the process of political activity. Jordan points out that although collective responses to such social ills as racism and sexism generally begin with recognizing, and organizing around, the identities of victims, such a politics can easily become self-perpetuating and self-defeating. Instead of focusing on the presumed likenesses of those who are affected by social problems, she stresses politics over identity. Such a choice means refusing to valorize "unity" as a goal. Indeed, Jordan notes both that the individuality of group members exceeds the shared dimensions of group identity-"! think it's important to understand that each one of us is more than what cannot be changed about us" -and that those with similar identities will pursue different kinds of political causes and solutions. 70 Her position is similar to that taken by Hannah Arendt during the I 96os debate over the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem. 71 When one critic challenged her love for the Jewish people as a "daughter" of that people, Arendt responded, "in this sense I do not 'love' the Jews, nor do I 'believe' in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument." 72 For Jordan, as for Arendt, refusing the seduction of uncritical unity does not mean refusing political action in concert with those with whom one shares dimensions of identity. It is merely that, as Jordan puts it, "There are enough of us to

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

131

go around, and you don't have to do what I do and vice versa. I do this and you do that, there is plenty of room." 73 As leaders, black feminists practice holding and containing not only by assessing the unity and stability of group character, but also by resisting the uncompromising characterizations and attributions of other groups that help to stabilize group identity. One example is Mary Helen Washington's account of her own pedagogical strategies for teaching an undergraduate course in "Images of Women." Echoing many themes in the psychodynamic literature on small groups, Washington writes that as aresult of her and her co-instructor's inadvertent division of the course material into "white" and "black" authors and arguments, her particular small group quickly became polarized by immutable racial identifications. In spite of her belated efforts, "tension grew" and the predominant group character became a "refusal to be known" apart from narrow-and, for Washington, surprising-racially coded signifiers. Evaluating the experience retrospectively, Washington suggests that she became for the class a representative of race in ways that evaded both her own unique attributes and the potential for cross-racial identifications based on other likenesses among students. Her account of the nature and ends of leadership (both pedagogical and discursive) rejects her class's rigid divisions and two particular assumptions embedded in them: first, that classmates of different racial groups occupy positions and interests that are irreparably distinct from one another; and second, that black women writers occupy a raced and sexed territory that defines both their subjectivity and their intellectual projects. She disputes both assumptions, claiming about the second that "these are writers whose words deal with evil and moral responsibility, who are attempting to solve the urgent dilemmas of the twentieth century, whose feminism is a deeply felt part of that struggle, who use their inward lives to probe the central social issues of our time." 74 Washington concludes that black women writers possess a social and political voice that is universal in the sense of responding to universal human themes and problems. But more than this, she challenges her students' attributions, containing and interpreting them in a way that encourages greater understanding of their objects and of themselves as raced and gendered class members. Finally, black feminist theorists resist the ever-present possibility of identifying consistent enemies upon which group members can focus aggression and through whom members can build and consolidate solidarity. Some resist this possibility explicitly: Collins warns that "one powerful catalyst fostering group solidarity is the presence of a common enemy," 75 and Lorde contends that solidarity against enemies cannot

132

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

substitute for group members "cherishing each other." 76 The problem in political life is that these phenomena are often simultaneous and virtually impossible to differentiate. Attacks by outsiders present leaders with easy opportunities to encourage bonding and care for group members grounded in fury against the enemy. Indeed, group members may regret the fading of empathic concern for others in the group, just as many Americans express regret for a diminution of the warm solidarities of the early days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In performing social, political, and economic analysis, black feminist theorists write of many groups that are differentiated by intersecting dimensions of identity. Of these, some groups-especially black men and women of various racial and ethnic groups-share dimensions of identity with black feminists while others-such as white men-do not. All white men have not occupied an oppressive position vis-a-vis all black women. Still, it is impossible to ignore that a significant percentage of those who have been the authors, enforcers, and principal beneficiaries of oppressive laws, practices, and social systems in the United States and in colonies throughout the world have been both white and male. Add to this relation the fact that genealogical ties with white men coexist with the absence of shared racial or gender identity and this group might be expected to represent a perfect "other/enemy" for black feminism. However, this expectation is not fulfilled as it is in the discourses of many identity groups analyzed by psychoanalytic political theorists. It is a surprising feature of black feminist theory that white men occupy as little discursive space as they do. When white men do appear in black feminist thought they are addressed in two ways: as a group and as individual group members. In addressing white men as a group, it is not uncommon for black feminists to write of the interests, power, and authority of "privileged" or "elite" white men such as those responsible for placing the politically conservative Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court. 77 In such writings, generalizations about the relation of white men to political power, control of social institutions, wealth and assets, and ideological legitimacy constitute an attempt to elucidate structural and historical patterns of economic and political interests and their consequences for less privileged groups. 78 Generalizations are of attributes and effects of power and not of essentialized qualities. Even white men who might be considered ideal targets for black feminists because their explicitly white supremacist beliefs and acts lie on the extreme Right of American domestic politics receive virtually no attention. When black feminists do write of white men as individuals they either respond to the thought and practices of conservatives who are closer to

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

133

them on an imagined Left-Right political continuum than those on the far Right, or they construct a narrative that invokes an individual white man for the purpose of a historical or theoretical argument. In the first instance, black feminists debate the views of such figures as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 79 Dan Quayle, 80 and Charles Murray. 81 Black feminists invoke the words and acts of such public figures in an attempt to demonstrate unspoken assumptions, inaccurate or incomplete information, and unexamined consequences. In the second, white men sometimes figure in historical roles. In the narrative of her ordeal as one of the "Little Rock nine," Melba Patillo Beals relates how it was that the only student who assisted her, often warning her of impending danger orchestrated by adults in the community, was a white male. 82 White men also sometimes figure in theoretical narratives that highlight dimensions of social experience; Patricia Williams tells the story of a white homeless man's treatment by a white woman clerk in a coffee shop to reflect on the ways in which monolithic liberation ideologies such as feminism sometimes do not account for class differences that shape positions of power and social authority. 83 When Patricia Hill Collins writes of the historical meanings of "sexual freedom," she notes that for black women it has denoted freedom from sexual depredation by white men rather than "the freedom to choose white men as lovers and friends." 84 There are identifiable patterns to white racism and male supremacy that can be documented in the history of many modern cultures and societies, but documenting these patterns need not devolve into a process of enemy creation. The juxtaposed words of bell hooks and Pat Buchanan earlier in this chapter address the multiple meanings of justice and the need to refuse the seduction of achieving solidarity through the medium of enemy representation and discourse. Hooks argues that political goals of"forgiveness," "assertivelyidentify[ing] wrongs," and "demand[ing] justice" are not mutually exclusive. Forgiveness transforms those who practice it and allows them to have "compassion and insight" for their putative "enemies" even as they unapologetically seek justice for themselves. The goals of a common existence are "what is peaceful and life-sustaining for all and not just for ourselves." 85 Hooks does not privilege black women or, for that matter, all oppressed peoples in her definition of "justice." Instead, she emphasizes reparation, recognition, and reconciliation between groups. The emphasis on inclusion and careful analysis of the specificities of victimizing and victimization is consistent with a discourse that eschews a division of groups into inherently virtuous and inherently evil. Indeed, just as Collins enjoins black women against establishing solidarity based on hatred of an enemy, hooks discourages black women from using victimization and narratives

134

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

of injury as a principal means of bonding. 86 Among other pernicious effects, both strategies may make group members more receptive to group idealization to the detriment of reality-testing.

NEGOTIATING IDEALIZATION 1: THE "STRONG BLACK WOMAN"

Perhaps because of the comparative and competitive existence of social groups, the theme of idealization emerges more frequently in the political than in the group-analytic literature. Idealization is commonly understood as the identification of another with goodness or wholeness. Often, though not always, idealization is accompanied by self-denigration or ingratiating inauthenticity in the face of the good and complete object. In relational psychoanalytic theory, idealization is a mechanism of defense "aimed at achieving relations with a good object." 87 This simple formulation does not elaborate much of the complexity of idealization. For one thing, idealization functions to keep "loved people safe and undamaged. The unconscious belief seems to run: I am able to keep some loved people intact, then I have really not damaged any of my loved people and I can keep them all for ever in my mind. "88 The preservation of an untainted goodness residing in one object protects the self from the "utter desolation" associated with the loss of love and goodness itself. Another dimension of this achievement of good relations is the consolidation of bad relations when idealization in one direction is accompanied by hatred in the other. However, contempt and devaluation are not an inevitable corollary of idealization. Idealization may be a sign that the frustration of needs is so pervasive as to bring into existence a defense that denies the frustration by employing a "strong feeling of omnipotence." 89 In this form, idealization is directed toward internal objects-parts of the self-in an attempt to annihilate a frustrating reality that threatens to overwhelm the self. Black feminist theorists respond to this aspect of intragroup idealization when they carry on a dialogue with black women about the costs and consequences of a conception of black women as "strong." Deconstructing and rebutting stereotypes about black women constitute important projects of black feminist literature. Commonly invoked and critiqued, pernicious representations of black women in the United States are defeminized and pathologized "variations of universal female archetypes": the matriarch ("bossy" and "emasculating"), mammy ("servile, loyal [and] obedient" nurturer of white families), and Jezebel ("libidinous" and "sexually aggressive"). 90 Wahneema Lubiano adds to these the stereo-

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

135

type of the independent and aggressive "black lady" ("the welfare queen's more articulate sister"). 91 Exemplified by Anita Hill in her appearance at Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the "black lady" is implicated, along with the matriarch/welfare queen, in the devastation of black families and communities. All these stereotypes serve historical and contemporary functions as "cover stories that shield the text of power."92 However, an arguably more insidious stereotype withstands the scrutiny of even critical public discourse. The idealizing image of the strong black woman passes for empirical description, is less easily revealed as engaging self-interested white fantasy, and plays a complicated role in black women's self-representations as a frequently ignored "nonsymptomatic" "way of being in the world." 93 The image of the strong black woman as matriarch does serve an important role for white fantasy-to solidify the conviction of endurance that excuses, even while denying, any meaningful harm committed against black women through white racism and sexism. Hooks notes that the image helps white women believe that black women avoid oppression because of their strength. Such idealizing strips its object of "essential human qualities." 94 But the specific image of the strong black woman requires additional attention because of the way engagements with it in black feminist thought exceed discussions of stereotyping by members of outside groups. Black feminist theorists do not draw attention to the different contexts in their writings in which, for example, the image of the strong black woman and the image of the matriarch appear. Nonetheless, it is clear that while the image of the matriarch/welfare queen functions primarily as an othering fantasy projectively directed at black women by white women and men, the function of the related image of the strong black woman is primarily internal to black women as a group and to black community more generally. One psychologist concludes that "perhaps the single most consistent term African American women use to describe themselves is strong. " 95 Indeed, black women in corporate America interviewed for a study of"life and career struggles of successful black and white women" 96 claim the unique strength of black women as "something passed down from female ancestors ... who were of blood-kin or those whose strength and achievement were legendary."97 The strong black woman is a positive essentializing trope that assumes and rewards the endurance of black women against insuperable odds and imaginatively constitutes black women through resistance and insensibility to hardship. Most discussions of the strong black woman image acknowledge the ways in which black women's responses to actual historical threats and requirements of survival on behalf of themselves, their families, and their

136

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

communities contribute to an image of black women's invulnerability. Michele Wallace's germinal response to the image in Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman responds to the simultaneous idealization and denigration of black women in her own experience of black community in the United States of the 197os.98 From the intricate web of mythology that surrounds the black woman, a fundamental image emerges. It is of a woman of inordinate strength, with an ability for tolerating an unusual amount of misery and heavy, distasteful work. This woman does not have the same fears, weaknesses, and insecurities as other women, but believes herself to be and is, in fact, stronger emotionally than most men .... In other words, she is a superwoman.... Even for me, it continues to be difficult to let the myth go. Naturally black women want very much to believe it; in a way, it is all we have. 99

Wallace is mindful of the controversy engendered by her book and of the challenges to her conclusions leveled by Mrican American critics. 100 Nonetheless, her personal account of the interconnections between the image of the strong black woman and the politics of white racism and the civil rights and Black Power movements travels easily into the works of other contemporary black feminists. Patricia Hill Collins, whose more sanguine interpretation of sexual politics suggests that black men uphold the image out of"well-intentioned efforts to defend and protect black women" and to counter racist interpretations of black motherhood, concurs with Wallace's interpretation of the strong black woman. 101 Unlike Wallace, Collins frames her treatment of the strong black woman image as inextricably related to black motherhood and the ideals of "devotion, self-sacrifice, and unconditional love" that define it. Yet, in Collins's reading, these ideals have both negative and positive aspects, and both must be considered in responding to the image of the strong black woman. On the negative side, Collins links the social contexts in which the ideal of the "superstrong Black mother" are embedded to the loneliness, poverty, and political invisibility of large numbers of black mothers. In these contexts, the image of the strong black woman is a defense, a denial, and possibly a talisman against poverty, racism, sexism, or isolation. It may also function as an assertive rejoinder to the meaningful absence of cultural images in American history of black women nurturing their own biological children. 102 Yet, while she does not recuperate the image of strength criticized by Wallace and others, Collins does affirm dimensions of black motherhood as "symbol[s] of power." Collins focuses on biological mothers and "community othermothers" who become activists on behalf of the needs of communities of children and adults, and she also affirms the intimate experience

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

137

of mothering as one that can ground strengths of creativity, self-definition, and "individual empowerment" for individual mothers. 103 Finally, Collins reconciles these positive and negative dimensions of the image of strength in the figure of the battered woman, writing of the ways in which women who provide support for children and communities and experience themselves as powerful may simultaneously depend on their abilities to please and accommodate the needs of others in ways that make them vulnerable to exploitation and violence. 104 It is interesting that in constructing her many-sided account of the strong black woman, Collins anchors her positive rendering of strong black motherhood to autobiographical accounts of particular black women in particular settings. In so doing, she implicitly repudiates the kinds of abstract and normative discourse about black women's strength that she and other black feminists reject. In contrast to social and political accounts, many recent treatments of the idealizing image of the strong black woman explicitly speak to black women about its disabling meanings and effects. The image is a recurring motif in recent work on black women's mental and physical health. For bell hooks, the strength attributed to black women is often no more than the "ability to mask, hide, and contain feelings." 105 Noting that black women are "asked to be strong," Byllye Avery, the founder of the National Black Women's Health Project, responds: "if one more person says to me that black women are strong I'm going to scream in their face." 106 Avery relates the injunction to black women's lack of care for themselves in the face of overwhelming demands and a "conspiracy of silence" about black women's needs and the threats to their survival. Her message is clear: whenever she investigates a medical problem that afflicts black women, whether reproductive health, child mortality, or obesity, she finds a social problem that cannot be reduced to the problem's physical causes, symptoms, and effects. In the mental health literature, authors focus on both the psychological effects of the pernicious stereotype of black women's strength and black women's own investments in it. In Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, clinicians examine the ideal of strength in a number of contexts: racist and sexist "microinsults" and "microaggressions" of everyday life, 107 sexual assault, motherhood and family life, heterosexist social practices, work and professional life, and psychotherapy. In all these contexts, black women therapists confirm the historical antecedents and adaptive dimensions of the ideal, but they quickly move beyond historical and sociological observations to probe the psychological meanings of the image for black women. The most focused treatment of the theme is Regina Romero's study of the strong black woman as an "icon" who represents courage and tenac-

138

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

ity as well as vulnerabilityand "the illusion of control." 108 Romero finds that African-American girls as well as adult women embrace the image of the strong black woman. In fact, rather than addressing the strong black woman as a theoretical abstraction, Romero constructs an ideal type-the SBW-and places her own therapeutic experiences with African-American women in the service of explicating this type. Yet her objective in this technique is neither to leave her clients' own claims to iconic status unexamined nor to deny their individuality. Rather, her recitation of the characteristics of the SBW-"the SBW actually experiences crying as 'falling apart'"; "the SBW often inherits other peoples' problems"-mimics the de-individualizing form of the internalization of the fantasy of superhuman strength while it illuminates the kinds of harms individuals suffer as a result of such internalizations. 109 Romero demonstrates through brief clinical vignettes both the hazards of maintaining the image of the strong black woman and the difficulties of challenging this artifact of "cultural folklore." 110 Ultimately, the goal of therapist and client is to work through an idealizing image to support and realize individuality within group identity: "each African American woman has a unique story and an individual worldview." 111

NEGOTIATING IDEALIZATION II: BLACK AND WHITE FEMINISTS

As a defense, idealization can operate in different ways in different developmental positions; in any case, it operates as a defense against painful ambivalence toward an "object." For example, rather than respond with open hostility or defensiveness to the anger of another-and especially an other perceived to be powerful or to be able to withhold some good-the recipient of anger may collude to deflect its blow. 112 This suggests that groups may reveal a basically paranoid-schizoid position with idealization rather than aggression. "Excessive idealization denotes that persecution is the main driving force" behind action. 113 Applying such an understanding to accounts of relations between black and white feminists helps to make sense of these intergroup relations. The history of feminism is a history of women from many racial and ethnic groups, but the history of black and white women in feminism reveals many fault lines and inequalities. Challenges by black feminists to white feminists to respond to the history of racism in white feminism and to theorize whiteness provoke many kinds of responses on the part of white feminists. Some of these are positive reexaminations of knowledge production, 114 but one kind of response is idealization that evades self-

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

139

and scholarly examination. As a result, many dialogues between women of color and white women end by glossing and romanticizing black community and the work of black women/feminists or black feminists themselves.115 Exemplary are bell hooks's dissections of the "black" posturing of Camille Paglia and Madonna. Hooks finds in Paglia a political conservatism that belies both Paglia's apparent fascination with MricanAmerican culture and symbolism and her identification of herself as a feminist.l 16 Similarly, hooks argues that Madonna's faux feminism and transgressiveness actually operate to reinscribe white supremacy in the guise of celebrating African-American community. 117 In "The Occult of True Black Womanhood," Ann duCille addresses the "traffic jam" that increasingly characterizes the academic study of Mrican-American women and critiques white women's often careerboosting "discovery" of the study of Mrican-American women. duCille invokes white feminist idealization in her analysis of]ane Gallop's preoccupation with Deborah McDowell. For duCille, Gallop's "fear of black feminists" and desire to appease them is meaningful in ways that Gallop, with her arsenal of interpretive skills, does not fathom. "McDowell, whom I believe Gallop means in some way to honor, is actually demeaned by a narrative that casts her ... somewhere between monster and mammy: demanding, demeaning, impossible to please, but at the same time possessing irresistible custodial power and erotic allure as the larger than life (racialized) other." 118 duCille places her discussion of Gallop and white feminist idealization of black feminists under the caption "I once was blind, but now I see-you"; the phrase underscores the ways idealization replaces the inability to engage a threatening cipher with a refusal to engage one's own ambivalence and culpability in relation. As Audre Lorde argues in her incisive critique of white women's relation to anger, the strategy of substituting romantic disengagement for painful engagement diminishes capacities for understanding and self-criticism. Anger may be, as Lorde argues, "loaded with information," 119 but that information is indiscernible to those who are threatened by the deployment of anger and criticism. Self-abnegation and inauthenticity protect the self at the considerable cost of disabling attunement to the ideas and feelings expressed by others. Idealization crystallizes binary oppositions-in this case, black feminist versus white feminist-that facilitate the unconscious splitting of"good" and "bad" that is illuminated by relational psychoanalysis. Thus, many white feminists resolve the challenge posed by black feminist scholars in a way that discourages integration and the reinterpretation of established knowledge by renegotiating the singular category of a putatively unraced "feminism" into the new categories of "good" black feminism and "bad" white feminism.

140

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

More than many other leaders of identity groups, black feminists and womanists explicitly offer their writings in the spirit of dialogue with other group members. Invoking family members, friends, students, academic colleagues, and fellow political activists as readers and respondents, black feminists and womanists invite group members into processes of questioning, correction, debate, concurrence, and cooperation. These theorists also respond to one another critically in ways that are consistent with processes of scholarly investigation and debate. This kind of process is valued abstractly in an academic context, and it has great significance as intragroup dialogue. Intragroup disagreement, refinement of ideas, attribution and response: all these bolster the ability of group members to test and learn about others and to tolerate differences of identity, perspective, and purpose that emerge from within the group.

TOWARD A CHASTENED SOLIDARITY

While conflict almost always bears a negative connotation, solidarity is a positively connoted term in the lexicon of group lik 120 Black feminist theorists write in a variety of ways about the possibilities of solidarity for improving black women's prospects and well-being. For them, solidarity is essential to the social and political work that has been and must be done by and for black women. At the same time, both black feminists and psychoanalytic political theorists acknowledge the anxieties and problems that are aroused, and sometimes merely exposed, by group membership and the forms of solidarity practiced within groups. Many group leaders who foment group feelings and set agendas for political action "hold" the groups over which they exercise authority by reciting the grounds of supposedly natural forms of solidarity in the group, by reiterating the characteristics that distinguish group members from others, and by directing the group's attention to enemies. These interpretations of social and political realities may take the form of obvious diatribes and invitations to violence against members of other groups or they may be more subtle reconstructions of history that appeal to virtue, respectability, martyrdom, or godliness. Groups that have the strongest bonds, the least dissent, and the most internal conformity are, as psychoanalytic political theorists fear, likely to be dangerous both to group members and to those outside the group's boundaries. In cross-cultural studies of political conflict, Marc Howard Ross finds that one result of limits on internal group conflict is an increased likelihood of "aggression against an outside group." 121 Far from being a necessary condition of solidarity, discipline and a requirement of

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

141

"authentic" identity enhance the probability of group punitiveness in both directions-both within and outside the group that wields it. In spite of frequent assumptions to the contrary, solidarity is not an unambiguously positive feature of the life of groups. Neither is conflict an unambiguously negative feature of group life. Rather, both solidarity and conflict have positive and negative effects, in groups and for the individuals who identify with them as members. Giving careful attention to these effects carries us into the psychodynamics of coalition politics and the culturally and historically situated politics of coalition psychodynamics.

