Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference (The Psychotherapy Series, 1) [2011 ed.] 0299169243, 9780299169244, 0333964578

Citation preview

Internal Racism

Internal Racism A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference

M. Fakhry Davids Consultant Editor: Ann Scott

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Reprinted by Bloomsbury Academic, 2022 Copyright © M. Fakhry Davids 2011 Foreword © Ann Scott 2011 M. Fakhry Davids has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. ix-x constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-0-3339-6457-6 ePDF: 978-0-2303-5762-4

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for Zaib, Taufiq, Faadil, Zahra

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Foreword

xi

1 Introduction The Impact of Racism Racism Inside and Out Psychoanalysis and Racism: A Problematic Engagement This Book Terminology: The “Racial Other”

1 1 6 7 11 15

Part I Internal Racism 2 A Clinical Study of a Racist Attack A Comfortable Beginning The Attack Countertransference A Paranoid Transference A Defensive Organization Built Upon Ethnic Difference Supporting Evidence Conclusion

19 19 21 23 25 28 32 35

3 Theoretical Considerations Defensive Organizations Theory of Internal Racism Internal Racism in Normal Development Conclusion

37 37 42 54 63

4 An Established Racist Organization Background The Analysis An Anti-Semitic Defensive Organization Evidence of Analytic Progress Discussion Conclusion vii

65 65 66 73 76 80 81

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CONTENTS

5 Analysing Racism in a Group Context Structure of the Event A Small Group Discussion Conclusion Part II

83 83 85 86 95 104

The Psychoanalytic Context

6 Frantz Fanon: The Black Problem The Black Problem Mannoni’s Psychology of Colonialism Theory Race/Class Difference and the Oedipus Complex Fanon’s Theory Conclusion

107 108 115 121 124 134 142

7 Psychoanalysis and Racism: Anti-Semitism The Psychoanalytic Silence on Race Anti-Semitism Conclusion

144 144 152 172

8 White–Black Racism Anti-Black Racism Psychoanalysis and the Racial/Cultural Other Clinical Encounters Across the Racial Divide Conclusion

175 175 181 189 201

Part III Application 9 Institutional Racism The Racism of Everyday Life Institutional Racism Identifying Hidden Racism Individual and Institution Conclusion

205 205 207 211 218 227

Concluding Remarks

229

Notes

232

Bibliography

237

Index

249

Acknowledgements

My journey towards an understanding of racism in the mind has been a long one, and I guess memories of apartheid South Africa, where I grew up, fuelled my motivation to undertake and persevere with it. In the first instance I must acknowledge my parents, whose commitment to our education during those years, even when it entailed considerable personal sacrifice, ensured that I ended up with the tools with which to tackle this task. Words cannot adequately repay my indebtedness to them. Many others helped along the way – some with small gestures of support, others with indispensible assistance when it was most needed. I am grateful to them all. Analysts do not thrive outside of an analytic home, and I am very fortunate to have had the British Psychoanalytical Society, and the broader psychoanalytic scene in London, as mine. Here, I have drawn inspiration and support from many over the years – some, inspiring teachers, supervisors and mentors; others, supportive friends and colleagues ready for critical engagement. I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to them, though I could not possibly mention all by name. It is, however, a special pleasure to single out two exceptional psychoanalysts, Elizabeth Bott Spillius and Ruth Riesenberg Malcolm, whose generosity to me over the years, both personal and professional, I am most profoundly grateful for. Analysis is not possible without patients, and it is a privilege to treat people who, by granting one access to their minds, allow knowledge of the mind to deepen. Though they must remain anonymous I thank them all. The idea for this book was suggested to me by Ann Scott, my Consultant Editor. Writing while carrying a full analytic practice and raising a family is not easy, and she has ensured that the project was kept alive over the years. A clear thinking clinician well-versed in theory, Ann’s engagement with the topic and appreciation of the approach I was trying to take meant that I could always look forward to a fruitful interchange over issues that exercised me as I worked. She has the gift of the understated, ix

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tactful suggestion which, with hindsight, turns out to have been quite indispensible – the structure of the book is one example of this. I thank her for her interest in the subject and her unstinting commitment, involvement and support. Catherine Gray, Commissioning Editor at Palgrave Macmillan, gave invaluable and generous feedback on earlier drafts. She will be aware how much that has improved the book’s overall accessibility, for which I am most grateful. Work on the book would not have been possible without the active involvement and support of my wife, Zaib. I have come to take for granted her astute observations on the vicissitudes of difference in the world, as well as the sheer pleasure of having a partner with whom one can discuss things in depth. Her ongoing input is woven into the book’s fabric, and it is impossible to say how it might have turned out without her presence. A companion on the journey, she is, in the words of the poet, “true – like ice, like fire”. In addition, she and our children, Taufiq, Faadil and Zahra, often had to manage without me and I thank them most sincerely for their forbearance and love, without which writing would not have been possible. I am grateful, too, to members of our extended family in general for their support, to Rabia Ahmad and Taufiq Dawood for research assistance, and to them and Kauser Ahmed for feedback on some of the chapters. Though “the book” is now part of the family, we are all glad its time to leave home is upon us. London, October 2010

Foreword

We live, increasingly, within political and social cultures whose official language opposes racism and celebrates difference. At the same time, racism – whether individual or institutional – continues to exist, and its effects continue to reverberate, in subtle or more obvious ways. How we are to understand the provenance and nature of this racism is the project of this remarkable book. It is remarkable in the way that it moves between the consulting room of intensive analytic work, the interactive spaces of group relations work, textual commentary on earlier psychoanalytic writers on racism, and the language of contemporary public inquiry. Despite its focus on the momentby-moment nature of human experience, at both conscious and unconscious levels, Internal Racism never forgets that the self is psychosocial and that all of us exist within the broader canvas of an external world, and, increasingly, a global culture whose conditions of existence cannot be read off from an intrapsychic state alone. The book is the fruit of ten years’ work. As Fakhry Davids acknowledges, there is a long history of psychoanalytic engagement with race and difference, and a growing body of contemporary clinical writing on racialized interchanges in the consulting room. But what concepts are the most productive in furthering this debate? Davids takes the view that racism should not be approached as an area of applied psychoanalysis but rather as one for proper clinical investigation. To that end, he believes that the work can remain within well-established analytic principles. His claim is that internal racism is a universal feature of the human mind – as he terms it, a ‘paranoid, us–them construction involving self and racial other as a permanent feature’. He argues the need for a psychoanalytic account that attends to the race/class divide in the way that the theory of the Oedipus complex attends to the gender divide. In developing this ambitious position, a number of perspectives are brought to bear. The book is centrally located within recent debate on the pathological organization; equally, xi

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as it pertains to a model of normal development, it bears on metapsychological inquiry and conceptual research. At the heart of the book is an attention to the fine grain of the clinical encounter. Davids is working in a Kleinian tradition, particularly that associated with Betty Joseph’s attention to momentby-moment changes in the session, ‘in behaviour, feeling and atmosphere’, as Michael Feldman and Elizabeth Spillius put it in their discussion of Joseph’s approach.1 It is this framework which enables Davids to look, say, beyond a moment of apparent ease, within the consulting room, to something more disturbing and more concealed. In the presentation of an anti-semitic defensive organization in one of his patients, for example, he observes that ‘the sense of bonhomie between us as citizens of a racially tolerant London was meant to blind me to these conflicted racial dynamics’. In doing so he conveys most delicately the precise nature of the interaction between his patient and himself at different levels, and illustrates his commitment to the ‘well-established principles’ of analytic work he has already referenced. Such moments of astuteness and receptivity, which bring the external world into the consulting room in a deft way, run through the book. As he says, the level of clinical detail that he chooses to present in the book is unusual in current clinical research. It allows him to deepen his clinical accounts, to work with different strata of meaning. It is particularly valuable at a time when concerns about confidentiality have led some writers to shorten their clinical accounts, or to give brief vignettes only. Davids’ approach also allows the reader to consider the evidence for his interpretations, in each of the clinical cases that he presents. He interrogates his clinical data in a reflective and dispassionate way, sharing his own mental processing, not only ‘thinking under fire’, as Bion famously put it, but in processes of iteration over time. There is a density and subtlety in his clinical accounts. His patients are vivid, their conflicts and splits convincingly and compassionately portrayed. A similar density attaches to Davids’ accounts of group relations work. While the organizing principle of the therapeutic dyad might be seen as the flow of transferencecountertransference, the organizing principle in group relations work turns on the capacity of the group to work to its primary task, or to be derailed by anti-task phenomena. In a moving account of a study group, in South Africa, reflecting on

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post-apartheid process – which we could take as emblematic of social relations across the race divide – Davids brings the same close attention to bear. The reader is ‘in’ the room, through the author’s close observation of interactions within the group, verbal and affective. This work is in the tradition of systemspsychodynamics and its attention, following Isabel Menzies Lyth – whose work Davids makes use of – to the ‘exporting’ of anxiety to a wider, institutional system. It allows him to posit an unconscious purpose served by (for example) Equal Opportunities Units in public bodies. Davids importantly extends this work by considering the extent to which public institutions can be ‘recruited into playing the role of repositories for racist guilt’, with case studies involving inquiries into two deaths in the UK which – quite properly – became part of the national conversation in recent years. As Davids writes, in the opening sentence of Internal Racism, ‘To be black in a white world is an agony’. It is a bald, searing statement. He is the first to acknowledge that progressive social or political change requires intervention ‘beyond the psychic’. But it is in his study of the relationship between intrapsychic and social – in all its subtle nuance – that he helps us to understand and theorize more precisely the nature of that agony, experienced, as it may often be, in the most imperceptible of attacks. Ann Scott Member, British Association of Psychotherapists Editor-in-Chief, British Journal of Psychotherapy Literary Executor, Isabel Menzies Lyth

1

Introduction

The Impact of Racism To be black in a white world is an agony. This is because the white world is racist – if you are black, you are seldom allowed to be an ordinary, regular human being. Instead, at every turn you are confronted by hidden stereotypes that can spring to life in a flash, push violently into you, destabilize you and make you think, feel and act in ways that are wholly determined from the outside, as if you yourself had no say in the matter. This can turn even the most innocuous of situations utterly fraught. Here is an example of one such moment recounted by a British actor, comedian and broadcaster: Sanjeev Bhaskar got his first taste of a traditional British curry house – and of the traditional British attitudes sometimes on the menu alongside the chicken tikka masala – when he was a business studies student at Hatfield Polytechnic. He’d gone out with a group of mates to an Indian restaurant. The menus had been passed round, the lagers and poppadums ordered. Then attention turned to the one non-white person in the room who wasn’t a waiter. “It is one of the most uncomfortable experiences I’ve had in a restaurant,” recalls Bhaskar. “Somebody said to me: ‘Well you’ll obviously order the hottest thing on the menu.’ And I felt tricked into ordering it. Obviously, in my mind it was me in an Indian restaurant. But to everyone else I was an Indian in an Indian restaurant. And at that point I suddenly became aware of who I was and how unpleasant it all was.” It had never occurred to Bhaskar before that the heat of a curry was an indication of anything other than how long it had been on the boil. It hadn’t really sunk in – despite . . . having endured a pretty tough time at school – that to many 1

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of those around him he wasn’t just another bloke, another student. He was foreign, different. (Graf, 2007, p. 48) The setting for this incident could hardly be more routine and ordinary. Yet the effect of that single remark, “Well you’ll obviously order the hottest thing on the menu,” transforms things totally. It is as if a chasm momentarily opens up in Bhaskar’s mind, allowing someone else’s idea of what he wants to enter – to lodge itself there, to seize control of his voice and to speak in his own voice – so that there can be no denying that the preference being uttered is his. A mere fraction of a second later the deed is done and things return to normal. Now he can observe with his own eyes what has just taken place, and what he sees is shocking: in the deftest way possible he has been put back into his proper place – that of a black foreigner in a white land. Where has he been not to have recognized this fact before? Has he been deluded, thinking of himself as an Englishman? On the outside, meanwhile, the bonhomie among equals continues, his white companions apparently unaware of the drama taking place inside him. What does one do in a situation like this? Were he to halt the proceedings and confront his assailant, he risks being seen as an Indian with a chip on his shoulder about race. The other person was, after all, asking an innocent question that Bhaskar’s hypersensitivity about his race/culture, now revealed, has blown out of all proportion. This confirms that the problem is in his mind, not in that of his assailant. Were he to let it pass, on the other hand – as he did – he stands accused of keeping quiet about what is, after all, the kind of categorization that ends in the openly racist refrain, “Paki Go Home!” Again, the problem – now, guilt associated with racism – is in his mind. Following the incident, therefore, a quiet life is out of the question as far as the victim is concerned. Alone in company, it is Bhaskar who is left to process the experience of how “unpleasant it was to be him”, whilst his assailant is free to move on. It is worth noting that to characterize this as “one of the most uncomfortable experiences I’ve had in a restaurant” hardly does justice to what has taken place. Replayed in slow motion and viewed close-up, as I have just done, it becomes clear that we are dealing with nothing short of a psychotic moment. A rupture in the continuity of his being – that ongoing sense we all have of

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being more or less in control of our insides, of what uniquely sets “me” apart from “them”, which underpins our capacity to be with others – has taken place, allowing the other to march in and to take possession of the self. This is a serious matter, especially when the interchange takes place in a white world where power cleaves along the colour line. Writing in another time and place, Frantz Fanon (1952) characterized this use of one’s blackness – one’s difference from the white – as forcefully tossing the black person into an arid area of non-being from which he has, somehow, to gather together once more the now-fractured strands of his being. Let me relate another incident that can help flesh out further what is involved. You are driving along in your perfectly unremarkable car when a policeman stops you on a technicality – say, one of your tail lights isn’t working. You sense trouble: you are bound to get a ticket, an on-the-spot fine, or be required to produce evidence of a working tail light within days, which is, at the very least, a nuisance. An apology is worth a try. So you explain that you were unaware of the fact and are grateful to him for having alerted you to it. You will have it put right forthwith. Might politeness elicit kindness in return? Might you be let off with a warning, bringing things to a speedy conclusion? Who knows? His face, however, tells you he is unmoved. He wants to see your driving licence, the car’s certificate of roadworthiness and your motor insurance papers, all of which the law requires you to produce on request, though hardly anyone carries them. You have only one of them, so you’re in the wrong again. Will this make it worse? It turns out that this second offence occasions meticulous scrutiny of the piece of paper that you do have ostensibly to confirm your identity and so on. But why – surely he can’t be thinking this clapped-out old banger is a stolen car? Once he is done with you, however, the car itself turns into an object of intense suspicion – registration details are relayed back to base, and then he goes through it literally from bumper to bumper. Can he be looking for drugs? Surely not! As this charade goes on and on, you become convinced that you have, unfortunately, been singled out to be his victim in today’s power game. Rage, which builds, has to be checked, for you notice that the clock has ticked and you are now in

4

INTRODUCTION

danger of being late for your next appointment. You must avoid unnecessary delay. Don’t make a fuss. If you lose your cool (as you feel like doing), you will probably just provoke him further. You recall hearing that blacks are often arrested for “obstructing police officers in performing their duty”, so you shut up hoping that, at the very least, this will not complicate matters further. In addition, there is an almost palpable sense that he is aware of your discomfort and is enjoying it: is that summons for you to produce the missing paperwork not being filled out painstakingly slowly? “Can you please spell that again for me, sir?”, “No sir, I am required to complete this form myself.” It dawns on you that clemency is having the day off and, with the die cast, you throw caution to the wind and object to the delay, saying that you have to see a patient at your clinic in a few minutes. And now, with a distinct note of triumph, he trumps you with, “Sorry sir, it’s the law.” And, are you imagining it or has the checking and rechecking of details become even more cumbersome? By the end of this, you feel truly done over and put in your place: that of a black outsider who dared to presume that you could be a regular citizen of a multi-cultural European metropolis. Who did you think you were? And that ignites a seething cauldron that rocks you to the core, leaving you feeling that you could easily join a mob on a wild rampage against the sheer injustice of it all. When you speak to your friends you realize that blacks and whites react differently. Blacks seem to know what you are talking about, but seem amazed that you expect them to revisit something so utterly awful that, if one had any sense, it would be best to leave it be. Light-hearted banter and laughter are medicines of choice. “It happens every day”, “Don’t take it so personally”, “We are brothers in this together”, or, more seriously, “When push comes to shove they are basically against us. We know that, though many whites pretend otherwise”, “We’ll always be outcasts”, and “It’s just the way the world is, bro”. A paranoid view seems to suffice, and when you challenge this, you are met with, “True, but nothing will ever change, will it, so why bother?” White friends, on the other hand, seem a little too willing to show how aware they are of such troubling outrages on the street, and want to think seriously about them. No, they do not

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think the police would treat a white person in that way – though the police themselves would dispute this – and yes, an element of racism must be at play. Some police are out-and-out racists. But is it race? Perhaps the police are just morons who prey on any vulnerable group. Your more sophisticated friends suggest that these officers, lower middle class at best, compensate for their own inferiority by abusing their authority in order to lord it over blacks and so on. Or, they may just be plain envious – why tell them you work in a clinic but not as a cleaner? Such conversations feel manic: they fill your head with a whirl of ideas that pull you out of your misery. But has political correctness crept in? Are you to take comfort from the idea that we are vastly superior to them, thereby not resolving your problem but relocating it – in them? Where the policeman forcefully pushed you out, your white friends invite you in, offering you the comfort of belonging and pushing them out into the underworld of idiots where they belong. But, unlike your black friends’ offer, this one seems forced. They seem to be trying too hard to empathize with you, to establish common ground, to show that they too know what it is like to come up against blind prejudice. But do they? Is their tone not a little too condemnatory? Does it cover up guilt over the fact that the police would not treat them like that, which threatens to expose the fact that you and they do not make we? That you are on different sides of the black–white divide? Anyhow, you realize that talking and thinking have taken the place of a knowing that, by being grounded in lived experience, might just bring true peace of mind. And so it is not a question of whether you go with your black friends or white, but whether, by following either of them, you walk away into a comfort zone of belonging, thus dropping the issue as insoluble, or whether you stay with what you feel, awful as it is. If you stay with it, you find yourself trapped between the two alternatives I mentioned earlier: either you fit in quietly with what is expected of you (i.e. accept the policeman’s authority), in which case your very silence supports the notion that blacks are fair game for racial abuse1 , or you rebel (against his abuse of that authority), in which case the denial that anything untoward is going on (“Just carrying out the law, sir”) casts you as the stereotyped, hypersensitive black person with a chip on their shoulder about race and too angry/reluctant to submit to the

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INTRODUCTION

rule of law. This is an agonizingly conflicted place to be in, but it is what being black in a white world involves psychically. It is the small change of daily life, sealed up within, which the black person has no choice but to live with, if not consciously then within the unconscious. Either way, you have been invaded, your peace of mind shattered. And, except for the lure of either comfort zone, you are stuck with it, utterly alone.

Racism Inside and Out The above incidents took place in the outside world, but they produced profound effects internally. We can conclude, therefore, that racism exists both in the world and in the mind. In the world, racism’s many forms are readily recognized and extend all the way from the grotesque horror of genocide – by the Nazis in Germany and Pol Pot in Cambodia, or more recently in Rwanda and Bosnia – and racist murders, race riots and so on at one extreme, to racial abuse, systematic prejudice and petty discrimination at the other. On this broad external canvas, racism is both recognized and publicly debated; it is also taken seriously as a subject of academic study in the social sciences. More subtle dimensions of racist interchange, such as the ones I related above, are occasionally discussed publicly, but even then the frame of reference remains an external-world one. While their internal nature is indeed recognized, this tends to be seen as the inner experience of, say, institutional racism or of growing up as a second-generation immigrant. That is to say, although the subjective experience of racism is acknowledged, it is rarely taken seriously as a subject of psychological inquiry in its own right. Is it because they are so ordinary – who could not imagine, in a relaxed, unguarded moment, making a faux pas like the one Bhaskar relates? And who wants to be accused of being racist on account of that? The above incidents, however, make it plain that racist interchanges have the power to get inside us in a most disturbing way. Why should this be so? What makes the perpetrator – a friend in Bhaskar’s case – carry out such an attack? What gives racist attacks the power to eat into one’s being in this way? Why do they interfere so with our ordinary functioning? Why, in the grip of them, is it so difficult to break free and to keep hold of yourself – of what you think, feel or want, of what

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was you before all of this came your way? What immobilizes the capacity to think? If we return to the opening vignettes, the questions I have just raised require us to go beyond an external world perspective and move inwards into the psychoanalytic realm. The powerful and deeply disturbing impact of such interchanges is obvious. However, as I have already noted, confronting the assailant directly with what they are doing would get nowhere, eliciting either outright denial or utter incomprehension – the policeman was only doing his duty; Bhaskar’s friend was making a joke. Our first observation, therefore, is that the racist element runs outside of, and parallel to, ordinary conscious discourse – that is why our inquiry must be psychoanalytic rather than psychological. Secondly, it operates at a pre-verbal rather than verbal level: one is not inclined to reflect on or discuss the situation but is, instead, impelled to action – Bhaskar reacted as he was expected to; I did everything I could to suppress my reaction to the police officer. These observations point to the need for a psychoanalytic framework capable of shedding light on non-verbal modes of being.

Psychoanalysis and Racism: A Problematic Engagement The need to address both external and internal dimensions of racism has been recognized for many years (e.g. Fenichel, 1946; Gordon, 1994b; Dalal, 1997). Over 50 years ago, Frantz Fanon argued that shedding light on “the anomalies of affect” (1952, p. 12) implicated in racism called for a psychoanalytic approach, whose models of the mind are theoretically sophisticated and thus “specifically” suited to that purpose (Bhugra and Bhui, 1998, p. 319). How far have we come? For many years, progress was held up by an unseemly spat over the question of origins. While social scientists tended to see racism as originating in the world around us, clinicians tended to reduce it to psychological issues assumed to be primary. Racist hatred towards the black man, for instance, was seen as stemming from hatred of the father as an Oedipal rival2 (e.g. Rodgers, 1960). As the “real” psychological source of white hatred as Oedipal takes centre stage, the question of whether there is something specific in the relationship between white self and

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INTRODUCTION

culturally sanctioned black scapegoat fades out of focus – the black person is just one of many possible substitutes onto whom Oedipal hatred might be displaced. The racist object relationship is just not the real issue. Farhad Dalal (2002) argues that psychoanalytic models partial out racism through their neglect of the social. While his review of that literature is open to criticism (Davids, 2003a), this does not detract from his central point that clinicians continue to reduce race to more familiar psychological issues or conflicts assumed, a priori, to underpin it. While such an approach may “work” in the consulting room,3 it limits our ability to shed light on the psychology of racism, and may be a manifestation of institutional racism, in the form of an indifference to race, present in our profession at large (Thomas, 1992; Gordon, 1994b). Joel Kovel’s (1988) comprehensive psychohistory of white racism, written whilst he was a psychoanalyst-in-training and first published in 1970, changed a landscape polarized between external and internal world perspectives. He demonstrated the ubiquity of racism in white American (and by extension, Western) society, showing how its roots in the conquest of the natives of that land, together with its extensive role in the slave trade – both predicated on dehumanization of the other – is a racist underbelly integral to the narrative of America as land of the free. He argues compellingly that the racism of our world is deeply embedded within us: “in a society such as ours, which has earned the dubious distinction of being called racist as such, racism marks each and every individual life” (Kovel, 2000, p. 583). This courageous and admired work (Young, 1994) has gradually come to serve as a counterweight to earlier, more conventional psychoanalytic views that either avoid race altogether or reduce it to an inner essence. If, in a racist world, racism comes to mark every individual mind, psychoanalysts have a responsibility to investigate its origin, development and functioning within the wider psychic economy. That seems obvious, and yet, if we examine the psychoanalytic engagement with the subject, two problems become apparent. First, the recognition of a need for a psychology of racism appears ambivalent; second, when the psychology of racism is indeed investigated it is most often seen as “applied” psychoanalysis.

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Ambivalence In 2002, Farhad Dalal published an important book entitled Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialisation: New Perspectives from Psychoanalysis, Group Analysis and Sociology. The subtitle might lead us to expect an even-handed approach to external and internal dimensions of racism. However, whilst Dalal’s historicized account of how racism arises out of an imperative to distinguish “haves” from “must-nothaves” – an external world perspective – is compelling, he does little justice to the inner world dimension. Instead, he argues that a psychology of racism can give the impression that racism originates from within, thereby obscuring the role of external, material forces in generating and maintaining it. Dalal justifies stepping away from a psychology of racism by arguing that the mind is not a thing out there but an abstraction. He quotes the psychoanalyst and group analyst S. H. Foulkes: The group, the community, is the ultimate primary unit of consideration, and the so-called inner processes in the individual are internalizations of the forces operating in the group to which he belongs. (Foulkes, 1971, p. 212, cited in Dalal, 2002, p. 114, Dalal’s italics) I think this is problematic. Theoretical constructs are, of course, abstractions, but to use this to argue that little can be gained from understanding the role of the mind in perpetuating racism, in giving it an individual lease of life, is unconvincing. One does not have to believe the mind has a material existence to do so because the assumption that one’s object of study is real is necessary whatever the field of inquiry. Foulkes himself acknowledges as much: The network of all individual processes [the matrix] – the psychological medium in which they meet, communicate and interact . . . is of course a construct – in the same way as . . . the mind. (Foulkes, 1966) The test lies not in whether the mind is real or an abstraction, but in whether the inquiry into the role it plays in racism adds

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to our understanding of the phenomenon. Dalal and, to a lesser extent, Foulkes prioritize the social as the locus of motivation, but I think this extends the earlier polarized debate over origins and places a fully worked out psychology of racism beyond reach. The price Dalal pays for this is that his model, which looks convincingly to the broader socio-historical-political realm to account for the origin and maintenance of racism, generates clinical interventions that are atheoretical, exceedingly thin and framed almost entirely in the language of consciousness (Dalal, 2002, pp. 216–227). Dalal’s is an example of an ambivalent engagement with the inner dimensions of racism that is, sadly, widespread. This must, I think, raise the question of whether it reflects resistance to opening up the study of inner racism out of a fear of how uncomfortable and close to the bone it may be for all of us.

Applied Psychoanalysis There is a fundamental problem with seeing race as an area of applied rather than “pure” clinical psychoanalysis. Applying pre-existing concepts to a new phenomenon is like photographing a new object from different vantage points. Whilst each picture yields an interesting new angle, the sum of them cannot substitute for a dissection of that object that would reveal its inner make-up. At best, the applied approach presents us with psychoanalytic perspectives on race that may be rich and interesting but, in the final analysis, contribute more to psychoanalysis than they do to the understanding of racism. For example, Wulf Sachs’ (1937) pioneering “analysis” of a black migrant worker in South Africa in the 1920s yielded fascinating data, but its scientific value lay in its ability to confirm, by demonstrating how they could be seen at work in the mind of a tribal black African, the universality of the central psychoanalytic concepts of the day. Likewise, Sherwood’s (1980) rich study into racialized constructions of the other yielded a model of vicious and benign racial spirals. However, the model is neither a psychoanalytic nor a sociological one (Hopper, 1982); its psychoanalytic contribution is confined to showing that when, during adolescence, anxiety is greater the use of racialized categories in the outside world is more pernicious,

INTRODUCTION

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creating a destructive inner–outer spiral. Racial categories are external ones solving inner adolescent tension. The latter thus occupies the space where an inquiry into inner racism should be located, and the question of why racial categories should so attract the mind in its moment of desperation is not addressed. I hope even this brief discussion shows that the applied orientation does not equip us to maximize the learning about inner racism that lies dormant in the data of these excellent studies. At worst, the applied approach leads to a plethora of illustrations of how “our” concepts can be demonstrated in racism. The drive theorist can show that sexuality and aggression are projected across the race divide, the Lacanian that the Other is embodied there, the Kleinian that primitive object relations are played out there and so on, each then referring back to its theoretical corpus to shed light on the phenomenon. Racism becomes the newest canvas on which our concepts are illustrated. The fact that being used for someone else’s purposes is such a central element in the experience of racism is an added incentive for calling this practice into question.

This Book This book takes a fundamentally different approach, treating racism as a subject of proper clinical investigation in its own right. I am fortunate in that I am a brown-skinned immigrant whilst a number of my patients are of European origin, thus creating a cross-race/culture dyad in the consulting room. That is where my investigation begins. My interest in this subject began in 1975 when, as a postgraduate psychology student in Cape Town, I discovered the work of Frantz Fanon. Fanon, whose work was banned during the apartheid years, speaks explicitly of the experience of being black in a racist milieu where power is white. My first response to him was emotional. It was an immense relief that an experience I was only barely aware of, and which was otherwise invisible in psychology – and that at a liberal, anti-apartheid university – was not only recognized but also articulated powerfully and without compromise. On the theoretical plane, Fanon (1952) was the first to make the case that a psychoanalytic inquiry is required to elucidate deeper elements of what he

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INTRODUCTION

termed the “black problem” – a particular version, in the black person living under colonialism, of what I now see as internal racism that is a universal feature of the human mind. Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), which had just been published, showed that a psychoanalytic inquiry could illuminate how another form of oppression in our world – that of women – comes to exist in a real and highly charged way deep in our minds, marked distinctively by our lived history. Because that oppression involves relationships across the gender divide, Mitchell could draw directly on the clinically validated theory of the Oedipus complex to address the links between mind and social context, yielding a rich, multi-layered and nuanced understanding. A suitable theory was not readily available as far as the racial divide is concerned, and Fanon’s own attempt to generate one, using the method of applied psychoanalysis, suffers on account of it. Drawing on subsequent developments, I shall flesh out one of his ideas – the epidermalization of inferiority – to give it psychological depth, showing how it can begin to deepen our appreciation of the mechanisms involved in internal racism, whilst still falling short of providing a fully worked-out general account of it. What is required is a psychoanalytic account that does for the race/class divide what the theory of the Oedipus complex does for the gender one. The chapters in Part I develop an account of how racial difference is inscribed in the mind, the need for which is widely recognized (e.g. Leary, 2000). Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex was informed substantially by his self-analysis (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973). This made available a wealth of detailed data, ensuring that theory remained close to clinical observation. I follow this same path, beginning, in Chapter 2, with the description of a racist attack, which was sensed initially in the countertransference.4 Using detailed clinical material I show that it emanated from a defensive organization constructed around a racial difference between patient and analyst. I present two kinds of clinical fact (Tuckett, 1995) as evidence for this formulation – the patient’s here-and-now response to me, including my naming race as an element in the attack, and details that emerged from the subsequent analysis showing that the elements I suggest were assembled into the defensive organization were indeed present in the patient’s mind. The level of detail in the evidence I present is unusual today, when clinical research tends to investigate finer

INTRODUCTION

13

details of psychoanalytic concepts whose general validity has already been established (Leuzinger-Bohleber and Fischmann, 2006). Since this is not the case as far as internal racism is concerned, treating them as such would risk reducing racism to known psychological categories, an issue I have already referred to. In Chapter 2, therefore, I resist my initial attempt to ignore race as a factor, returning to the clinical method of Freud’s early case studies to show that it was indeed implicated in the attack, and that it emanated from a defensive organization. Chapter 3 asks whether the existing concept of the pathological organization (Steiner, 1987) can account for the defensive system from which the attack emanated. I present further evidence to show that whilst this concept describes the operational features of the system, it does not take full account of the fact that it was a normal strategy, available to all, that aligns organized inner defence with social stereotyping in the outside world. This hides both its defensive nature and the cruel way in which it intrudes, through projection, into the racial other. I suggest we call this normal variant an internal racist organization to distinguish it from its pathological counterpart. It would, of course, be irresponsible to add needlessly to the plethora of concepts that already litter the psychoanalytic landscape. In Chapter 3, I therefore consider what further evidence there is to support the proposition of an internal racist organization in the mind. Since this involves our theory of normal development and functioning, it calls for a metapsychological inquiry, which falls into the category of conceptual research in contemporary psychoanalysis (Leuzinger-Bohleber and Fischmann, 2006; Wallerstein, 2009). I draw on developmental evidence as well as observations in the wider world to support the idea, and show it to be continuous with the existing body of psychoanalytic knowledge of the mind, into which I integrate it. The material in Chapter 2 allowed me to investigate in detail the dynamics of internal racism and its place in the mind via the analysis of an opportunistically constructed racist defence – if the clinician were not black, the patient would have used an alternative. It cannot therefore support the idea that a racist organization exists, over time, as a stable defensive entity as I contend. Chapter 4 returns to the clinical arena to bring evidence of such a defensive arrangement, which had gone unrecognized in a previous analysis.

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INTRODUCTION

If the racist organization functions like a pathological organization, we would expect a patient to cling as tenaciously to it as more disturbed patients do to the latter. Again, the material from the patient in Chapter 2 could not demonstrate this – because of the seriousness of his disturbance, mention of the loaded race dimension brought about a descent into a paranoid mindset. The material in Chapter 5 corrects this omission, describing the quality of engagement involved in accessing internal racism. If internal racism exists in every normal mind, as I contend, one might expect it to come to the surface in a group mind created when individuals gather to face their racism, the task of the group on which I report in this chapter. The material shows both the difficulty of the struggle and, from a theoretical point of view, that the work was located between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive mindsets (Segal, 1964; Steiner, 1987). The fluidity of this work supports my contention that the racist defence exists in a normal mind, making available the ego’s normal capacities in the difficult task of facing one’s internal racism. This chapter concludes the section in which I bring forward detailed clinical evidence to support the validity of the concept of internal racism. Part II reviews previous psychoanalytic attempts to engage with the psychology of racism. It begins with a chapter on Frantz Fanon’s contribution. Fanon’s critique of Mannoni’s reductionism helps to focus the debate and to sketch out a background orientation on the relationship between psychoanalysis and social context that forms a backdrop to my own inquiry into internal racism. I go on to examine how the discipline has approached the topics of anti-Semitism and white–black racism, showing that although the need for a clinically led inquiry – as distinct from applied psychoanalysis – was recognized very early on, this has proved exceptionally hard to come by. If, as I suggest, internal racism is a normal part of the mind, it may be that it bedevils our attempts, as a discipline, to engage fully with the topic. In Chapter 8, I look specifically, for example, at the equation between the brown skin and the colour of faeces to highlight this. Nonetheless, it will become apparent that the model I propose can be seen as a development of trends that have been emerging over the past two decades or so. A more disturbed element implicated in racism – sometimes described as narcissistic or borderline involvement – has increasingly been recognized, as

INTRODUCTION

15

has the need for clinicians to deal with their own racism to be clinically effective. However, the implications of these isolated observations for a coherent theory of internal racism have not, hitherto, been fully recognized. The book ends with Part III, where I apply the concept of internal racism to instances of racism in the outside world. The material and evidence brought forward here is of a different order from that in Part I, where the evidence had to support the validity of the construct of internal racism. Here the material illustrates how internal racist themes can be recognized in institutions in the outside world, where it can illuminate the phenomenon of institutional racism (Chapter 9). Elsewhere, I have taken the same approach in trying to identify internal racist themes in the emergence of Islamophobia post-9/11 (Davids, 2006a). Applications such as these raise the question of whether it would help to address the internal racist strand. An understanding of what form such interventions might take, and whether they would make a difference, must await further investigation. However, it is worth noting that psychic forces are not the only ones, or perhaps even the decisive ones, that operate within our broader world; changing racist mindsets will almost certainly require intervention beyond the psychological. Understanding the nature of the psychological processes implicated in this is, I think, an indispensible part of the work. I hope this book goes some way towards addressing this need.

Terminology: The “Racial Other” This book explores the internal relationship between self and “other” of social stereotyping. I wish I could simply call that figure “the other”, but that term is already taken, twice over. Developmentally, the first other is encountered whilst the infant is wholly dependent on at least one other for survival. If things go well in this relationship, usually with the mother, a self more or less successfully differentiated from other ensues. Difficulties arising at this stage affect one’s capacity for object relatedness itself, and thus impact on all relationships. The self–other relationship involved in social stereotyping is not an instance of something so general.

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INTRODUCTION

The second other is the third object, conceptually the father, encountered in the Oedipal situation. If the other of social stereotyping corresponded to this figure, difficulties in that relationship would correspond neatly to those between gendered self and other, which they don’t (see Chapter 6, pp. 124–134). I therefore use the term “racial other” for the other of social stereotyping. It is arbitrary and inaccurate since social stereotyping is not confined to race alone, as I will discuss. However, it has the advantage of keeping company with a plethora of powerful meanings absolutely relevant to our study, which are instantly evoked by the term “racial”. Short of inventing a new term, I can think of nothing better.

Part I Internal Racism

2

A Clinical Study of a Racist Attack

This chapter begins our investigation into the elements involved in internal racism with a clinical study of a racist attack. This will bring out aspects of such attacks that are usually hidden from view, allowing us to see how the object is cast within a racist mould prior to the attack. Once cast in this mould, the object must not be seen as ordinary, and it was when I carried out my therapeutic task in an ordinary way that I was felt to be so out of order that it justified the attack. The aim of this was to re-instate a defensive order that was seen as absolutely vital to the patient. I will be able to specify the steps by which this defensive organization was set up, and to delineate its function.

A Comfortable Beginning There are two points I want to stress at the outset. First, though I will speak of a racial attack on me – my patient is a white Englishman and I am a brown-skinned foreigner – he is not a racist in the everyday sense of the term. This incident, therefore, allows us to see how racist mechanisms operate in a non-racist mind. Second, I am writing after the end of the analysis and can present an analysis of the attack informed by a fuller understanding of the patient’s mind than I had available when it took place. My clinical interventions at the time, therefore, drew upon a much more circumscribed database. Mr A, a native Englishman, had had an unremarkable childhood. Highly intelligent, he was always at the top of his class and great things were expected from him. However, towards the end of his time at university he began to struggle; after graduation he found a good job in his chosen profession, but he soon broke down and never quite recovered. He was just 30 when he came into treatment with me, pained at the way life had turned out. In our first two sessions he gave a coherent account of his 19

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difficulties, for which he blamed his parents. For the first few months of his life his mother had a back injury so severe that it often kept her in bed, interfering with her ability to hold and feed her baby. His father was working extremely hard at the time and could not have been of much help; in any event, he was remote, insensitive and unfeeling. He stressed how motivated he was to get help. However, his path to analysis was long and tortured, with steps towards help punctuated by determined attempts to pull himself up by his own bootstraps. As a patient he believed that cooperation would bring success. Each time, however, he found that instead of being helped, the pattern of his life – of going along with others in the hope of salvation and triumph over adversity – was repeating itself. It was then that he would break off, determined to find his own way, only to return when he realized he was getting nowhere. Now, he was finally going to try analysis – the most rigorous and demanding form of treatment available – but even as he did so, he castigated himself bitterly for looking to others for salvation. Why could he not learn that putting others in the role of saviour was doomed to failure? Surely there had to be another way. These accounts of his struggles in previous treatments were intended, I thought, to alert me to how difficult it would be for him to accept his dependence on me. He had already been assessed and judged suitable for psychoanalysis, so in these first sessions I tried to address his fear that I would expect him to conform meekly, leaving no room for him as a person in his own right. What if he found himself frustrated or angry, or disagreed with, or opposed me? Would I be able to accommodate such reactions, or would he once more have to leave? Although he acknowledged that he might indeed get frustrated and so on, he maintained that the fact that he had previously broken off treatment at such junctures was purely coincidental. Anyhow, how could he feel safe with therapists who sought only compliance? I, on the other hand, was clearly alert to this as a problem – indeed, was I not addressing it explicitly? What could be more reassuring? His relief was usually instantaneous and total, but my countertransference was of being kept at arm’s length by his quick intellectual grasp of the situation. Interventions carefully framed to touch anxiety seemed curiously unable to do so. Instead of deepening emotional contact, they led to a discourse

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rather too comfortable and cosy, which reinforced my sense that things were unfolding according to a plan that precluded emotional contact. We were two rather sensible chaps able to discuss all manner of difficult things that were either in the past or elsewhere; between us, in the here-and-now, there was no fear, no anxiety, no danger, and no problem. I was uniformly sensitive and insightful, my patient utterly cooperative. What more could we want?

The Attack In our third session together, my ongoing attempt to make emotional rather than intellectual contact with him led to a very different and much more disturbing interchange. He described an occasion when he knowingly defied his father. Whilst dropping the latter off at the airport for a business trip, his father asked him to renew a car insurance policy which was expiring on that day. Resentful at being treated like a child, he left it for a few days – he was, anyway, busy with exams. Three days later, while backing out of a parking bay, his mother scratched the bumper against a lamppost and, upon reporting it to the insurance company, found that the policy had expired. By the time they spoke, she had already contacted his father who, she told him, was absolutely furious with him over his inconsiderateness towards them. Incensed at her one-sidedness, he slammed the phone down on her. On his way to university he heard a strange noise coming from the engine of his new, and hence unfamiliar, car. He became convinced the engine was about to explode and, fearing for his life, he stopped, got out and locked the door behind him. He felt relief, but this brought a new thought: had he imagined it all? Now he panicked: what if, in a moment of foolishness, he returned to the car to try again, thus placing his life at risk? To forestall this possibility he dropped the keys down a drain. However, he became gripped by a panic that his mother had died and rang her. To his immense relief she answered the phone. Here he broke off and waited for my response. I understood the new car to stand for his new therapy which, he feared, would blow up were he to follow his own impulses. However, given how intellectually he had responded to my

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earlier interventions, I was reluctant to put this to him. Was there a way of speaking to him that might promote more direct emotional contact? I thought a way forward might be to address the psychotic feeling-quality of what he had described: that the disagreement with his father stirred something too violent to be contained within. This had to be split off and projected into the engine where it was going to cause an explosion. I thought this problem involved a hated, uncontaining internal mother, hence the fear that his mother was dead. The question to be investigated was whether, in the transference, murderous violence towards a therapist/mother seen as demanding conformity had been split off and projected into the engine. Since the details of this formulation were at best sketchy and provisional, I sought an interpretation that would open things up. I therefore said that I thought he wanted me to know he had enormous rage inside, and he feared that were this touched in his therapy I would not be able to cope with it. For some moments he seemed, silently, to be mulling over what I had said. Eventually, through gritted teeth, he muttered that it was always the same: his rage was always so enormous. His voice became strained and choked, its reasonable tone quickly giving way to a furious onslaught against my use of the term enormous. He heard this as a complaint at the extent of rage I saw in him. By characterizing it thus he believed I was simultaneously warning him that I was aware of it and pressurizing him to suppress it – to be the good boy he had been all his life. In a fit of uncontrollable rage, he flung out an unending string of accusations: first there were his parents, always preaching “be good, listen to us, trust us and all your troubles will gradually vanish”; then the teachers who patted him on his head for being so good and clever; and then that succession of therapists . . . every time, he was taken in by their empty promises! He actually believed them! Yet, no one ever wanted to know about the enormous, ugly, horrible rage that was in him. By now he was yelling uncontrollably at me: everyone is just interested in shutting him up, but no, no longer will he allow it. Never again. He knows now that fitting in with others is part of the problem, and never ever would he allow anyone to bully him into believing this is a solution. He drew breath briefly and, before I could think of a response, was off again: All his life he had gone along with this, yet no one

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ever owned up to the fact that it was what they did to him that screwed him up. No, he was always the enormously horrible, angry person; they were just trying to help. Always the same – put the past behind you, after all, you’re bright, be a good lad, follow our advice and hey presto, like a plant you will really flourish in the glow of our praise and approval. What a recipe for a life – and that is what he was expected to grow on! Always, always, always: be reasonable, believe in me, trust me, just settle down nicely and everything will turn out fine. Well, nothing is f∗∗∗∗∗ g fine, just look at him! He turned contemptuously on his previous “cosy, successful, well-adjusted” therapist churning out interpretations that suggested smugly “just follow my way and it’ll all work out. I know what’s best for you.” And what did he do? Like a meek bloody puppy he went along with her cosy little stories about him. Taken round the houses he was! And where did that get him, exactly? Nowhere – he is as messed up as ever! With enraged, tear-filled eyes, he yelled, mocking that we were all the same: always, “suppress your enormous, ugly rage. Just be calm like me, fit in!” Never ever again would he do that! He had become more and more enraged and out of control, with swearwords (which I have edited out) flung at me repeatedly. During the very occasional lull in this onslaught, I tried to reach him through interpretation. I pointed out, for example, that he seemed to take my remark as a complaint; or, that he was convinced I would not tolerate his rage but instead try to reason him out of it. However, these interventions simply added fuel to the fire, provoking him to lay into me with renewed gusto.