6

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

WHAT MAKES GROUPS REPARATIVE?

Black feminist theorists consistently acknowledge differences nested within likenesses of identity. In fact, they are among the foremost critics of the tendency of identity groups to mask or deny intragroup differences. Viable, flexible, and supportive communities recognize differences andrespect individuality. But an affirmative stance toward differences is also linked to the possibility of positive and respectful intergroup relations. Kimberle Crenshaw provides an example of this linkage when she gestures toward the role of intragroup dynamics in creating less destructive relations between groups: "ignoring difference within groups contributes to tension among groups." 1 The reverse also obtains: "we must recognize that the organized identity groups in which we and others find ourselves are in fact not monolithic but made up of members with different and perhaps competing identities as well. Rather than viewing this as a threat to group solidarity, we should view it as an opportunity for bridge building and coalition politics." 2 One reading of Crenshaw's claim is that some differences-say, of class or sexuality-help to connect black feminists with members of groups organized around dimensions of identity that are minimized by a primary identification with the intersecting interests of race and gender. However, a second reading is possible: perhaps Crenshaw alludes to the fact that group discourse links and explicates intra- and intergroup dynamics. In this perspective on groups, the possibility of reparative relations with other groups depends upon openness and tolerance toward differences within the group, while the maintenance of regressive relations with other groups depends on the suppression of differences within the group. Crenshaw does not spell out this second reading, but her concern with perpetuating an identity group that invites and displays individual differences is consistent with such a reading.

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

143

Black feminist thought challenges bleak conclusions about identity groups and suggests that conflict and power can be discursively negotiated in ways that facilitate reparative and productive politics, within the group and between groups. Aspects of black feminist thought that address leadership, conflict, and solidarity demonstrate that multiple dimensions of this discourse are reparative. A final dimension to consider is black feminist engagement with coalitions and the ways in which coalition discourse is central to the negotiation of identity and group life. As with leadership, conflict, and solidarity, so too with coalitions there are connections between black feminist thought and a psychoanalytic conception of reparative groups. When psychoanalytic political theory is oriented toward coalitions it provides resources for comprehending and strengthening the reparative potential of groups and group discourses.

COALITIONS

African-American and other black women have written a prodigious literature on the politics of group relations. A prominent theme in this literature is coalition politics, including the dangers of coalitions, strategies for coalition-building, and theorizing about the benefits and consequences of coalitions. Although black feminists create an abundance of affirmative theory regarding coalitions, many urge caution about coalition work. The Combahee River Collective suggests, for example, that marginalized groups will be more effective if they concentrate on responding to the forms of oppression that directly affect them. 3 Similarly, Sheila Radford-Hill claims that black women should not be expected to work in coalition with white feminists and others. Her fear is that when black women "build premature coalitions" with white women, the goal of ending racism in the white women's movement displaces black feminists' own agendas. Radford-Hill echoes Combahee: "organizing separately on behalf of our own interests" is a way of "allow[ing] groups to build even stronger coalitions when issues cut across the interests of several groups. "4 However, a close examination of arguments such as these reveals that coalition politics remain central to the aspirations of black feminists. True, black feminists decry the ways black women's energy is dissipated in antiracist pedagogy with white women. Yet this concern recurs precisely because white feminists are so commonly imagined and theorized as coalition partners. 5 Whatever partners they imagine, however, black feminists recognize the historical importance of coalitions to black women. "An important aspect of the African-American woman's skills in alliance building has been shaped by her social status: She is both African-American and fe-

144

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

male. Gender and race affiliations have made it necessary for AfricanAmerican women to develop political relationships across cultural lines as a matter of survival."6 Nora Hall notes the ineluctably cross-cutting nature of identities to explain black women's disposition toward coalition. She also implies that black women's coalition-building in majority-white political contexts is a function of the relative political powerlessness of minority identities. This reading of coalition work makes black women's interest in constructing coalitions a function of small numbers and relative lack of political and economic power. Even if coalitions were merely instrumental tools to achieve political goals, this reality would not, by itself, explain the discourse surrounding coalition in black feminist thought. In fact, black feminists augment the instrumental purpose of coalition politics with a normative and transformative discourse about coalition. They argue that coalitions implicate and modify the identities and self-understandings of those who engage with others in political tasks. Audre Lorde ties this second normative goal of coalitions with the instrumental goal: "As Black women we have the right and responsibility to define ourselves and to seek our allies in common cause: with Black men against racism, and with each other and white women against sexism. But most of all, as Black women we have the right and responsibility to recognize each other without fear and to love whom we choose. " 7 Likewise, bell hooks acknowledges the transformative effects of coalitions for group members as well as the pernicious effects on groups of the failure to engage in coalition work. In Killing Rage, hooks explores contemporary opportunities for and barriers to coalition between black women and men, black and white women, black people and those ofJewish descent, and blacks and other people of color. Hooks demands of all who would participate in political coalitions and the group-based dialogues that accompany coalition work that they take responsibility for interrogating their own assumptions about the other and for relinquishing their own sense of innocence in relations with others. Such emotional labor is instrumentally essential to fulfilling discrete agendas of social and political reform. But it is also a necessary condition for challenging pernicious aspects of identity itself, for confronting "psychic social apartheid." 8 In spite of the differences in the ways they conceptualize groups, black feminist theorists and psychoanalytic political theorists alike conceptualize coalition thinking and action as central to reparative relations within and between groups. Psychoanalytic political theorists emphasize the emotional and intellectual labor necessary to bind and overcome the more regressive dimensions of group life. Black feminist theorists emphasize not

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

145

only the material benefits to be derived from common political activism, but also the ways in which successful struggles to construct coalitions across and between groups enhance individuality and human relations. Coalition politics can be conceptualized at three levels of analysis. It is not surprising that the three coalitional frames correspond to the three levels of conflict: conflict within the self, conflict within the group, and conflict between groups. Coalition recognizes difference and reaches across conflict, although the conflict may take the quite diverse forms of interests, of perspectives, or of friction arising from distrust and suspicion. And all levels of coalition-building have implications for the reparativeness of group life and group discourse. In discussions of coalition politics, the third coalitional frame-coalitions across differences between groups-usually receives the most attention. The second and third frames have much in common, however: discourses and acts of negotiation within and between groups are unavoidably public and political. What the first level of conflict and coalitional frame contributes to our understanding of group reparativeness may be less obvious. Perhaps it is at this level that the psychoanalytic perspective on groups becomes most helpful in elucidating not only the processes of group membership "within" the subject but the ways in which these processes are linked to the more obvious political dimensions of identity groups. COALITIONS WITHIN THE SELF

The first coalitional frame-coalitions within the self-is usually regarded as the province of psychology rather than politics. Within psychodynamic analysis, a "working alliance" with the analyst or therapist brings to consciousness repressed material or, more generally, brings aspects of the self into conversation with one another. It is this notion of "coalition" as reconciliation of conflicting desires or of desires with internal or external prohibitions that Freud had in mind when he developed his structural theory of the mind as consisting of id, ego, and superego. In the relational tradition, psychoanalysts turn from an emphasis on internal conflicts that engage drives to conflicts arising from the need to reconcile conflicting emotions, impulses, and representations of the self and of others. Group theorists map the ways in which group members employ defenses such as splitting, projection, idealization, and projective identification to quell anxieties that are both personal and group-related. Even at the individual level, conflict within the self is a consequence of relations with others. The movement from a monadic "one-person" psychology to an interpersonal "two-person" psychology inaugurates an important distinction in the way theorists and clinicians conceptualize the mind. Al-

146

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

though Freud acknowledges psychic processes and defenses such as identification, internalization, and projection, it is relational theorists who find the self constructed dynamically from the residues of relations with others and the conflicts and desires they occasion. 9 Moving from the psychoanalysis of groups to psychoanalytic political theory places the psychological operations characteristic of groups in larger social contexts. At first glance, it might seem that psychoanalytic political theorists would minimize the intrapsychic dimensions of group life, focused as they are on the group as a whole and the effects of its processes. However, one group analyst's answer to the question "what is Mind?" belies this assumption of disinterest in the intrapsychic: "I do not think that the mind is basically inside the person as an individual. ... The mind that is usually called intrapsychic is a property of the group, and the processes that take place are due to the dynamic interactions in this communicational matrix." 10 Such a perspective points up the difficulties of disentangling the intrapsychic from the interpersonal as group members experience or fantasize them. It does not mean that there is no such thing as the intrapsychic, since the group itself may come into existence as a product of the pooling of anxieties from individual members under particular social and cultural conditions. Even when they do not write in explicitly psychological terms, women of color frequently address the first coalitional frame when they write of the self as multiplicitous. The literatures of multiplicity and the consequences of the intersectionality of different forms of oppression by women of color is now too vast to summarize. 11 Crenshaw uses intersectionality as a concept that addresses multiple social "structures of domination" defined by such dimensions of identity as race, sex, and sexuality. 12 At times, she assimilates the concept to the familiar "additive" notion of discrimination that is often criticized by contemporary feminists. 13 However, intersectionality also provides a framework for conceptualizing multiplicity of identity and its effects-both positive and negative-that is more subtle than the typical legal and political accounts that reduce identity to race, sex, sexuality, or some other situationally relevant category. 14 Multiplicity of identity may refer to such a network of affiliations and ascriptions connected to axes of power, but it refers as well to more ordinary notions of the self as riven with dimensions that may not correlate directly with social and political interests and identities. 15 Concepts of multiplicity and intersectionality share with psychoanalytic understandings of metaphysics and structures of the self a common rejection of philosophical assumptions of the unity, identity, and transparency of selves. Angela Harris explicitly expresses the contributions of black feminist thought and implicitly demonstrates commonalities between black

COAliTIONS AND REPARATIVE POliTICS

147

feminist thought and psychoanalytic political thought: "In my view, there are at least three major contributions that black women have to offer postessentialist feminist theory: the recognition of a self that is multiplicitous, not unitary; the recognition that differences are always relational rather than inherent; and the recognition that wholeness and commonality are acts of will and creativity, rather than passive discovery." 16 The view that wholeness is a consequence of "acts of will and creativity" contrasts sharply with major strands of modern feminism produced by white feminists that emphasize a primordial wholeness or innocence of female subjectivity that is shattered and rendered conflictual by patriarchal victimization. One such feminist strand is primarily associated with lesbian theorists who use metaphors of stratification to envision female subjectivity. Conceptualizing internality using metaphors of an archeological site or an "onion," these theorists envision patriarchal socialization, conditioning, expectations, and suffering being removed-"pared away," in one potent image-to reveal the authentic woman beneath. 17 It is not surprising that those who subscribe to such an understanding of subjectivity reject psychological discourses that problematize simplified notions of subjectivity. It is perhaps more surprising that a similar notion of female subjectivity appears in a feminist psychological literature that focuses on the effects of trauma, one that is criticized by some feminist scholars as simplistic and sentimental. 18 In contrast, both black feminists who do and those who do not bring psychology to social thought focus on the effects of trauma, while being less sanguine about the nature of black women's subjectivity. Much of the representation of subjectivity on the part of black feminist theorists is oriented toward recuperating a full human status for black women that has been called into question by a succession of ideologies. Such a project of recuperation requires exploring the full range of human motives, dispositions, and characteristics, as well as the kinds of political interests black women may share with similarly positioned individuals and groups. An accounting of black women's subjectivities and group identity certainly cannot eschew any consideration of the effects of social traumas, but neither can it reduce to such effects. In her study of black women's subjectivity, Amina Mama explicitly rejects a number of models of black subjectivity, including those associated with a unified and "healthy" account of subjectivity ("nigrescence") and those that define black subjectivity through reference to trauma. 19 Both kinds of accounts are psychological in their reliance on disciplinary tools and their attempt to assess cognitive and emotional effects. But they are also political in their motivations and effects. Accounts of black women that select from the repertoire of human subjectivity, whether positively or neg-

148

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

atively, deny full human status in the name of some social or political goal. Political goals of various sorts may indeed be laudable. Demonstrating damage can serve as a prelude to demands for rights or reparations; demonstrating superior mental health or emotional strength might serve as a rallying point for group solidarity. Yet the same accounts of group members that work as politics present individuals as one-dimensional. In these narratives, group members are neither fraught with contradictions that must be confronted nor possessed of characteristics that create the potential for empathy and identification with those outside the group. Conversely, the "dialogue between me and myself" that helps to locate differences within the self also locates differences between the self and others, enhancing possibilities for intra- and intergroup recognition and respect. 20 COALITIONS WITHIN THE GROUP

The second coalitional frame addresses relations across differences within groups themselves. This coalitional frame is usually associated with political action and identity, and sometimes theorists such as Crenshaw link it to coalitional relations between groups. Feminist theorists often agree on the political nature of relations within groups, recognizing both the ways in which groups conceptualize and execute political work and the ways in which they reproduce hierarchies of status and power. However, feminists do not always theorize the factional forms of self-identification, (mis)understanding, solidarity, conflict, and trust that constitute social groups as simultaneously forms of coalition. As many black feminists suggest, groups are not homogeneous entities that affiliate and disaffiliate with other similarly homogeneous entities. Rather, even identity groups represent collections of differently situated members whose distinctions of class, color, ability, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion require confrontation and negotiation with "difference." Indeed, distinctions between groups must often rest on fictions of perspective and naming and on our willingness to distinguish groups from one another in ways that are belied by the multiplicitous nature of identity and membership. No matter how they may present themselves or be perceived by outsiders, identity groups are always, irreducibly, coalitions. 21 Beneath the surface of discussions of projective phenomena and other defenses in groups is a psychoanalytic language of coalitions and their failures. Wilfred Bion's "work group" is a sophisticated form of cooperation, or intragroup coalition, within a group. The work group is an antidote to the spontaneous formation of the unconscious basic assumptions that impede problem-solving processes within groups. For Bion, work group functioning is identified by "the development of thought translated into

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

149

action" and a "belief in environmental change." 22 The procedures of common activity bind and hold members in the performance of collective action. In the work group, basic assumptions do not disappear and leave a residue of pure rationality; "the work group is always, though varyingly, infiltrated by imperatives of feeling, thought and action." 23 Bion's notion of the work group is an alternative to the common understanding of group solidarity as a fantasy of selfsame identity. It suggests that group leaders and members, thrown together by ethnic, racial, sexual, or some other group identity, must struggle together to interpret their interests and goals and to define how they will pursue their ends. One way to illustrate the nature of the group as coalition is to return to Bernice Johnson Reagon's essay on "Coalition Politics." 24 Reagon points beyond the safety of groups constructed around aspects of identity to the larger world in which coalitions with others must be made. She insists that any group can be conceptualized not only as a womb but also as a "barred room" -one that denies the claims of those outside the group but also denies dimensions of the identities of those who reside within. Chandra Mohanty concludes that by scrutinizing the "potential divisions within political subjects as well as collectives," Reagon problematizes the nature and purity of "the group." 25 Thus, Mohanty suggests that the first and second coalitional frames are not distinct phenomena in the lives of groups and group members; rather, they are related inextricably to one another. The link between coalitions within the self and coalitions within the group is evident in discussions among black feminist theorists about the sexuality of black women, especially same-sex sexual desire. Groups from all along the spectrum, from national to identity groups, frequently hold samesex sexuality to defy nature and to disrupt group solidarity. Black feminists insist on the importance of a conversation among black women about bias against homosexuals and the importance of incorporating openly lesbian/ queer women and lesbian/queer issues into black feminist community. Some of this literature rehearses the multiple sources of anxiety about and discrimination against lesbians among black women (and men), including assumptions that link same-sex desire to white racial identity or proscribe it as behavior that works against the racial interests of already marginalized people of color. 26 Other literature is more autobiographical yet also details the consequences of invisibility and disapprobation for lesbian and bisexual women, failures of black feminist thought or practice to foreground social and political issues related to sexuality, and the other systemic issues, such as racism and sexism, that affect the responses of black and black feminist communities to sexuality-based discrimination. 27 Black feminists who write on the ways in which sexual difference troubles and enriches black feminist community emphasize that the option of

150

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

acceptance or inclusion is not the sole issue to be negotiated. Instead, as this passage from a dialogue between two black lesbians indicates, there is a complex dialectic between negotiating inclusion in the group and negotiating an individual's own conflicting ideals, beliefs, and aspirations. 28 Jewelle: I think that for so many young Black women, the idea of finding their place in society has been defined by having a man or a baby. And, usually, these two things don't come together. So, if you begin to espouse a proud lesbian growth, you find yourself going against the grain. That makes embracing your lesbianism doubly frightening, because you then have to discard the mythology that's been developed around what it means to be a young Black woman. 29

In their dialogue, Jewelle Gomez and Barbara Smith agree that young black women understand how becoming "lowlife by sleeping with women" makes it impossible to be "exemplary black women." 30 Such is the belief that, as Beverly Greene puts it, "sexual attraction to men is embedded in the definition of what it means to be a normal woman." 31 Gomez and Smith also make clear that redemption from this internalized ideal and from a young adulthood lived "in terror" depends in large measure upon supportive communities of black women that, although passionately desired, may or may not materialize at any particular moment. Barbara Smith speaks movingly of coming out to such a collective and finding them willing to reconsider the absence of connections between economic deprivation and sexual stigma in their own analyses of poverty. 32 In contrast, during debates in the early 1990s at the University of Maryland over homosexuality and black nationalism, Rhonda Williams finds herself supported by few of her straight black women students and concludes that many are no doubt reluctant to surrender "heterosexual privilege, the only privilege many know. " 33 Even in communities where members are willing to explore anxieties about difference, openness to intragroup differences alone does not vacate the ambivalent feelings that often constitute the internal life-worlds of individual group members. Still, many black feminists suggest that coalitions across differences within groups are a necessary condition for the kind of dialogue that discursively supports creative and protean forms of individuality. COALITIONS BETWEEN GROUPS

A final coalitional frame addresses what is often and traditionally understood when political thinkers and activists speak of coalitions. In a widely shared definition, coalitions consist of the joint activity of autonomous

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

151

groups, either for a single purpose or to pursue long-term social, economic, or political goals. Coalition politics can encompass many different kinds of political purposes-progressive, conservative, or reactionary. Some feminists distinguish short- and long-term goals and commitments through the use of, respectively, the terminology of coalition and alliance, and call for feminists to pursue arrangements across identity and other differences that are more permanent than those often evoked by "coalition."34 I do not make this distinction between temporary and durable coalitions here, although its importance for the psychodynamics of groups and for their political positionings and strategies may vary with group circumstances. Because therapeutic groups are singular and oriented toward understanding intrapsychic and intragroup dynamics, clinicians neglect the study of intergroup dynamics that is of such interest to students of politics. As a result, psychoanalytic political theorists provide the majority of insights about intergroup psychodynamics. Harold Saunders understands that orthodox political scientists would disapprove of his conceptual language, but he still recommends talking about large political group interactions using the "human word ... relationship." Saunders argues that large-scale political relationships have three characteristics: they may be good and bad; they are dynamic over time; and they are made up of numerous smaller relationships among subsets of the larger groups. 35 Like most psychoanalytic political theorists, Saunders is concerned with both distant scholarly comprehension and a more participatory shaping of reparative group relations. Peaceful problem-solving relations, which he dubs "creative" or "generative," reach beyond technical solutions to discrete problems. Instead, he calls for groups to commit to long-term efforts to sustain relations that encourage each group to understand the other's "deep-rooted human fears, hopes, wounds, perceptions, and cultural values." 36 Because even political interests and priorities enunciated by official representatives of groups communicate unconscious dimensions of political interests, approaches to politics are inadequate if they ignore the importance of feelings and demands for recognition. Contemporary feminist scholars generally recognize that the thought and scholarship of feminists of color provides more support for coalition discourse and politics than theory produced under the auspices of many other groups. In providing "specific theory" that analyzes the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, women of color recognize both the existence of political discontinuities and the need for political affiliations across those discontinuities. 37 Through the work of black feminist theorists the dream of a common language becomes the reality of "common differences." 38

152

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

The black feminist literature on coalition politics between groups ranges from cautionary to hopeful, from abstract to concrete and pragmatic. Although different moods and positions characterize this literature on coalitions, black feminists share concerns with ethics and identityand not only with the most instrumental forms of political behavior. As Janet Flammang notes, the typical approach to the study of coalition politics emphasizes electoral politics and conventional forms of political leadership. However, feminists she labels "transformational"-most of whom are women of color and/ or working class-are in the forefront of an alternative conceptualization of coalition. For these feminists, identity issues (such as those raised by differences of race, ethnicity, and class), "emotional conflict," and an "engaged epistemology," and not simply strategies associated with successful interest group politics, are central to coalition work. 39 Debates about the meaning and utility of the concept of intergroup "sisterhood" draw on this distinction between instrumental and transformational in conceptualizations of intergroup coalition politics. Maria Lugones and Pat Rosezelle represent the skeptical side of the debate over sisterhood, pointing out that such a familial metaphor is potentially dangerous for women of color. This is because its suggestion of unconditional love between participants can help disguise inequities of voice, power, and political resources to create an illusion of harmony. Instead, they suggest "friendship," with its voluntaristic associations, as a model for coalition politics. 40 Hooks concurs in part, writing that sisterhood can function as a cover for the dominance of one group-for example, white, middle-class women-over another. It can also make it more difficult for coalition members to identify the construction and coercive operations of demands for authentic identities such as that denoted by "women." But hooks also refuses to proscribe the coalitional language of sisterhood. She clarifies that the bonding between diverse communities of women in "sisterhood" cannot only be premised on struggle against oppression "out there" beyond the boundaries of the coalition. Instead, sisterhood must be founded on a struggle against the residues of collaboration with oppression "in" ourselves as individuals and in the groups that constitute coalition. 41 Patricia Hill Collins's reflections on coalition politics place emotional conflict squarely at the center. Collins argues that coalition-building unavoidably raises issues of "individual accountability" in group members who must form "fully human relationships" with coalition partners. For Collins, individual accountability requires "developing empathy for the experiences of individuals and groups different than ourselves. "42 The vehicle for this empathy is knowledge of the circumstances individuals and

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

153

groups confront because of their situatedness in relations structured by race, class, gender, and other variables of social power. In discussions of coalition politics, as in other aspects of social and political life, black feminists are alive to the effects of differential relations of power. Collins carries this attentiveness to unequal power relations between groups into her treatment of coalition politics, arguing that "building empathy is difficult, no matter which side of privilege we inhabit." Regardless of the kind of social identity that is under scrutiny, in order to build empathy those whose identities are privileged must engage in sustained processes that are both intellectual and emotional. The intellectual component of the process involves questioning the forms of symbolic and institutional privilege that adhere to dominant forms of identity. The emotional component involves inquiring into the ways in which these forms of privilege have "shaped [one's] personal biography." 43 Standing on the "subordinate side of privilege" also makes building empathy for coalition partners difficult, as members of subordinate groups are forced to relinquish tools of survival such as basic mistrust for privileged others. Collins notes that in spite of these enormous differences of positioning and perspective, those who would enter into coalitions share the challenge of replacing categories and stereotypes of the other with new images and experiences grounded in realistic appraisals of allies. In Patricia Williams's words, we are responsible for "the images of others that are reposited within us." 44 For black feminists and psychoanalytic political theorists alike, coalitions between groups depend upon more than merely discrete and instrumental interactions over specific issues. They require long-term attention to the feelings that are revealed or generated in the context of intergroup relations. However, while both psychoanalytic political theorists and black feminists address the creation and maintenance of coalitions between groups, black feminists respond more directly to the dilemmas of coalition in the context of legacies of inequality. Because of this distinction, psychoanalytic theories of groups and black feminist thought make different contributions to a reparative theory of groups.

A PSYCHOANALYSIS OF COALITION POLITICS

Although they do not refer to "coalitions" explicitly, psychoanalytic political theorists know that normative theorizing about group psychology implicates what political activists call coalitional politics. Group psychologies emphasize the irrepressible nature of human longing for groups and affiliation. For psychoanalytic political theorists the longing for

154

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

groups is, however, ambivalent and potentially dangerous. Individuals within groups are always subject to being sacrificed for refusing to relinquish threatening aspects of individuality. 45 Further, members of groups may rightly fear the consequences of other groups acting out projective and dehumanizing processes. 46 For psychoanalytic political theorists, no great distance separates the human need for belonging and affiliation from the human construction of closed and hostile groups. Such groups provide affiliation and stabilize group identity, although often at the cost of regression, mutual fear, suspicion, hatred, and sometimes violence. Writing of psychologically regressive groups and the politics created by such groups, Alford suggests that there is only one kind of political practice that can mitigate the fantasies of independence and purity that feed group regression. This is the political practice he calls "mature" or "mutual" interdependence-the striving toward and practicing of collective activity. Mature interdependence may be a feature of collective action within groups or between groups, but "when collective activity and mutual interdependence are denied and downgraded, and strictly individual solutions emphasized, we become less adept at collective activity." 47 Alford argues that failures to practice mutual interdependence enhance fantasies of individual and group independence and shrink the arena in which reparative practices are believed to be appropriate. The result is a morally impoverished group regime in which a "talion morality" of suspicion and destructiveness can flourish. Work group functioning also has implications for cooperation or conflict beyond the boundaries of the group. One way of illustrating this point is to examine the quite different meanings attached to a work group in the sense first described by Bion-that is, a small clinical or other group delimited in space and time-and large social or political groups. Applying Bion's concepts of work groups and basic assumptions to politics and warfare, Hanna Segal emphasizes that work group orientaticm is an attempt to cope with the psychotic disturbances and phenomena that are "typical" in groups because of the ways groups function as containers for frightening or undesirable aspects of individual subjects. Both work group functioning and mature interdependence refer to the possibility and the desirability of realistic appraisals of social and political situations and of coalitional work. Work group functioning differs from mature interdependence in its embeddedness in a specific group culture and, thus, in the first instance, its reference to intragroup activity. More important, however, is that both work group activity and mature interdependence require support from the group for the individuality of group members. Bion does not discuss the political implications of work-group culture for diffuse large groups, so he does not address the question of

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

155

whether all ostensibly rational (that is, planned and carefully executed) group action qualifies as work-group functioning. Can, for example, a military that with great strategic and technological sophistication annihilates its enemy be understood as a work group? Segal hints at an answer to this question. She argues that a large diffuse group, such as a nation, may delegate not only the execution of destructive acts of war but also the "psychotic functions" of the group to a smaller group such as a military whose existence is premised on "paranoid assumptions. "48 We may conclude that groups can operate in the guise of a work group while the fantasies that underlie their actions are transparently those of a ba such as fight-flight. Such a conclusion is consistent with Bion's own account both of the distinction between work group and basic assumptions and of the fragility of the work group against the pull of basic assumptions. Understanding the grounds of cooperation and the negotiation of conflict and differences clearly remains a central issue for the study of groups and group discourses. Unfortunately, insights regarding mature interdependence and work group functioning are generally sparsely theorized in psychoanalytic political theory. These dimensions of group life do get attention in such realms of discourse and practice as track two and other forms of informal diplomacy and the plethora of conflict and dispute resolution theories, workshops, and seminars offered by organizations and private corporations. 49 However, the focus of psychoanalytic political theorists is usually the failures of political relations and dialogue between groups and not the successes or productive possibilities. This focus on failures over successes is understandable. The stakes of conflict between identity-religious, racial, ethnic, or other-groups are high. In politics, group conflict can precipitate torture, genocide, mass migrations, terrorism, the destruction of civil society, and the fall of states. To the extent that psychoanalytic political theorists believe they can illuminate shared dimensions of fateful group processes and behavior, they tend to focus on these phenomena. Coalition politics take place between groups, but coalition politics implicate forms of negotiation of difference within groups themselves. The processes of the first (relations within the self), second (relations within groups), and third (relations between groups) coalitional frames are mutually constitutive. In their internal and external functioning and discursive processes, groups can provide support for either the most reparative or the most authoritarian of orientations toward otherness, wherever that otherness resides. Groups that foster a reparative orientation toward otherness "outside" the group will also encourage reparativeness toward otherness within the group and in the constitution of individual group members. Conversely, groups that provide members with outsiders as

156

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

ready containers for unwanted characteristics and strivings will support singular and authoritarian, rather than reparative, forms of intrapsychic and intragroup politics. One version of the claim that the ways in which a group treats-or, in a more discursive vein, theorizes-the identities of its own members can be read as a marker or precursor of the ways in which a group might treat or theorize connection with other groups is found in discussions of the narcissism of minor differences. In Freud's rendering, the narcissism of minor differences addresses the processes of dehumanizing rhetoric and action that arise in close attachments, either personal or within or between groups. 5° In identity groups, collective projective fantasies operate to dispose of unwanted aspects and characteristics of the group, with groups that are either similar or in close proximity becoming principle recipients of these negative attributions. Thus, the narcissism of minor differences is central to the process of enemy-making between proximate groups. 51 However, the key insight for contemporary theorists is that projection practiced in situations of proximity and similarity, while common, is particularly fraught with danger for groups. In these situations, groups must consistently, and sometimes coercively, assert their internal homogeneity in order to police the porous boundaries between the group and other groups-in order to maintain fantasies about identity consistency that will sustain a group's fantasies about the difference of the "other." Both internal and external implications follow from projection and "minor differences." Groups provide their members with other groupsoften groups that are similar in some respects or close in proximity-that function as suitable targets for projection of unwanted characteristics. However, "the group does not provide this service gratis. On the contrary, the group generally demands as payment that the individual give up his uniqueness to the group, which means that he not express his individuality in the group. In return, the individual is offered a group identity, a selfdefinition based upon the group-sanctioned suitable target." 52 To a greater or lesser degree, coerciveness and dehumanization are common processes within groups. But what can be conceptualized in the abstract as the sacrifice of internal group differences is from another perspective the sacrifice of individuals whose differences threaten the often tenuous distinctions between one group and another. From such analyses, psychoanalytic political theorists conclude that a group's willingness to tolerate or, more rarely, to encourage internal diversity can contribute to forms of intergroup cooperation by permitting the relaxation of boundaries between characteristics that belong inside and outside the group. Both black feminist thought and some psychoanalytic writing on race illustrate this interdependence of internal and intergroup politics. Writ-

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

157

ing of the reparative dimensions of Malcolm X's thought, Wolfenstein anticipates recent treatments of Malcolm by emphasizing how his turn away from the strict tenets of Black Nationalism opened up intergroup coalitional possibilities. Wolfenstein suggests that when Malcolm redefined his own group and its intrinsic multiplicity he redefined coalitional possibilities-recognizing, for example, the continuities between black racial and revolutionary class interests. Indeed, in Wolfenstein's narrative, the point where Malcolm begins to see hitherto unimagined coalitional possibilities corresponds with his own rupture with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation oflslam. 53 In this psychoanalytic political biography, the three coalitional frames connect in a meaningful pattern of support for individuality in the context of group life.

REPARATIVE BLACK FEMINIST POLITICS

Victor Wolfenstein's linkage of Malcolm's reappraisal of his notions of self and group and his conceptualizations of coalition is consistent with black feminist readings of Malcolm's thought. In reconsidering Malcolm's Black Nationalism, Patricia Hill Collins argues that an expanded conceptualization of black identity was crucial for Malcolm's transformed understanding of coalitional possibilities. "Relinquishing his biological essentialism in the last year of his life opened the doors for a greatly reformulated Black nationalism, one encompassing different notions of Black political consciousness and the types of political coalitions that Blacks might forge with other groups." 54 Here, an expanded menu of political relations and coalitions accompany enlarged possibilities for individual thought and action. Patricia Williams offers a cautionary note to this analysis of Malcolm in the form of a commentary on Clarence Thomas and his putative admiration for Malcolm. In Williams's account, Thomas-"Horatio Alger, Miss Jane Pittman, and Colin Powell all wrapped into one" 55 -is able to position himself as a successor to Malcolm by championing black advancement. But Thomas's brand of black advancement "supplants a larger common history with individualized hypotheses," effectively substituting a deracinated individual achiever for any understanding of the impact of historical events and processes on black people. Williams notes that "while some commentators have observed that Clarence Thomas and Malcolm X share a common thread of black nationalism, Clarence Thomas has added a peculiarly stultifying, nullifying twist-that of simultaneously individualizing nationalism and nationalizing individualism." 56 Williams demonstrates that the attempt to substitute an imperial individualism for

158

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

group membership and identification is a political gesture that denies history and the struggles of individuals within intra- and intergroup social contexts. Individualism does not stand outside group membership except in the fantasies of those who propagate this ideal. 57 Cornel West demonstrates the relationship between the ways groups negotiate intragroup differences and the ways they negotiate intergroup differences in his response to Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings. West explicitly connects arguments for racial authenticity with a politics of exclusion that is racist, anti-Semitic, and misogynist. Racial authenticity, West's version ofReagon's "barred room," not only creates a dangerous intergroup politics of disrespect for difference, but also creates an intragroup politics of suspicion and denigration. 5 8 Collins concurs with West and Reagon in her formulations of the linkages between "group autonomy" and the ability to engage in "principled coalitions." Relying on the distinction between "autonomy" and "separatism" delineated by Barbara Smith, 5 9 Collins argues that group autonomy does not require the construction of rigid boundaries that distinguish those within from those without, but is instead the development of standpoints that advocate the interests of women of color. Such a formulation makes both the political expressions and the membership of a "black feminist" group fluid, and Collins argues that black feminist politics depends on such fluidity. Rather than trying to fix the criteria for membership in the group, Collins explicitly positions the group as a discursive political site whose defining character is "internal dissent." She then links the internal dissent that allows individuals within groups to develop independent identities and political analyses with the need for coalitions between black feminists and others. 60 Both West's notion of "prophetic leadership" and Collins's articulation of black feminist intellectual leadership recognize realities of racial oppression, poverty, and the effects of other stigmatizing practices of dominant white American society without resorting to narrow and restigmatizing definitions of what it means to be a group member. Both explicitly link toleration of diversity within groups to the possibility of effective and respectful social and political relations between groups. This is perhaps the most valuable dimension of black feminist thought on the subject of political coalitions: coalitions do not merely construct discrete opportunities for cooperation between groups; rather, they consist of a constant openness to negotiation of differences within groups. Black feminist discourse articulates a less dangerous, hierarchical, and closed definition of difference within the group whose consequences resonate in the theory and politics of coalition-building. Discussions of cross-cutting di-

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

159

mensions of class, color, and sexuality among black feminists and their political allies especially highlight the black feminist commitment to refusing the idea of the group as a "barred room." Psychoanalytic political theorists expect groups to sacrifice group members to unconscious unifying logics of authenticity and unity. Further, they expect groups to externalize undesirable dimensions of humanness and to attribute them to other groups. Black feminists explicitly reject this opportunity, preferring forms of leadership and of group discourse that invite differences and dialogue within groups and that engage the reparative impulses of other groups. Psychoanalytic political theorists reject contemporary liberal and antiliberal complaints about the affiliative politics of identity groups. For them, groups are simply a product of human proclivities toward sociability and the formation of identity. The central question about identity groups is not whether they should exist, but how they will respond to the inevitable pressures of group membership, individuality, and difference. Although psychoanalytic political theorists are not sanguine about the possibilities for reparative group discourses and acts, they do theorize reparative group moments. These reparative moments depend upon the possibility of coalition-building within and between groups. Black feminist theorizing about groups violates pessimistic expectations about group life that are widely held by social and political theorists. The reparativenesss of black feminist thought is most plainly revealed precisely in the dimension that is so often celebrated by scholars and commentators of black feminism: coalition-building and coalition politics. It would be easy to assume that coalitions are, for black feminist theory and practice, merely an indispensable instrumental tool of minority politics. But close examination suggests another plot behind the instrumental necessities of politics. Black feminist theory is a coalitional discourse, not only because it insists upon the political expediency of coalitions, but because it constitutes itself in and through a persistent discussion of the ubiquity of difference and the necessity of intellectual, political, and emotional work across differences. It is this dialogue about difference that has so often troubled relations between black feminists and their allies. As both black feminists and psychoanalytic political theorists demonstrate, the discomfort of common differences cannot be exchanged for a common language. A politics of common differences can function in better or worse ways, and the distinction between better and worse matters. Singular political events that appear to throw group identifications into question can reveal the dilemmas and dangers of identity politics, and they can also produce unexpected forms of discourse and political action.

160

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

ANITA HILL EFFECTS

In 1993, David Brock, a journalist, published a salacious book that purported to tell his audience the story of the "real" Anita Hill. In 2001, Brock published another book, this one a mea culpa for his role in assailing Hill's character and obfuscating the facts surrounding her allegations of sexual harassment. In Blinded by the Right, Brock describes his enthusiastic efforts to libel Hill on behalf of his right-wing sponsors. 61 Anita Hill, Justice Clarence Thomas, and the groups who identified with them were suddenly back on the American cultural agenda. The irony is that for many, Hill's charges of harassment, and particularly the treatment she received at the hands of members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, were never off the agenda. For many women, and especially for African American women, David Brock's self-indulgent revelations were already beside the point. For the majority of those in the media and mainstream politics, the confrontation between Hill and Thomas was a classic set piece of partisan political conflict. On this view, the principals of the spectacle represented opposing interests, and losing meant forfeiting control of crucial political resources to the other-liberal or conservative-side. This dominant conversation, the kind of conversation provoked by figures like Brock, obscures other conversations about the episode that continue to appear as a regular motif in the work of black feminists. These other conversations take place within black community, among black women, and between black and white feminists, and they define what is at stake for many African American women in the legacy of Anita Hill. Why does Anita Hill, and her three days of testimony before the Judiciary committee, continue to command attention today? One critic of communications media holds that because of their "visual imagery and political symbolism," those three days of hearings "take their place alongside other memorable television events, including the Army-McCarthy Hearings and the Watergate Proceedings." 62 Many of the political events that followed the hearings reinforce this assessment of the importance of the confirmation drama. In the immediate wake of the hearings, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of I 991, which strengthened remedies for workplace sexual harassment and discrimination and permitted plaintiffs access to jury trials. Political observers conceded that, whatever its limitations, the Act would not have passed but for Hill's accusations and the extraordinary attention given the subject of sexual harassment during those fall days. In 1992, as a direct result of Hill's testimony, an unprecedented number of women campaigned for, and many won, U.S. Congressional seats. Although the impact of the year's political events is easily overestimated, pundits named 1992 the "Year of the Woman." 63

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

161

The political mobilizations catalyzed by Hill-Thomas continue to influence American politics in often unexpected ways. "Women for Judge Thomas," formed with a nucleus of prominent women from the Reagan and Bush administrations to counter the influence of liberal women against the nominee, eventually became the Independent Women's Forum. IWF formulates and lobbies for conservative causes and·nurtures the careers of such conservative women as Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter, who in zoo I called for the elevation to the Supreme Court of"eight more just like Thomas. "64 Vehement opposition among women's groups to George W Bush's choice for Attorney General, John Ashcroft, was explicitly fueled by Ashcroft's I99I support for Thomas's elevation to the Court. In contrast to his relative silence on the bench, Thomas remains a sought-after speaker in such ideologically conservative venues as the Cato Institute, the Acton Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Claremont Institute, and Pat Robertson's Regent University. For a figure whose publicized views on the political issues of the day were scarce at the time of his confirmation, Thomas has helped to bring together a potent coalition of secular and Christian conservatives that reinforces and reflects the contemporary New Right. The Hill-Thomas hearings initiated a spate of books and popular media articles that explored, and sometimes exploited, the charges, hearings, media, personalities, and political system that delivered the confirmation drama. Of these, it is easy to distinguish those written for a popular audience from those written for scholars and university students. However, the literature on Hill-Thomas can be distinguished more fruitfully by another criterion: books, essays, and magazine articles for the mainstream political audience that read the charges and subsequent hearings in partisan political terms, and those published for the audience that read the charges and hearings in terms of raced and gendered genealogies of power and relationality in American social and political life. This distinction bisects popular and scholarly literatures, and it reveals the specific forms taken by discourse that speaks directly to black women, black men, and white women about the meaning of what happened in the Senate hearing room. 65 Linda Williams points out that national African American organizations were "derelict" in their refusal to analyze the credibility of Thomas's nomination for a Court seat and in their delay in opposing him on the grounds of his political philosophy. The G.H.W Bush administration accurately judged that the nomination of a black conservative would cause consternation among black political and community leaders. Indeed, while the mostly male leadership of groups such as the National Urban League and the NAACP remained silent during the summer of I 99 I, sup-

162

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

port for Thomas among black women and men remained high. This silence from mainstream African American organizations, in turn, discouraged women's groups from vociferously opposing Thomas. By the time Anita Hill was identified and called to testify before the Committee, the infrastructure for discourse about the candidate's veracity and politics was largely absent. The concerns of liberal groups about opposing the confirmation of a black man to the Court and the vocal support tendered to Thomas by African-American spokespersons such as Glenn Loury and Orlando Patterson made it possible for Thomas support groups like Women for Judge Thomas and the Heartland Coalition for the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas to proliferate in a climate largely supportive of the nomination. When the mostly white leadership of national feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women did act, representatives wholly or partially ignored the intersections of race and gender in the hearing participants and in the larger political audience. The slogan "I believe Anita Hill" and the rhetoric of historical injuries to women did not communicate a grasp of the race/ gender dynamics of either the support of Thomas or the treatment accorded Hill. This mainstream women's movement failure is betrayed in the 1992 film Sex and Justice, a presentation of hearing highlights in which narrator Gloria Steinem intrudes to read Hill as a raceless everywoman. 66 In the drama of power relations between Hill, Thomas, and the senators, it was not only men who didn't get it; as Julianne Malveaux notes, white feminists didn't get it either. 67 Anita Hill was not a white woman complaining of sexual harassment at the hands of a powerful white man, but an African American woman accusing an African American man before a panel of white men and the eyes of the majority white nation. Darlene Clark Hine sums up what was lost in the contemporaneous interpretations of many white Americans, whether or not they were feminists: "I used to wonder how American history would read if it was told from the perspective of sexually exploited Black women. The Hill-Thomas sexual harassment hearings and the aftermath answered my question." 68 As historian and activist Barbara Ransby points out, black feminist and womanist leaders were excluded from the national debate over HillThomas: "Voices of Black women who for decades have struggled to address the concerns of Black women and redress the injustice of racial and sexual oppression highlighted so graphically by the mistreatment of Hill were wholly ignored." 69 In fact, black feminist leaders did not take their case against Thomas and the confirmation process directly to the people until November 17, 1991. On that day, the names of 1,603 prominent black women appeared in a full-page ad in the New York Times and in a

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

1!.>3

number of African-American newspapers. Titled "African American Women in Defense of Ourselves," the ad professed the signatories' "outrage" at the "racist and sexist" treatment of Hill by the Judiciary Committee and demanded attention to the nation's "long legacy of racism and sexism," including the "sexual abuse of black women." Tellingly, the ad concluded by noting that African-American women must defend themselves against their adversaries "no matter what color they are." This was no manifesto of simple racial or sexual solidarity, although it did speak to black women and invite allies to join black women in confronting forms of social and political injustice. Judging from the number and variation in public opinion polls performed during the hearings and in the following year, Hill's accusations against Thomas and the related testimony were common knowledge across a broad segment of the American public. News organizations asked the first questions during the confirmation hearings, and polling continued that fall until after Thomas was confirmed by a bare majority of the Senate to sit on the Supreme Court. CBS News/New York Times polling from October IO through October I 5, 199I, indicated that the majority of Americans (I) believed that Thomas was telling the truth when he denied harassing Hill, (2) believed that Hill had lied in her testimony before the Senators, and (3) held an unfavorable opinion of Hill. The day after the conclusion of the hearings, on October 14, a CBS/NYT poll found that high percentages of Americans-76 percent of men and 72 percent of women-believed that Hill had been treated "fairly" by the senators on the Judiciary committee. 70 However, a year after the hearings, in October I992, polls carried out by major news organizations show that a majority of all Americans believed it was Thomas who had lied during the hearings and Hill who had told the truth. It is important to note that changes in women's attitudes effected more of this shift than changes in men's attitudes.7 1 Researchers who evaluated the 199I and 1992 polls conclude that the "deteriorating opinions" of Judge Thomas's verisimilitude accurately reflect changes in public opinion rather than being artifacts of the polling procedures. What accounts for these deteriorating opinions? Political scientists who studied the poll results note that there are two explanations for such changing attitudes: the receipt of additional information between polls, and the short- and long-term effects of disconfirming evidence on attitudes. Of these two explanations, the authors explore the second and argue that some of the shift in attitude toward Thomas is a result of information available at the time of the hearings precipitating belief change over time. 72 Yet it is no doubt true that the public discourse that spoke directly to women about the rac~d and gendered nature of sexual harassment and to black women about the need to defend themselves also had

164

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

an impact on some group members' rethinking of the issues at stake in Hill-Thomas. Support for this conclusion comes from an unlikely source: in her recent best-selling conservative polemic, Ann Coulter concludes with disgust that Americans changed their minds about Thomas and Hill despite the fact that there were "no new facts, no new hearings, no new evidence-but a lot of media propaganda." 73 In the months and years after Thomas's confirmation, black feminist scholars confronted and analyzed what they admitted was the overwhelmingly negative response toward Hill and her testimony among African-American women. In that response, black feminists found residues of black women's history in the United States: the imperative to protect black men and, through them, the upward mobility of the racial group; internalized sexism that denies the importance of their own experiences and demands the same self-denial of other black women; suspicion about the motivations of a woman who was not only supported by white women in her fight against a black man, but who seemed more culturally "white" than "black." 74 It was to these women that black feminists directed their public discourse, taking out ads in black newspapers and communicating in such forums as African-American magazines, public lectures, and television appearances. At the same time, black feminists contended with white feminists' and black men's interpretations of HillThomas in lectures, in the popular press, and in scholarly venues. 75 At this "watershed" moment "of Black women's history," black feminists listened and spoke to black women, mobilized different strands of discourse for the audiences to which they spoke, and began educating likely coalition partners regarding the flaws in their respective analyses.7 6 To a considerable degree, they also scrutinized Hill, criticizing her apolitical careerism in the Reagan administration. 77 Black feminists refused to make of Hill a virtuous martyr even while they exposed the extent to which she became a protean symbol to the different groups who "read" her: tool of liberal interests, scorned woman, race traitor, patriarchal victim, sexualized and silenced black woman.