Countertransference When Mr A left I felt well and truly done over. His ferocious attack got through and left me reeling. I felt completely numb, and as my mind gradually returned I found it scurrying down alley after alley, seeking an explanation for the sudden switch in him. What was it that provoked him so? What had I done wrong? How might it be related to his history, and so on? Gradually, I realized that this was a desperate intellectual exercise on my part designed to help me regain my emotional

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balance, a realization that helped me to see how much the encounter had got in and destabilized me. Now, I began to see that I was really unable to put a name to my feelings of extreme discomfort, and following this realization I was able to put the whole matter aside and settle down to the rest of the day’s work. I came to realize that I had been badly wounded by his attack; something – I knew not what – had got under my skin, and this made me furious with him. However, that was not the whole story. On my way home that evening a police car sped by, siren blaring and blue lights flashing. The lines of a Bob Dylan song, describing how a black boxer, Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, was framed for murder by a white racist establishment, played in my mind, and I could just see the police, at the end of the chase, arbitrarily arrest some hapless black man, paralleling a similar experience of my own some years before (see Chapter 1, pp. 3–6). Feelings associated with racial harassment – of being immobilized in the grip of helpless fury – came flooding back. In a quiet moment later that evening, I realized that these were the very feelings that were alive in me after Mr A’s session, but which I couldn’t name at the time: I had felt racially attacked. This was puzzling. As a compliant patient, Mr A did not attack therapists – when frustration began to stir, he simply left. Was it easier for him to attack me because I was black, I wondered? One of the first things he had told me was that he was relieved I wasn’t a big man. Could this also be a reference to my being black – someone cut down to size in some way in a world of white power? Was this seen as a pressing disability that limited my availability to him in a way that his mother’s physical condition during his infancy limited hers? Did I stir primitive rage belonging to her? Although plausible, on reflection I felt such considerations seemed rather too speculative and intellectual. Anyhow, without corroborating clinical material I was doubtful about placing so much weight on my countertransference feeling of being racially attacked, especially since it also seemed inconsistent with the general picture I had of him. I therefore dismissed these thoughts as my own racial preoccupations, seeing them as a transference reaction of my own that had somehow crept in, rather than a proper countertransference reaction to his material.

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A Paranoid Transference When Mr A returned he had regained his composure, and it was as if the encounter of the previous session, although acknowledged, had somehow become unreal. About halfway through the session I addressed this problem, pointing out that he spoke as if I were putting something abstract to him, rather than something real and disturbing that had actually taken place between the two of us. This was followed by a thoughtful silence, whereupon he admitted that since the last session he’d had doubts as to whether I would be able to understand him fully, and thus to help him. This was not a personal criticism – in fact, many of the things I said sounded insightful and right, but . . . . I interpreted that he feared that his attack had destroyed my capacity to understand him. The word “attack” halted him momentarily, but he regained his composure, saying that he would not call it an attack – he was just angry, which was surely okay in therapy. The referrer had spoken highly of my abilities and he was, therefore, sure I could take it. I noticed that “it” – what I was able to take – came across as empty and somehow devoid of real meaning. Anyhow, he continued, there was no other way; he’d had enough of being the good boy. His tone had become clipped and intellectual, his words so full of bland generality that the prospect of a genuine emotional engagement seemed to be rapidly fading. During the silence that followed I reflected on how much struggle “it”, which he passed over, had caused me. I recalled my desperation in scurrying around, at first, for an explanation of what had happened, how I recognized this as an intellectual defence against feelings I could not name, how I only gradually (and fortuitously) came to recognize that I had felt racially attacked, and how much this had troubled me. I thought my patient had little idea of the mental processing I had done – when he sounded hollow it also conveyed how hollow he believed my reaction to him had been. I also felt summarily dismissed – as if how I handled “it” was my department, not his. This made me angry, and I felt determined to find a way of talking to him about what had happened as something real, in which we had both participated, and which we might now reflect on and discuss. However, even the word “attack”, which provoked initial

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discomfort in him, had by now become part of a more cosy “therapy speak” and I could think of no way of making it more real other than by referring to my experience of the attack as racist. However, I was reluctant to use that countertransference feeling unsupported by further corroborating material. While these thoughts were going through my mind, I heard him reiterate that he had no reason to doubt my credentials. On the other hand, who was I really? Where was I from? Perhaps, he mused, this was connected with the question of whether I would be able to understand him fully. This would not have been the case with Dr M, the referrer, who was obviously English – he wore a tweed coat, had an English accent, and the decor of his consulting room was very English indeed. After our last session he realized that he had found Dr M’s Englishness reassuring: whatever difficulties arose in therapy, as they were bound to, with Dr M as therapist he could at least trust that he would end up in a place that was more or less right for him. An English analyst could be relied on to restore an English patient to his proper place in his world. I, on the other hand, was clearly a foreigner, and my consulting room gave little away. This made him wary lest, consciously or unconsciously, I lead him to a destination of my choosing, a process that he would be oblivious to until it was too late. How could he know whether, in the end, I would help him toward a place, in his own world, that is right for him? His reference to the foreign–English divide confirmed that he was aware of the racial difference between us. Here it was used as a vehicle to articulate doubts, at first denied, as to whether I could “take it”, confirming how hollow his earlier reassurance was. In truth, he feared that his attack had got through to me and, in revenge, I would retaliate by exploiting his dependency to take him over and do with him what I liked. My clinical problem was how to build on the (difficult) emotional contact of the previous session, and his mention of the racial divide gave me licence to discuss the attack as a racist one – as an experience in the countertransference. This would be a prelude to opening up the issue of uncontainable rage (at the demand for conformity). However, I was also aware of the danger that it might lead to something textbook-like – such as discussing the possibilities of therapeutic understanding between natives and foreigners – that would inhibit deeper contact. Could

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I use it to convey to him that something real that had taken place last time? After some thought, I said that he wanted me to know that he noticed I was a foreigner of a different race, and that this made him uncomfortable; further, I wondered whether in some way this fact was connected to his attack on me last time. He was silent for several minutes before asking, “Are you accusing me of making a racist attack on you?” His directness surprised me; by contrast, I felt altogether more mealy-mouthed. I said that he felt accused by the interpretation I had just made, which he confirmed by complaining bitterly that I clearly was not going to tolerate this sort of behaviour – whatever one called it. He had no doubt I objected to it: there was no other way of thinking about a racist attack. For him, though, it was the same old story – no one wanted to know. Now, however, there was no rage; instead he became more and more deflated and resigned. I said that putting into words that he felt accused the same as me accusing him, but this made no difference to his mood. Defeated, and with a heavy heart, I could feel him retreat into intellectual mode: he had no choice but to agree that beneath his obviously liberal facade there must lurk some racism. I tried to speak to him about how utterly deflated he had become, linking this with the hopelessness that speaking of the attack as real brings, but to no avail. The situation now seemed to be reversed: whereas earlier he could maintain that I was, rather omnipotently, protected from an awareness of attack by being soaked in theories foreign to me, now I had concretely confirmed I had been hurt, and things were beyond hope. He backed off, convinced that whatever my words might say, a wounded man is a dangerous man. This opening gambit set the scene for an extended period during which he was convinced that I was hostile towards him in a specific way. He experienced me as a mother who wanted to get to know him in order to take him over and use him for my own purpose, which was to prove that I was a proper British psychoanalyst. Yet, my sensitivity to racial attack (he, genuinely, did not know whether his was a racial attack, only that he stood accused of one) showed how easily I could be rattled, and hence how fraudulent my claim to being a proper analyst actually was. His only hope lay in a desperate rearguard attempt to control

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things: he would anticipate my every move and, forewarned, would protect himself. Every ounce of effort went into keeping at bay a crippled, wounded and hostile analyst, which led to a desperate, paranoid transference. If I did not understand him (which was often the case), then what I said was obviously wrong and was seen as an attempt to put ideas into his mind, and thus to take him over in this way; if I did understand him, it was worse since it was often guided by my countertransference (as my taking up the race issue was) and this would confirm his terror that I could see into him and hence that I had taken possession of his mind. He would, then, be forced to redouble his efforts to keep me out. In addition, the more he kept me out, the greater his frustration and fury that he was not getting the help he had come for in the first place.

A Defensive Organization Built Upon Ethnic Difference By naming his attack as racist I brought about an unintended descent into a frankly paranoid transference. With hindsight, in my search for a way to speak of the attack as real, not “as-if”, I had hit the nail too firmly on the head. The fact that there was so little room for manoeuvre between one and the other already suggests that we were on terrain where concreteness held sway and where symbolic functioning (which presupposes containment) was not possible. At the time I understood only this much. I did not appreciate the way in which internal racism, which I had stumbled onto, was organized in his mind, solving an urgent problem connected with beginning the treatment. I did not therefore anticipate that my interpretation would rob him of an entire defensive system, thus exposing the raw impulses it was designed to protect him from. The paranoid transference that arose can be seen as a (normal infantile) defence hastily assembled to deal with the impending catastrophe threatened by powerful, raw impulses characteristic of paranoid-schizoid functioning (Segal, 1964). The details crucial to understanding the racist attack of the third session became clear only in the course of his analysis. Because of the absence in his mind of a containing object, the idea of depending on an analyst was, for Mr A, an utterly horrifying, unthinkable prospect. Yet, he managed to cling on to

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the knowledge that he desperately needed that help. This created an impossible dilemma, which he solved by projecting the source of the problem – the needy part of himself – into me. It is not uncommon for disturbed patients to do so, but what was unusual was that he used his awareness of the meaning of the colour difference between us as the basis for that projection. He was a native Englishman and saw me, correctly, as an immigrant; he was also acutely aware of racist attitudes in the country towards brown-skinned foreigners (which he, himself, did not subscribe to). Through projection I was transformed, in his perception, from an individual who happened to have a brown skin (and a strange accent) to a foreigner struggling to find acceptance in a hostile (xenophobic) Britain. His problem with finding acceptance was therefore relocated in me. Following the projection, this problem – now mine – was to be faced on the street outside, where nameless xenophobes would threaten me. This enabled the consulting room to become, from the outset, the cosy meeting place of the first two sessions. Newer psychoanalytic conceptualizations of racist phenomena, especially in Britain, recognize the primitive quality of the projections involved (Rustin, 1991). They can account for the following aspects of Mr A’s defence: 1. A real difference that divides subject and object is identified – in this case skin colour/spoken accent (that marks us out as “English/native” and “foreign” respectively). 2. Unwanted aspects of the patient’s mind are split off and projected across that divide – in this case a psychotic “infant” desperate for a home/place – through projective identification (Sandler, 1988). As a result, the other is now literally perceived as possessing those qualities whilst the patient is free of them – I was the one struggling to find acceptance; he the calm, unflappable gentleman. However, this account cannot shed light on what provoked his unexpected and extraordinarily vicious attack on me. Immediately before, I interpreted that he had a problem (enormous rage) that he wanted/needed me to be aware of but feared I would be unable to manage. I think this cast him too directly as a patient in need. He experienced me as forcing the initial projection (of the

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needy infant) back into him. But why should he experience it like this? After all, all I did was to speak as an analyst offering a view as to the meaning of his communication. However, this crossed a boundary of acceptability that stemmed from a set of role expectations hidden up to that point. With hindsight it became clear that he insisted, quietly and out of sight, that I was to make only certain kinds of interventions and to avoid others. I was not to speak as an ordinary analyst; on the contrary, everything I said had to be consistent with the picture of me as an immigrant with a problem. Taking in details of his life story fulfilled this requirement: I could be seen as trying to find a way around his mind in much the way one might struggle to find one’s way in a strange land. Following the initial projection, therefore, a complex inner template governing how we were to conduct ourselves had been set up in his mind. I was attacked only when I was seen, unavoidably, as having departed from this script by referring to (as I saw it, or insisting on, as he saw it) my ordinary analytic role. Because I had crossed a sacrosanct boundary, he felt justified in laying into me, with the aim of forcing me back into my allocated role. My comment was, he insisted, not an interpretation but a complaint – one complains when a need or demand has not been met. This clinical understanding allows me to complete the picture of how internal racism works by suggesting that, in addition to the two steps already outlined, a vital third one followed: 3. An organized internal template is set up to govern the relationship between subject, now free of his unwanted aspects, and object, now containing them. Henceforth all their interactions must conform to the demands of this defensive organization – both must stick to their roles. Safety from the feared situation is promised in return for compliance. This requires that the object should not be seen as ordinary, but should be visible as the recipient of the original projection; the organization remains hidden until this demand, that the object must not be ordinary, is breached. At that point the violence behind its opposition to ordinary object relating is unleashed in full. I suggest that the function of this third organizing procedure is to cover over the first two steps, which are more recognizably racist. It renders them invisible, and so sanitizes the situation.

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What remain visible are only innocuous expectations as to how people should behave which, in turn, are usually justified on grounds other than racist stereotyping. For example, what could be more reasonable than Mr A’s expectation that his analyst take in everything he has to say, and tolerate whatever angry outburst is provoked in him? I am suggesting, therefore, that his attack can be fully understood only by reference to an internal racist organization that existed in his mind at that point. It had been constructed earlier to rescue him from the torment of beginning a treatment seen as vital when the very prospect of dependency on another brought overwhelming terror. The processes setting it up swung swiftly into action, selecting a difference (between us, step 1) consistent with stereotyping in the outside world across which to effect the initial projection that made his problem mine. This allows projection (step 2) without one having to take responsibility for the object’s plight: my struggles on the street were my own; as a liberal he was not implicated in them. The inner template that was to govern interactions between us was then set up; at root, I was at all times to conduct myself in a way that confirmed I contained his projection – I should always speak as someone in need. By this stage we could say an internal racist organization existed in his mind, which he imposed on me. The apparently calm interchanges between us concealed active processes that organized perceptions, linked these with external situations, effected projection, set up role expectations and monitored and interpreted interchanges. It is these complex organizing processes, together with their end product, that I am trying to capture in the notion of an internal racist organization. Like all defensive organizations, the internal racist one offers a more effective refuge from anxiety than the single defence of projection on its own: once operating inside its parameters the individual feels safe. Rosenfeld (1971) pointed to the mafia-like quality of such organized systems of defence – the protection offered comes at the price of absolute loyalty. This means that all transactions must be seen as taking place within the parameters of the organization: it must appear in control. This means that everyone must keep to their proper place (and be seen to be doing so), and they must not occupy an unsanctioned place. For

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Mr A, the demand was that I should be seen as “in need”, which also meant I should not function in an ordinary way. It was when I spoke directly as an ordinary clinician, with attention “evenly suspended” (Freud, 1912) between conscious and possible unconscious meanings in his communication, that I provoked him. I had prefaced my interpretation with the words, “You want me to know that you have an enormous rage inside you . . . ”, which located the need to be known squarely in him, as a patient. This was not how it was meant to be: I was to be the one in need. That is why my interpretation had to be seen as a complaint, a version of events that his attack tried to beat into me.

Supporting Evidence In order to set up the internal racist organization from which Mr A’s attack on me sprang, he must have been aware of the racial difference between us and of the particular shades of meaning it had in the outside world. In addition, the prospect of starting analysis must have mobilized urgent and pressing anxiety in him, though anxiety was ostensibly absent from our interchanges in the first two sessions. What evidence is there to support these propositions? The Meaning of Difference Mr A was aware of the English–foreign divide, as reported earlier. His response to my attempt to name the attack as racial revealed it as an over-determined area that could not be discussed in an ordinary way. Instead, it was either to be ignored altogether or, if acknowledged (or, as he perceived it, insisted upon), it led inexorably to an entrenched paranoid transference. Later on in the analysis, “foreign” was narrowed down to “of Middle Eastern or North African extraction” – plausible, given my physical features. During the first Gulf War it emerged that he saw the political argument that the war was aimed at upholding international law as nothing but rationalization for a war intended to safeguard the flow of cheap oil on which Western economies depended. He saw this as an extension of the exploitation of the Third World

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set up during the colonial period, which was now being perpetuated in more subtle ways. He was certain that there would be a price to pay for this – the West would not get away with it; there would be a backlash. He was, of course, totally opposed to the war. The war brought much anxiety in the analysis. He feared that, preoccupied with the safety of relatives in the Middle East, I might be distracted from his treatment. Would I be called away unexpectedly? More subtly, he feared I would see his liberalism as hypocritical: was his lifestyle not, after all, dependent on the very exploitation of the Third World that he opposed? Did he not rely on the free flow of cheap fuel that the war was to secure? Under normal circumstances I could probably tolerate these as life’s ambiguities, but what if my loved ones back home were to suffer or die because of this war? Would I turn on him for his vested interest in it? Would I be aware of such hatred and resentment, or would it exert an unconscious influence on how I now saw and treated him? Was he safe in my hands? Although these considerations were brought to the fore by the Gulf War, they speak to the complex meanings attached to the difference between us in colour, appearance and accent (the usual markers of race or ethnicity) in Mr A’s mind. It is the rich tapestry of meaning from which, in his fourth session, the foreign–English divide appeared. That divided world contains a sharp division between privilege and deprivation, in which unrelenting need/greed, merciless exploitation, ominous hatred and revenge loom large. Military-economic power enables the privileged to continue colonial exploitation in ever more sophisticated ways; all the while hatred builds in the Third World. Deprived of real power, this finds expression only ever more impotently. Within this world one’s thoughts and feelings are determined almost exclusively by one’s place in the world: as a have or a have-not (Dalal, 2002). These considerations confirm the extent to which Mr A’s internal world was dominated by an infantile situation divided sharply between powerful parents and a powerless infant, whose dependency and helplessness are to be exploited, leading to endless resentment and hatred. It is not difficult to see how my Third World appearance presented him with an opportunity to embody the elements of this internal situation in the relationship between us, the infantile side lodged firmly in me.

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The Nature of the Patient’s Anxiety Why should the prospect of beginning an analysis generate such anxiety in this patient? Earlier, I linked this with the absence in his mind of a containing object, and in the course of the analysis it became clear that the object established in his mind as a consequence of good interchanges (the psychic equivalent of an infantile feed) was subjected to intense destructive forces mobilized by the awareness of himself as separate from his object. This was most clearly illustrated in the second half of the analysis, when he was making progress on the path towards rehabilitating his career (which he eventually did). By now he had married, which helped him to discover tender feelings towards the dependent part of himself, and there was a wish to have children and to work for them (as a “proper” father). The underlying tension related to separateness eventually came to a head when, having applied for a job, he was not shortlisted. He was furious with me for leading him to believe that it was possible for him to find a job at all; it was all an illusion, he insisted, and dependence on state benefit was the only realistic future for him. I took the view that if one wanted a job rejection had to be faced – as a normal part of life – but I saw that the intensity of hatred mobilized by “ordinary” disappointment threatened hope itself. I therefore addressed the negative therapeutic reaction (Freud, 1923), speaking of his intense hatred and murderousness towards the part of himself that wished to work. That interpretation inflamed him and after the session, without prior warning, he made a very serious attempt on his life, following which he was admitted to the emergency department of a nearby hospital, where his stomach was pumped before he was discharged the following morning. In his next session, I addressed the conflict between his wish to have a life, on the one hand, and intense murderous feelings directed against it, on the other. It seemed he could only have a life provided everything went smoothly without setback. Otherwise, murderousness directed against that wish was powerfully mobilized. I took this into the transference, saying that his murderous impulses were really directed against me – for showing him that work was desirable and, indeed, a real possibility – but had been redirected at the part of him that cooperated with

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me in this endeavour. My patient, the product of my work over many years, was to be killed in order to root out the part of him that wanted to work, like I did. “Yes”, he screamed with tears in his eyes and, turning violently from one side to the other, repeatedly stabbed at the couch beside him as if with a knife, “Kill, kill, kill . . . dead, dead, dead . . . in the gutter, downstairs, dead . . . your patient!”, followed a moment later by a rather more deflated “– me?!” In that moment I came face to face with the intensity of the attack on the life-seeking aspect of himself I had just spoken of, and how in thrall he could be to the death instinct (Segal, 1993). I have skipped several years into the analysis, when Mr A’s defences were degraded, to show that the anxiety the racist organization was meant to protect him from was very real indeed. At that early stage, we can see he was utterly terrified of what seeking help would itself stir up in him. Although he was not aware of the details of this he was right to be afraid, for when it emerged his murderousness did very nearly wreck everything. It was the intensity of this anxiety that made him desperate for any refuge, and he clutched opportunistically at the prospect of a racist organization constructed around the difference in skin colour between us, which was pregnant with meanings that dovetailed neatly with his own personal psychic issues.