BACK, AND FORWARD, TO IDENTITY GROUP POLITICS

Political events come and go, and what is front page news today may be scarcely remembered tomorrow. Yet some political events linger precisely because group members come to identify with protagonists and their struggles. In these cases, group leaders may not explicitly allude to the timelessness of unconscious identifications, injuries, and aspirations when speaking to group members, but they expose this timelessness nonethe-

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

165

less. It is a striking consequence of the Anita Hill hearings that "she" has become embedded in the emotional lives of many black women as a symbol of trauma and of the struggle for voice. Many African-American clinicians report the emergence from black women of therapeutic material involving Hill and the hearings. For some therapy clients, the hearings trigger "memories of personal, familial, and community" traumas and suggest identifications with the denigrated HilP 8 It is difficult to say whether these particular kinds of identifications would have evolved without the intercession and interpretation of black feminists. Rather than focusing on such one-directional causality, it is probably more fruitful to assume a multidirectional conversation among black women in which interlocutors work, and work through, a panoply of feelings and arguments, personal and collective. In these kinds of conversations, group leaders exercise influence, and are influenced in their turn, as they struggle to respond to the anxieties, dilemmas, and aspirations of group members. Leaders help to create and shape identity groups and group discourses by mediating, defining, organizing, exhorting, and rearticulating values, beliefs, ideals, and practices. And together, leaders and group members create the shared social meanings through which groups come to interpret the world around them. In the face of multiple interpretations of the Hill-Thomas drama, black feminists discursively worked the meanings of Hill and her circumstances in three directions. First, they challenged the social demand for black women's self-sacrifice and loyalty to black male leadership. Second, they encouraged black men to acknowledge the unexamined and unrepudiated forms of sexism in black community. Third, they interrupted white women's perceptions of sisterhood across race to lay bare the continuing racism of white feminists and the differences contained in the nexus of race/sex. Politically, black feminists fought to replace Hill's adversaries in the Senate through electoral means, but their interpretations of the HillThomas debacle aimed at a more thorough dissection of history, ideology, and group relations. Beginning with the struggle over Thomas's nomination and Hill's charges of sexual harassment, black feminists examined the political context of the hearings, Hill's career, Thomas's legal philosophy, the conservative record on racial and sexual equality, black women's labor history, and the intersectional allegiances and dilemmas of black women's social and political lives. They delivered these analyses in a variety of settings and through a variety of media. What distinguishes the analyses of black feminists from mainstream media profiles and polemics is their careful reconstructions of history and their attentiveness to the sometimes conflicting values, attitudes, and experiences of black women. For example,

166

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

it was black feminists, rather than television pundits, who dug deeply enough into black women's dismissal of Hill to hear the shared conviction that Hill's education and social position would surely have either insulated her from the intrusions she described or permitted her to seek effective redress. Far from exculpating Thomas and his allies by popular opinion (even black women don't believe her!), such a conviction illuminates the shared tacit hope for a status that can defend against group-based humiliation and vulnerability. We can distinguish black feminist analyses and messages about Hill, sexism, and racism from the superficial or salacious packaging of mass media. But we can also distinguish them from the idealizing and enemy-producing discourses of many identity groups, and here is the difference between reparative and regressive group behavior and discourse. Black feminists do not respond to the Hill-Thomas hearings by drawing boundaries that represent horizons of good and evil. Nor do they draw the lines of struggle over Hill's testimony and Thomas's elevation to the Court along ostensibly incontestable lines of group identity. This is not to say that black feminists ignore race and gender-quite the opposite: they analyze the operations of race and gender in political calculations, in institutional power dynamics, and in latent understandings of roles and subjectivity. It is just that instead of appealing to raced and gendered identities as essential categories, vehicles for innocence and corruption, they excavate the histories that constitute these categories. In the context of these histories, Anita Hill's accidental arrival on the political stage is less important than the legacies of race, gender, and power that become visible in her testimony, in Thomas's defense, in the spectacle of the hearings, and in the multiple ways that spectacle was packaged for the public. How does psychoanalysis help make sense of the role of identity groups and leaders in shaping group perceptions and values? It is undeniable that in their thought and clinical practice, psychoanalysts generally draw a boundary between the universal psychic operations they seek and find in the individuals and small groups before them and the larger sociopolitical relations and processes "out there" in the public realm. Indeed, this very failure to apprehend the conditions of existence for marginal and vulnerable social subjects fosters reactions toward psychoanalysis that range from enmity to indifference. But the objects of psychoanalytic study drag their social and political issues into the consulting room with them, and when they do, the boundary between the private and the public cannot hold. When psychoanalysts fail to interpret the intersections between social group memberships and individual experience, other theorists and political actors take up the unanalyzed remainder of group experience.

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

167

Psychoanalytic political theory springs from the inevitable interpenetration of"public" and "private" identities. Armed with theory developed in clinical and other contexts, psychoanalytic political theorists examine the empirical world of group identifications for clues about group behavior and feeling. Unfortunately, political thinkers are usually preoccupied enough with the most obvious cleavages of power politics that they fail to see the ways in which gender interacts and intersects with other group identifications to create group psychodynamics, identities, and discourses. In other words, women's multiple social and political positionings frequently make them invisible to those who analyze the most disruptive forms of political conflict. But these same positionings produce forms of group identification distinctive enough to warrant close attention for what they can teach about confronting conflict without destroying otherness, about moderating dangerous forms of solidarity, and about supporting individuality. With regard to gender in particular, it is ironic that psychoanalytic political theorists who study groups might be tempted by essentially conservative narratives of women's physical delicacy and natural predisposition to nurture to overlook the multiple forms oflabor that create reparative political work and discourse. Like other forms of overlooked women's labor, women's emotional and political work lies in plain sight. The Hill-Thomas hearings were a messy and profoundly disheartening spectacle. Besides deepening cynicism about democratic political processes, the hearings call into question for some the efficacy of identity politics altogether. 79 Nevertheless, politics of group identity persist in old and new forms, conscious and unconscious, both denied and reaffirmed in politics of"color-blind" liberal individualism, dissolving and reforming in ways that fit and reshape existing social configurations. In the United States, the ideal of assimilation/the "melting pot" vies consistently with another, more complicated ideal that is threatening for some and hopeful for others: the ideal of a social and political order that respects individuality but does not insist upon the submersion and disavowal of group identifications. Group memberships fulfill basic human psychological needs and are a prerequisite for the development of individuality. If this is so, identity groups, and the leaders and group members that populate them, will always be with us. We do not have the option of dispensing with group identities through intellectual gestures. But we can learn from the ways groups speak and act and theorize the dilemmas and opportunities that group identifications entail.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION I. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, vol. I (New York: Time, I964), 6. 2. Andrei Codrescu, The Devil Never Sleeps, and Other Essays (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2ooo), I 29. 3· See Amy Gutmann, Identity in Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). Gutmann argues that students of politics are still not attentive enough to the ways in which group identifications help determine political beliefs and orientations. Although she does not explore the psychological dimensions of group identifications, her latest work is a welcome addition to the literature on identity politics. 4· Franke Wilmer, The Social Construction ofMan, the State, and War: Identity, Conflict, and Violence in Former Yugoslavia (New York: Routledge, 2002), 22. 5. Herring et al. emphasize the role of "the cultural milieu in which individuals learn the meaning and value of the group" in determining how sttongly associated "ingroup favoritism" is with "outgroup dislike." Mary Herring, Thomas B. Jankowski, and Ronald E. Brown, "Pro-Black Doesn't Mean Anti-\Vhite: The Sttucture of African-American Group Identity," Journal of Politics 6I, no. 2 (1999): 379· 6. Bobo writes of the relation of black feminist theory to the black women to whom it is addressed: "in a sort of symbiotic relationship, black women's texts nourish and sustain their readers, while the readers are indispensable for interpreting the works appropriately." See Jacqueline Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers (New York: Columbia University Press, I 99 5), 6. 7· For examples of this literature, see: Jessie Daniels, White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse (New York: Routledge, I997); Raphael S. Ezekiel, The Racist Mind: Portraits of American Neo-Nazis and Klansmen (New York: Penguin, I995); Linda Kintz, Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions that Matter in RightWing America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, I997). Like most studies, these focus on group discourses that progressive intellectuals deem socially pathological or desttuctive. 8. For examples in political thought, see Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (New York: Macmillan, I974); and Murray]. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I988). 9· David G. Winter, "Power, Sex, and Violence: A Psychological Reconstruction of the wth Century and an Intellectual Agenda for Political Psychology," Political Psychology 2 I, no. 2 (woo): 386-87. See also Winter, "Power, Affiliation, and War: Three Tests of a Motivational Model," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65, no. 3 (I993): 532-45. 10. Dan Balz, David S. Broder, and Helen Rumbelow, "War Talk Shapes Fall Elections:

170

NOTES TO PAGES 3-11

Democrats' Ability to Use the Economy against GOP Wanes," J!Vilshington Post, 29 September 2002, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/AI 5678-2o02Sep28.html. II. Frank). Barrett, Gail Fann Thomas, and Susan P. Hocevar, "The Central Role of Discourse in Large-Scale Change: A Social Construction Perspective," Journal ofApplied Behavioral Science 3I, no. 3 (I995): 352-72. I2. Minnie Bruce Pratt uses the phrase in her essay "Identity: Skin Blood Heart," in Rebellion: Essays, rgSo-1991 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand, I99I). I3. Shane Phelan, Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 200I). I 4· Katherine J. Mayberry, ed., Teaching What You're Not: Identity Politics in Higher Education (New York: New York University Press, I996). I 5. Foil owing the example of many women of Mrican descent, I use the term "black" to denote the multinational origins of black feminist scholars and scholarship as well as a diasporic collective identity. See Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (New York: Routledge, I 994), 3 I- 32. I6. For discussion of the strategic uses of essentialism and a plea for contextual theoretical responses to such uses see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, I 990); and Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Dijfe1·ence (New York: Routledge, I989). I 7. Jane Flax, "The End of Innocence," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W Scott (New York: Routledge, I992), 445-63.

I. PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND RACISM

r. For a feminist-therapeutic critique of this model and an attempt to account for diversity of women's identities see Marsha Pravder Mirkin, Women in Context: Toward a Feminist Reconstruction of Psychotherapy (New York: Guilford Press, I994). 2. See Mary Daly, Gyn!Ecolog;y: The Metaethics ofRadical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, I978), and Webster's First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, I994); Anna Lee, "Therapy: The Evil Within," Trivia 9 (I986): 3444; Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Towa1·d a Philosophy of Female Affection (Boston: Beacon Press, I986); Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Villue (Palo Alto, Calif.: Institute of Lesbian Studies, I988); Rachel Perkins, "Therapy for Lesbians: The Case Against," Feminism and Psycholog;y I, no. 3 (I99I): 325-38; Pauline Bart, "Psychoanalytic Feminism: An Oxymoron," off our backs 23, no. 2 (I993): 20; Celia Kitzinger and Rachel Perkins, Changing Our Minds: Lesbian Feminism and Psycholog;y (New York: New York University Press, I993). Another kind of criticism of traditional psychoanalytically inspired psychotherapy is offered by Carter Heyward, When Bounda1·ies Betray Us: Beyond Illusions ofWbat Is Ethical in Therapy and Life (San Francisco: HarperCollins, I994). 3. Although the category of "woman" has been a consistent puzzle within psychoanalysis, it is arguably the case that throughout most of the history of psychoanalytic theorizing, "woman" has referred to those of European descent and not to women of color. On this general problem of African-American women's invisibility see, for example, Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 199I); and Leith Mullings, On Our Own Te1ms: Race, Class, and Gender in the Lives ofAjricanAme1·ican Women (New York: Routledge, I997). 4- See, for example, Gloria Joseph's comment on the uselessness of feminist psychoanalytic analyses that do not "embrace the Black female population," in Gloria I. Joseph and Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives (Boston: South End, I98I), 79· 5. Claudia Tate, "Psychoanalysis as Enemy and Ally of African Americans," Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society I, no. I (I 996): 53.

NOTES TO PAGES 11-15

171

6. For a similar argument, see Aida Hurtado, "Relating to Privilege: Seduction andRejection in the Subordination of White Women and Women of Color," Signs I4, no. 4 (I989): 833-55· 7· Hortense Spillers, "All the Things You Could Be by Now, if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother," in Female Subjects in Black and U'hite: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Berkeley: University of California Press, I997), I35· 8. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Sex, Race, and God: Christian Feminism in Black and U'hite (New York: Crossroad, I989), 2 r. 9· Ibid., 7· IO. Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, Psychoanalytic-Mm·xism: Groundwork (New York: Guilford Press, I993), 50-52. I I. Ibid., I. I 2. Elizabeth Abel, "Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation," in Female Subjects in Black and U'hite: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Berkeley: University of California Press, I997), I3°· 13. bell hooks, Sisters ofthe Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (Boston: South End, I 993), I 5· I4· bell hooks, Yeaming: Race, Gender, and Cultw·al Politics (Boston: South End, I990). I 5. See, for example, Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg, eds., Psychoanalytic Versions of the Human Condition: Philosophies ofLife and Their· Impact on P1m1:ice (New York: New York University Press, I998). I6. Charles Shepherdson, "The Concept of'Race,' "Joumal for the Psychoanalysis of Cuitun and Society I, no. 2 (I996): I]3-]8. Shepherdson insists that scholars consider the embodied dimensions of race and argues that psychoanalysis should be conceptualized as a discourse that challenges the alternative explanatory regimes of"nature" and "culture" without succumbing to either. I]. See, for example, Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "Mrican-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs I 7, no. 2 (I 992 ): 25I-74; Ruth Frankenberg, U'hite Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction ofU'hiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, I993); and Phyllis Palmer, "Review Essay: How We Talk about Race Affects What We Do about Race,'' Joumal ofAmerican Studies 28, no. 2 (I994): 255-65. I8. Patricia]. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Dia1y of a Law Professor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I99I), 49· 19. Michael Rustin, The Good Society and the Inner Wodd: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Culture (New York: Verso, I99I), 6r. zo. Sander L. Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gende1· (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, I993). 2 r. Tate, "Psychoanalysis as Enemy and Ally,'' 55. 22. For a quite different treatment of the production of white identity using Freud's theory of jokes and the comic see Seshadri-Crooks's analysis of George Orwell's essay "Shooting an Elephant." Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, "The Comedy of Domination: Psychoanalysis and the Conceit of Whiteness," in The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed. Christopher Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, r 998), 353 -79· 23· Freud, quoted in Tate, "Psychoanalysis as Enemy and Ally," 54-55· 24. Ibid., 56-6o. 25. For an example involving Anita Hill's testimony against Clarence Thomas in his I 99 I Senate confirmation hearings, see Jane Flax, The American Dream in Black and U'hite: The Cla1-ence Thomas Hearings (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, I998). 26. Amina Mama, Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender, and Subjectivity (New York: Routledge, I995).

172

NOTES TO PAGES 15-22

27· Alexander Thomas and Samuel Sillen, Racism and Psychiatry (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, I972). 28. Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender. 29. The journal is now published as the Psychoanalytic Review. On the heterodoxy of American writings on race by those not trained in psychoanalysis see MariJo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century ofStruggle with Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I998). 30. Thomas and Sillen, Racism and Psychiatry, 6-9, 6o-63. 31. WulfSachs, Black Hamlet (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., I947). 32. Jacqueline Rose, "Wulf Sachs's Black Hamlet," in The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed. Christopher Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, I998), 33 7-38. 33· Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Pantheon, I97o; reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, I984); Rustin, Good Society, and "Lacan, Klein, and Politics: The Positive and Negative in Psychoanalytic Thought," in Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths Between Theory and Modem Cultu1·e, ed. Anthony Elliott and Stephen Frosh (New York: Routledge, I995), 22 3 -45; Wolfenstein, Psychoanalytic Marxism, and The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (New York: Guilford Press, I993); Elisabeth YaungBruehl, The Anatomy ofPrejudices (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I996). 34· Rustin, Good Society, 74· 35· For a similar argument about psychic investments in racism from a Lacanian perspective, see Patricia Elliot, "Working through Racism: Confronting the Strangely Familiar," Joumal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society I, no. I ( I996): 63-72. 36. Kovel, White Racism, 8. 37. Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Sn-vants in the United States, rgzo-I945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, I989). Palmer's analysis of race, housework, and domestic labor substitutes "dirt" for excrement, but the chain of signifiers remains intact. See also Flax, American Dream. 38. Kovel, White Racism, 2I7. 39· See Joel Kovel, "On Racism and Psychoanalysis," in Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths between Theory and Modem Culture, ed. Anthony Elliott and Stephen Frosh (New York: Routledge, I995), 205-22. 40. Wolfenstein, Victims of Democracy, 7 I. 41. Ibid., 32. 42. Ibid., J4I, 343-44· 43· Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, "Reflections on Malcolm X and Black Feminism," Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 3, no. 2 (I998): 4I-S9· 44· For a number of comparable arguments, some by black feminists, see the essays collected in Joe Wood, Malcolm X: In Our Own Image (New York: St. Martin's Press, I992). 45· Wolfenstein, Psychoanalytic Marxism, 333· 46. Young-Bruehi, Anatomy of Prejudices. 4 7. See Cynthia Burack, "The Uneasy Intimacy ofFeminism and Psychoanalysis," in Psychoanalytic Versions of the Human Condition: Philosophies of Life and Their Impact on Practice, ed. Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg (New York: New York University Press, I998), 392-4I I; and Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents. 48. See Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). 49· This is generally accurate, although see Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents; Marcia Westkott, The Feminist Legacy of Karen Homey (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I986); lsobel Armstrong and Helen Carr, eds., "Positioning Klein," Women: A Cultural Review I, no. 2 (summer I990): 127-220. so. Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents, 20, 355· 5 I. Ilene J. Philipson, On The Shoulders of Women: The Feminization ofPsychotherapy (New York: Guilford Press, I993). 52. See, for example, the work of well-known feminist theorists such as Dorothy Din-