Conclusion In this chapter I presented a clinical study that revealed how a racist attack on me stemmed from the existence in the patient’s mind of a defensive organization in which he and I had been allocated specific roles. This organization, which rescued him from unbearable anxieties stirred by beginning the treatment, opportunistically saturated the real English–foreign difference between us with his own, highly personal issues. He split off and then projected into me, the state of neediness, which had been identified as the source of his difficulties. Having freed him of need, the system then insisted that I stick rigidly to my role of being the one in need, and I showed that the attack was sparked when I stepped out of line by drawing attention to myself as an analyst functioning ordinarily, rather than one dominated by need. The attack was an attempt to force me back into line.

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This finding suggests that racist attack is not simply the result of projection into the object. It stems from something larger and more organized in the mind. The internal racism my patient called on cast me in a specific role, and was to govern interchanges between us. This clearly involves extensive psychic work that takes place behind the scenes, unconsciously, of which the attack was a surface manifestation that revealed its existence. To the extent that this system protected against overwhelming anxiety, it appears to be like other defensive organizations, the violence with which he resisted my taking on an ordinary role reminiscent of the extent to which disturbed patients feel their very survival depends on such systems. Unusually for an organized defensive system, however, this one yielded quite readily in the face of my focused interventions. This therefore raises the theoretical question of how we are to think of such structures in relation to pathological organizations. In addition, since it was set up opportunistically it could not have been a stable feature of his mind, although the capacity to set it up must have been latent in him, existing alongside his more liberal inclinations. How did it get there? It is to these theoretical questions that I turn in Chapter 3.

3

Theoretical Considerations

The defensive system described in Chapter 2 had the features of a pathological organization of the personality organized around an ethnic difference. This chapter brings forward further clinical evidence to show why it was a normal rather than pathological feature of the mind. I suggest that in the normal variant the features of these dynamic defensive systems are grafted onto the relationship with the racial1 other – the other of social stereotyping. This usually involves a racial, ethnic, class or other group difference between subject and object (“English-Foreigner” for Mr A), which is already saturated with meaning in the outside world. I go on to explore this object relationship in the mind, suggesting that our model of the mind must be extended to incorporate a paranoid, us–them, construction involving self and racial other as a permanent feature. I describe its development, from the earliest stages, tying this into existing psychoanalytic developmental theory and observational research. The chapter ends with a description of a relevant body of social psychological research pointing to an inner relationship between self and racial other in harmony with “white” power in our post-colonial world.

Defensive Organizations Organized systems of defence protect against anxiety more effectively than individual defences do. Analytic interventions, on the other hand, aim to expose anxiety in order to contain the elements that lie at its core, which is what is needed. Yet, once in treatment, the analyst is confronted by the organization’s alternative strategy for managing anxiety, namely through evasion. In Mr A’s first two sessions, for example, the complete absence of anxiety was most striking, as was the effective way 37

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in which he could assimilate interventions aimed at touching it. The immediate relief obtained in this way earns the patient’s gratitude, which renders his loyalty to the system ever more unswerving. The more the analyst threatens to touch anxiety, the greater the fear of what will be exposed should the defences against it be breached; the greater the fear, however, the more urgent the need for the defence. In general, it is because the underlying situations they defend against are so fearsome – in Mr A’s case it was the impulses that led to his suicide attempt – that the anxiety is so intense; it also explains why patients cling to their defensive systems with such tenacity. There is now a substantial clinical literature documenting these features of defensive organizations. John Steiner (1987, 1993) synthesized these contributions into his theory of the pathological organization, which is the most coherent account of defensive organizations we have. I want to consider, therefore, whether Mr A’s defensive organization can be viewed as a pathological organization. Pathological or Internal Racist Organization? Let me, by way of background, recall the developmental origin of pathological defensive systems. 1. Theoretical background The human infant is, for a very long time, incapable of meeting pressing needs (e.g. hunger, warmth etc.) on which its survival depends. Others must help and, when they do, being in need gradually becomes tolerable, a development that follows a very particular pathway. A need fulfilled brings inner discomfort or pain to an end, and since others are intimately involved in this process, they come to be encoded as part of the experience. Three elements – inner need, the subjective experience of frustration or gratification, and the existence of an object – are thus yoked together in a way that recognizes real inner need and manages it via someone in the outside world. In time, the success of this strategy leads to a sense of trust in one’s objects, and object relatedness, rather than withdrawal into the self (and hence phantasy), is internalized as the preferred mode of addressing states of need and the anxiety flowing from it.

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The patient who ends up developing a pathological organization, whom we can characterize as borderline,2 cannot count on such a benign infantile situation. Like the frankly psychotic patient, for whom the occasion of inner need is so terrifying as to render contact with both outside and inner world utterly fraught, the borderline patient also finds real dependency on others difficult. However, where the psychotic develops a deep aversion to contact and ends up with a cursory and highly selective engagement with the world, borderline patients have sufficient purchase on reality to generate detailed knowledge of the external world. A capacity for object relating, therefore, does exist in them, but where the more normal/neurotic individual uses that capacity to deepen contact with the world – inner and outer – the borderline patient uses it largely in the service of constructing and maintaining a highly organized and efficient phantasy system felt to be primarily responsible for his or her care. That system, a narcissistic construction, is essentially defensive against true object relating.

A brief clinical illustration of a pathological organization. Henri Rey (1994) gives this example: A patient appeared to be deeply involved in her treatment – regular attendance, evident improvement, etc – suggesting that she was using her therapist appropriately as an external source of psychological help. However, he came to discover that the contact between them was constantly reinterpreted to be consistent with the parameters of a defensive organization, the existence of which attested to the extent to which she had set her face against dependence on an ordinary therapist. To enable contact with him at all she endowed him with magical powers, and, from her point of view, the key therapeutic moment occurred not when they talked to each other, but when she touched the door handle – believed to contain magic from his last touch – thus allowing his healing power to pass into her and fortify her. It would, of course, be replenished each time they met. Letting the therapist speak as if the work in the sessions was a central component in the therapeutic arrangement was a price well worth paying to conceal the operation of her defensive organization.

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The borderline patient distinguishes between actual contact with the world and awareness of it. Sufficient real contact with others is tolerated only to the extent that allows needs to be met, following which there is a tremendous struggle over how that contact is to be viewed. The role of others responsive to one’s needs is minimized and things are reconfigured so that the organization’s primacy in providing for the patient can be asserted. To this end, a complex phantasy system constantly monitors and reinterprets transactions, showing how the system, through being in control, is to be credited with taking care of one. The relationship with the object is now held to be strictly secondary, which elides into it being purely incidental. Steiner (1993) came to view these organizations as psychic retreats, and Rey’s example shows just how difficult it is for a patient who relies on them to break free. If others fail one, it confirms how unreliable they are; if they meet one’s needs, it proves how well the organization – as mediator of the contact – is arranging things. Either way, its claim to the patient’s loyalty is enhanced. In this way, almost every interaction with the outside world strengthens the organization’s hand, and real learning from experience is minimized. The ego’s capacity for object relating, rather than being deepened as a result of involvement with others, remains limited and impoverished and relationships that are formed – as they must be – end up thin and lacking in depth. Defensive organizations thus exert a stranglehold on development. 2. Mr A’s defensive system Patients with dependency problems as profound as Mr A’s characteristically use a pathological organization to mediate their significant relationships. However, I think there are compelling reasons why the system I am describing should not be seen as one. Firstly, Mr A did indeed have a pathological organization, but this was built around an idealized mother. Just before entering treatment with me, he began what was to become his first stable relationship. For a long time, his idealized internal mother was projected into his partner: he was her baby, she the mother in whom he found refuge from the demands of the world, including the analysis (the day’s session would be pored over with her). In phantasy an ideal object satisfies one’s every need, and

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the experience of frustration at her hands cannot be accommodated. Such experiences were, therefore, split off and located elsewhere – in Mr A’s case, this was the domain of the inner father, which then posed the utmost difficulty for him (she was desperate to marry and have children, but he could not contemplate being a husband and father, he could not work, the work of the analysis was fraught, etc.). Secondly, during his outburst against me, Mr A indicated that he had previously seen his therapist as an idealized mother with whom he would comply in the hope of finding salvation. Indeed, confronted by the reality of his attack upon me, his complaint was that he felt pressurized into repeating this failed strategy, the only alternative defence he knew, with me. This suggests that the defensive organization operating up to that point, and which my intervention breached, was a different one. Thirdly, after several years of the paranoid phase, Mr A did install me in his pathological organization, notwithstanding his early determination not to. Two factors played a part in this: I had survived that difficult period, and could make sense of what was going on, both of which increased his awareness of the value of the analysis to him. This exposed him anew to all his anxieties about dependency, and his pathological organization now installed me as the new ideal object who understood everything about him, and with whom salvation lay, to the extent that I was viewed, unconsciously, as a god at whose altar he worshipped (Davids, 2006b, pp. 46–47). Being in my care was now seen as the solution to all his problems, and during an eventual breakdown the psychiatric hospital to which he was admitted was seen as an extension of that care designed to overcome limitations – endings of sessions and weeks, regular breaks – that, as an ideal object, I could not possibly be held responsible for. They were not my arrangements but arbitrary social conventions imposed on both of us alike. In addition to these considerations, at the beginning of his treatment Mr A had insight into the fact that recruiting therapists to his pathological organization had failed repeatedly. This may have left him unusually exposed to anxieties it ordinarily concealed, and the arrangement he put in place may be seen as an alternative one. In his pathological organization he was the infant of an idealized mother, but in the new defensive system he projected the infantile part of him into his object. Because this

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system was built, opportunistically, around the observation that the two of us came from different racial/cultural backgrounds, an ethnic difference suffused with socially inscribed meanings (at odds with his conscious stance as a liberal), he could evade responsibility for my plight, even though it was his projection that had produced it. His conscience clear, he could converse comfortably with me as an equal – as long as I did not step out of role. 3. A normal defensive organization Before leaving Mr A’s story there is one further issue to address. The fact that he set up a racist organization so seamlessly in his moment of need suggests familiarity with the mechanisms involved. How could he then, in his conscious life, be so liberal? The answer is that though he himself abhorred racism, his inner world was not, in fact, devoid of it: it was alive and well, but located in his father who was an intolerant bigot. It was not, therefore, experienced as part of the self. The projection of an inner racist into someone else was brought out even more starkly in another patient who, whilst happily travelling Europe with her black boyfriend, left behind a mother who “hated blacks, the unemployed and Princess Margaret” (Davids and Davison, 1988a, p. 41). In this, of course, my patient was not alone: how many of us who are otherwise tolerant and/or liberal on racial, ethnic or cultural matters cannot, when we look hard enough, find an intolerant bigot or racist lurking in some corner of our minds? This observation supports the conclusion that the racist organization, unlike its pathological counterpart, is indeed part of the normal mind, and that Mr A had used it as a defensive system mediating his relationship with me which, on account of its sheer normality, stood a better chance of evading detection than the pathological one. Let me now turn to the theoretical implications of this conclusion.

Theory of Internal Racism Two aspects of internal racism are central to the formulation that I am advancing. Firstly, that a relationship between self and

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racial other exists universally in the inner world. The beauty of the concept of an inner world is that it is infinitely variable – our inner world is populated by an array of objects particular to each of us. Some objects, though, are to be found in every internal world and can thus be thought of as part of the structure of the mind. Self, mother, father and superego fall into this category, and it is to this list that I think the racial other belongs. The second aspect of my formulation is that the relationship between self and racial other is located within a defensive organization. I must now consider these matters in further detail.

The Racial Other as Universal Usually, the existence of the racial other – the other of social stereotyping, and the object of internal racism – remains hidden and private precisely because it is so unremarkably normal. For some this figure is a member of a particular racial group, for others language/religious groups; some of us are familiar with the objects of our racism (i.e. we can own our racism), others parade a pseudo-tolerance that is hollow and carries no emotional resonance (“some of my best friends are Jews”), suggesting a cover-up. Yet others project the racist within into someone else (e.g. a parent who wants their offspring to marry within the family/clan/faith), leaving them apparently free but immobilized by that other person’s prejudices, and powerless in the face of it. That is, some of us know our racism while others project it; either way, though, it is present in the mind. If at first we cannot find it we probably have not looked hard enough. Our clinical responsibility to the patient limits our freedom to investigate racial dynamics in the consulting room, but there are a number of relevant non-clinical observations that can be made. Firstly, splitting and projective identification, central components of internal racism, can readily be observed in relation to social out-groups. Members of such groups are usually loaded with negative stereotypes that stubbornly bypass reality testing, and we might note that the out-group is a safe repository for projection precisely because it is outside the range of our ordinary lived experience. For several years, asylum seekers and economic migrants have played that role prominently in

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Europe. Public discussion of their plight easily reveals polarized mindsets in which members of this group are either openly hated and detested, or else such intolerance in turn stirs up implacable hatred among more tolerant and liberal-minded individuals. Such out-groups exist in every society. Research confirms a link between socially observed racializing, on the one hand, and inner emotional states, on the other. In her extensive study of three London families in the 1970s – African-Caribbean, Indian and white-English – Sherwood (1980) shows how racialized constructions of the other become more prominent when one’s identity as an individual is under stress, such as during adolescence. Such observations support the idea that elements of organized internal racist defences, which find a more or less final resting place in relation to social out-groups, lie dormant in the mind until needed. As a strategy for managing overwhelming anxiety, elements of internal racism can be observed in responses to major atrocities such as the aftermath of the attack on New York’s Twin Towers on 9/11/2001 or the attack on London’s public transport network on 7/7/2005. As I argue elsewhere, by successfully targeting citizens like us, going about their daily lives, these events underlined our vulnerability and hence mobilized massive annihilatory anxiety, the response to which was a racist construction in which Islam or Muslims were cast as the enemy (Davids, 2006a). Such constructions, which can be pressed into service for socio-political ends, replicate in the external world a widespread psychological response in the individual mind that set up, and left in the ascendant, a paranoid, us–them, construction holding Muslims responsible for the atrocity. Paralysing anxiety was replaced by a known quarry. I think this same mechanism comes into play following the break-up of secure and stable homelands – for example, India in the 1940s and Yugoslavia in the 1990s – and allows crude ethnicity to emerge as a basis for war and genocide.

Internal Racist Functioning To consider internal racism as a normal component of the mind, I must show that elements of racist functioning, which I delineated clinically in relation to Mr A, also occur as a feature

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of racist mindsets beyond the consulting room. I shall discuss two key features of racist functioning in this way: projection and rapid reversal, and the persuasive way in which phantasy is presented as reality. Projection and rapid reversal can be observed in the following vignette from Mr A:

On account of my foreignness, Mr A projected his unwanted “infant” into me, a role that he insisted, unconsciously, that I take on. I remained unaware of the initial projection, but following his attack I stumbled onto the recognition that I experienced it as racist. When I tried to discuss this with him I was accused of accusing him of being racist. The original projection remained hidden, but mention of his racism was experienced as a projection stemming from my heightened sensitivity over matters racial. The recipient of a racist projection ends up accused of making a racist projection, thus reversing the situation.

The following example illustrates this feature at work in the world at large. A chain email was circulated in a London office. It emphasized the need to remember the Holocaust and went on to associate UK Muslims with the Holocaust denial of the Iranian president – on spurious grounds,3 as it happens. A member of staff responded spontaneously to the first message – on the need to remember the Holocaust – without addressing the anti-Muslim slur. A few days later a white Muslim replied to his email, adding her support whilst regretting the way in which Muslims were racially stigmatized in the same breath (in the chain email). How easy it is, she noted, to end up demonizing an other (Muslims) even while trying to remember the dire consequences that such processes led to in the past (against Jews). That was the end of the public exchange, but privately the first respondent now bombarded her with emails accusing her of accusing him, falsely, of being anti-Muslim, for which he demanded a public apology. The mobile accusation of racism in the original email was concretely replicated within the group in the office trying to be mindful of racism.

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The determined way in which phantasy is passed off as reality can be observed in the following excerpt:

In the midst of his onslaught, Mr A insisted that my interpretation was a complaint. The view of me as being always in need, of not having anything to offer, was his phantasy construction, but was seen as a true picture of reality. When reality does, momentarily, get through and the object is glimpsed as ordinary, the organization moves rapidly to reinstate its version, if necessary by force. It is, therefore, highly resistant to change.

The insistence that interactions conform to a phantasy system ensures that everyone keeps to their proper place, which is necessary to show that the organization is in control. The singular focus on conformity helps to keep out of awareness that an arbitrary attribute (e.g. skin colour) was selected to justify projection into others, which would be recognizably racist. The particular us–them divide is selected because it has a prior, value-laden meaning in the outside world, and is not created by the individual in the first instance. The ego’s acute awareness of reality is thus pressed into service to initiate the process. This occurs with imperceptible speed – quick as a flash. Mr A had no pause for thought – he just found himself facing a black man who, as it happened, was likely to encounter terrible hostility on the street. By that point both my brown skin and his pale one had been racialized (Dalal, 2002) through projective identification. The assumed normality of this situation may account in part for extent of his rage: if he was simply doing what everyone else did, why should he be pulled up for it? Following the initial projection, substantial mental work goes into covering up the purely racist mould in which the object has been cast. This is achieved by finding evidence that the prejudiced view is true, which makes it harder and harder for the object to be perceived in ordinary human terms. Extensive unconscious phantasy construction is involved, the only conscious remnants being justifications that prove one’s view of the object: blacks do smell; Jews do control the world; Muslims are intolerant fanatics; Mr A’s therapist was touchy about matters

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racial, and so on. That such perceptions are selective does not enter into the equation. Mr A’s insistence, in the midst of his onslaught, that I wanted him to be no trouble is an instance of this; he knew it for sure, and interpretations to the contrary could be tossed aside with alacrity. By then, my black skin told him, manifestly and for sure, that I was weighed down by the struggle for acceptance in a foreign country. He had nothing to do with this, but, though I would no doubt deny it, I would also want him to be no trouble. In his racist mindset these were facts. I was indeed weighed down, not by who I was but by his initial projection into me. The relationship between self and racial other is, therefore, located within a system that functions like a pathological organization in seriously disturbed patients. Such structures are elaborate, organized phantasy systems that regulate the relationship between self and other, primarily by determining how the other is perceived. Once in place, a single preoccupation remains: to keep it in place. This means that the object must not be seen as ordinary; s/he is not allowed to be him- or herself. The object of internal racism is thus recruited, willy-nilly, to play out a role in someone else’s “inner dream script”. This is an invasive process which operates unconsciously. Whilst the subject may be unaware of it, though, the object usually feels fully the impact of the assertion that s/he is not and must not be an ordinary person. This central aspect of one’s being is systematically targeted and slowly eaten away at. In Mr A’s eyes he was simply objecting, forcibly, to an unreasonable attempt to force him into conformity, yet I felt racially attacked, though I had done nothing more than make an ordinary interpretation. This aspect of internal racist functioning can also be observed beyond the consulting room. For example, at first the officer at the scene where a black youth had been fatally stabbed (Stephen Lawrence4 – see Chapter 9) delayed. She could, in all innocence, feel it was her job to bear in mind that anyone, including his distressed companion, Duwayne Brooks, might have assaulted the boy. At the receiving end of it, though, Brooks felt something racist happening – the victim was now the accused. This experience of being the target of racism appears as if out of the blue. In fact, they are preconscious perceptions that occur at the precise moment when the object has appeared too ordinary, underlining the fact that they are not subject to the demands

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of a racist organization. It is then that the role prescribed by the organization is thrust upon them with renewed force from which there is to be no escape. The same can be said of the individuals in the two incidents described at the beginning of this book – they felt the impact of something racist being imposed on them. Once a racist organization is in place, therefore, it is the very ordinariness of the object that is provocative and leads to determined attempts to force him or her back into their prescribed phantasy role. These resilient phantasy systems defend successfully against primitive anxiety, either paranoid-schizoid or depressive in nature (Steiner, 1987), which are exposed when their defences are breached.

Mr A’s paranoid anxieties were exposed when I was seen as accusing him of a racist attack, following which I became an enemy from whom he tried to protect himself. The depressive mode, on the other hand, was implicated in his suicide attempt: he did not deserve to live if he hated so venomously the analyst who had helped him.

Once we gain access to the area of the mind where the racist organization is located, therefore, we are on sensitive mental terrain where a characteristic nexus holds sway, comprised of intense emotion and primitive defences, accompanied by a paralysis of what Freud called secondary process functioning (including the capacity to think). As a refuge from paranoidschizoid and depressive anxieties, any movement threatens to expose those anxieties afresh. The anxieties and defences characteristic of these two positions will be familiar to all who have tried to grapple with cross-cultural/racial issues, and I will describe them separately. Paranoid-schizoid themes are easily revealed: One is not described as racist – it is always an accusation, for which one is condemned. Anything said in one’s defence only makes it worse, and the only thing to do is to own up and atone. However, deep down one hates being treated in this way and, deep down, will surely have revenge – even if it cannot be today. Alternatively, one is cast as a virtuous victim of racism, survivor and saviour; by virtue of having experienced it one

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becomes the authority on racism. This, I think, is a way of allowing the victim to have revenge, to do something to us. In addition, the atmosphere turns easily hostile and suspicious, it is impossible to think, and political correctness becomes the order of the day. We feel divided into friends and enemies.

In a race awareness group a white woman insisted that today white people must accept and tolerate black hatred since they bear collective responsibility for the sins of colonialism. Does not the white world continue to profit from neo-colonial exploitation of the Third World (as Mr A noted during the Gulf War)? Black anger and hatred towards whites was to be expected and she understood terrorism, corruption in Third World governments, blacks cheating the social welfare system in Europe and so on as manifestations of it. The idea was that this had to be tolerated as a natural consequence of colonial injustice – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth! Racist projection is, of course, a very personal way of colonizing someone else.

Depressive themes relate to the fact that owning one’s racism brings guilt, which is often unbearable. Perhaps the most ready examples of this come from the inquiry into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, which I mentioned above. In the light of what subsequently happened, think of the police officer having to live with the fact that she hesitated on the grounds of suspecting Lawrence’s companion of complicity in his attack. Had she, instead, rushed Stephen to hospital might he still be alive? Or, had she followed Brooks’ urgent exhortation to pursue their assailants down a particular road might the killers be behind bars, instead of triumphantly walking the streets to strike again who knows when? When the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police accepted the verdict of the eventual inquiry that racism was inherent in his force, he did so equivocally, vehemently denying the charge of institutional racism. This would mean, he said, accepting that all members of his force come to work each day intending to commit racist acts in the course of their duties, which he knew to be untrue – his officers are basically good people. The charge of

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institutional racism does, of course, involve just this proposition, but we would add that it emanates from a part of the mind outside of conscious awareness, and over which we may not have direct control. However, the commissioner voices an anxiety that accepting responsibility for racism would wash away almost any redeeming qualities (goodness) in his force, hence there is no alternative but to deny it. When reading these examples as written words on the page, this impact of unbearable guilt may not be immediately apparent as reading allows one to pass quickly over weighty matters. Psychotic mechanisms, too, pass over issues with manic speed. However, if we pause to take in and ponder each with the question, “What have I done?”, it becomes more possible to appreciate how burdensome the task of accepting responsibility for internal racism is. Guilt felt to be unbearable cannot be processed mentally, and this failure leads to repetition of the original act as a nonsymbolic, concrete form of “remembering” (Freud, 1914); it is remembering without the guilt. In the murder of Victoria Climbié by her guardian “aunt”, despite extensive scrutiny by the British health and social security systems, there was extensive paralysis of ordinary thinking accompanied by political correctness (see Chapter 9). Here too it is possible to identify a breakdown in professional functioning, on the part of a senior doctor setting aside a diagnosis of child abuse on inadequate evidence, paralleling that of the police officer. The paralysis on the part of others points to their feeling unconsciously implicated in the racist act/thought alive at the point of breakdown. It is thus directly linked to unconscious guilt felt to be unbearable, which leads to the repetition of the original failure. On a smaller scale, these dynamics can also be observed in experiential work groups attempting to address and understand racism. At first there is usually a tentative political correctness, and if the possibility of racism in the room is raised the atmosphere turns paranoid, showing clearly the mental terrain we are on (see Chapter 5). These observations lead to a final point. I have argued that racist organizations arise in order to bind primitive anxiety. Once we become accustomed to using them, however, they can

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function like an addiction that allows us to triumph over ordinary human vulnerability and frailty, which are projected into others. The more we do so, the more guilt there is to face, making the burden more unbearable, and the more in need we are therefore of the organization as refuge.

Internal Racism as Normal The internal racist organization is, therefore, a pathological organization that occurs in the “normal” mind. This paradoxical characterization captures two different aspects of internal racism. Once in place it works like a pathological organization, defending tenaciously against intense anxiety by asserting its dominance and control (Steiner, 1987, 1993). Yet, the projection that lies at its core is built on sophisticated awareness of the social meanings of difference in the outside world. A pathological organization results from something having gone wrong in the course of development, but the racist organization is the outcome of development that has proceeded normally, which I will discuss in detail below. It develops to help the child bind primitive anxiety more or less permanently, at a time when the child is already sufficiently attuned to external reality to be aware of social stereotyping. For example, in a white supremacist milieu it is aware that blacks exist, and that negativity accrues to blackness. These stereotypes are given a new, individually charged lease of life so that the stereotype is assimilated into a belief system about others who populate the individual’s racist organization. The fact that these beliefs are accepted as true (within the social milieu) allows their use for the purpose of psychological defence to go undetected. Racist organizations operate in a pervasive but hidden way. Mr A’s, for example, exerted a stranglehold over proceedings in the first two sessions, impeding proper emotional contact with him. They are utterly relentless in doing so, and that clinical situation may well have endured for much longer but for two fortuitous factors. First, the chance event of being overtaken by a speeding police car allowed me to access my countertransference feeling of having been racially attacked.

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Second, I was keen to explore the limits of emotional contact with disturbed patients, which led me to raise the possibility that race may have been implicated after all other attempts to make the altercation between us real had failed. Without these the existence of the organization may well have gone undetected at that point. Once in place, an internal racist organization is available to the individual as a resource with which to manage overwhelming anxiety. Henceforth the child, and later the adult, will never again have to experience the most feared situations associated, in the mind, with utter infantile helplessness. Under threats of a sufficient magnitude, or ones perceived as such, the ego can, unconsciously, trigger internal racism, which replaces crippling anxiety with a known quarry. However, like all paranoid solutions, it runs the risk of protecting at the cost of interfering with our ability to get to grips with the real danger. I think of this capacity as part of the basic structure of the mind, a sort of last refuge bedrock that prevents the absolutely unthinkable from happening. This status, as the ultimate insurance policy whose premium we all pay, is what gives it its extraordinary power. Ordinarily, however, when we are not subject to intense anxiety, our internal racist causes few problems – it lives quietly in the background either as part of the self, its venom covered by the innocuous wish for distance from an out-group seen as necessary to preserve our essential nature or way of life . If such prejudice is too ego-dystonic, however, the internal racist can be safely lodged in an object (as Mr A’s was in his bigoted father). Flashes of it may emerge from the woodwork in incidents such as those described at the beginning of this book. However, its naked racism, whose perniciousness would be readily recognizable, remains private and safely contained in the mind without its dynamics interfering with our ability to adapt to reality and to get on with our lives. When they do come fully into play, however, they are clung to as tenaciously as if the person were a disturbed patient in the grip of a pathological organization. In otherwise normal individuals anxiety of exceptional intensity has, unconsciously, been mobilized, driving the racist defensive system. This is why racist functioning exercises such a tight hold on the mind, is so slippery and is so notoriously hard to shift.

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Internal Racism and Clinical Practice Before moving on to developmental matters, I want to consider a final point related to the proposition that internal racism is located in the normal part of the mind. Racism is rarely discussed in the clinical literature (reviewed in Chapters 7 and 8). However, references to racism inevitably arise in patients’ material, especially in today’s multi-cultural Western metropolis, and clinicians tend to deal with these in a characteristic way. A clinical seminar, for example, heard of a patient who reported that, en route from his session the previous day, he cursed a motorist who barged into the traffic stream just ahead of him with the words, “black bastard”. The analyst and patient were both white, and the analyst saw the motorist as the recipient of rage directed at her following an intervention the previous day that touched him. She therefore tried to re-locate it between them by suggesting that the motorist stood for an analyst hated for cutting into his narcissistic stream with her interpretation, a theme they were working on. That intervention was accurate and allowed the clinical work to progress, but in the process both the motorist’s blackness and the patient’s racism slipped out of focus. Was there any significance in this patient’s choice, in multicultural London, of a black rather than, say, a Pole for racist abuse? Is it a passing, opportunistic racist incident or does it hint at something more stable in his mind in which racializing hatred – hating in the plural (Moss, 2001) – is an established strategy for managing inner destructiveness? Addressing such questions would, of course, advance our understanding of the role of internal racism in the patient’s psychic economy as a whole, but they may not pertain to the issues that brought the patient into analysis. Aside from this latter consideration, I think the only other legitimate justification for focussing on internal racism is when it comes dynamically alive in the analytic process (see the discussion of Dr B in Chapter 4). The fact of race coming up in a patient’s material does not, in itself, give us licence to pursue it clinically. This point is, however, seldom recognized, especially by those who look to psychoanalysis to illuminate racism. On the grounds of the clinical approach described above, for example, Dalal (2002) concludes that psychoanalysis reduces racism to known

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psychoanalytic themes. I think, however, that this may reflect not an unwillingness to consider race in its own right – say, for defensive reasons in a largely white profession – but the clinical judgment I have just outlined, namely that addressing it is not relevant to advancing the therapeutic process. In passing, it is worth noting an observation that while racial references and dynamics are often considered in discussions of clinical material, this seldom results in race being addressed explicitly in the consulting room. Bringing it into the realm of discussion and thought, rather than explicitly addressing it with a patient, may be sufficient to deepen the unfolding clinical process and thus to contribute to therapeutic progress. This perspective suggests an alternative explanation for the relative lack of clinical attention to race, namely that racial dynamics pertain not to psychopathology – the specific site of therapeutic intervention – but to the normal part of the mind. The normal part of the mind is not usually implicated in a patient’s psychopathology, and since the clinician’s task is to access pathology, it does not emerge as a legitimate area of inquiry. This does not, of course, absolve psychoanalysts of responsibility for identifying when racism qua racism may be present in the consulting room. We might ask, for instance, why my colleague did not put into words the precise nature of the venom in the patient’s racist curse before addressing it in the transference. Here the absence of a coherent psychoanalytic theory of racism may, in fact, contribute to the failure to recognize the degree of primitive affect internal racism can embody, and to consider whether it might be addressed in a way that adds to, rather than detracts from, the therapeutic goal.

Internal Racism in Normal Development The clinical model of internal racism I propose is built on the assumption that profound anxiety exists within the normal mind, which the racist organization binds. However, general developmental theory holds that whilst in very early infancy anxiety takes the form of wordless, intense, raw panic, fear and terror (which can be observed in psychotic states in the adult), it is gradually modified into something more tolerable, which we would recognize as normal anxiety or fear. Where, then, does

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the profound anxiety at the root of internal racist functioning come from?

Psychotic Anxiety: A Metapsychological Problem States of overwhelming anxiety abound in very early infancy – on account of the infant’s helplessness in the face of its most pressing needs – and object relations theory pays particular attention to emerging strategies for managing them. Optimally – a normal infant in the care of a properly attuned adult – real interchanges with others effectively remove the source of the disturbance at the root of the anxiety (e.g. being fed in the case of hunger). This experience can be described as the earliest relationship between an infant, anxious on account of need, and a breast – a good object – capable of relieving the situation. From the infant’s point of view, the different elements involved (need, hunger, feed, satiation, subject and object) are unlikely to be clearly differentiated out from the goodness (or non-badness) of the experience as a package. Such transactions, repeated many times, come to be associated with a particular individual in the outside world – usually the mother – and in time an internal version develops, which object relations theorists think of as the inner good object. By contrast, the state of anxiety that the good experience displaces can correspondingly be thought of as a bad one, but the pathway to its internalization is more complex. Since it involves the absence of a need-fulfilling experience, the task of linking it to an external person awaits a further development, namely the capacity to split. Splitting good experience from bad is considered to be a vital early developmental achievement since it protects the good experience from premature contamination by the bad, isolating it so that it can be consolidated, deepened and refined. This results in an inner sense of well-being and security. If the split-off bad experience of frustration (initially of psychotic intensity on account of the ego’s utter inability to master it) can be located in relation to someone other than the mother – usually it is the father – the infant will have achieved a paranoid solution to the problem of anxiety: in a primitive way, it now has a “friend” and an “enemy”. Initially, splitting allows good experience to be uncontaminated by the bad, protecting

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it and allowing it to consolidate. In time, good experience is consolidated and increased security comes to be associated with a securely established good object, and this allows the paranoid solution to be revisited and redressed. In the depressive position (Segal, 1964), the ego’s growing capacity to integrate different sets of its experience – a manifestation of the life instinct – drives this development. In facing what it has unwittingly done to a love object (by casting him as a “hated enemy”), the capacity to experience new feelings such as pain and sorrow enriches the ego considerably. As a result, the relation with the father is, in time, detoxified. This view of early development suffices for the practising clinician – it enables us to facilitate a patient’s psychic growth in analysis – but I want to suggest that it is an incomplete account of the fate of the psychotic forces implicated in the infant’s earliest anxiety states. It implies that under optimal conditions those forces are transformed in toto, yet we know that every one of us can regress into such states. Likewise, when clinicians judge therapeutic success not by the complete absence of such minibreakdowns, but by a patient’s ability to recover from them, they implicitly recognize this fact. However, such observations are not properly theorized; our picture of maturation through increasing integration is too smooth. If object relations models tend to smooth out the psychotic, Lacan’s notion of primal splitting recognizes such a level of experience explicitly. Qualitatively “out of range”, it is too primitive/intense to be captured by the symbolic order and thus cannot but be separated off (Lacan, 1972; Lemaire, 1977). Outside the constitution of the human subject (since it cannot be known) it is nonetheless integral to one’s being, and Lacan theorizes it simply as the Real, an area of experience that exists but cannot be represented or symbolized, and about which little more can be said. Its impact is felt, however, as a constant underlying anxiety/tension that threatens to come flooding in at moments when our symbolic systems break down. If we recognize that a psychotic level of experience cannot be obliterated in the course of development, what is the fate of the forces involved in this level of anxiety? I think we can account for this in object relations terms with the idea that, alongside the normal integrating processes, the paranoid solution first

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glimpsed in infancy is never fully relinquished but continues to operate silently, beneath the surface.

A Developmental Trajectory Three discernible phases can be observed in the paranoid solution. The first two are well documented in the literature, and my contribution here is to bring them together explicitly as solutions to the single problem of managing psychotic anxiety. The third I suggest involves the racial other, which I will discuss in greater detail. Phase 1

I have already described the processes involved in the earliest split between good and bad experience, which ensures that, safe from threats posed by intense “bad” experience, the good object can be consolidated in the service of development. As a result, by approximately 6 months at the earliest (Klein, 1932), depressive position functioning begins to heal the split that had previously been instituted between these two experiences, which are usually embodied in the two parents. The benign circle of goodness associated with the mother can now be expanded to incorporate the father. This is usually where the clinically derived developmental narrative ends. Phase 2

If, however, we move beyond the clinical field to incorporate data from developmental research it becomes clear that this picture is incomplete. Beyond the boundaries of the nuclear family, at about 8 months, stranger anxiety emerges (Spitz, 1950, 1965). This suggests that the paranoid solution to psychotic anxiety has not been fully left behind; instead, it has been refocused, pointing now not to the father but to the stranger as the new bad object. This significant development, flowing from the depressive working through of the earlier split between mother and father, shows the infant’s definition of the good object expanding rapidly to include others within the family circle. This leaves

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the stranger – the unfamiliar – as the final recipient of projections originally involved in setting up the first bad object. Phase 3

In the fullness of time the stranger, too, becomes detoxified. Slowly, the fact that some strangers turn out to be okay or even good/nice sinks in. The growing ego’s integrative capacities – its ability to put two and two together, to observe its experience that a stranger initially condemned as bad, was in fact condemned in error – ensure that further psychic work is done. Internally this involves the same work as I have just described in relation to the detoxification of the father, and his inner rehabilitation. The category of the good object is expanded beyond the family, and at around 12–15 months stranger anxiety begins to wane. However, although the now-detoxified category of stranger appears, potentially, to include everyone, in reality this is not so. It includes, I think, only those who can be thought of as “us” or “our people” – those who are not members of society’s out-group. Developmental research suggests that awareness of the out-group emerges between the ages of around three and seven (Proshansky and Newton, 1973; Pushkin and Veness, 1973). However, I think it likely that the process is set in motion much earlier, when it is present in cruder, perhaps less stable, ways not readily amenable to social psychological investigation. The following incident I was able to observe shows what I have in mind:

A 12-month-old girl, accompanied by her mother and older brother, arrived from a long flight to visit relatives she had not seen before. She adapted remarkably well to the strange surroundings and responded warmly to both her uncle and aunt, freely going to both of them and appearing quite content in their arms. This friendly, agreeable atmosphere prevailed until dinner that evening when the voice of a newcomer, a darkskinned friend who had joined them a little earlier, seemed suddenly to register in her mind. Abruptly, she began to cry in distress, stopping only when she could cling tightly to her mother as if, in phantasy, she found refuge deep inside her.

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Her aunt, uncle and their darker friend were all strangers to her, yet she seemed to have been able to extend the benign circle to include her relatives but to exclude the darker skinned friend. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that her definition of the stranger was beginning to extend beyond the classical not-family-member category to not-like-us – an early version of an out-group categorization.

Such early awareness of an us–them divide must await developments associated with the waning of the Oedipus complex before it can be incorporated into the organized racist structure I describe. As the research suggests, this has happened by about seven, when it enables the child to begin to identify as part of a larger ethnic, religious or national group – an identification with one’s in-group, and an unconscious identification against an out-group. Once this is in place, the designated bad object is roughly in line with broad social stereotyping, the full details of which may never have been spelled out to, or understood by, the child. It is enough to know that unlike the stranger of the earlier stage, “they”, really, are not like “us”; they are truly different, truly other. Onto this distinction highly personal meanings can be grafted, the details of which probably remain unconscious. Evidence

The first split between good and bad object, together with its resolution, is well documented with plentiful evidence from the analytic setting, augmented by direct infant observation (e.g. Miller et al., 1989; Reid, 1997; Waddell, 2006). The second incarnation of that split, between the infant’s family circle and the stranger, was illuminated by systematic, analytically informed developmental research (Spitz, 1950, 1965). The third and final step in the trajectory involves installing members of an out-group as the bad object. This has not, as far as I am aware, been subjected to psychoanalytic investigation. However, there is a compelling body of research directly relevant to my theme. In an elegant study that makes painful reading, Clark and Clark (1947) examined “Negro”5 children’s racial awareness and identification.

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Working in Chicago during the 1940’s, these black social psychologists conducted on black children a series of tests using primarily dolls . . . . The Clarks . . . aimed to measure how racism and segregation damaged the self-esteem of black children aged three to seven. These tests involved showing the children four identical dolls – two brown and two white. The children were asked eight questions: the first four “Give me the doll you like to play with”, “Give me the doll that is a nice doll”, “Give me the doll that looks bad”, and “Give me the doll that is a nice color” – were designed to test preferences. Requests five (“Give me the doll that looks like a white child”), six (“Give me the doll that looks like a colored child”), and seven (“Give me the doll that looks like a Negro child”) were meant to test the children’s awareness of racial differences. The final request “Give me the doll that looks like you”, was meant to show racial self-identification. (Marriott, 1998, p. 424) As far as race awareness went, 90 per cent of the children answered correctly, with greater variability among the younger age groups – 70 per cent of 3-year-olds, rising to 100 per cent of 6/7-year-olds, correctly identified the dolls as looking like a white and coloured/Negro child respectively. When it came to preference, however, the findings were more troubling as shown in Table 3.1 below. Table 3.1 Percentages of black children choosing the white/brown doll in response to the Clarks’ preference questions. Instructions to child

Give me the doll you like to play with Give me the doll that is a nice doll Give me the doll that looks bad Give me the doll that is a nice colour

White doll

Brown doll

Don’t know

67 59 17 60

32 38 59 38

1 3 24 2

Source: Clark and Clark (1947).