NOTES TO PAGES 22-25

173

nerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: SexualArrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper and Row, I976); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction ofMothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, I978), and "Introduction: Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory," in Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I989), I-I9;]essica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, I988); Jane Flax, "Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Epistemology and Metaphysics," in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy ofScience, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (Boston: D. Reidel, I983), 245-Sr. These theorists use relational psychoanalysis to analyze gender identity, authority, and unconscious processes of social and political meaning-making. 53· Elliot, "Working through Racism." 54· For some responses to both of these varieties of critiques of psychoanalysis, see Cynthia Burack, The Problem ofthe Passions: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Social The01y (New York: New York University Press, I994), and "Mind Mending and Theory Building: Lesbian Feminism and the Psychology Question." Feminism and Psychology 5, no. 4 (I995): 495-510. 55. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Pantheon, I 97 4); Dinnerstein, Mermaid and the Minotaur; Chodorow, Reproduction ofMothering. 56. For one example of this strategy in feminist theorizing see my critique of Carol Gilligan's dismissal of psychoanalysis in Burack, Problem of the Passions, 6o-62. 57· I will not rehearse those debates here, but for representative pieces of literature, see Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering, and "Preface to the Second Edition," in The Reproduction ofMothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, 2d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, I999), vii-xx;Judith Lorber, Rose Laub Coser, Alice S. Rossi, and Nancy Chodorow, "On The Reproduction of Mothering: A Methodological Debate," Signs 6, no. 3 (spring I98I): 482-5 I4; Pauline Bart, "Review of Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering," in Mothering: Essays in Feminist The01y, ed. Joyce Trebilcot (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, I983), I47-52; Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems ofExclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, I988); Jean Grimshaw, Philosophy and Feminist Thinking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, I986);Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley: University of California Press, I99o); Ruth Perry, "Book Reviews of Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodemism in the Contemporary West, Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings ofPatriarchy," Signs I6, no. 3 (I99I): 597-6o3;Janet Sayers, "Book Reviews: The Rocking of the Cradle, and the Ruling of the World, The Reproduction of Mothering," Women's Studies International Quarterly 4, no. 2 (I98I): 260-62; Judith Kegan Gardiner, "Self Psychology as Feminist Theory," Signs I 2, no. 4 (I 987 ): 76 I- So; Elizabeth Fee, "Critiques of Modern Science: The Relationship of Feminism to Other Radical Epistemologies," in Feminist Appmaches to Science, ed. Ruth Blier (New York: Pergamon, I986), 42- 56; Janet Montefiore, "Book Reviews: Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory and Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis," Women: A Cultuml Review I, no. 3 (I990): 308-13; Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, I986); Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, zd ed (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, I997); and Colleen Heenan, ed., "Special Feature: The Reproduction of Mothering: A Reappraisal," Feminism and Psychology I2, no. I (zoo2). 58. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 7-8. 59· Nancy J. Chodorow, The Power of Feelings: Po·sonal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I999). 6o. The following discussion draws on Burack, Problem of the Passions. 6r. See Janet Sayers, Sexual Contradictions: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism (London: Tavistock Publications, I986); Chodorow, Reproduction ofMothering. 62. Janice Haaken, Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, I998), 94·

174

NOTES TO PAGES 25-32

63. Ian Craib, Psychoanalysis and Social The01y: The Limits ofSociology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, I 989 ). 64. Audrey Edwards, "Black and White Women: What Still Divides Us?" Essence z8, no. II (I 99 8): 7]. 65. Audre Lorde, Sister/Outside1·: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, I984)· 66. Julia Sudbury, "Other Kinds of Dreams": Black Women Organisations and the Politics of Transformation (London: Routledge, I998), 202. 67. Leith Mullings, "Images, Ideology, and Women of Color," in Women of Color in U.S. Society, ed. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, I994), 267. 68. Mullings, On Our Own Terms, I I6-I7. 69. Mama, Beyond the Masks, I 30- 32· 70. Chodorow, Power of Feelings, 55. 71. Chodorow, "Preface to the Second Edition." 72. See, for example, the brief comment in Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History," 255. 73· Chodorow, "Introduction," 4; Spelman, Inessential Woman; Collins, Black Feminist

s

Thought. 74· Nancy]. Chodorow, Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: H·eud and Beyond (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, I994), and "Preface to the Second Edition." 7 5. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I992). 76. Kovel, "On Racism and Psychoanalysis," 2I6. n Ibid., 2 I 8. 78. Jean Walton, "Re-Placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse: Founding Narratives of Feminism," Critical Inquiry 2I (I995): 775-804. 79· Ibid., 786. 8o. Ibid., 8oo; 803, emphasis in the original. It is instructive to compare Walton's deconstruction of the role of race in Joan Rivere's essay "Womanliness as a Masquerade" with the gender analysis of the same essay in Noreen O'Connor and Joanna Ryan, Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities: Lesbianism and Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, I993), 576r. In O'Connor and ~yan's analysis, racial binaries disappear into sex/gender terms. 8 I. Some literature produced by pro-lesbian and gay psychoanalysts fails to consider intersections between race and sexuality. See Cynthia Burack, "The Sexuality Revolt in Black and White," Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 2, no. I (I997): 67-54. 82. Stuart Hall, "The Afrer-Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?" in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Vzsual Representation, ed. Alan Read (London: Institute oflnternational Arts, I996), I9. 83. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, I967), I6I-62. 84. Lola Young, "Missing Persons: Fantasising Black Women in Black Skin, White Masks," in The Fact ofBlackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (London: Institute of International Arts, I 996), 97, I oo. 85. Spillers, "All the Things." See, for example, Spelman, Inessential Woman; Burack, "Mind Mending," and Problem of the Passions. 86. Tate, "Psychoanalysis as Enemy and Ally." 87. Hortense Spillers, "Hortense Spillers interviewed by Tim Haslett for the Black Cultural Studies web site collective in Ithaca, NY February 4, I998." http://www.blackcultural studies.o1·g!spillerslspillers_intvw.html. 88. Williams, Alchemy ofRace and Rights. 89. hooks, Yearning. 90. Leslie C. Jackson, and Beverly Greene, eds., Psychotherapy with African American Wmnen: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice (New York: Guilford Press, zooo).

NOTES TO PAGES 32-36

175

9r. Angela P. Harris, "Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory," in Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender, ed. Katharine T. Bartlett and Rosanne Kennedy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), 235-62. 92. Flax, "Political Philosophy," 250; see also Jean Grimshaw, "Autonomy and Identity in Feminist Thinking," in Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy, ed. Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret Whitford, 90-ro8 (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988). 93· For a less group-oriented perspective on "points of contact" between psychoanalysis and black feminist thought, see Kimberlyn Leary, "Race in Psychoanalytic Space," Genda and Psychoanalysis 2, no. 2 (1997). 94· See Beverly Greene, "African American Families: A Legacy of Vulnerability andResilience," NationalFm"Um 75, no. 3 (1995): 29-32. Greene and others emphasize tire importance of attending to counter-transference effects between minority clients and dominant-group analysts. 95· Spillers, "Hortense Spillers interviewed." 96. For one resource on intellectual history that could inform such retheorizing, see Louise Michele Newman, White Women sRights: The Racial Origins ofFeminism in the United States (London: Oxford University Press, 1998). 2. FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS TO POLITICAL THEORY

r. Stephen Mitchell conceptualizes "relational" psychoanalysis as a broad model that includes object relations, attachment theory, and other related psychoanalytic approaches. See Stephen A. Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). Otlrer theorists employ some variation on a "relational perspective," including: Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), and autlrors affiliated witlr the Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies at Wellesley College. 2. At the individual level, I refer to tire work of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott. At the group level, I look to Wilfred R. Bion, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (London: Routledge, 1989); Elliott Jaques, "Social Systems as Defence against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety," in New Dinctions in Psycho-Analysis, ed. Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann, and R. E. Money-Kyrle (London: Tavistock, 1955), 478-98; Isabel Menzies Lyth, Containing Anxiety in Institutions: Selected Essays (London: Free Association, 1988); S. H. Foulkes, Selected Papen: Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis (London: Karnac Books, 1990); Didier Anzieu, The Group and the Unconscious (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, r984); Zanvel A. Liff, ed., The Leader in the Group (New York: Jason Aronson, 1975); Rafael Moses, "The Leader and the Led: A Dyadic Relationship," in The Psychodynamics of International Relationships, Volume I: Concepts and Them?es, ed. Vamik D. Volkan, Demetrios A. Julius, and Joseph V Montville (Lexington: D. C. Heatlr, 1990), 205-17; and Lionel Kreeger, ed., The Large Group: Dynamics and Therapy (Itasca, Ill.: F. E. Peacock, 1975). 3· R. D. Hinshelwood, A Dictionmy of Kleinian Thought (London: Free Association Books, 1989), 29. 4· Mitchell, Relational Concepts, r 7. 5· Adam Phillips, Winnicott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 45· Philips argues (Winnicott, 9) that Winnicott's "work cannot be understood without reference to Klein." See also Cynthia Burack, The Problem of the Passions: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Social Theory (New York: New York University Press, 1994). 6. See, for example, Phyllis Grosskurtlr, Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work (New York: Jason Aronson, 1995); and Jacqueline Rose, Why T¥tn·? Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Retum to Melanie Klein (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993). 7. Nicholas Wright, Mrs Klein: A Play (St. Paul, Minn.: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, 1989); and Susan Robinson et al., Introducing Melanie Klein (Blue Ridge Summit, Pa.: National Book Network, 1998).

176

NOTES TO PAGES 37-40

8. See Winnicott's own comments on this difference between himself and Klein, quoted in Judith Hughes, Reshaping the Psychoanalytic Domain: The Work of Melanie Klein, W R. D. Fairbairn, and D. W Winnicott (Berkeley: University of California Press, I989), esp. I74· 9· Craib, Ian, Psychoanalysis and Social Theory: The Limits of Sociology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, I989), I39· IO. Grosskurth, Melanie Klein, I 96. II. Roy Schafer, The Analytic Attitude (New York: Basic Books, I983), 292. I 2. Pauline Bart, "Review of Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering," in Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Joyce Trebilcot, I4 7-52 (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, I983). For a persuasive insider's critique of the way analysts' use of "object" language deforms analytic practice, see Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I995). I 3. Leslie C. Jackson, "The New Multiculturalism and Psychodynamic Theory: Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and African American Women," in Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, ed. Leslie C. Jackson and Beverly Greene (New York: Guilford Press, 20oo), I-I4· I4. Nancy Chodorow, Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, I994). IS· See, for example, Susan Kreiger, The Mirror Dance: Identity in a Women's Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, I983); and Shane Phelan, Identity Politics: Lesbian Feminism and the Limits of Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, I989). I6. Howard F. Stein, "Disposable Youth: The I999 Columbine High School Massacre as American Metaphor," Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 5, no. 2 (2000): 2 I 736. The quote ends: "and its consequences in violence." In context, Stein suggests not that group psychology always results in violence-an empirical claim that is vitiated by direct evidence-but that in order to understand school violence researchers must attend not only to the developmental issues of perpetrators of youth violence but also to the group psychological context in which school violence occurs. I7. John D. Cash, Identity, Ideology and Conflict: The Structuration ofPolitics in Northern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I996), 76. I8. For exceptions to this generalization see, for example, Rita Mae Brown, "The Furies Collective," in Feminism and Community, ed. Penny A. Weiss and Marilyn Friedman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, I995), I25-34; and Kreiger, Mirror Dance. I9. For a brief and accessible introduction to these concepts see Klein's essay "Our Adult World and Its Roots in Infancy," in Melanie Klein, The Writings ofMelanie Klein Volume Ill: Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946-1963 (New York: Free Press, I975), 247-263. 20. Ibid., 14. 2 I. Donald Meltzer, The Kleinian Development (Pershire, Scotland: Cluny Press, I 978), 9· 22. Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self Philosophical Papers, 1956-1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I973), 222-2 3· 23. Klein, Writings vol. Ill: Envy and Gratitude, 262. 24. See Donald Woods Winnicott, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers (Levittown, Pa.: Brunner/Mazel, I992). See also Klein's acknowledgment of a "false" goodness in children that masks mental illness in Writings vol. III: Envy and Gratitude, 104. 25. Some feminists contest the idea that there is a moral dimension to mainstream psychological theories. See Celia Kitzinger and Rachel Perkins, Changing Our Minds: Lesbian Feminism and Psychology (New York: New York University Press, I993). 26. Hinshelwood, Dictionary ofKJeinian Thought, 398. 27. Klein, Writings vol. Ill: Envy and Gratitude, I 33. 28. Wendy Kaminer, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self Help Fashions (New York: Vintage Books, I993), I8. 29. Melanie Klein, The Writings ofMelanie Klein, Volume I: Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works, 1921-1945 (New York: Free Press, I975), 344-69.

NOTES TO PAGES 40-47

177

30. Ibid., 333-34· 3 I. Klein is often understood by critics to neglect external reality, and attention to actual relations constitutes one of the crucial differences between Klein and Winnicott. See Janet Sayers, Sexual Contradictions: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism (London: Tavistock, I986), 64-69. 32. Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I984), 207. 33· Ibid., 217. 34· Hughes, Reshaping the Psychoanalytic Domain, 64. 35. Anzieu, Group and the Unconscious, I 3 I- 32. 36. C. Fred Alford, Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory: An Account of Politics, Art, and Reason Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I989), 86-87. 37. Donald Woods Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (New York: International Universities Press, I965), I76. 38. Klein, Writings vol. III: Envy and Gmtitude, 6. 39· Hinshelwood, Dictionary ofKleinian Thought, 4I7· 40. Klein, Writings vol. III: Envy and Gratitude, I92· 41. Hinshelwood, Dictionary ofKleinian Thought, 386. 42. Elizabeth Bott Spillius, "Some Developments from the Work of Melanie Klein," International Journal ofPsycho-Analysis 64 (I 98 3): 32 I- 32. 43· Robert M. Young, "Benign and Virulent Projective Identification in Groups and Institutions" (I 992 ). http://www.human-nature.com/ rmyoung/papers/papeqh.html. 44· Wilfred R. Bion, "Attacks on Linking," in Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on PsychoAnalysis (New York: Jason Aronson, I 984), 93- I 09; Betty Joseph, "Projective Identification: Some Clinical Aspects," in Melanie Klein Today: Developments in Theory and Practice. Volume I: Mainly Themy, ed. Elizabeth Bott Spillius (New York: Routledge, I988), I 38- so. 45. Klein, Writings vol. III: Envy and Gratitude, 9· 46. Ibid., I92· 47· RobertS. Robins and Jerrold M. Post, Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I997), 92. 48. Ibid., 83. 49· Bion, Experiences in Groups, Ip. so. Spillers, "Hortense Spillers Interviewed by Tim Haslett," for the Black Cultural Studies web site collective in Ithaca, N.Y., February 4, I998. 5I. Bion, Experiences in Groups. 52. It is necessary to determine the implications and usefulness of essentialist claims and arguments instead of merely dismissing them. Diana Fuss argues that essentialism is probably unavoidable: "the sign 'essence' circulate[s] even in theories that are explicitly anti-essentialist." See Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Diffirence (New York: Routledge, I989), xi. 53. There is a meaningful (albeit frequently unremarked) "theoretical disjunction" between the work of Bion and that of Klein. See Joan Symington and Neville Symington, The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion (London: Routledge, I 996), I- I 3. 54· Michael Eigen, "Wilfred R. Bion: Infinite Surfaces, Explosiveness, Faith," in Psychoanalytic Versions of the Human Condition: Philosophies of Life and Their Impact on Practice, ed. Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg (New York: New York University Press, I998), I86. 55· Bion, Experiences in Groups; Symington and Symington, Clinical Thinking of Wilfred

Bion. 56. For a more specific version of this argument see Cynthia Burack, "Mind Mending and Theory Building: Lesbian Feminism and the Psychology Question," Feminism and Psychology 5,no. 4 (I995): 495-SIO. 57· Mark F. Ettin, Jay W Fidler, and Bertram D. Cohen, "Introduction: From Group

178

NOTES TO PAGES 47-55

Process to Political Dynamics," in Group Process and Political Dynamics, ed. Mark F. Ettin, Jay W Fidler, and Bertram D. Cohen (Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, I995), I-20. 58. Ibid., 8- 9. 59· Jaques, "Social Systems"; and Lyth, Containing Anxiety in Institutions. 6o. For this distinction between "group" and "collectivity" see Victor Wolfenstein, "Discussion: Cynthia Burack," Gender and Psychoanalysis 2, no. 3 (I997): 370-72. 6 r. Bion, Experiences in Groups, I 3 r. 62. Ibid., I32. 63. Michele Barrett. "Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A British Sociologist's View." Signs I7, no. 2 (I992): 459· 64- Mitchell, Relational Concepts, 3· 65. Judith C. White, "Psychoanalytic Group Psychotherapy with African American Women: The Bad Mother in All-Female Groups," in Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, ed. Leslie C. Jackson and Beverly Greene (New York: Guilford Press, woo), 2 I3· 66. See James M. Statrnan, "Exorcising the Ghosts of Apartheid: Memory, Identity and Trauma in the 'New' South Africa" (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Washington, D.C., July 8, I995). 67. See, for example, Anna Lee, "Therapy: The Evil Within," Trivia 9 (I986): 34-44; Sara Lucia Hoagland, Lesbian Ethics: Towards New Value (Palo Alto, Calif.: Institute of Lesbian Studies, I988); Rachel Perkins, "Therapy for Lesbians: The Case Against," Feminism and Psychology I, no. 3 (I99I): 325-38; Pauline Bart, "Psychoanalytic Feminism: An Oxymoron," off our backs 23, no. 2 (I993): 20; Kitzinger and Perkins, Changing Our Minds. 68. Malcolm Pines, "The Group-as-a-Whole," in The Psyche and the Social World, ed. Dennis Brown and Louis Zinkin (London: Routledge, I994), so. 69. Alford, Melanie Klein. 70. For the latter, see Cynthia Burack, "Defense Mechanisms: Using Psychoanalysis Conservatively," in Fundamental Differences: Feminists Talk Back to Social Conservatives, ed. Cynthia Burack andJylJ. Josephson (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 7r. See Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, woo). 72. Victor Wolfenstein is a notable exception to this broad characterization of psychoanalytic political theorists because of his explicit attention to black nationalism and to feminism, including black feminism. 73· Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W W Norton, I96I), 65. 74· Adam Michnik and Leon Wieseltier, "Adam Michnik and Leon Wiesel tier: An Exchange," The New Republic 224, no. 23 Qune 4, zooi): 26. 75· C. Fred Alford, Group Psychology and Political Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I994), I8. 76. Cash, Identity, Ideology, and Conflict, 25. 77. Hennessy argues that one problem for feminist standpoint theorists is the inability to reconcile discourse and women's experience without ignoring the claims of either or collapsing one (usually experience) into the other (usually discourse). Hennessy's materialist response to this challenge is understanding discourse as ideology. Rosemary Hennessy, Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (New York: Routledge, I993). 78. Mary R. Jackman, The Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, I 994). 79· Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, I990), ro3. 8o. E. Francis White, "Aftica on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse and AfricanAmerican Nationalism," Journal ofWomen's History 2, no. I (I990): n; Cathy J. Cohen, The

NOTES TO PAGES 55-62

179

Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 41-43. Sr. For the former, see Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). For the latter, see Susan Bordo, Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). S2. There are exceptions, including Renata Salecl, The Spoilr ofFreedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism after the Fall of Socialism (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Joel White book, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). S3. Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans, and Peter Redman, "General Introduction," in Identity: A Reader, ed. Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans, and Peter Redman (London: Sage Publications, zooo), r-s. S4. Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), S9. On the distinction between "praxis" and "linguistic" feminism see Kathy E. Ferguson, The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist Themy (Berkeley: University of California Press, r 993). S5. Amina Mama, Beyond the Masks: Race, Gendo; and Subjectivity (New York: Routledge, 1995), I. Mama prefers "subjectivity" to "identity," but I continue to use the term "identity" to emphasize continuity with the work of other psychoanalytic political theorists. S6. On this point see also Robert T. Carter, The Influence ofRace and Racial Identity in Psychotherapy: Toward a Racially Inclusive Model (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995). Carter surveys the various models of psychotherapy and their orientations toward race, but he finds little to say about psychoanalysis. S7. Mama,BeyondtheMasks, r28. S8. Ibid., 133, S9, So. S9. Ibid., 89, 9S. 90. Cash, Identity, Ideology, and Conflict, 25. 91. David]. Baker, "Book Review: John Daniel Cash, Identity, Ideology, and Conflict: The Structuration ofPolitics in Northern b'eland," Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 2, no. 2 (1997): 179-81. 92. For a critique of the traditional spatial language of psychoanalysis, see Roy Schafer, A New Language for Psychoanalysis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976). A critical stance toward the embodied conceptual language of psychoanalysis is particularly useful when applying psychoanalytic theory to the study of discourse. 93· Melanie Klein, "Love, Guilt, and Reparation," in Love, Hate, and Reparation, ed. Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere (New York: w w. Norton, I964), 5?-II9. 94· Winnicott, Through Paediatrics, zo6. 95· Vamik D. Volkan, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: From Clinical Pmctice to Into·national Relationships (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1988), 191. 96. Alford, Group Psychology, r 5 I. 97· Wolfenstein, The Victims ofDonocracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), So-SI. 9S. Cash, Identity, Ideology and Conflict, 190. 99· Ibid., 203. roo. Alford, Group Psychology, 6 5.