Although many methodological issues and questions of interpretation inevitably arise in research of this sort, I want to confine myself to the larger picture. This suggests that a profoundly negative view of their own blackness, together with

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a correspondingly positive view of whiteness, is inscribed deep within the young black child’s mind. In a comprehensive overview of such studies spanning some 50 years, Don Foster (1994) confirms that this main finding has, on the whole, been upheld: Williams and Morland (1976) reviewed a wide range of studies which reported identity-type questions, and found that in 27 reports on preschool black children, roughly 45% chose white and 45% chose black, with the remainder not clear. In 9 studies of school-going black children, only about 13% chose white figures. Further literature reviews by Banks (1976) and Aboud and Skerry (1984) both reported that the majority of studies found black children’s pro-white choice to be in the region of 50%, that is – as argued by Banks – not significantly different from chance. For Banks therefore, there was no clear evidence at all for systematic white preference. However, the real significance of these data only emerges in comparison with white children, a comparison that Banks ignored. Williams and Morland (1976) summarised 21 studies showing that young white children’s identification with white figures ranged between 75% and 85%. Asher and Allen (1969) found the same. In a review of 16 further studies since 1965, Aboud and Skerry reported virtually 100% own-group preference among white children. So while the evidence for outgroup preference or identification among black children is not that strong, there is a clear picture of a substantial difference between black and white children. (Foster, 1994, p. 223) Foster draws attention to two smaller trends hidden within the general findings. First, that response patterns are contextdependent. Already in the Clarks’ 1947 study Southern children appeared, in general, to be more averse to black skin colour than their Northern counterparts, suggesting a link with the more pernicious and deeply embedded racism of Southern society.6 Societal changes over time, too, can make a difference. Across three British studies, carried out in the 1960s, in 1973 and in 1980 respectively, a steady decline in the numbers of AfricanCaribbean and Asian children aged 5–10 who prefer the white dolls was observed. And within these figures there is a further

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development: white identification (“Which doll looks like you?”) decreases more markedly than white preference (“Which one would you want to be?”). During this period there were profound changes afoot with respect to white racism in British society – more black role models, public debate on black consciousness and black power and so on. Despite these changes in detail, however, the troubling general pattern of findings is replicated in all three sets of studies, perhaps reflecting the fact that anti-black racism remains a feature of British society and hence continues to influence individual psychology (Foster, 1994). A second hidden trend concerns the effect of maturation: In general, white children tend to show strong own-group preferences between ages 3 to 6 or 7 years; thereafter this tendency decreases from 7 to 12 years. Young black children by contrast evidence strong outgroup preference in the earliest years, 3 to 5 or 6; thereafter this declines, to be replaced by increasing own-group preference through to 12 or so years of age. (Foster, 1994, p. 224) Although own-group preference increases with age, Foster cautions against concluding that the problem has disappeared. I would add that it is possible that it is assimilated during adolescence into an unconscious internal racist structure capable of organizing relationships such that the racism in them is effectively kept out of sight, as Mr A did. Before moving on, it is worth noting that these general trends have been replicated in a number of countries – the United States, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa – all of which have a history of white racism that therefore forms the backdrop against which the findings must be interpreted. In addition, Foster argues that although the children are asked to choose between black and white figures, that choice very likely taps into minority-group status (i.e. they are objects of white racism) rather than colour per se – Canadian Indians, for instance, show the same pro-white pattern. Bald statistics can conceal powerful emotions. Growing up in the American South, Robert Young (1994) dates his own awareness of racism to the age of 5, when his parents stopped him from playing with a black playmate, a prohibition with which he was uncharacteristically compliant. Did its power stem from

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an unconscious demand felt to be irresistible, stemming from an internal racist structure, that he position himself as a white person, and thus target blacks as an out-group, as I suggest? He notes that this did not feature in his analysis. The Clarks, too, were aware of the intense pain and trauma locked up in the part of the inner world to which their study forced access: Observing the trauma provoked by these eight requests, some of which left the children inconsolable and convulsed in tears, Kenneth Clark wrote, “Some of these children, particularly in the North, were reduced to crying when presented with the dolls and asked to identify with them. They looked at me as if I were the devil for putting them in this predicament. Let me tell you, it was a traumatic experience for me as well”. (Marriott, 1998, pp. 424–425) The relevance of the doll study findings for the model I propose is twofold: first, it confirms that by age 3 or 4, in our current Western multi-cultural settings, children are aware of the difference between black and white “races” and can place themselves accurately in relation to them. Second, how they do so incorporates awareness of the external power differential between these two groups: the equations “light-clean-clever-white” and “darkdirty-dumb-nigger” (Erikson, 1964) seem already to be in place. These findings may be seen as evidence of the internalization, along the lines I suggest, of a broad social divide prevalent in our post-colonial world where power and privilege continue to cleave along white-western versus dark-others lines (Treacher, 2005).

Conclusion This chapter concludes the task of accounting for the racist attack against me by the patient described in Chapter 2. It yielded a model of how internal racism was mobilized as a defence to which he turned to bind overwhelming anxiety mobilized by beginning the treatment. It was not a pathological organization but a normal defence, and I suggested the term internal racist organization for the normal variant.

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I proceeded to expand our picture of the normal mind to include the idea that psychotic anxiety, observed most directly in the earliest stages of life, remains as a real, lived experience whose intensity, in its naked form, is either unbearable or perceived as such. As the ego grows and develops, this experience shrinks but is never totally obliterated. A paranoid us-them structure, which contains the self-racial other relationship, binds such anxiety in a time-honoured way dating back to our earliest days. However, it is set up in a developed mind – not an immature infant’s – whose greater sophistication allows the racist structure to be concealed amidst real stereotyped beliefs about others extant in the outside world. If the crude stereotyping contained there is too ego-dystonic, this object relationship can itself be lodged in extreme, intolerant figures – bigoted parents, right wing groups and so on – who explicitly articulate racist positions we abhor. Such projection affords us distance from the racism within, freeing us to be more humane in relation to the other of social stereotyping, but can limit our ability to engage with racism in the real world. Moreover, the true test comes in times of acute anxiety – will we, like the Bosnian Serb, turn on our Muslim neighbour, or like the decent, upstanding German turn a blind eye, as bystander, to the Nazi’s attack on our Jewish compatriot? The formulation of internal racism allows us to return to the incidents described at the beginning of Chapter 1 and suggest that the very ordinariness of the conduct of the object – Bhaskar and me – stirred unconscious internal racist structures in the white native – Bhaskar’s companion and the policeman respectively. The racial other had stepped out of line and the aim of the attack was to force him back into a designated role. Although its impact was felt forcefully by the other, the clinical and theoretical study of Mr A’s racist attack allows us to suggest that the racist structure in these individuals is successfully concealed, and surfaces first as an emotional response in the other. These examples focus on internal racism in white individuals in a post-colonial order. However, for it to have an effect on blacks, I think internal racist mechanisms must have been mobilized in them too. I will postpone a discussion of this to Chapter 6 where I consider Frantz Fanon’s contribution in delineating what he calls the black problem.

4

An Established Racist Organization

The model of internal racism outlined in Chapter 3 holds that organized racist defences, which accord with social stereotyping, are set up normally in childhood. This chapter brings forward clinical evidence in support of that proposition. I give an account, from an analysis, of a racist organization that had been set up in childhood – long before the analysis – which barred access to essential elements of the patient’s psychopathology, namely hatred of her parents and guilt stemming from her attacks on them. The material allows me to show how anti-Semitic stereotypes were blended into the defensive organization so that the patient was always defined as victim, never perpetrator of cruelty. The grip of the organization derived from its being an inaccessible, split-off enclave, and if its grip was to lessen, its defensive function had to be properly understood and analysed.

Background Dr B, an academic in her mid-40s, was in her third analysis. She had thrived in her first – begun in her early 20s – which helped her to settle in her chosen field in the social sciences. She discovered a deep interest in her subject and began to flourish. Soon she was publishing papers in prestigious journals, confirming a prodigious promise that led, at an unusually early age, to a tenured academic appointment at a prestigious university where she went on to establish an enviable reputation and position. In addition, she settled into a stable and satisfying relationship. After several years, with her prospects good, she and her analyst agreed an ending, but as it drew near she had second thoughts and asked him to consider prolonging it. She felt her decision had been premature – she could not put her finger on it, but just had a feeling there was more to do. Her analyst, 65

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however, was quite firm about sticking to their arrangement, and interpreted her fear as a resistance to ending. The analyst was East European, in his early 40s, and she surmised that he had come to the United Kingdom to train as a psychoanalyst, bringing a wife and young family with him. Responsibility for childcare, she imagined, fell primarily to the wife, which helped her feel less homesick, but with the children growing up, she was impatient to return home and Dr B’s decision to end was an opportunity seized with both hands. This, she thought, was what really lay behind her analyst’s refusal to reconsider the ending. When she put this to him, he did not disabuse her of it and stuck instead to his interpretation. She assumed, therefore, that she was right. After the analysis ended, her life began to unravel and, over the following years, she gradually lost its main achievements. Her academic output dried up and she stagnated professionally. She was unable to build on her previous creative output. She felt fraudulent and sought no advancement in her position. For example, taking charge of administrative tasks in her department felt like a cop-out, which she shunned: if she was barren as a scholar, better to face this than distract herself with phoney advancement. The one role in which she continued to exercise her gift was as a teacher, where she was valued and sought after. In her personal life, she left her partner and embarked on a series of destructive short-term relationships, each without promise and doomed to failure. A second analysis could not arrest the decline and she abandoned it after approximately 18 months. It was to be many years before she tried again, with me.

The Analysis I soon came to realize how alive her first analyst still was in her mind; I was constantly compared to him. At practically every turn, she would tell me how he would have dealt with material – say, a dream – in a way that highlighted how unexpected or unusual my way was. Characteristically for her, this would be done in a precise, long-winded way that was difficult to interrupt, and in the end an interpretation I had not made – his – took

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up most of our session. In this way I came to understand that she had not mourned him – the ending had been experienced as a complete catastrophe. In the analysis with me the separation problem was present in a very specific way. She was principal investigator in a large, ongoing research project that was essential to her academic work – it attracted vital funding. However, the fieldwork took place abroad and her physical presence there was required for a week at a time at least twice in every academic term. She feared that I, like a previous assessor, would see this as an insurmountable obstacle to further analysis. Following my own assessment, I came to see it as an obstacle insurmountable without further analysis. Through projective identification it was the analyst, not the patient, who was to be serially abandoned. This reversed the situation of her abandonment at the hands of her first analyst, the very problem with which she needed further help. Would this turn out to be analysable?

Obsessional-intellectual Defence At the outset, then, I thought that hatred against her object was prompted by separation. In fact, in time it became apparent that it took the form of a murderous attack, in unconscious phantasy, on the parental couple who excluded her. However, the murderous attack turned out to have a second prong. The parents were also hated for bringing into the world a plethora of children whom they could not provide for: she was the youngest of five in a family who lived in exceptionally overcrowded accommodation. Money was always short, and to complicate matters further, her father, a travelling salesman, was often away from home for extended periods, when the patient shared her mother’s bed. His return, which brought the possibility of sex between the couple, also visited on her the pain of exclusion. There were no younger siblings – they had been killed off in the womb (she knew of one abortion) – and it became possible to see that the products of the first analytic intercourse, so precious to her, had also perished one by one. My analytic task was, therefore, to engage murderous hatred in order to contain it. Here Dr B’s intellect proved a formidable obstacle. She quickly grasped an interpretation and

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then ruminated endlessly – disguised as free association – until any prospect of emotional contact had long passed. If I interpreted this endless stream of words as a resistance or an attack on my ability to help her, she always took my general point, but on this particular occasion she just had to point out . . . . Her obsessional, intellectual defences thus rendered Dr B almost inaccessible. Practically any experience – an incident that had taken place, a dream and so on – could take up so much time in the telling, leaving little room for me to get a word in. I could then feel her anxiety about this build, but that would, in turn, generate even more detail. Interrupting did not help either, for I would inevitably reveal something that I either did not know or whose significance I had not appreciated fully, prompting more. I found this mode of relating difficult to tolerate, but it was also hard for her. In between sessions she spent much time ruminating over our last conversation. Guilt over preventing a spontaneous intercourse between us seemed to demand that my comments be given proper air time, and she would return unfailingly to some aspect of what I had said last time. Needless to say, this did not help.

Attack on Creativity With so little spontaneity tolerated, it was hard to imagine her as possessed of inner creativity – how did she write those early papers? I concluded that creativity – in her life and work, and now in the sessions – was the most visible casualty of her catastrophic exclusion by the parental couple. Addressing this directly with her, however, failed to penetrate her defensive style. She quickly grasped what I was getting at, generously acknowledging both accuracy of observation and truth of interpretation. However, I would inevitably be regaled with details of all the work done on the issue previously, “helpfully” bringing me up to date. I experienced this as Dr B positioning herself comfortably by my side, as an observer of the interpretation I had just made. There was therefore little prospect of my words acting as a bridge to emotional contact with her as a patient. My words came from formulations taking shape in my

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mind – an intercourse in a parental bedroom that excluded her (Britton, 1989) – and concretely inflicted on her the pain of loss. This was unbearable, and she responded by installing herself as the partner at my side helping to fashion and refine “analytic understanding”. This struggle over emotional contact in the sessions went on for a number of years, during which a picture of how the parents were viewed emerged. They were experienced as utterly irresponsible and cruel to bring into the world children for whom they could not provide. All five siblings were seen, wordlessly, as victims of this situation, which each, in their own way, had just managed to rise above. Getting within striking distance of blaming her parents, however, stirred such anxiety that she would move pre-emptively to distance herself from any putative accusation, defending them against impending criticism seen as shot through with conventional, bourgeois or establishment values (“an analyst might well see it that way, but things are really much more complex. Where we lived . . . ”). There was, of course, a transference dimension to this problem in that I, in loco parentis, did not provide the wherewithal for her to grow in the analysis. Her failure to thrive was itself evidence of my hateful failure to provide properly for her. Interpretations like this made sense to her, but we could not move beyond this point to accessing hatred in a real way.

A Dream Ordinarily an analyst’s ability to arrive at a clear formulation of a patient’s inner problem and to pinpoint its components in the transference helps to move things on. Interpretations help inner dynamics come alive in the here-and-now of a lived relationship, an emotional engagement that allows grounded work on elements of the patient’s psychopathology. The fact that our attempts to access her hatred of the parental couple proved so difficult was therefore a serious problem. After a considerable time struggling with this, she brought a dream, the analysis of which showed that the hatred we sought was located within an internal racist organization, which prevented her from feeling it as part of herself.

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Embossed cross dream She is sewing costumes with others. There was a man’s suit, in black, and a dark crimson dress, both made from strips of velvet carefully sewn together. She notices a grey jacket with a large red cross which appears to be embossed onto it. However, the jacket seems more flexible than embossing would allow.

The boldness of the red and black in the dream suggested intense feeling. Did the dream, I wondered, offer the prospect of bringing forward the emotionality that had been so hard to find, both in her inner world and in our work together? Could she approach her dream in a bold crimson dress? Did the surprising flexibility of the jacket signal a bit more room for manoeuvre? What exactly was her cross, and was it indeed more possible for her to bear it? Dr B learnt sewing from her mother, who was good at it. Small strips of velvet sewn together with such precision that it concealed the fact that the cloth was in pieces would have been typical of her mother – the family owed a lot to her needlework. She went on to describe these three aspects – sewing, the delicately sewn-together velvet and the androgynous black suit – and their associations in such detail that I became concerned that the new promise of emotional connectedness might be under threat. At the first opportunity I therefore asked what she made of the cross. It reminded her of St George’s Cross, the English national flag, in the news recently as a symbol of white supremacists. Their racist mindset distressed her. There has been some recent debate as to whether the cross could be reclaimed as a symbol of a more inclusive, contemporary multi-ethnic identity. This led her to the streets of London where, some months ago, the victorious Arsenal football team were parading the Premier League trophy they had just won. “Well Done Arsenal” proclaimed a banner painted boldly in the team’s red and white – held aloft, as it happened, by six black players. Half the team were black! What a pleasure to see the obvious affection and camaraderie between them all, and the joy that this multi-racial team brought to that crowd, people

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of every shade, from every background, united as Londoners. Arsenal had shown we can, together, rise above petty differences and win. If the red and white of Arsenal could capture this new kind of Britishness, the red cross of St George would surely be a fitting symbol of it. Dr B’s description of the victory parade was infectious. It filled me with a wave of pride at living in such a tolerant and inclusive city, something shared between us. When I became aware of this I became concerned lest this togetherness was carefully crafted, like the velvet in the dream, to conceal something more broken, more in pieces. That brought to mind a reference, some days before, to attempts by the International Red Cross to highlight prisoner abuse by American soldiers at a detention facility in Iraq. Torture, in turn, reminded me of the cruel way in which she had ended her relationship with her partner in the aftermath of the first analysis. These thoughts prompted me to question whether her detailed description of the victory parade, together with the cosy atmosphere it engendered, obstructed a deeper investigation into intense feelings that burdened her, and which came to the fore in the dream when she allowed herself to approach the question, “What sort of parental couple do I have inside me?” Dr B said no more and I commented eventually on the fact that she had not referred to the Red Cross report that she spoke of a few days ago. This reminder surprised her – the report had not been in her mind at all. She lapsed into a thoughtful silence, from which she emerged several minutes later to describe an idea, developed in the first analysis, of her as a “swastika child” – shorthand for an idea that her Jewish identity concealed a level of cruelty usually associated with the Nazis. That, she said, evokes another cross – a black one, associated with the red, white and black of the Nazis. Was the red a disguise for what is really a black Nazi cross, standing for her disowned cruelty – a theme in the earlier analysis?

Cruelty Why speak of herself as a Nazi? This way of speaking of cruelty seemed intellectual and hollow. It felt familiar: sometimes her acknowledgement of an interpretation would, on closer

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examination, turn out to be agreement with a self-evident, general truth. For example, if one feels cruelly treated, it is because one has projected cruelty, therefore one is cruel, so she would agree that she feels cruel. Earlier, it became clear that such constructions kept at bay painful truths, for example that as a child she was the victim of cruel racial prejudice. During a period of political correctness schools were required not to foist Christianity on children from other faiths. As a result, she and one other Jewish child in her class were made to sit at the back during Religious Education lessons whilst their classmates were taught that the Jews were “Christ-killers”, a taunt that then pursued them around the playground. She knew the teacher had made an anti-Semitic attack, but she made a virtue of not stooping to blame – she understood teachers were just doing their job. Just as she understood her parents were doing their best, and that her analyst, who manifestly did not provide an analysis that allowed her to thrive, was also doing his best. Yet, officially, she was the cruel “swastika child”. There would be no point in raising any of this with her now, I thought, since it would yield not a meeting of minds but only a reversal of perspective (Bion, 1963). Where was the real cruelty? About 2 months earlier she described how, as a child, she loved playing with the little English girl next door, an only child. As I listened to her description of a room brimming with every toy a girl could want, I found myself pulled into that scene. It was as if I were there, walking up the stairs, into the room, surveying the scene, touching the toys and so on. What I “saw” contrasted sharply with things in their own overcrowded home with insufficient room and little basic supplies, let alone luxuries such as dolls and and the like. A little had to go a long way – recalling the dream’s fine velvet cloth expertly crafted together, but from remnants and off-cuts. In that session I had pointed out that she studiously avoided making comparisons between their respective homes. She replied that she and her siblings had learnt to accept, early on, that that was just the way things were. It was their fate. What was the point of being jealous or envious of others for their good fortune? When I pressed the matter she would acknowledge any emotion that I thought this might involve, without it touching real feeling.

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However, my reverie in that earlier session continued so that I found myself looking at a cute blond girl (my patient had brown hair) and imagining her grow, in front of my eyes, into a beautiful, contented, English Rose. At the time I could not make sense of this experience, but I now saw that I had been pulled in. Was this her way of conveying, without words, what she, as a child, had done: had she moved in next door in order to get away from her impoverished home and, in addition, racialized that act?

An Anti-Semitic Defensive Organization Formulation Her “swastika child” association had helped to reveal how she used internal racist mechanisms. She solved the problem of scarce supplies in her home – an unbearable cross – by turning her back on her family and entering her friend through projective identification, thus living in her. Within this phantasy structure her every need was attended to and feelings of hatred, jealousy, envy and so on that might arise from being deprived simply did not exist. This turning away was racialized – it was from her Jewish family to the English one next door.1 There was a further racial twist. Phantasy cannot totally obliterate the reality of lack, so ongoing hatred from this source was lodged in the antiSemite (e.g. taunting teachers/pupils at school) whose victim she was in real life. The sense of bonhomie between us as citizens of a racially tolerant London was meant to blind me to these conflicted racial dynamics. Dr B’s internal racist organization thus had two components: the first managed her unfulfilled needs, wishes and desires by projecting them into the little English girl, with whom she was thus identified; the second managed the hatred stirred by the reality of privation, which was projected into anti-Semites. Both needy and hating parts of the self existed in external objects. Her conscious identification as a Jew ensured that neither was likely to burst into conscious awareness. As a Jew, who would suspect her of being identified with the English? And as a Jew she was also constantly aware of the hidden threat from antiSemites. Images of the victims of the Nazi concentration camps

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haunted her, and she thought it was only the presence of darker skinned peoples (initially African-Caribbeans, more recently Muslims) that stood between the Jews and racial persecution in Britain/Europe. This defensive organization should be considered a racial one since it made use of stereotypes involving Jew and anti-Semite in the world around her, which were incorporated as elements of her defensive system. This concealed her role in selecting them for intrapsychic ends and incorporating them into a sophisticated and efficient organized system. Safety came from ensuring that when it mattered she was seen as a Jew vis-à-vis an antiSemite. However, I have also argued that racist organizations evolve in a way that takes account of changing external reality, as long as its fundamental tenets remain intact. Dr B’s identification with the English could elide neatly into British, European or Westerner – all of which she quite clearly was. With these identifications, however, it was harder to maintain a picture of herself as a victim of persecution,2 which had, therefore, to be buttressed at key points when anxiety over inner destructiveness was at its peak. For example, when abandoned by her first analyst, she left her partner and began a series of short-lived relationships, each with a sadistic man. This allowed her to be the victim of cruelty, as demanded by the racist organization, although that cruelty was not at the hands of an anti-Semite. Providing this requirement was fulfilled, the existence of the organization, together with the projections and so on located within it, remained hidden; everything was as it should be.

Clinical Intervention At the time I had been addressing the theme of her profound hatred of me for withdrawing into a parental bedroom (as described earlier). This was not experienced as such, but manifested as opposition to being fully creative herself – she could not identify with a creative inner couple. Her sewing in the dream signalled a change in this attitude, which brought the parents as a couple into the frame, signified by the suit and dress, precious but of limited resource. In addition, her characteristic obsessional/intellectual defences, the meticulous sewing together, no longer work so well: they don’t prevent her from seeing two

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people as a couple – the dress and suit are linked by being made of the same stuff. The embossed cross, normally an unbearable burden that would rigidify everything, turns out to be flexible: with analytic support she feels bolder, more flexible and able to bear/face her cross. I thought these elements, taken together, suggested she might be able to face the gist of my understanding of the dream. I said St George’s Cross signified her identification as English, dating back to her childhood, and which her identity as a Jew covered up. This secret English part of her felt superior to, and looked down on, the Jewish family next door. However, the naked racism of this was too awful to bear, filling her with shame and guilt. She avoided this by lodging her English part of her in her friend next door. I suggested that here – in her racism – was located the hatred towards her parents that we had been struggling to find. It took the form of triumph over her parents, as Jews, who were wordlessly despised for their failure to provide properly for their family – as her English family did. I added that I thought as long as she and I got along in the analysis despite our obvious differences (like the Arsenal fans), she felt sure that this racism within her would be safely hidden: I would surely see her as a fellow Londoner proud of her non-racist credentials. The session ended without time for a proper response, but she returned to these themes the next day. However, as she proceeded to clarify details of my formulation, I sensed that she admired it as an ingenious theory of mine. On reflection I realized I had said too much, encouraging an intellectual response. In particular, she probably thought that my pleasure at solving an analytic puzzle blinded me to just how serious an attack this racist one was on her parents – both her parents had lost relatives in the Holocaust. I now said that something important has been missed out, perhaps because it was just too terrible to take in: “When, in your mind, you put yourself into Sarah, it was not simply to enjoy what she had. By turning your back on them you gave vent to hatred of your parents, as Jews, for breeding like rats when they had scarcely enough for one child, unlike the civilized Aryan couple next door.” Though tempted to add many things, I left it at that. Dr B fell silent for some 10 minutes, during which time the colour drained from her olive-skinned face. Right at the end of the session, she spoke, slowly nodding her head. “Yes,”

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she said, “I understand. I see exactly what you are saying. And coming from you I appreciate its gravity.” Some months later she told me that when I spoke of her racism she realized my experience of racism, as a black person,3 must have informed the way I addressed her, which made the awfulness of what she had done to her parents quite plain. It was as if, having been taken in by the propaganda of the British National Party,4 she were to announce that she was walking out of this analysis to go to Dr X, a colleague of mine, simply because he was English. Everything there was between us would be trampled underfoot and tossed aside in one contemptuous move. She could not possibly countenance that. This confirmed my observation that the work felt different following my interpretation of the dream. The pseudo, intellectual quality gave way to something more grounded, and she began to bring detail that had previously been kept away. For example, rather than poring over an interpretation from the previous session, she would now return with detail of how she had spent time on a weekend earmarked, say, for creative research and writing. I saw this fuller cooperation as a consequence of my having located her hatred of the creative couple in the precise place where her racist organization had lodged it. It had been properly contained.

Evidence of Analytic Progress When an analyst sees something of personal interest (as the study of internal racism is to me) in a patient’s material, this creates a particular clinical difficulty. Was I recognizing a “selected fact” in her dream material that brought coherence and meaning to what was latent, or was I imposing onto it an overvalued idea of my own (Britton and Steiner, 1994)? This question can be addressed by examining what effect the understanding that I put to her made. External I noted above that the quality of her engagement improved considerably. Work was one area where, I had long suspected,

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the dynamics of hatred and destructiveness were played out, and she now discussed her struggles over work more fully. She had distinguished between truly creative work – reading and research in search of the creative spark that would enable her to write as before – and the humdrum – mainly related to teaching. She was an inspired and sought-after teacher but did little to use these activities to advance her career. Instead, she maintained loftily that only original contributions to one’s field were deserving of academic advancement. She never wrote about her innovative teaching methods; nor had she tried to publish proceedings of conferences and so on she organized. This reflected a split in which potentially valuable contributions in these areas were denigrated, which could now be analysed as an attack on the aspect of her creativity identified with routine analytic care. Dr B’s level of engagement with this work was impressive. She now took issue with me, often vigorously, and was especially outraged when I spoke with authority about areas of which I could have no specialist knowledge (e.g. her field and the nature of the pressures in the academic world at present). When pursued in detail, the disagreements usually involved nit-picking at a peripheral detail (where I might well have been speaking out of turn), but at the cost of losing the larger picture, the thrust of which, it would turn out, she had no quarrel with. It was then clear that the fight with me expressed an opposition to the intercourse in my mind that had produced a fresh angle on things (Britton, 1989). It was possible to see that waiting for inspiration covered up a refusal to use the possibilities at hand that might make life easier. Failure also wordlessly accused her analyst/parent of not providing the resources that would permit her to thrive. As a result of working through these issues, she began to put things right: she published her contributions to teaching, and became more involved administratively. With her CV enhanced, she secured a more senior position.

Internal On a Monday morning, about a year after the embossed cross dream, Dr B dreamt:

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Three paintings dream She was visiting the studio of an artist. A set of three abstract canvases hung side by side, as a group, caught her attention. Were they works in progress? She found them intriguing. Each had marks painted on a background over-painted perhaps several times in different shades of white. On the first a thin red line ran around the perimeter of the painting; the second had a solid black rectangle painted towards its bottom edge. All the while, though, her attention kept being drawn to a larger painting standing on the floor over to her right.

The colours in two of the paintings were, of course, reminiscent of those in the earlier dream. However, what impressed me was that she was intrigued by the group of three paintings, which I thought of as her engaging with the weekend break involving a threesome: patient, analyst and a third party who took priority over her. This reproduced in this analysis the emotional experience of losing her first analyst. I thought the red marks around the boundary probably signified aggression towards the abandoning mother; the black on the second canvas was reminiscent of the man’s black suit in the earlier dream. However, this dream showed how difficult it was for her to engage with the threesome – as she looked at the three canvases something tugged at her mind, pulling her gaze towards the canvas on the floor which, in the session, also prevented her from describing the third one on the wall. When I spoke I addressed this difficulty (of engaging with the threesome), putting these observations to her. It was then that she added that the third canvas had red marks all across it – blood on her hands, she suggested. Blood linked with awareness of a threesome is a significant advance on from the stage when she projected all aggression, leaving herself as its hapless victim. A fortnight later she dreamt:

Broken consulting room dream She was in a session, on the couch. I was in the chair behind her. However, the door was open, and there were others just

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outside – were they other patients, family members or friends; would they stay out or intrude? She then notices that beyond the foot end of the couch the wall had been broken through, creating a new doorway that leads into the building next door. It seemed to have been hastily done – the broken brickwork was still exposed and plasterwork and decoration were yet to follow. From the other side distinct sounds of family life could be heard. When she looks again at the front wall she realizes that it has been moved forward by a few feet. How will the new position of the wall, she wonders, affect the view from the two windows?

My consulting room is on the first floor of a small self-contained non-residential building. The couch, together with my chair immediately behind it, takes up virtually all the space against the side wall directly opposite the door. Its foot-end almost comes up to the corner where side and front walls meet. Two large windows in this wall do look out directly onto the street below, but there would be no space for the newly constructed doorway of the dream, hence the need (in the dream) for the front wall to be further forward. The dream indicates the extent to which the picture of herself as hermetically sealed, insulated from awareness of other aspects of my life – the parental intercourse – was giving way. The two windows, I thought, stood for her two eyes that looked not out but into a mind now broadened to accommodate the fact that I have a private life that impinges on her – the view is different. Here, however, the difficulties begin. Dr B cannot yet experience directly her emotional response to this development; its violence is built into the fabric of the building alterations, and even then it is only hinted at. The new doorway seems to have been formed by hurriedly breaking through a wall, suggesting impulsive rather than planned acts. Moving the front wall, which the new doorway necessitates, is also highly improbable – the new wall would be located in the space over the road below. Not properly grounded, it might collapse. However, this dream does confirm that the problem posed by her aggressive impulses, stirred by the awareness of the parental couple, is very much in the frame. The dream work (Freud,

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1900), which institutionalizes them in the hastily reconstructed consulting room, takes them into account. However, they are not yet recognizable as aggression, let alone located in her, where they belong. In time, as the end of the analysis drew near, this situation improved as aggression became explicitly located between us in the transference, allowing further processing, working through and containment. I cannot describe these developments here as my aim has been to show that the problem of aggression began to emerge more directly after her racist defence had been analysed.

Discussion Dr B’s racist organization was set up in childhood to protect her from awareness of her hatred of her parents. A racialized distinction between Jew and anti-Semite, fed by accounts of relatives who perished in Nazi concentration camps, facilitated its projection into the Nazis. Locating her hatred in these murderous anti-Semites allowed her some distance from it, for, as a Jew, she was now the target of hatred and the violence it spawned. Hatred had found a place in her inner world that ensured there was little risk of it being seen as part of her. The projection of hatred into the Nazis, with herself as its victim, was risky: it might easily have been seen as something belonging to another time and place (1930–1940s in Nazi Europe), placing it at a remove. The “Christ-killers” taunt solved this problem, establishing that she herself was indeed the target of anti-Semitism in her everyday life. It was, of course, the teacher who was guilty of mounting a racist attack on her Jewish pupils. However, even as a child, Dr B ended up feeling guilty, the only indication that her racist organization was not as efficient as she might have wished. She had a complex childhood fantasy that her absent father was a criminal, tainting her by association. However, she could never fully believe this. The persistence of guilty feelings stems from the fact that she was guilty: • she harboured murderous hatred towards her parents (a normal human phenomenon), • she made racist projections into her family, making them subhuman Jews who bred with gay abandon,

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• she made racist projections into the family next door, idealizing5 them as free of the subhuman projections in her own home, and • she made racist projections into the English-Christians, who became anti-Semites. These projections circumscribed the possibility of the English (and Jews) being ordinary humans, and this could be seen as a racist crime. Aside from the guilt associated with racist projection, the racist organization served her well, allowing gratification of her desires through identification and locating hatred of her parents in anti-Semites. Because she used an anti-Semitic construction, which is part of the fabric of our world, it evaded analysis up to the point I described here. The reasons for this are no doubt multi-faceted, but I do think the fact that internal racism has not hitherto been recognized as an organized psychic defence may well have contributed to this. Earlier work on the swastika child theme, while close to the mark, did not hit the nail on the head – as I failed to do with my longer first interpretation. The model of internal racism, however, alerted me to the fact that disturbed, psychotic functioning prevails in these systems; concreteness dominates at the expense of symbolism proper. To get through the interpretation therefore needed to be as focused as my second one in order to show that another mind could conceive of, and hence understand and contain, the racist way in which she managed hatred. In the absence of such precision the psychotic part of her triumphs as the analyst is perceived either as making a racist attack on her (rapidly reversing the situation – see Chapter 3) or as rambling intellectually as he doesn’t really “get it”. Either way, the organization’s way of dealing with destructiveness is presented as superior. This problem of containment is characteristic of psychotic modes of functioning (Rosenfeld, 1965), and it was my understanding of this as the terrain on which the racist organization operates that allowed me to recognize it and remedy the situation.

Conclusion This chapter brought forward evidence to support the idea that the internal racist organization is set up in childhood and exists

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as a stable structure in the mind. It showed that this structure is located on the same primitive terrain, at the interface between paranoid schizoid and depressive modes of functioning, as the pathological organization. Splitting and projective identification could be observed as prominent mechanisms in the defensive system. It contained an idealized “white” other, in harmony with outer-world stereotypes: this was the English child who, in phantasy, had her every need met, and with whom the patient was projectively identified. The counterpart to this object was another containing her projected hatred of reality, namely the anti-Semite, a situation that remained polarized in an us–them system. The complexity enshrined in the self-racial other relationship showed how it served as a locus where hatred could be projected to and fro, enabling its constant evasion. Finally, the account brings out the protracted struggle involved in tackling the racist defence, which is further evidence of it being part of a defensive organization rather than an isolated defence. An isolated defence would yield more readily to interpretation, but here we encounter a resilient system whose aim is to keep itself in place; at the core of that system stood the racist projection into an idealized object. That object was not allowed to be ordinary. Externally, one may share one’s prejudices with another; internally, the details of what is involved will vary from patient to patient, citizen to citizen. This contributes to making racism the complex and stubborn phenomenon that it is, and gives the lie to any notion that simply acknowledging “we are all racist” is enough to make a real difference.

5

Analysing Racism in a Group

Because internal racism belongs to the normal mind, opportunities to analyse it clinically will necessarily be circumscribed – people rarely seek analytic help for their racism. This is not the case in psychoanalytic group work, where the focus is on the group mind, rather than on the individual one. This chapter describes aspects of the work of a small group that was part of a two-day workshop organized along group relations lines to work on racism in the mind. The account I give will demonstrate two theoretical points about internal racism. First, that it involves defences characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position: the atmosphere becomes concrete as secondary process functioning is paralysed and political correctness holds sway. As a result the situation is polarized into accusers and sympathetic supporters. Second, that this psychotic mindset exists alongside a normal one temporarily paralysed but nonetheless accessible through focused analytic intervention, which can restore it. When this is done a movement from the paranoid-schizoid to depressive modes becomes possible. Accusations of racism can then be faced and internal racism experienced as containable, which is a central aspect of my formulation. This work illustrates how the theoretical understanding of internal racism can be translated into clinical interventions, and shows the progress that can be achieved in doing so.

Context In the years following the elections that finally brought South Africa’s apartheid regime to an end, relief and optimism gradually began to be tempered by recognition that a racist legacy in the mind was living on far beyond the political system that had spawned it. This internalized racism often came to the fore 83

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in the workplace, where the need to address the fact that power and authority were still largely in white hands was, by common consent, a high priority. Nonetheless, when translated into tangible structural change – for instance, when blacks were appointed to senior positions previously occupied by whites – forces came to the fore that seemed calculated to undermine the near universal wish to build a new South Africa free of the burdens of its racist past. Addressing this urgent problem was complicated by a palpable fear that to go anywhere near the subject of racism risked igniting a tinderbox that would threaten the muchvaunted achievements of the country’s political settlement. Nelson Mandela’s conciliatory style, which embodied the wish for a new beginning free of racism, was an ideal almost universally aspired to. A sheer effort of collective will, it seemed, might just allow all to rise above the racism of the past. In reality, of course, things were not so simple – the past proved very much alive in the present. The psychoanalytic approach to such difficulties holds that facing one’s fears can, paradoxically, make a situation safer. By shining the light of awareness on the elements – impulses, feelings, thoughts – that are most feared, they are contained in the mind, which minimizes their ability to produce anxiety. This in turn allows us to face real problems which, if not addressed, could produce the very outcome that is so feared. To be contained, however, these elements must first be experienced, preferably in here-and-now interactions where something is really at stake, and survived so that there can be progress towards observing and finally understanding what is involved. This sequence detoxifies powerful impulses and feelings that are rightly feared, and is an approach in line with the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was still in session at the time. Although great hope was vested in the work of the commission, there was also some, mostly unspoken, anxiety as to whether the process of uncovering past atrocities would lay them to rest and heal or whether it would inflame things further. Could the psychoanalytic approach help? A group of us interested in extending the psychoanalytic approach to working with the psychology of racism decided to offer an experiential event aimed at creating a space for thinking about racism. In contrast to a regular conference that focused on theory or

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research presentations, the event aimed at examining how racism manifests in the day-to-day experience of participants. We noted, in the flyer, that racism can impel one into action, often driven by political correctness, and suggested that this makes it difficult to access our inner resources fully and hence to mobilize them in dealing with the problem of racism. The workshop would seek to create a setting in which this could be done, attempting to engage directly participants’ own experiences of racism, and work with them.

Structure of the Event The workshop was organized jointly by two sets of South African mental health professionals: one group, four in number, was based in academic or clinical psychology in South Africa; the other, two in number, was based in psychoanalysis or group relations/organizational consultancy in London. The staff group as a whole had not worked together before, and this was their first attempt to work with the problem of racism psychoanalytically. The workshop was entitled “Thinking about Racism”,1 and was hosted on a university campus in a South African city. It had a membership of 24, mostly academics or mental health professionals from all 3 major racial groupings in the country, with whites just in the majority. The event took place over the 2 days of a weekend, and consisted of large plenary sessions, at which the entire membership and staff were present, and small group sessions. Each small group consisted of eight members, mixed, as far as possible, by race and gender, with a male and female facilitator. There were 4 meetings in all over the 2 days, each lasting for 1½hours. On the Friday afternoon there was a preparatory staff meeting where we discussed our personal investment in the event: our experience of racism, how this related to our professional training, what we brought to the event by way of personal baggage, how this had impacted on us and what we anticipated from the event. Given that we recognized the race dynamic to be alive in each of us, we discussed our anxiety as to whether we had the necessary expertise to make a contribution to working with racism, noting a tendency to deskill ourselves – we were in fact all experienced psychotherapists with experience of

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working in groups. These discussions set the scene and alerted us to issues we ourselves brought to the event, which might easily be projected into others. We then proceeded to finalize the organizational details for the weekend. Further staff meetings were held during the tea breaks and over lunch. In what follows, I shall report from the work of a small group I co-facilitated with a white, Afrikaner2 colleague, an experienced psychotherapist and university lecturer; we had not worked together before.

A Small Group The two staff members began by stating that the task of the small group was to create a space for thinking about racism in a real and personal way, based on members’ own experiences. We added that we would be meeting in the same room for the four timetabled sessions. In the remaining sessions the two facilitators signalled the time boundary – the beginning and ending of the session – and left it to the group to begin the deliberations. In the beginning there was a relieved silence, perhaps because the smaller membership promised greater intimacy than the plenary that had preceded it. Looking around the room, Anne, a white, English-speaker, observed that she knew only one other person there – a colleague – and suggested that they introduce themselves and say something about their background, work situation and what they hoped to get from the weekend. The group proceeded to do so, and spoke of how pleased they were to have an opportunity to engage directly with issues of racism, in a protected setting away from the pressures of everyday life. They also acknowledged some apprehension about being there. The group then discussed its shared relief that, with the apartheid years finally over, almost everyone now had black people holding higher status or professional positions at work. Despite this, however, there was a sense that the old racist attitude, of white supremacy, was alive in the workplace, though where and how to locate and address it was not easy. An amused comment, that all the racists seemed to have vanished into thin air, followed. To raise the subject of racism as something tangible that was there and needed to be addressed was to risk being seen as stuck in the mud, full of personal hang-ups from the apartheid years.

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Bukelwa, a young black university lecturer, said that when she was appointed to her current position she was delighted, and it was then that she dared to believe apartheid was finally over. In practice, however, things at work turned out more difficult. Teaching students was great, but among the staff she felt not fully accepted as an equal; in subtle ways she was made to feel not quite up to scratch – not that this was ever stated explicitly. Sometimes she wondered, was she imagining it? However, when speaking to black colleagues in similar positions she realized that they too felt the same thing, as if there was a widespread assumption that black faces should belong exclusively to cleaners or secretaries. A discussion followed about affirmative action and black empowerment, buzzwords associated with the need to put right the inequalities left over from apartheid. Perhaps black professionals picked up on resentment about this as an unspoken accusation that without political pressure their jobs would have gone to whites, not because they were white, but because they were better qualified or more experienced. Could this be a shadow that hung over the workplace, making the black professional feel tolerated rather than fully accepted? Lindiwe, a black educationist, now raised a related issue. She was unfailingly deferred to in discussions relating to black students, as if she was an expert not in her field of specialization but in diversity-related matters. She found herself constantly reasserting her area of expertise, which might give the impression that she is insecure or seeks recognition. It could also be taken to mean that she is not interested in the problems of educating black pupils. Why was it so hard for black professionals – was their presence perhaps resented, leaving them constantly to restate their professional identity and to prove their worth? Was there an idea that, unlike their white counterparts, they had not earned their positions on merit but had been let in through the back door of political expediency? Were they genuinely wanted, or was their presence a token gesture aimed at bolstering their employers’ non-racial credentials? It was noticeable that the black group members, though from different core professions and working environments, seemed familiar with each other’s struggles, while white members seemed somewhat surprised to hear of them. One of the latter acknowledged that her ignorance regarding black people,

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stemming from the apartheid years, was such that she was just relieved to have blacks on the staff so they could get to know each other better after all the years of enforced segregation. She simply took for granted that they merited their positions. She felt badly, though, that it had not occurred to her that this might be an issue for her black colleagues; she would have to think about that. Racist Decisions: To Name or Not to Name? A more substantial problem was now introduced by a white group member, showing how complicated it can be to try to implement a policy that took account of the need for racial equity post-apartheid.

Joint management in black and white Lisa, an experienced professional with many years’ experience in her field, was asked to head up a new service in their organization. All their clients, and a substantial number of her subordinates, were black, so she suggested that in view of the new dispensation in the country it might be appropriate for the post to go to a black person. Management sympathized, but she was reassured it was widely agreed that she deserved it on merit. Also, they were keen not to lose her accumulated expertise in the field. Moreover, her sensitivity to how the organization might be perceived in post-apartheid South Africa showed acute awareness of the changed context in which they were now operating, demonstrating further just how able a leader she would be in these changing times. Although she appreciated the vote of confidence, Lisa nonetheless insisted that it would not be right for a white person to head up the service; they should take a bold leap into the present. Management suggested a compromise: they would appoint joint managers – one white, the other black. Lisa, who would be offered the white post, would bring continuity and past experience, while the black manager would, as she suggested, address the need for a more equitable distribution of opportunity, power and authority at the highest levels. The

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decision was widely supported, the post advertised and a black manager duly appointed. However, the latter was unable to take up her post for some 2 months, and since everything else was in place, pragmatism ruled the day. Lisa would get things going and when her black counterpart arrived joint management would get under way in earnest. Once they were both in post, however, her black colleague, who was a few years younger and new this particular project, complained that the staff mostly deferred to Lisa. As she was more experienced in the area this was, perhaps, understandable. However, it left her black colleague feeling distinctly second-class. This reproduced the very thing she had initially wanted to put right: whites continued to be seen as in charge, though in name they weren’t. Joint management might appear as window dressing. Her black joint manager questioned how deep the commitment to sharing authority went, and whether tokenism had come into play. Lisa, whose wish to bring in a black manager was sincere, found that hurtful. She was exasperated that her idea for change had run into this obstacle, and was desperate for help in trying to remedy the situation.