3·

REPARATIVE GROUP LEADERSHIP

r. Charlotte Bunch, Passionate Politics: Feminist Themy in Action (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 122. 2. For a more complicated account of the resistance of many black women to their designation as supporting players in civil rights and revolutionary organizations see E. Francis

180

NOTES TO PAGES 64-68

\Vhite, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics ofRespectabi#ty (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2ooi). For critiques of male leadership in the "black church" see Cathy]. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I999), 276-88; Katie G. Cannon, "Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: The Womanist Dilemma in the Development of a Black Liberation Ethic," in Feminist Theological Ethics: A Reader, ed. Lois K. Daly, 33-4I (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, I994). 3· Arlene R. Wolberg, "The Leader and Society," in The Leader in the Group, ed. Zanvel A. Liff (New York: Jason Aronson, I975), 247. 4· This is a simple version of Arendt's argument, which she develops in such works as The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I958), I92, and Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I982). 5· Rafael Moses, "The Leader and the Led: A Dyadic Relationship," in The Psychodynamics ofInternational Relationships, vol. 1: Concepts and Theories, ed. Vamik D. Volkan, Demetrios A. Julius, and Joseph V. Montville (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, I99o), 2I2. R. D. Hinshelwood, Thinking about Institutions: Milieux and Madness (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, zoo I), I oo. 6. Vamik D. Volkan, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: Fmm Clinical Practice to International Relationships (Northvale, NJ.: Jason Aronson, I988), and Bloodlines: From Ethnic P1·ide to Ethnic Terrorism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, I997); C. Fred Alford, Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory: An Account ofArt, Reason and Politics Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I989), and G1·oup Psychology and Political Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I994). 7· Alford, Group Psychology, 42. 8. Volkan, Need to Have Enemies and Allies, I09-10. 9· R. D. Hinshelwood, in What Happens in Groups: Psychoanalysis, the Individual and the Community (London: Free Association, I987), writes in quite similar terms of the "bridging function" of group leaders. 10. Alford, Melanie Klein, 90. I I. Alford, Group Psychology, 7. I2. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," in The Moynihan Report and the Politics ofConn·oversy, ed. Lee Rainwater and W. L. Yancey (Cambridge: MIT Press, I967), 29. 13· Robert Blood and Donald Wolfe, quoted in Moynihan, "Negro Family," 77. I4· Lee Rainwater and W. L. Yancey, eds., The Moynihan Rep011: and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge: MIT Press, I967). I 5. Angela Davis, "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves," in Words ofFire: An Anthology ofAfrican-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: New Press, 1995), 201. I6. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, woo), 75· I 7. Jenrose Fitzgerald, "A Liberal Dose of Conservatism: The 'New Consensus' on Welfare and Other Strange Synergies," in Fundamental Differences: Feminists Reply to Social Conservatives, ed. Cynthia Burack and Jyl]. Josephson, 95-110 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). IS. Rhetaugh Graves Dumas, "Dilemmas of Black Females in Leadership," in The Black Woman, ed. La Frances Rogers-Rose (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, I98o), 205. 19. For the ways in which these images pervade organizations, see also Ella L.]. Edmondson Bell and Stella M. Nkomo, Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Sn-uggle for Professional Identity (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 200I). 20. Wahneema Lubiano, "Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War by Narrative Means," in Race-ing Justice, En-gendn-ing Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Consn-uction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 340.

NOTES TO PAGES 69-75

181

2 I. N ancie Caraway, Segregated Sisterhood: Racism and the Politics of American Feminism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, I99I); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam, I985);Jacquelyn Grant, "Black Women and the Church," in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, I982), I4I-52. 22. Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, I997); Julia Sudbury, 'Other Kinds of Dreams': Black Women's Organisations and the Politics ofTransf01mation (London: Routledge, I 998). 23. Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage Books, I973); Giddings, When and Where I Enter. 24. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 34· 25. Ibid., 5 -6. 26. Alford, Group Psychology, I 63-66. 27. Ibid., I63. 28. S. H. Foulkes, Selected Papers of S. H. Foulkes: Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis (London: Karnac Books, I99o), 292. 29. See, for example, Patricia Williams, The Alchemy ofRace and Rights: Diary ofa Law Professor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I99I); bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End, I989), and Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (Boston: South End, I993). 30. Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory," in Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Pn'Spectives by Feminists ofColor, ed. Gloria Anzaldua (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation, I990), 336. 3 I. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 22. 32. Audre Lorde, SistedOutsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, I984), 53- 59· It is a measure of the popularity of this essay that it has been sold individually, in pamphlet form, in many African-American, women's, and progressive bookstores. 33· Sandra Harding, "The Curious Coincidence of Feminine and African Moralities: Challenges for Feminist Theory," in Women and Moral Theory, ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, I987), 296-3 IS; Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 2 I 2. 34· Volkan, Need to Have Enemies and Allies, 83-88. 35· Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W Norton, I96I); Paul Berman, ed., Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments (New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, I994). 36. For the way these ideological convictions play out for some dominant group members as "color- and power-evasiveness," see Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, I 993). 37. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion ofIdentity (New York: Routledge, I990). 38. Leith Mullings, On Our Own Terms: Race, Class, and Gender in the Lives ofAfricanAmn·ican Women (New York: Routledge, I997), 268. 39· See, for example, Michelle Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone, I98o); Nella Larsen, Passing, in Quicksand and Passing, ed. Deborah E. McDowell (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Phyllis Palmer, "Review Essay: How We Talk about Race Mfects What We Do about Race," Journal ofAmerican Studies 28, no. 2 (I994): 255-65. 40. For a fictional treatment of the theme, see Dorothy West, The Wedding (New York: Doubleday, I995). 4I. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 20-2 I; bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultuml Politics (Boston: South End, I99o), 23-31. 42. Bernice Johnson Reagon, "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century," in Home Girls:

182

NOTES TO PAGES 76-85

A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 357· 43· Alice Walker, "In the Closet of the Soul," in Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 8o. 44· Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 154-55· 45. Sudbury, 'Other Kinds of Dreams', 98. 46. Max Rosenbaum, "The Leader and Cultural Change," in The Leader in the Group, ed. ZanvelA. Liff(NewYork:JasonAronson, 1975), 272. 47· Volkan, Need to Have Enemies and Allies. 48. Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 19. 49· Lorde, Sister/Outside~; 5 I. 50. Alford, Group Psychology, 33· 51. Lorde, Sister/Outsider, r63. 52. Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994), 69. 53· hooks, Yearning, 91; Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 5-8. 54· Peter Beinart, "Civil War," New Republic 227, no. 21 (r8 November 2002): 6. 55· RobertS. Robins and Jerrold M. Post, Political Pm·anoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). 56. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 223. 57. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Rep1·oduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1999). 58. See Walker, "Closet of the Soul"; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Litermy Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 59· Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1987); hooks, Talking Back; Kendall Thomas, "Strange Fruit," in Race-ing Justice, En-gende1?ng Powe1·: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarena Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 364-89. 6o. Lorde, Sister/Outsider; Caraway, Segregated Sisterhood; Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982). 61. Alford, Melanie Klein, 59· 62. Alford, Group Psychology, r65. 63. Ervin Staub, The Roots ofEvil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 64. Deborah Gray Wbite, "The Cost of Club Work, the Price of Black Feminism," in Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsack (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 247· 65. Lorde, Sister/Outsidn; 124-33. 66. hooks, Yearning, 95-96; Sheila Radford-Hill, "Considering Feminism as a Model for Social Change," in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Laure tis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), r67. 67. Volkan, Need to Have Enemies and Allies, r 55-79, and "An Overview of Psychological Concepts Pertinent to Interethnic and/ or International Relationships," in The Psychodynamics ofInternational Relationships, vol. r: Concepts and Theories, ed. Vamik D. Volkan, Demetrios A. Julius, and Joseph V Montville (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1990), 43-44. 68. On grief in response to racism and the effect on children of "vicarious" trauma see Michael A. Simpson, "Bitter Waters: Effects on Children of the Stresses of Unrest and Oppression," in International Handbook ofTraumatic Stress Syndrome, ed. John P. Wilson and Beverley Raphael (New York: Plenum, 1993), 6or-24. 69. Volkan, Need to Have Enemies and Allies, 172-73. 70. The novel is based on a real event involving Margaret Garner. See Lerner, Black Women, 6o-63. 71. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin, 1988).

NOTES TO PAGES 85-94

183

72. Ibid., 36. 73· Barbara Offutt Mathieson, "Memory and Mother Love in Morrison's Beloved," American Imago: A Psychoanalytic Journal for Culture, Science, and the Arts 47, no. r (1990): 7· 74· Bette]. Dickerson, "Ethnic Identity and Feminism: Views from Leaders of African American Women's Associations," in Color, Class, and Country: Experiences of Gender, ed. Gay Young and Bette]. Dickerson (London: Zed Books, 1994), 103. 75· James exempts Elsa Barkley Brown and Bernice Johnson Reagon from this critique. 76. Some might take issue with placing black nationalism on the right of a hypothetical left-right political continuum. This choice can be defended based on core atttibutes and ideals common to many nationalist ideologies, including: inflexible identity, discipline, and the subordination of women. See, for example, Wahneema Lubiano, "Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense: Policing Ourselves and Others," in The House that Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage, I 998), 232- 52.

4·

CONFLICT AND AUTHENTICITY

r. See Errol Anthony Henderson, "The Democratic Peace through the Lens of Culture, I820-I989," Intemational Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3 (I998): 46I-84; Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone Books, I 997 ). 2. See, for example, Amy E. Ansell, "The Color of America's Culture Wars," in Unraveling the Right: The New Conservatism in American Thought and Politics, ed. Amy E. Ansell, I 739I (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, I998); Angela D. Dillard, Guess Ulho's Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America (New York: New York University Press, 2oor). 3· To be fair to social and political theorists, the notion of "consilience" is proposed by an evolutionary biologist. See Edward 0. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, I998). 4· Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon Press, I986),

I2S-26.

5· Elliott Jaques, "Social Systems as Defence against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety," in New Directions in Psycho-Analysis, ed. Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann, and R. E. Money-Kyrle (London: Tavistock, 1955), 479, emphasis in the original. 6. James M. Glass, Life Unworthy of Life: Racial Phobia and Mass Murder in Hitler's Germany (New York: Basic Books, I997). For a chilling account of professional and industrial collusion with Nazi racial science and mass murder, see Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown Books, zoo I). 7· Glass, Life Unworthy of Life, I27. 8. For an example, see Megan Boler, Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (New York: Routledge, I999). For a critique, see Cynthia Burack, "Resisting Passion: Pedagogy and Power," Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 5, no. r (zooo): 105-I4. 9· Audre Lorde, Sister/Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, I984), I46. IO. Ibid., I66, ISI. I I. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, I 992 ), 53. u. Leslie C. Jackson, "The New Multiculturalism and Psychodynamic Theory: Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and African American Women," in Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, ed. Leslie C. Jackson and Beverly Greene (New York: Guilford Press, zooo), r-I4. IJ· Patricia]. Williams, "A Rare Case Study of Muleheadedness and Men," in Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon Books, I992), r6o, I 59·

184

NOTES TO PAGES 94-99

I4. For exceptions to this generalization, see Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, The Victims of Democracy: Makolm X and the Black Revolution (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), and "On the Road Not Taken: 'Revolt and Revenge' in W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk," Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 5, no. I (2 ooo): I 2 I- 32. I5. C. Fred Alford, Group Psychology as Political Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I994), 55· I6. Vamik D. Volkan, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: From Clinical Practice to International Relationships (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, I 988). I7. Hooks uses the term "sites of resistance," in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End, I99o), I5I-53· The concept of intersectionality is primarily identified with Kimberle Crenshaw, although it is in wide use among feminists today. See Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics," in Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender, ed. Katharine T. Bartlett and Rosanne Kennedy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, I99I), 57-80. I8. hooks, Yearning. I9. For another perspective on black women's relations with one another see bell hooks's response to Andre Lorde in her essay "Revolutionary Black Women: Making Ourselves Subject," in hooks, Black Looks, 4I-6o. zo. Lorde, Sister/Outsider, I 5o, I 57• I63. 2 r. See also Bernice Johnson Reagon, "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century," in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, I983), for a critique of the fantasy of safety provided by sites of resistance cultivated by identity groups. 22. hooks, Yearning, I45-53· 23. Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, I997), I 59· 24. See also Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, zooo), 95-96, for a discussion of the ways in which black institutions and groups can be dangerous to black women. 2 5. bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, I 994), 6372.

26. Ibid., 68; 66. 27. Ibid., 65-66. Michele Wallace criticizes hooks for contributing to a closure of black

feminist thought around hooks's personal authority. Ironically, hooks seems to invite this kind of pointed critique. See Wallace, "Art for Whose Sake?" Women s Review of Books I 3, no. I (I995): 8. 28. Sudbury calls the dominance of black women's organizations by women from the capital "London-centredness." Julia Sudbury, "Other Kinds ofD1·eams": Black Women's Organisations and the Politics of Transformation (London: Routledge, I998), Io5. 29. Ibid., 29. For similar critiques of Collins's approach to intragroup difference see E. Francis White, "Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse and African-American Nationalism," Journal ofWomens History 2, no. I (I990): 73-97; and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American's Women History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs I7, no. 2 (I992): 25I-74· 30. Throughout much of this text I use the first edition of Collins's Black Feminist Thought because critics have responded to this edition. 3 r. Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, I998), 25, 36. 32. Sudbury, "OtherKindsofDreams," I30. 33· See, for example, the critiques and reconsiderations of standpoint theory in Sally J. Kenney and Helen Kinsella, Politics and Feminist Standpoint Theories (New York: Haworth Press, I 997). Most critiques of standpoint produced by white feminists suggest Collins's con-

NOTES TO PAGES 100-105

185

cept of black feminist standpoint as an exemplary critique of the singular notion of standpoint derived from the work of Nancy Hartsock and others. For some black feminists, however, Collins's attempt to repair the concept leaves its original problems largely intact. 34· White, "Africa on My Mind," 92-94. 3S· Ibid., n 36. Didier Anzieu, The Group and the Unconscious (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, I984), IOO. 37. Analysis of these mechanisms may be found in many group psychoanalytic texts, but for a good succinct discussion see Tom Main, "Some Psychodynamics of Large Groups," in The Large Group: Dynamics and Therapy, ed. Lionel Kreeger (Itasca, Ill.: F. E. Peacock, I975), 57-86. 38. Roy Schafer, A New Language for Psychoanalysis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I 976). 39· See, for example, Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, woo); and Elaine Brown, A Taste ofPower: A Black Woman's Story (New York: Anchor Books, I994). Brown also describes the t!Ireat and practices of physical intimidation and force t!Iat mobilized obedience within t!Ie Black Panther organization. 40. Frequently used terms for cognitive and affective depletion are "depersonalization" and "de-skilling." 41. Pierre Turquet, "Threats to Identity in the Large Group," in The Large Group: Dynamics and Therapy, ed. Lionel Kreeger (Itasca, Ill.: F. E. Peacock, I975), 92. 42. Wendy Brown, States ofInjury: Power and Freedom in Late Modemity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 54· 4 3. Brown identifies t!Iis position with Christine DiStefano, but t!Ie claim is innocuous enough for some version of it to be identified wit!I all group psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic political t!Ieorists. See Brown, States ofInjury, 5 I. 44· Franke Wilmer, The Social Constmction ofMan, the State, and l¥rl1·: Identity, Conflict, and Violence in Former Yugoslavia (New York: Routledge, 2002), xii. 45· Ibid., II, I-3, 259-66. 46. For a recent critique of the inability of identity groups to tolerate ambiguity and privacy see Debora Morris, "Privacy, Privation, Perversity: Toward New Representations of t!Ie Personal," Signs 25, no. 2 (2ooo), 32 3-51. Unlike Wendy Brown, Morris uses relational psychoanalysis but does not consider eit!Ier psychoanalytic or oilier research on groups t!Iat would illuminate her observations about t!Ie tendencies of identity groups. 4 7. Patricia J. Williams, "The Ethnic Scarring of American Whiteness," in The House that Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage, I998), 254· 48. Pratibha Parmar, "Black Feminism: The Politics of Articulation," in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed.Jonat!Ian Rut!Ierford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, I990), 106. 49· Ibid., Io7. 50. Such arguments can be found in the work of black feminists as well as black male t!Ieorists wit!I gender-sensitive critiques of discourses of aut!Ienticity and leadership. See Manning Marable, The Crisis of Color and Democracy: Essays on Race, Class, and Power (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1992); and Cornel West, "Black Leadership and t!Ie Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning," in Race-ing]ustice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Const17lction ofSocial Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pant!Ieon, I 992), 39°-4°1. 5 I. Patricia]. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I99I), I6I-78. sz. bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End, I98I); Collins, Fighting Wonls. 53. Amina Mama, Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender, and Subjectivity (New York: Routledge, I99S), 141.

186

NOTES TO PAGES 105-109

54· Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995); Jean Walton, "Re-Placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse: Founding Narratives of Feminism," Critical Inquiry 2 I (1995): 775-804. 55. See, for example, Slavenka Drakulic's essays on the construction and deconstruction of Yugoslav national identity in Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War (New York: HarperCollins, 1994); and the essays in Part Three ("The Devil in Eastern Europe, One of His Ancestral Homes") of Andrei Codrescu's The Devil Never Sleeps. 56. W W. Meissner, "Projection and Projective Identification," in Projection, Identification, Projective Identification, ed. Joseph Sandler (Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1987), 35· 57· R. D. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (London: Free Association Books, 1989), 53-54; Judith M. Hughes, Reshaping the Psychoanalytic Domain: The Work of Melanie Klein, W R. D. Fairbairn, and D. W Winnicott (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 83-87. 58. C. Fred Alford, Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory: An Account ofArt, Reason and Politics Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 2 9-33· 59· Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 207-8. 6o. Vamik D. Volkan, Demetrios A. Julius, and Joseph V. Montville, eds., The Psychodynamics ofInternational Relationships. Volume 2: Unofficial Diplomacy at Work (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1991); Marc Howard Ross, The Management of Conflict: Interpretations and Interests in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 17882. 61. Didi Herman, The Antigay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). With regard to antihomosexual attitudes, note therecent research of psychologists who identify what is often referred to on the political Left as "homophobia" with disgust rather than fear. See Allison Hogge, "Disgust, not Fear, Drives Homophobia, Says UA Psychologists," University ofArkansas LifeNews, 8 June 2002, htrp://www.newswise.com/articles/zooz/6/HOMOPHOB.UAR.html. 62. See Anna Marie Smith for a reconstruction of British political discourse on race and sexuality that both locates racist and sexually biased citizens as good centrist citizens andreveals their systematic biases. Anna Marie Smith, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality: Britain, rg68-rggo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 63. Alford, Group Psychology, 62. · 64. Freud writes of the revolt against mourning in "Mourning and Melancholia," in On Metapsychology: The Theory ofPsychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: Penguin Books, 1984). 65. John F. Harris, "God Gave U.S. 'What We Deserve,' Falwell Says," Washington Post, 14 September 2001, C3. . 66. Of course, it is not obvious that groups will always be able to discern and articulate the precise nature of grievances or the interests that members share. See Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, Psychoanalytic Marxism: Groundwork (New York: Guilford Press, 1993). 67. Ann Burlein, Lift High the Cross: Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Converge (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). 68. To be sure, black women also frequently write of black women and men as sharing a group identity. But when theorists tum to gender relations and specifically address issues in which gender interests diverge, they consider and address black women as a group. See Collins, Black Feminist Thought. 69. Collins, Fighting Words, 255. 70. See Lorde, Sister/Outsider; and hooks, Black Looks, especially chap. 6, "Reconstructing Black Masculinity," 87-114. 71. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 184-85.

NOTES TO PAGES 109-112

187

72. Elsa Barkley Brown, "Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory," in African American Women Speak Out on Anita HillClarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), IOI.

73· Beverly Grier, "Making Sense of Our Differences: African American Women on Anita Hill," in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), r5o-5S. 74· Wahneema Lubiano, "Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense: Policing Ourselves and Others," in The House that Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage, 199S), 251. 75. Paula Giddings, When and Whe1·e I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam, r9S4). 76. Marable, Crisis of Color. 77. I borrow the term "profeminist," meaning a "male advocate of women's equality," from Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders andAme1·ican Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 1997), 37· 7S. Margaret Homans, "'Racial Composition': Metaphor and the Body in the Writing of Race," in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 95· 79· See Joyce A. Joyce, "The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism," New Literary History rS, no. 2 (winter r9S7): 335-44, and" 'Who the Cap Fit': Unconsciousness and Unconscionableness in the Criticism of Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.," New Literary History rS, no. 2 (winter r9S7): 371-S4; Henry Louis Gates Jr.," 'What's Love Got to Do with It?' Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom," New Literary History rS, no. 2 (winter 19S7): 345-62; Houston A. Baker Jr., "In Dubious Battle," New Litermy Hist01y rS, no. 2 (winter r9S7): 363-69. So. On the debate between Joyce and Baker and Houston see also Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 19S9), 73-96. Sr. See Deborah Diane McDowell, "Transferences: Black Feminist Discourse: The 'Practice' of 'Theory,'" in Feminism Beside Itself, ed. Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman, S3r rS (New York: Routledge, 1995). Another version of the debate over "embodiedness" is found in James Sidanius and Felicia Pratto's critique of the "double jeopardy" thesis about black women's subordinate social status. The double jeopardy thesis suggests that black women suffer from the effects of subordinate social statuses based on racism and sexism. Sidanius and Pratto argue that forms of discrimination based on gender and age are primary, cross-cultural, and transhistorical. Hence they argue that black women are not generally discriminated against on the basis of race (their "subordinate arbitrary-set group membership") but-like white women-on the basis of gender. See Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hiemrchy and Oppression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, zoor). See also bell hooks and Cornel West, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (Boston: South End, r 99 I), 64. S2. hooks, Black Looks, S7-1 I3· S3. Ibid., roS. S4. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedmn (New York: Avon Books, 1969). S5. Demetrios A. Julius, "The Genesis and Perpetuation of Aggression in International Conflicts," in The Psychodynamics ofInternational Relationships. Volume I: Concepts and Theories, ed. Vamik D. Volkan, Demetrios A. Julius, and Joseph V. Montville (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1990), 99, emphasis in the original. S6. Ibid., IOI. S7. John E. Mack, "The Enemy System," in The Psychodynamics of International Relationships. Volume I: Concepts and Theories, ed. Vamik D. Volkan, Demetrios A. Julius, and Joseph V. Montville (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1990), 57-69.

188

NOTES TO PAGES 112-120

88. S. H. Foulkes, Selected Papers of S. H. Foulkes: Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis (London: Karnac Books, I99o), 276.

5.

BONDING AND SOLIDARITY

1. Most conventional histories of the modern American women's movement trace its inception to the social ferment of the I96os. However, Barnett argues persuasively that AfricanAmerican women's organizations of the 1940s and 1950s undennine this history, which is premised on middle-class white women's political activity and organization. Bernice McNair Barnett, "Black Women's Collectivist Movement Organizations: Their Struggles during the 'Doldrums,' "in Feminist Organizations: Haroest of the New Women sMovement, ed. Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 199-221. 2. Susan Ostrov Weisser and Jennifer Fleischner, eds., Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds: Feminism and the Problem of Sisterhood (New York: New York University Press, 1994). 3. For one exception to this conclusion, see Wahneema Lubiano, "Introduction," in The House that Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), viii. Lubiano writes that one merit of the anthology is that it "presents work that addresses withinthe-group dynamics of black Americans." 4· Gail Pheterson, "Alliances between Women: Overcoming Internalized Oppression and Internalized Domination," in Bridges of Power: Women s Multicultural Alliances, ed. Lisa Albrecht and Rose M. Brewer (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1990), 36, emphasis in the original. 5. Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley: University of California Press, I990), I I 1. 6. John Bowlby, The Making and Breaking ofAffictional Bonds (London: Tavistock, I 979). 7· Didier Anzieu, The Group and the Unconscious (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 75· 8. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W Norton, I959). 9· W R. Bion, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (London: Routledge, I989), 98. 10. Ibid., I 70. I I. Anzieu, Group and the Unconscious, I I o. I2. Hanna Segal, "From Hiroshima to the Gulf War and Afrer: A Psychoanalytic Perspective,'' in Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths between Theory and Modern Cultu1·e, ed. Anthony Elliott and Stephen Frosh (New York: Routledge, I995), I95. 13· Bion, Experiences in Groups, 74· I4· Irving L. Janis, Groupthink: P;ychological Studies ofPolicy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, I982), 37· I5· Ibid., 58-59· I6. See W R. Bion, "Attacks on Linking,'' in Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 93-I09 (New York: Jason Aronson, I984). I 7. Tom Main, "Some Psychodynamics of Large Groups," in The Large Group: Dynamics and Therapy, ed. Lionel Kreeger, 57-86 (Ithaca, N.Y.: F. E. Peacock, I975). I8. Angela P. Dillard, Guess Whos Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conseroatism in America (New York: New York University Press, 20oi). I 9· R. D. Hinshelwood, Thinking about Institutions: Milieux and Madness (London: Jessica Kingsley, zoo I), I 3 I- 34· 20. Pierre Turquet, "Threats to Identity in the Large Group," in The Large Group: Dynamics and Therapy, ed. Lionel Kreeger, 87-I44 (Ithaca, N.Y.: F. E. Peacock, I975). 21. Main, "Some Psychodynamics of Large Groups,'' 68-69, emphasis in the original. 22. C. Fred Alford, Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory: An Account ofArt, Reason and Politics Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I989), 59·

NOTES TO PAGES 120-125

189

23. Turquet, "Threats to Identity," I I8. Turquetuses the term "skin" primarily to denote the boundaries that are erected and defended by individual members of groups, but psychoanalytic political theorists expand the concept to embrace similar psychodynamics of boundaries between groups. See also Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego (London: Karnac, I989). 24. D. Colin James," 'Holding' and 'Containing' in the Group and Society," in The Psyche and the Social World: Developments in Group-Analytic The01y, ed. Dennis Brown and Louis Zinkin (New York: Routledge, I994), 6o. 25. D. W. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (New York: International Universities Press, I965). 26. In Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papen (Levittown, Pa.: Brunner/ Maze!, 1992), 149-50, Winnicott distinguishes between disintegration and unintegration, arguing that the former is a symptom of regression and psychopathology while the latter is a developmental precursor and foundation for psychic integration. 27. W. R. Bion, Elements ofPsycho-Analysis (London: Heineman, I963); Jeremy Holmes, "Attachment Theory: A Secure Base for Policy?" in The Politics ofAttachment: Towards a Secure Society, ed. Sebastian Kraemer and Jane Roberts (London: Free Association Books, 1996), 3 I. 28. On retaliation see Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds ofLove: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, I988). 2 9· Charles Ash bach and Victor L. Schermer, Object Relations, the Self, and the Group (New York: Routledge, 1987), 6I-62. 30. See, for example, Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Err01·: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, I994); and George E. Marcus, W. Russell Neuman, and Michael MacKuen, eds., Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 20oo). 3 I. Judith C. White, "Psychoanalytic Group Psychotherapy with African American Women: The Bad Mother in All-Female Groups," in Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, ed. Leslie C. Jackson and Beverly Greene (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 209. 3 2. For a counterexample that is a political, rather than a psychological, analysis see Chris Bull and John Gallagher, Peifect Enemies: The Religious Right, The Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990s (New York: Crown Publishers, I996). 33· Janice Haaken, Pillar of Salt: Gendn; Mem01y, and the Perils of Looking Back (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, I998), 192. 34· Alexander Payne, Citizen Ruth (New York: Miramax Films, I997). 35· Haaken, Pillar of Salt, I93· 36. C. Fred Alford, Group Psychology as Political Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I994). 37· Andrew Powell, "Towards a Unifying Concept of the Group Matrix," in The Psyche and the Social World: Developments in G1·oup-Analytic Theory, ed. Dennis Brown and Louis Zinkin (New York: Routledge, I 994), I 5. 38. John E. Mack, "The Enemy System," in The Psychodynamics of International Relationships, vol. z: Concepts and Theories, ed. Vamik D. Volkan, Demetrios A. Julius, and Joseph V: Montville (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, I990). 39· Vamik D. Volkan, Bloodlines: From Ethnic P1·ide to Ethnic Ter;o1·ism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, I997), 43· 40. Alford, Melanie Klein, 64. 41. Patrick]. Buchanan, "Address By Patrick]. Buchanan," in Official Repo1"t of the Proceedings ofthe Thirty-Fifth Republican National Convention (Washington, D. C.: Republican N ationa! Committee, I992), 374· 42. bell hooks, Sisters ofthe Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (Boston: South End, 1993), I72. 43· Rafael Moses, "The Leader and the Led: A Dyadic Relationship," in The Psychodynam-

190

NOTES TO PAGES 126-130

ics of International Relationships, val. 1: Concepts and Theories, ed. Vamik D. Volkan, Demetrios A. Julius, and Joseph V. Montville (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, I990), ZII-rz. 44· Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory," in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, ed. Gloria Anzaldua, 335-45 (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation, I99o); Nancie Caraway, Segregated Sisterhood: Racism and the Politics ofAmerican Feminism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, I99I). 45. See arguments against reductive readings of the sources of women's disagreeable passions in Cynthia Burack, The Problem of the Passions: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Social Theory (New York: New York University Press, I994). 46. Zora Neale Hurston, "How it Feels to be a Colored Me," in Telling Stories: An Anthology for W1·iters, ed.Joyce Carol Oates (New York: W W Norton, I998), 274. 47· Angela P. Harris, "Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory," in Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender, ed. Katherine T. Bartlett and Roseanne Kennedy (San Francisco: Westview Press, I990), 254· 48. Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migration of the Subject (New York: Routledge, 1994), 8. 49· Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, I998), 52. so. Elizabeth Abel, "Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics ofFeminist Interpretation," in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Los Angeles: University of California Press, I997), II3. 5 I. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I992). 52. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End, I990), 54· 53· Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, woo), 27. 54· Ibid., 25-26, emphasis in the original. 55. hooks, Yearning, 24. 56. See also Collins's critique of postrnodern theories, which includes both the absence of black women and the alleged failure of the theories adequately to confront race, power, and the role of black women as producers of knowledge. Collins, Fighting Words, 95-I54· 57. hooks, Yearning, 27. 58. Ibid., 29. 59· Collins, Fighting Words, 54· 6o. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs I7, no. 2 (I992): 254-55, 268, 270. 6r. Ibid., 27462. White, "Psychoanalytic Group Psychotherapy," 2 ro. 63. Jean Thomas Griffin, "Black Women's Experience as Authority Figures in Groups," Women's Studies Quarterly I4, nos. r-2 (I986): 7-12. 64. White, "Psychoanalytic Group Psychotherapy," 210. 65. Nancy Boyd-Franklin, "Recurrent Themes in the Treatment of African-American Women in Group Psychotherapy," Women and Therapy I I, no. 2 (I99I): 25-40. 66. White, "Psychoanalytic Group Psychotherapy," 2 I 3. 67. Ibid., 2I7. 68. Pratibha Parmar, "Black Feminism: The Politics of Articulation," in Identity: Community, Culture, Differences, ed.Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, I99o), 103. 69. For an account of racial and sexual politics during the period, see Anna Marie Smith, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality: Britain Ig68-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I994). 70. Jordan, in Parmar, "Black Feminism," I09. 7r. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jemsalem: A Rep011: on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, I994).

NOTES TO PAGES 130-135

191

72. Arendt, in Peter Baehr, ed., The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin, 2000), 393· 73. J ardon, in Parmar, "Black Feminism," I I 3. See also June Jordan, Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (New York: Doubleday, I998). 74· Mary Helen Washington, "How Racial Differences Helped Us Discover Our Common Ground," in Gendered Subjects: The Dynamics ofFeminist Teaching, ed. Margo Culley and Catherine Portuges (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, I985), 229. 75· Patricia Hill Collins, "Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection," in The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States, 2d ed., ed. Joan Ferrante and Prince Brown Jr. (New York: Longman, I998), 491. 76. Audre Lorde, Sister/Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, I984), I69. 77. Geneva Smitherman, ed., African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, I995). 78. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill, eds., Women of Color in U.S. Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, I 994). 79· Collins, Black Feminist Thought and Fighting Words. So. Patricia]. Williams, The Rooster's Egg: On the Persistence ofPrejudice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I995). 8 I. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning ofLiberty (New York: Vintage Books, I999). 82. Melba Patillo Beals, Warrio1"S Don't C1y: A Searing Memoir ofthe Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High (New York: Pocket Books, I994). 8 3. Patricia J. Williams, Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox ofRace (New York: Noonday Press, I998), 31-32. 84. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, I9I· 85. hooks, Sisters of the Yttm, 72. 86. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, I992), 44-45· 87. R. D. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (London: Free Association Books, I 989), 315. 88. Melanie Klein, "Love, Guilt, and Reparation," in Love, Hate, and Reparation, ed. Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere (New York: W W Norton, I964), 330. 89. Melanie Klein, The Writings of Melanie Klein, vol. 3: Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, I946-I963 (New York: Free Press, I975), 64-65. 90. Leith Mullings, On Our Own Terms: Race, Class, and Gender in the Lives ofAfrican American Women (New York: Routledge, I997), I09-30. 91. Wahneema Lubiano, "Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War by Narrative Means," in Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon, I992), 340. 92. Ibid., 331. For an account of tire development of the trope of the "welfare queen," see Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 207. Roberts traces tire evolution of white majority ideation from "worthy white widow to welfare queen." 93· Cheryl L. Thompson, "African American Women and Moral Masochism: When There Is Too Much of a Good Thing," in Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, ed. Leslie C. Jackson and Beverly Greene (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 240. 94· bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End, I 98 I), I I I. 95. Regina E. Romero, "The Icon of the Strong Black Woman: The Paradox of Strength," in Psychotherapy with African Ame1ican Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Pe1"Spectives and Practice, ed. Leslie C. Jackson and Beverly Greene (New York: Guilford Press, 20oo), 226, emphasis in the original. 96. Ella L. ]. Edmondson Bell and Stella M. Nkomo, Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Struggle jo1· Professional Identity (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 200 I), I.

192

NOTES TO PAGES 135-142

97. Ibid., 2 r. 98. Wallace acknowledges her critics and reflects on her early claims in an introduction to the recent edition. 99· Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Verso, I994), IO]. roo. See, for example, Jean Carey Bond and Carole E. Gregory, "Two Views of Black MachoandtheMythoftheSuperwoman," Freedomwaysi9,no. I (I979): 13-26;andLindaC.Powell, "Black Macho and Black Feminism," in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith, 283-92 (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, I983). ror. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 2d ed., I75· Io2. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, I5. I03. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 2d ed., I83 -99· 104- Collins, Fighting Words, 30. 105. hooks, Sisters of the Yam, I 33. Io6. Byllye Y. Avery, "Breathing Life into Ourselves: The Evolution of the National Black Women's Health Project," in Feminism and Community, ed. Penny A. Weiss and Marilyn Friedman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, I995), I48. I 07. Leslie C.] ackson, "The New Multiculturalism and Psychodynamic Theory: Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and African American Women," in Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, ed. Leslie C. ] ackson and Beverly Greene (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 7. ro8. Romero, "Icon of the Strong Black Woman," 225. ro9. Ibid., 22 7-28. I IO. For a more personal narrative on this theme, see Bridgett Davis, "Speaking of Grief: Today I Feel Real Low, I Hope You Understand," in The Black Womens Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves, ed. Evelyn C. White (Seattle: Seal Press, I99o), 226-34. I I I. Romero, "Icon of the Strong Black Woman," 237. I I 2. William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, I99I), ror. I 13· Klein, Writings vol. 3: Envy and Gratitude, I93· I 14. This body of literature is growing. See Caraway, Segregated Sisterhood; and Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). I I5. Sheila Radford-Hill, "Considering Feminism as a Model for Social Change," in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, I986), I67; hooks, Yearning, 89-I02. See also Judith Kegan Gardiner, "Psychoanalysis and Feminism: An American Humanist's View," Signs I7, no. 2 (I992): 452. I I6. bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 1994), 83-90. II]. hooks, Black Looks, I57-64. I I8. Ann duCille, "The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies," Signs I9, no. 3 (I994): 609. II9. Lorde, Sister/Outside1; I27. I20. For an argument in favor of the effects of political solidarities see Nancy L. Rosenblum, Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). I 2 I. Marc Howard Ross, The Culture of Conflict: Interpretations and Interests in Comparative Penpective (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I993), 35·

6.

COALITIONS AND REPARATIVE POLITICS

I. K.imberle Crenshaw, "Intersectionality and Identity Politics: Learning from Violence against Women of Color," in Reconstructing Political Theory: Feminist Penpectives, ed. Mary

NOTES TO PAGES 142-147

193

Lyndon Shanley and Uma Narayan (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, I997), I 78, emphasis in the original. z. Ibid., I8o. 3· Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women ofColor, ed. Cherrfe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, I983), 2 Io-I8. 4· Sheila Radford-Hill, "Considering Feminism as a Model for Social Change," in Feminist Studies, O·itical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, I986), I64-65. 5. For scholarship on the racializing and racist foundations of much white feminism see Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, I988); and Nancie Caraway, Segregated Sisterhood: Racism and the Politics of American Feminism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, I99I). 6. Nora Hall, "African-American Women Leaders and the Politics of Alliance Work," in Bridges of Power: Women s Multicultural Alliances, ed. Lisa Albrecht and Rose M. Brewer (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, I 990), 75. 7. Audre Lorde, Sister/Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, I984), 52· 8. bell hooks, [(jl/ing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt, I995), 224. 9· Stephen A. Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). For another example of intrapsychic conversation or relation (the notion of the "internal saboteur"), see W. R. D. Fairbairn, An Object Relations Theory of the Personality (New York: Basic Books, I954). IO. S. H. Foulkes, Selected Papers of S. H. Foulkes: Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis (London: Karnac Books, I99o), 277-78. II. See, for example, Angela P. Harris, "Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory," in Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender, ed. Katharine T. Bartlett and Rosanne Kennedy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, I99I); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, woo); Kimberle Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics," in Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender, ed. Katharine T. Bartlett and Rosanne Kennedy, 57-80 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, I99I); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience," in Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, ed. Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, I992), 74-92; Pauline Terrelonge, "Feminist Consciousness and Black Women," in Women: A Feminist Perspective, 3d ed., ed. J o Freeman (Palo Alto, Calif.: Mayfield, I984), 557-67; and Valerie Smith, Not Just Race, Not Just Genda·: Black Feminist Readings (New York: Routledge, I998). I2. Crenshaw, "Intersectionality and Identity Politics," I79· 13· Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, "Positive Effects of the Multiple Negative: Explaining the Success of Black Professional Women," American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 4 (I973): 9I235; and Kimberle Crenshaw, "Whose Story is it, Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill," in Race-ing]ustice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction ofSocial Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon Books, I992), 404. I4. Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection." I 5. Compare the conception of multiplicity found in black feminist thought with Jane Flax's critique of the postmodern celebration of multiplicity, which she understands as a valorization of identity fragmentation. Jane Flax, Thinking Fmgments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemp0111ry West (Berkeley: University of California Press, I 990), 218-I9. I6. Harris, "Race and Essentialism," 250. I7. Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Lesbian Ethics: Towards New Value (Palo Alto, Calif.: Institute

194

NOTES TO PAGES 147-151

of Lesbian Studies, I988), 61. For a critique of these theories of subjectivity, see Cynthia Burack, "True or False: The Self in Radical Lesbian Feminist Social Theory," in Playing with Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories, ed. Shane Phelan (New York: Routledge, I997), 3I-50. For the image of the onion, see Jean Grimshaw, "Anatomy and Identity in Feminist Thinking," in Feminist Perspectives in Phikisophy, ed. Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret Whitford (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, I988), 93· I8. Janice Haaken, Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, I998). The "trauma model" is represented at its best by Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence- From DomesticAbuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, I992). I9. See Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, r88o-1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, I997). 20. Although she would not approve of the use to which I put it, I borrow this phrase from Arendt. Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. with an introduction by Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, I978). 2 I. Kendall Thomas," 'Ain't Nothin' Like the Real Thing': Black Masculinity, Gay Sexuality, and the Jargon of Authenticity," in The House that Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage Books, I998), 128-29. 22. W. R. Bion, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (London: Routledge, I989), I45· 23. Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, "Group Phantasies and 'The Individual': A Critical Analysis of Psychoanalytic Group Psychology," Free Associations 20 (I990): I6o. 24. Bernice Johnson Reagon, "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century," in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, I983). 25. Mohanty, "Feminist Encounters," 86. 26. Beverly Greene, "Lesbian Women of Color: Triple Jeopardy," Journal ofLesbian Studies I, no. I (I997): I09-47· 27. SeeJewelle Gomez and Barbara Smith, "Talking about It: Homophobia in the Black Community," Feminist Review 34 (I990): 47-55; Evelynn Hammonds, "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality," Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultuml Studies 6, nos. 2-3 (I994): 126-45; Laura Alexandra Harris, "Queer Black Feminism: The Pleasure Principle," Feminist Review 54 (I996): 3-30. 28. See also Hilda Hidalgo, ed., Lesbians of Color: Social and Human Services (New York: Haworth Press, I995); Greene, "Lesbian Women of Color." 29. Gomez and Smith, "Talking about It," 49· 30. Ibid., 51. 31. Greene, "Lesbian Women of Color," I I I-12. 32· Gomez and Smith, "Talking about It," 52. 33· Rhonda M. Williams, "Living at the Crossroads: Explorations in Race, Nationality, Sexuality, and Gender," in The House that Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vmtage Books, I998), I 52. 34· Lisa Albrecht and Rose M. Brewer, "Bridges of Power: Women's Multicultural Alliances for Social Change," in Bridges of Power: Womens Multicultural Alliances, ed. Lisa Albrecht and Rose M. Brewer (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, I990), 4· 35. Harold H. Saunders, "An Historic Challenge to Rethink How Nations Relate," in The Psychodynamics ofInternational Relationships, vol. I: Concepts and Theories, ed. Vamik D. Volkan, Demetrios A. Julius, and Joseph V Montville (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, I990), I2. 36. Ibid., I5. 37· Shane Phelan, Getting Specific: Postmodern Lesbian Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, I994). 38. I borrow these phrases from, respectively: Adrienne Rich, The Dream ofa Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 (New York: W W Norton, I978); and Gloria I. Joseph and Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives (Boston: South End, I 98 I).

NOTES TO PAGES 152-158

195

39· Janet A. Flammang, Women's Political Voice: How Women are Transforming the Practice and Study ofPolitics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, I997), 297-3I3. 40. Marfa C. Lugones and Pat Alake Rosezelle, "Sisterhood and Friendship as Feminist Models," in Feminism and Community, ed. Penny A. Weiss and Marilyn Friedman (Philadelphia: Temple university Press, I 99 5). I 35-46. See also Hazel v. Carby, "White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood," in Black British Feminism: A Reader, ed. Heidi Safia Mirza, 45-53 (New York: Routledge, I997). 4I. bell hooks, "Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women," in Feminism and Community, eq. Penny A. Weiss and Marilyn Friedman, 293-p 5 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, I 99 5). 42. Patricia Hill Collins, "Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection," in The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States, ed.Joan Ferrante and Prince Brown Jr. (New York: Longman, I998), 492. 43· Ibid., 493· 44· Patricia Williams, The Alchemy ofRace and Rights: Diary ofa Law Professor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I99I), 73· 45. C. Fred Alford, G1·oup Psychology as Political Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale U niversity Press, 1994), 55· 46. John D. Cash, Identity, Ideology and Conflict: The Structuration ofPolitics in Northern Ireland New York: John Wiley & Sons, I995). 4 7. C. Fred Alford, Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory: An Account ofArt, Reason and Politics Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), ro2. 48. Hanna Segal, "From Hiroshima to the Gulf War and After: A Psychoanalytic Perspective," in Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths between Themy and Modern Culture, ed. Anthony Elliott and Stephen Frosh (New York: Routledge, I995), I95· 49· I do not discuss tire vast literature on groups and conflict resolution here because, altirough much of it relies tacitly on psychodynamic ideas and concepts, the reliance is attenuated and frequently implicit. For an example, see Jay Rothman, Resolving Identity-Based Conflict in Nations, Organizations, and Communities (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1997). so. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W W Norton, 1959). sr. Vamik D. Volkan, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: From Clinical Practice to Inte1·national Relationships (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, I988); and Paul Berman, ed., Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments (New York: Delta, I994). 52. Alford, Gmup Psychology, 42. 53· Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (New York: Guilford Press, I993), 30I-28. 54- Patricia Hill Collins, "Learning to Think for Ourselves: Malcolm X's Black Nationalism Reconsidered," in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, ed. Joe Wood (New York: St. Martin's Press, I992), 6r. 55. Patricia J. Williams, "Clarence X, Man of the People," in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, ed. Joe Wood (New York: St. Martin's Press, I992), 193. 56. Ibid., I 97 . 57· Wolfenstein, "Group Phantasies," 169. See also chapter r, "Malcolm X's Words in Clarence Thomas's Mouth: Black Conservatives and the Making of an Intellectual Tradition," in Angela P. Dillard, Guess Who's Coming to Dinnn· Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America (New York: New York University Press, zoo I), 24-55. 58. Cornel West, "Black Leadership and tire Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning," in Race-ingJustice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction ofSocial Reality, ed. Toni Morrison, 390-40I (New York: Pantheon, I992). 59· Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, I983).

196

NOTES TO PAGES 158-164

6o. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 35-36. 61. David Brock, The Rea/Anita Hill: The Untold Story (New York: Free Press, I993), and Blinded by the Right: The Conscience ofan Ex-Conm"Vative (New York: Crown Publishers, zoo I). 62. Vanessa Beasley, "Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Hearings," The Museum of Broadcast Communications, I 995. http://www.museum. tv I archives/ etv/H/htmlH/hill-thomash/hillthomas.htm. 63. For a brief account of the hearings and their aftermath from the perspective of Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, see Joan Steinau Lester, as authorized by Eleanor Holmes Norton, Fire in My Soul (New York: Atria Books, 2003). . 64. Ann Coulter, "Eight More Clarence Thomases," TownHall, 9 February 2001. http: I /www.townhall.com/ columnists/ anncoulter I acwo I 0209.shtml. 65. For a sampling of this literature, see Toni Morrison, ed., Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Powe1·: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction ofSocial Reality (New York: Pantheon, I992); Geneva Smitherman, ed.,AfricanAmerican Women Speak Out on Anita HillClarence Thomas (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, I995); Anita Faye Hill and Emma Coleman Jordan, eds., Race, Gender, and Power in America: The Legacy of the HillThomas Hearings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Anita Hill, Speaking i1-uth to Power (New York: Doubleday, I997);Jane Flax, The American Dream in Black and White: The Clarence Thomas Hearings (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, I998). 66. Sex and Justice: The Highlights of the Anita Hill I Clarence Thomas Hem·ings, dir. Julian Schlossberg and Seymour Wishman, narr. Gloria Steinem (First Run/Icarus Films, I993). 67. Julianne Malveaux, "The Year of the Woman or the Woman of the Year: Was There Really an 'Anita Hill Effect'?" in African Amn·ican Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, I995), I67. 68. Darlene Clark Hine, "For Pleasure, Profit, and Power: The Sexual Exploitation of Black Women," in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, I995), I73· 69. Barbara Ransby, "A Righteous Rage and a Grassroots Mobilization," in African American Speak Out on Anita Hill-Cla1·ence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, I995), 45· In this essay, Ransby relates the grassroots process by which the ad campaign was created. 70. See the following poll questions at Polling the Nations: "Thomas, Clarence: Wbom do you believe more, Judge Thomas or Anita Hill?" I5 October I99I; "Hill, Anita: Wbat is your impression of Anita Hill?" I 5 October I99I; "Hill, Anita: Do you think that in the hearings this week the Senate Judiciary Committee have treated Anita Hill fairly, or not fairly?" I4 October I 991. http://poll.orspub.com/pollllpext.dll?f=templates&fn =main-h.htm. 7 r. See, for example, a Roper poll commissioned by the WiJshington Post and ABC News, "Thomas, Clarence: Do you now believe Anita Hill was sexually harassed by Clarence Thomas?" Polling the Nations, I8 December I992. http:/ /poll.orspub.com/poll/lpext .dll?f=templates&fn=main-h.htm; Michel McQueen, "Politics & Policy: Polled Voters Show Broad Agreement on Outcome of the Thomas Hearings," Willi Street Journal, I 7 October I99I. htrp://www.aidsinfobbs.org/ articles/wallstj/ 9Ih 77. 72.]. Scott Armstrong and Fred Collopy, "How Serious Are the Methodological Issues in Surveys? A Reexamination of the Clarence Thomas Polls," I 994· htrp://www-marketing .wharton.upenn.edu/ideas/pdf/arMstrong-thomasaffair.pdf. 73· Ann Coulter, Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right (New York: Crown, 2002), I22. 74· On black women's strategies for responding to violations of sexual integrity see Darlene Clark Hine, "Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women: Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance," in Hine Sight: Black Women and The Re-Construction ofAmerican History, 3748 (New York: Carlson, I 994). 75. See, for example, articles by Hill and Julianne Malveaux published in Ms. in the winter and spring of I992: Anita Hill, "The Nature of the Beast," Ms. rr, no. 4 (January/Feb-

NOTES TO PAGES 164-167

197

ruary I992): p-33; Julianne Malveaux, "What You Said about Race," Ms. I I, no. 6 (May/ June I992): 24-30. 76. Geneva Smitherman, Introduction to African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Cla1·ence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, I995), 7· 77. See, for example, Susan Watson, "Observations of a Journalist on the Wretched Spectacle," in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, I995); Joy James, "Anita Hill: Martyr Heroism & Gender Abstractions," Black Scholm· 22, no. Ilz (I992): I7-20. 78. Jessica Henderson Daniel, "The Courage to Hear: African American Women's Memories of Racial Trauma," in Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, ed. Leslie C. Jackson and Beverly Greene (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), qo-3 I; Kimberlyn Leary, "Race in Psychoanalytic Space," Gender and Psychoanalysis 2, no. 2 (I997): I64. 79· See the repudiation of identity politics in Flax, American Dream in Black and White.

INDEX

Abolition movement, 69 Abortion, I 22 Acting out, 63, 64, 7I Acton Institute, I 6 I Adams, Henry, I "African American Women in Defense of Ourselves," I63 Afrocentrism, 57, 72, 99, rzS A. K. Rice Institute, 45 Alford, C. Fred, so, 53, 7I, 96, I 54; on leadership, 6o, 65, 66, 77 American Enterprise Institute, I6I Anti-Semitism, I4, IS, I9, 20, ISS Arendt, Hannah, 64, I 30 Army-McCarthy Hearings, I6o Ashcroft, John, I 6 I Assimilation, I67 Attachment, II6 Authenticity, 76, 95-96, wo-ws, I I 3, I 59 Avery, Byllye, I 37

Black nationalism, 87, Ioo, 104, ISO, I 57, I83n76 Black Panthers, I o I Black Power movement, I 36 Black Skin/White Masks, 30-3 I Bonaparte, Marie, 20 Boundaries: group, 73-75, 8I, 9s, rzo, I40, I 56, I 58; individual, 23, 45 Bowlby, John, 24, II6 Britain, 26, 98, I 30 British Psycho-Analytical Society, 36, 44 Brock, David, I6o Brown, Elaine, I85n39 Brown, Elsa Barkley, Io9 Brown, Wendy, Io2-3 Buchanan, Pat, 124-25, I33 Buhle, MariJo, 2I Bunch, Charlotte, 62 Bush, George W, 3, I24, I6I Bush, George H. W, I24, I6I

Baker, Houston A., Jr., I IO Balint, Alice, 24 Balint, Michael, 24 Barnett, Bernice McNair, I88m Barrett, Michele, 48 Basic assumption group, II?-I8, I23, I48-49, ISS; pairing, II8; fight-flight, II 8, I 55. See also Bion, Wilfred Beals, Melba Patillo, I 33 Berlin, 36 Beyond the Masks: Race, Gende,- and Subjectivity, s6 Bion, Wilfred, 35·44-48, so-p, II?-23, I48-49· IS4 Black Feminist Thought, 24, 72 Black Hamlet, I6

Capitalism, I02 Cash,John, so,s3, s6,6o,6I, I08 Cato Institute, I6I CBS News/New Yo,-k Times polls, I63 China, II8 Chodorow, Nancy, 22-24, 26, 27, 28 Christian, Barbara, 72 Christian Right, IOI, I6I Citizenship, I09, IIO, I20 Citizen Ruth, I22-2 3 Civil Rights Act, I99I, I6o Civil rights movement, 62, 69, I36 Civil War, I09 Claremont Institute, I6I Cleaver, Kathleen, 70 Cold war, I, 9· SI, I IS, 124

200

INDEX

Collins, Patricia Hill, I9, 24, 67-72, So, 104, 133, 136-37, 157; critiques of, 86S7, 99; on groups, IoS, 126-27, I3I-J2, ISZ-53· I58 Colonialism, 3I, 40-4I, So Colored Women's Progressive Association, I29 Combahee River Collective, I43 Conformity, 45, 65, 73, 96, Ioo, I02 Containing, 117, 120-21, 124-25, IJI. See also Holding Congress, U.S.: I992 election, 16o; 2002 election, 3, 79 Constitution, U.S., 28, Coulter, Ann, I6I, 164 Court Reporting Services, Inc., I 25 Crenshaw, Kimberle, I42, 146, I48 Davies, Carole Boyce, 126 Davis, Angela, 67, 70, 109 Death instinct, 106 Defenses. See Idealization; Projection; Projective identification; Splitting Dependence, 65 Depressive position, 38-41, 51, 57, 59, 61. See also Paranoid-schizoid position Deutsch, Helene, 20 Dickerson, Bette, 86 Dillard, Angela, I I 9 Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 22-2 3 DiStefano, Christine, 1S5ll43 Drakulic, Slavenko, I86n55 DuBois, W E. B., I 10 duCille, Ann, 139 Dumas, Rhetaugh Graves, 6S Ego Ideal, Ioo Eichmann in Jerusalem, I 3o Empathy, S2, I 52-53 Engels, 86 Enslavement, 8o, 109 Enemies: construction of 51, 65, 74, 79So, II2, 11S, I23-25; orientation toward, 84,95, 13I-33 Essence, 25 Essentialism, 7 Ethnic cleansing, 64 Ettin, Mark, 47 "Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger," 78 False self, 39 Fanon, Frantz, 30-3I

Farrakhan, Louis, 104, I 10 Feminism and Psychoanalysis, 2 3 Ferenczi, Sandor, 36 Fighting Words, 99 Flammang,Janet, 152 Fliegende Bliittn·, I4 Florida, Eatonville. See Hurston, Zora Neale Foulkes, S. H., 112 Frankfurt School, I I I Freud, Anna, 20,36 Freud, (Sigmund), I2, 30,46-50, I 56; and the founding of psychoanalysis, 10-IS, 20, 36,46-so,9o, 116,145-46 Fromm, Erich, III Fuss, Diana, 177n52 Gallop,Jane, I39 Gates,HenryLouis,Jr., p, IIO Genocide, 20, so, S4, I 55 Germany, I07 Giddings, Anthony, 58 Gilman, Sander, IJ, 15 Gender-neutral language, 7 Glass, James M., 92 Gomez,Jewelle, ISO Greene, Beverly, I 5o, 175n94 Groupishness, 45, 64, 92, 102, 116 Guilt, 40, 55, 59, 61, 6S, 83, 91 Gutmann, Amy, 169n3 Haaken,Janice, I22-23 Hall, Nora, 144 Hall, Stuart, 56 Hamer, Fannie Lou, I29 Harris, Angela, 32, 126, 146 Havel, Vaclav, 70 Heartland Coalition for the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas, I62 Hegel, G. W. F., 30 Heritage Foundation, 161 Herman, Didi, IS6n6I Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, Ioo, 128 Hill, Anita, 7, 6S, 94, I09-IO, I35, I6o66 Hine, Darlene Clark, I62 Hinshelwood, R. D., II9 Holding, II7, 120-21,124-25,131. See also Containing Holocaust, I03 Homophobia, I9, IS6n6I; internalized, 94 hooks, bell, I9, 96-9S, I04, 108, 110-11, 127, I35, 139; critiques of, S6-S7,

INDEX

184nz7; on groups, 79, 93-94, 124-25, 133, 144, 152; on psychoanalysis, 12, 32 Horney, Karen, 20 Humanities, 3-4, 22 Hurston, Zora Neale, 126 Idealization, 4, 42-43, 55, 77, 81-83, 134, 138-39 Identification, 23, 103, IIS-I6, 129, 148, 159, 165, 167; destructive effects of, 9293, 105, 131 Identity, Ideology and Conflict: The Structuration ofPolitics in Northern Ireland, 56, 58 Independent Women's Forum, 161 Inequality, 1, 6, 52-54, 78, 93, 152 Ingraham, Laura, 161 "In the Closet of the Soul," 75-76 Internalization. See Homophobia, internalized; Racism, internalized International relations, 112. See also Social sctences lntersectionality, 96, 146 Introducing Melanie Klein, 36 Jackrnan,~ary, 54 Jacques, Elliott, 47, 92 James, Joy, 86-87, 187n77 Janis, Irving, 118 Jordan, June, 130 Joyce, Joyce A., 110 Julius, Demetrios, 112 Jung, Carl, 15-16, 32

Kaminer, Wendy, 40 Kardiner, Abram, 21 KKK, I8 Klein, ~elanie: and early object relations theory, zo, 25, 29, 35-41,43-44, 106, 176m9; and group theory, 26, 46, 5051, 59 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 58, 61 Kovel,Joel, 17-18, 28-30 Lacan,Jacques, 30, 32, 36 Ladies Home Journal, 2 5 Lasch, Christopher, 21 Leadership, reparative, 63-66, 71, 77, So, Sz, 85, 125 Leary, Kimberlyn, 175n93 Lesbian(s), I0-11, 91, 103, 107, 147; and group anxiety, 81, 96, 99, 149-50 Liberal theory, 53, 74, 100, 102; individualism, 38, 73• 74• I67

201

Little Rock nine. See Beals, ~elba Patillo Lorde, Audre, z6, 108, 139, on relations among black women, 72, 78-79, 93, 96, 131-32, 144 Loury, Glenn, 162 Lubiano, Wahneema, 68, 110, 134 Lugones, ~aria, 152 Lynching, 109, 129; anti-lynching activism, 83 Lyth, Isabel ~enzies, 47 112 139 ~ain Tom, 185n37 ~alcolmX, 19,157 ~alveaux, Julianne, 162 ~ama, Amina, IS, 26-27, 34· 56-sS, 1045· 1 47 ~arable, ~anning, no, 185nso ~arx(ism), II, 54, 56, 60, 86-87 ~aryland, University of, 1so ~asculinity, 14, 99, 110-11, 122 ~atriarchy, 21, z6, 67, 68, 134· See also Strong black woman ~cDowell, Deborah, 110, 139 Mermaid and the Minotaur, The, 2 3 ~iddle East, 89 ~iller, Alice, p Miller, Jean Baker, 91 ~illion ~an ~arch, 110 ~itchell, Charlene, 86 ~irror phase, 56. See also Lacan ~itchell, Juliet, 22-2 3 ~ohanty, Chandra, 149 ~orrison, Toni, 28-29, 85, 127 ~otherhood, 74, 136-37 ~ourning, 78, 83-85, 107 ~oynihan, Daniel Patrick, 21, 67-68, 133 "~rs. Klein," 36 ~uhammad, Elijah, 157 ~ullings, Leith, 26 ~ulticulturalism, 7 ~urray, Charles, 133 ~ack,John,

~adonna,

NAACP, I6I Narcissism of minor differences, 73· I 56 Narcissistic injury, 84 National Black Women's Health Project, 1 37 National Organization for Women, 162 National Socialism, 92, 111 National Urban League, 161 Nation oflslam, 157

202

INDEX

Nazi. See National Socialism Negritude. See Afrocentrism New Litemry History, 110 New Right. See Christian Right New York Times, 162 Northern Ireland, 89; Unionism, 53, 58, 6o-61, 108 Norton, Eleanor Holmes, 196n63 Object relations, 5, 7, 24-27, 35-38,48. See also Pychoanalysis, relational Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), 129 Ovesey, Lionel, 21 Paglia, Camille, 139 Palmer, Phyllis, 18 Paranoid-schizoid position, 38-43, 51, 5761, 106-8, 120-22, q8. See also Depressive position Parmar, Pratibha, 104, 130 Patterson, Orlando, 162 Payne, Alexander, 122 Performativity, 56 Philipson, Ilene, 21 Phillips, Adam, 36 Pine, Malcolm, so Polling the Nations, 196nn70-71 Powell, Colin, 110, 157 Ptrwer of Feelings, The, 24, 27 Pratto, Felicia, 187n81 Psychoanalysis: early object relations, 7, 22, 27, 35-38, 134· I7Sni; Freudian, s6; Lacanian, 3, 48, 55-56; relational group, 45 - 56, 61, 6 5, 73 , 9 2, us-18, 139 , 145 ; relational psychoanalysis and feminism, 32 -34. 94 Projection, 42-43, 101; projection in groups, 49, 78, 105, 112, 117-21, 145, I 56; projection and leadership, 76, I 24. See also Projective identification Projective identification, 42-44, 57, 76, 78, 93· 119, 145 Psychoanalytical Review, 15 Psychoanalytic political theory, 5-6 Psychotherapy with African American Women: Innovations in Psychodynamic Perspectives and Practice, 1 37 Quayle, Dan, 133 Racism, 85, 90, 99, 115,; black feminists on, 26, 83, 108-10, 127-30, 144; inter-

nalized, 78, 93; psychoanalytic approaches to, 10-20, 30-33, 104-5, in the women's movement, 81, q6-38, 165 Racism and Psychiatry, 15 Radford-Hill, Sheila, 143 Ransby, Barbara, 162 Reagan, Ronald, 161, 164 Reagon, Bernice Johnson, 75, 149, 158 Reality testing, u8-19, 123, 125, 133 Regent University, 161 Reparation, 39-42, 59-61, III, 133; mock/manic reparation, 40, 68. See also Depressive position Reparative therapy, 44 Reproduction ofMothering, The, 23-27 Republican National Convention (1992), 124-25 Riviere, Joan, 36 Roberts, Dorothy, 191 n92 Robertson, Pat, 161 Romero, Regina, 137-38 Rose, Jacquelyn, 16 Rosezelle, Pat, 152 Ross, Marc Howard, 140 Rustin, Michael, q, 17 Rwanda, 89 Sachs, Wulf, 16 Salome, Lou Andreas, 20 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 30 Saunders, Harold, 151 Segal, Hanna, 154-55 Segregation, 109, 129 Senate Judiciary Committee, 68, 94, 109, 135· 160-63 September 11, 2001, 107, 124; Pentagon, 132; World Trade Center, 132 Sex and Justice, 162 Sexual harassment, 160, 163 Sharpton, AI, 104 Sidanius,James, 187n81 Sillen, Samuel, 15 Simpson, Michael A., 182n68 Smith, Anna Marie, 186n62 Smith, Barbara, I so, I s8 Social sciences, 3-4, 22, 24 Solidarity, 99, IIS-II7, 123-33,140-42, 148, 163, 167 South Asia, 89 Soviet Union, 118 Spillers, Hortense, II, 31, 33, 45, 115 Spivak, Gayatti, 54

203

INDEX

Splitting: in individuals, 39, 42-43, 57; in groups,8o,82,93, 122, I39, I45 Standpoint theory, 99 State of nature, 53 Steinem, Gloria, I62 Strong black woman, 94, I35-38 Sudbury, Julia, 26, 76, 98-99 Suffrage,83 Supreme Court, U.S., rp, rs8, r63, r66 Tate, Claudia, II-IS, 34 Tavistock Model of Group Relations, 4S Terrorism, so, rss Third Reich. See National Socialism Thist!ethwaite, Susan, I I Thomas, Alexander, I 5 Thomas, Clarence, 68, I09-IIO, rp, I3S, I57, r6o-66 Tolerance, 39 Track two diplomacy, ro6, ISS Transference, 49, 76, 77, Trauma,49,6r, 8s, 88, I47 Vienna, 36 Volkan, Vamik, 6o, 6s-66, 7I-73, 77, 8485, 95, Walker, Alice, 75-76, ros Wallace, Michele, 136, r84m7 Walton, Jean, r2, 28-30 Washington, Mary Helen, I 3 I Watergate, r6o

Welfare, 68 Welfare queen, 68, 135 Wells, Ida B., I29 West, Cornel, 79, IIO, rs8 White, Deborah Gray, 82 White, E. Francis, 55,99-100, I79-8om White,Judith, I22, 129 Wieseltier, Leon, 53 Williams, Linda, I6I Williams, Patricia, r2, 32, 76-77, 94, Io4, 133, 153, 157 Williams, Rhonda, r 50 Wilmer, Franke, I03 Winnicott, Donald, 24-2s, 36-39,42, !20-2!

Wolf, Alexander, 46 Wolfenstein, E. Victor, I I, I7-I9, s2, 6o, 157, I78n72 Wollheim, Richard, ro6 Women for Judge Thomas, r6r-62 Work group, rr7, 148, 154-55 World War I, 44, 107 World War II, 92 Women's rights movement, 69 Women's Studies, 3 Working through, 76-77, 90, 94 Wright, Nicolas, 36 Year of the Woman, I6o Yugoslavia, 89, 103 Yaung-Bruehl, Elisabeth, I7, I9 Young, Iris, 97

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND SOCIAL THEORY A SERIES

EDITED

BY

C. FRED ALFORD JAMES M. GLASS

Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting BY RUTH LINN

Speaking through the Mask: Hannah Arendt BY NORMA CLAIRE MORUZZI

Inside/Outside Nietzsche: Psychoanalytic Explorations BY EUGENE VICTOR WOLFENSTEIN

,!7IA8A1-eijdhc!