Different group members added anecdotes of their own illustrating just how difficult it is to avoid subtle, everyday manifestations of prejudice. For example, the black manager’s position was understandable – as a black member of staff the idea that one is not quite up to the task is always around. One’s work appears to be always subject to special scrutiny, as if proving one’s worth as an equal is always at stake. Yet, no one seems to own such suspicions, and raising the issue risks appearing overly sensitive, as if the black person needs or wants the approval of whites. On the other hand, attempts to put things right easily run into difficulties, as Lisa’s did. The group atmosphere was marked by sympathy – with the black manager for feeling the way she did and with Lisa for finding herself in a post-apartheid setting where the ghost of apartheid bedevilled her laudable attempt to make a fresh start free of racism. Listless despair filled the air. We, the two facilitators, confined ourselves to naming and clarifying what people were saying. All were therefore on the right side, fully signed up to the need for change, but the forces

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that seemed constantly to conspire against our realizing that aim remaining unnamed and faceless. This atmosphere reminded me of the paralysis in the capacity to think that prevails when political correctness is in the ascendancy. 1. Interpretation I decided to identify the mindset that the group had fallen into as one of political correctness, describing it in the terms I have just outlined, and suggesting that it usually defends against naming, and facing directly, racist elements that run counter to the conscious aims of such projects. I left it there, hoping that this might be sufficient to open things up, but it left only an awkward silence. No one inquired after what I had in mind. After a little while I noted how paralysed and helpless the group had become and suggested this was a reluctance to put into words a rather obvious thought: that alongside the wish to have joint black–white leadership, an unconscious one existed, unacknowledged and unclaimed. The decision to grant de-facto leadership to the white manager, by allowing her to initiate the new project without her black counterpart, gave expression to this. I said that in South Africa today no one wanted to own so racist an impulse, yet we know that someone made that decision, others concurred with it and yet others may not have agreed but were silent bystanders, allowing it to happen. 2. Paralysis Judging by the stunned silence that greeted it, my intervention was experienced as blunt and brutal. The group seemed bruised and wounded, as if all well-intentioned acts had been called into question and branded as contaminated by hidden racism. When people began to speak they were preoccupied with what else could have been done. Was it viable to wait for weeks until the black manager was available? What would all the other staff, already in post, have done in the meantime? After some time dwelling on concrete steps that may or may not have been possible, a degree of polarization was hinted at. Two black members who spoke seemed relieved that I had verbalized the idea that real people were responsible for acting, perhaps unwittingly, in ways that might be racist. Usually it was just about impossible to articulate this without one being perceived as bitter, hostile and motivated by hatred from the past. In the group one could sense that not everyone saw it this way, but the other side was much harder to put a finger on. My sense was that

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others felt bogged down by an accusation of racism coming from the superego, through which lens my interpretation had been refracted. 3. Re-engagement In the second session the feeling of awkwardness continued, although the group tried to work around it by dwelling on themes that had emerged in the intervening plenary. There was palpable pressure to leave the traumatic impact of my intervention to one side – for the sake of a quieter life. My colleague eventually commented on this, noting how the strained atmosphere contrasted with their involvement early in the previous session. Using her own countertransference reaction, she suggested that the group had felt traumatized by my interpretation and was finding it difficult to recover. At first, voices were raised in my defence, saying that though it might be painful these matters had to be faced – that is what they had come for. In my countertransference, I felt my colleague had broken ranks, which made me realize that unconsciously I wanted her support. I concluded there must be a good deal of hatred directed at me for me to feel so insecure. I therefore said that I was being protected, as if the group feared I had experienced my colleague’s comment as an attack that would wound my ability to function in the group. I thought this fear gave voice to the group’s hatred of me for disturbing the comfortable equilibrium they had achieved, adding that they did not want this hatred in the open. 4. Trauma and recovery Lisa, who had remained silent up to now, reported somewhat tentatively that my intervention had a terrible impact on her. She was grateful the coffee break followed soon after, during which she broke down in tears and had to be comforted and reassured by a friend. My co-facilitator suggested that she had felt personally attacked by me, to which she agreed. There had been extra needle in the way I spoke, she said, suggesting that I was not just describing what I saw as a neutral observer, but that I had been driven to anger. I realized she sounded tentative because she feared I would resent her questioning the basis of my intervention. This caution was well placed as my impulse was to hit back at her, labelling her stance as defensive against facing her racism, which she was trying

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to attribute to me, thus turning an interpretation into a racist attack. However, I realized that this would indeed be experienced as a further attack on her, so I left it. A silence followed. My colleague suggested that the group may be concerned that I had been damaged by the accusation of having attacked, rather than helped, Lisa. A head or two nodded. After a pause I suggested that the real question was not about my anger or otherwise, but whether I could take in Lisa’s criticism, take in how she had experienced me, or whether it drove me to wanting to do something, such as attack her or defend myself. This intervention, following on my colleague’s, brought relief. There was some further discussion about why I had said what I did, what meaning could be given to it, why it may have been perceived as motivated by anger and so on, before the steam went out of it. They moved on, gradually returning to the group to work mode. This continued in the following sessions where they addressed further themes relevant to the task, with interventions from us as appropriate. There was no recurrence of the massive lapse into paralysis or other extended defensive modes. However, Lisa did seem to slip somewhat into the background, a wounded figure rather more peripheral than she had been at the outset. Inner Racism Verbalized In the final session Jo, a white woman, spoke of her guilt that though apartheid was over, there were still so many inequalities of the apartheid system prevalent everywhere one looked. For example, she lived a privileged lifestyle in a formerly white suburb, yet in the townships and squatter camps life continued much as before. It was, of course, great that black people were now moving into her neighbourhood, but she felt troubled by the continuing inequality in the country at large. There is so little that any one individual can do about this, and this made it especially important that in the work setting, where one did have some control, things should be put right. Could it be that black members of staff picked up this wish on the part of liberal whites? Was it a pre-existing agenda imposed on the work setting, and therefore felt as an imposition? Should whites learn to live with

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their guilt? Most of her white neighbours seemed oblivious to all of this, with an attitude that seems to say, “Thank God apartheid is gone, now we can have a normal life.” Guilt belonging to the past seems not to bother them. But what about one’s collective responsibility for the past? Should they not do something about the inequalities of the past, especially when they continue into the present? She was glad to now have contact with more black colleagues, but sad that, in her professional capacity, she has very little contact with black people. Elizabeth, a dark-skinned “coloured” woman who had made limited contributions up to that point, gave a personal account of feeling looked down upon at work, in the way described earlier by other black members. Was she really accepted as an equal? And where was this problem really located? Was it there in her work setting, or did it give voice to something internal? In the township where she grew up (and still lived) she was sometimes called kaffirtjie3 – “little kaffir”, a term of racist abuse – on account of her dark skin. As a child this made her cry as she felt ostracized, but she came to realize that it did not in fact set her apart from her friends – in fact, she was well-liked and popular – and in time the nickname became a term of endearment rather than exclusion. That was how it turned out, but sometimes she wondered why it made her feel so awkward, tainted and ostracized in the beginning. Why should she have felt it as a taunt, a reaction that she knew persisted beneath the surface, when one could equally well say that it simply drew attention to the fact that she was darker than others? What did it mean? What was wrong with being a “kaffir” anyway? So what if she had African blood in her veins – it was, after all, only the white group that made claims to racial purity, claims that were in any event widely ridiculed in her community? Strict residential segregation during the apartheid era ensured that no black African people lived in coloured townships – their township was three stops down the railway line, which did, however, mean that she encountered them on the train.4 There it was crystal clear that the distinction that mattered under apartheid was between whites, entitled to privilege, and the others, who were not. She came to realize that whatever the differences between coloured and African, they were really in the same boat, united by disadvantage, often cruelly exacerbated by apartheid.

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Everyone struggled to make ends meet. However, it was also true that the Africans were worse off, she said, looking guiltily at Bukelwa. They were often forced to live in squatter camps without rights to be in the city. She spoke of how poverty helped to create a new sense of community from diverse groups forcibly brought together under the Group Areas Act – the government’s policy of residential apartheid. Her family came from suburbs close to their places of work while others were moved from rural locations. She recalled how the memory of the parents’ previous home, in a suburb next door to this very event, had been kept alive by her mother who journeyed daily to these parts to work. In moments of extreme weariness she would lament the fact that things had been so much easier without all the travelling – when they were living closer to the city rather than in these desolate townships. For example, sometimes when her mother returned home at night exhausted, there might be a reference to the fact that, in the old days, the family had lived just 10 minutes from her employers.

Mental Pain It is difficult to convey the moving picture Elizabeth sketched of a vibrant, lively community in which people’s involvement with each other – children in and out of one another’s houses and so on – helped them not to be crushed by apartheid, whose effects had to be grappled with constantly, sometimes with greater upheaval than others.5 After a brief pause, in which the atmosphere felt curiously mixed – it was heavy with the awareness of how apartheid’s destructiveness had reached into people’s lives, yet there was a lightness to Elizabeth’s story that hinted at life forces deep within that could be called on to meet racism’s assault. During a brief pause, Barbara, a white member, caught Elizabeth’s eye and said, “I feel ashamed to think that the world you describe existed but a few kilometres from where I grew up [in the suburb from which Elizabeth’s family had been forcibly removed], secure and settled all through my childhood, as if a million miles away. I had no idea that there were other people who had lived here before me, of where they had gone . . . . I just feel so angry that I was kept apart from you, that there never was

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the possibility of making contact and hearing what I have just heard . . . .” At this point she broke off, overwhelmed by tears heavy with the pain of loss she was referring to. This touched everyone in the room, and I noticed hardly any eyes in the room were not moist. After a few moments my colleague remarked that Barbara had found a voice for the group’s pain, linking it with the fact that this was our final session, which was now drawing to an end. Different members spoke of their relief that difficult issues could be addressed head-on, how they would miss that in their everyday life, where an opportunity for directness might well help. Finally, someone enquired after Lisa’s state – was she all right now? Lisa gave an ambivalent half-smile, indicating that she was no longer in yesterday’s traumatized mindset, but that she could not subscribe fully to the idea of being all right. Addressing things head-on, I suggested, brought relief; however, doing so could also hurt people in a way that might breed lasting resentment.

Discussion Psychoanalytic Group Work The psychoanalytic approach to group work is based on the premise that the group is not simply a collection of individuals but an entity in its own right (Bion, 1961). It has a group mind, which different individuals give voice to at different times, and interventions are directed at it rather than the particular individuals who have spoken. That mind is constituted around the group’s primary task – the work the group exists to do. Faced with its primary task – here, thinking about racism – two sets of different reactions can usually be observed: those emanating from life-forces constructively working away at it; and anti-task ones that, usually for defensive reasons, block progress by turning the group into a comfort zone whose aim is to evade anxiety generated by the work. In a defensive mindset basic assumptions dominate group functioning. For instance, in fight-flight mode it employs two paranoid-schizoid modalities to avoid an engagement with the task: it either flees from the task for some “legitimate” reason

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(e.g. race is not the real issue but class is) or it gets high on a battle (e.g. the facilitators have got it wrong). Another common group defence is the “helping” mode, in which a problem – which may well be task-related – is located in an individual while others rush in to work on it, but in that person. Here the basic assumption of pairing between nominated “helper” and “helped” can be observed, and in this mindset the group as a whole is absolved of responsibility for the problem – if it belongs to the group mind it is also alive in every member. This defence relieves both “helpers” and “bystanders” of having to face the problem in themselves. In a work-group these defensive mindsets arise, but temporarily, and overall the group owns the problem by working on it and members, through their stake in the work, take individual responsibility for it. It is this richness of exchange that makes the group an appealing setting for working on difficult psychic issues. If it works, the group will have grappled with difficult, task-related issues in the here-and-now, and through their active involvement individuals have an inner basis for taking that work forward in themselves, irrespective of whether they bring these explicitly to the fore in the group. Such learning sets in motion a process, and deepening that process in the here-and-now offers its members the best way of learning from the experience.

The Group Process This group began in a promising way, responding to the boundary setting on the part of the facilitators by acknowledging anxiety and then managing it through the introductions strategy. There was no prolonged dependency mode, a common defence in which the group defers, helplessly, to the facilitators in order to get things under way. They acknowledged the difficulty of the subject matter, as well as their relief at having a setting where they expected to grapple with it. The problem of racism was named directly, and the defence of denial raised. This signalled an interesting problem that was to confront the group early on: it is easier to be a victim of racism than a perpetrator – the racists of the apartheid era had all vanished into thin air. The early interchanges followed this pattern, and black members spoke of the invisible and disowned racism of their

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otherwise liberal white colleagues which, as I discussed in Chapter 3, is felt directly by the victim while the perpetrator remains unaware of it. In the here-and-now of the group, this could be understood as unconscious resentment – consciously it is welcomed – at the very presence of the other, which threatens to bring racist impulses, thoughts or feelings, or the accusation/suspicion of such thoughts, into the open, a threat that therefore demands extra caution. The group’s defence at this stage was to settle, unconsciously, on a division of labour: black members would be the patients suffering from racism at work; white members there would help to address the problem, which coincided with the fact that a good number of white members were practising psychologists or psychotherapists. The group made reference to this split through the remark that only menial, non-professional roles – cleaners and secretaries – were earmarked for blacks. Later on there was the further thought that blacks knew only about race, while their ordinary competence – meaning here their ability to listen, comment and so on, as “professionals”, on their white compatriots’ involvement in racism – was completely bypassed. Was theirs a token presence, with the exclusive role of describing the experience of racism and hence bringing “material” for the group to work on, or would role allocation in the group be more mobile?

Can Racism Be Named?

The group corrected this imbalance by bringing manifestations of internal racism from a white member – Lisa. It was a courageous response to the unconscious communication I have just referred to, and was therefore a key moment in the group’s work. Its manifest content concerned a decision that, because it resulted in a white manager being installed, de facto, as senior, turned out to be a racist one that ran counter to the well-intentioned conscious wish for racial equity. This was a significant advance on the earlier theme of racism as real but somehow mysterious and unidentifiable. Could the group carry this momentum forward? Could they face the fact that racism need not be shrouded in mystery, but can be pinpointed and shown to be integral to the self-same wish who promote change – the disavowed other side of the coin. Could the implications of this be faced, or would

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the group have to become a comfort zone shielding its members from this potential understanding? 1. The problem Let me consider the unconscious meaning of Lisa’s material. In the here-and-now, it may be understood as a racist backlash against the fact that our group was properly under joint black and white management, a set-up in line with developments in the new South Africa at large. The backlash asserted that this change was skin deep – mere tokenism – and if one examined it closely one of us would, in fact, be revealed as really in charge. This was a complex subject that touched on real differences between the two facilitators – I was one of the original organizers of the workshop, while my colleague was recruited at a later stage; I had written on the psychology of racism while she had not; and I had previous experience of working with racism in similar settings. However, as I indicated earlier, in the staff group’s planning meeting the previous day, we had explored fully both the emotional baggage and the respective skills we were bringing to the task. In talking through these matters we tried to be as direct and personal as possible, avoiding the temptation to make exceptions of ourselves that would allow the “bad” white, black, coloured, Jew, Muslim, Afrikaner and so on to be located “out there”. Thinking through how our racial identity vis-à-vis one another was implicated in the work of the weekend steered clear of vague generality and unearthed powerful feelings such as racialized pain, guilt, hatred and so on. We recognized that all of us carried a legacy of apartheid within, and valued the courage of each member of the team in opening up these very personal burdens from the past, especially as our time for processing them was so limited. It was this work, in addition to our ability to face our anxieties about the coming weekend, that had forged our partnership. The unconscious accusation that we were not equal managers thus referred not to objective reality but to a subjective construction of it. I do not know whether my colleague saw Lisa’s communication as I did – it would have been unsurprising if she had not, since division of labour between co-facilitators is not uncommon. However, it would have been inappropriate to address it directly in a group of such brief duration – had it been an ongoing group we may well have pursued it at this level. The deep

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here-and-now emotional resonance attaching to the vignette, however, added a poignancy that lent emotional depth to the issue that might lead to a real, three-dimensional engagement with racist themes. The group, including the facilitators, had an unconscious stake in what had been placed on the agenda. 2. Paralysis and re-engagement Following Lisa’s intervention, there was a retreat from active engagement with the dynamics of racism. First, there was an attempt to render the subverting forces nameless once more – everyone knew that blacks feel undermined by constant scrutiny of their abilities . This located the problem in the black manager. Sympathy with victims of the faceless “ghost of apartheid” – the racists had vanished into thin air with apartheid’s demise – followed. An atmosphere of political correctness prevailed, in which all were on the right side, but the capacity to think was utterly paralysed. Internal racist mechanisms, characterized by splitting and concrete, primitive, psychotic modes of functioning, had been deployed against intense anxiety. This is felt as a fear that the racism involved in this incident cannot be faced directly and survived; yet I knew this to be a fear rather than a realistic anxiety. It had been blown out of proportion by the racist organization in an attempt to persuade us that retreat into polarized camps was the only way forward. Although the anxiety generated was of psychotic proportions, this was offset by my understanding that internal racism exists in a normal mind where issues, though they may be difficult and awkward to face, certainly can be survived. Based on this understanding, it was therefore essential to rescue the situation, not by sharing this insight about racism – that would have turned it into an intellectual exercise – but by engaging the forces that produced the fear, which the prevailing paralysis sought to avoid. My intervention thus began by noting the defence of political correctness, but this was not enough to mobilize thought, and it became clear I would have to put into words what the group could not, namely that what undermined the black manager was a backlash stemming from internal racist impulses none of us would want to own. I was convinced that this observation – that the real problem was not the black manager’s hypersensitivity but the way in which the project had been started – existed

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in the group but could not be spoken for fear that it would be felt as an utterly devastating criticism. This paralysed the group. I was clear that the group’s struggle was over accepting racist impulses and thoughts that, though they may be repressed or projected, nevertheless exist in us all. However, I spoke in a way that would facilitate not an intellectual but an emotional engagement, and this is indeed what followed. My words were experienced not as an invitation to thoughtfulness but as a brutal attack. Lisa rounded on the passion in them – it was true that I had not spoken in strictly measured neutral tones – which suggested to her that I was abusing my position as a facilitator to further a personal agenda. We were in fight mode. A black man furious over what apartheid had done to him was using his newly acquired authority for revenge: I was attacking her, and left her reeling in the coffee break, the only comfort to be had from her own people. A cover-up (with which, out of white guilt over apartheid, she was to cooperate) would ensure this was passed off, officially, as insight. She was tentative because we were now on delicate territory where, despite her non-racist, progressive credentials, she was attacked as a racist by a black man who claimed to see right through her. When, with encouragement, she shared how she experienced my intervention, she expected to be hit again – rightly so considering my immediate countertransference impulse, and my later wish for my colleague’s support. Lisa and I were on opposite sides, enemies, each feeling attacked by the other, neither willing to back down. Paranoid anxieties abound in this attack–counterattack loop, each side equally determined to prevail: I am right, you are wrong. It is a world in which containment, and hence knowledge of mental states, is inconceivable. The dynamics of internal racism were alive in the room. Were this incident to involve a disturbed patient in an ongoing analysis, I would have addressed the polarized situation directly. For example, I would interpret that the patient expects me to attack her, and follow through by teasing out the way even that interpretation was experienced as an attack, and so on. In time, such a strategy, based on the fact that speaking to someone is not attacking them, eventually allows the paranoia situation to be contained, the patient’s sense of being confronted by an enemy gradually diminishes, and thinking becomes possible.

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In this group, however, individual paranoia was not the focus. Instead, it signals the deployment of internal racism in the group mind, an on-task development. Because internal racism belongs to normality, the paralysis of ordinary thinking is temporary, and if it could be rescued it would naturally be brought to bear on the material the group was struggling with, much of it occurring outside of conscious awareness. Instead of using words that might be felt, in a paranoid mindset, as a disguised counter-attack, I therefore spoke directly of whether I could take in and think about what she had said. By placing thinking in the foreground in response to being attacked, I invited the group in through an open door that would lead once more to working mode, having precipitated the necessary sojourn through the paranoid-schizoid terrain where racism is located. Gradually, the group moved on. I noted earlier that it is easier to be a victim of racism than a perpetrator: why did Lisa find it so hard? I think this is the result of a superego insisting that racism should be defeated once and for all – triumphed over, rather than accepted as a fact of life one has an ongoing struggle with. This pressure adds to the problem and is easily projected into the interpretation, which is then heard not as a description of a state of affairs for which one might accept responsibility but as a devastating criticism. The paranoid mindset can be seen as a way of prolonging the racist construction. In a group setting one can look to other voices in the group, in time, to bring a fresh perspective, so that the paranoid racist reaction finds a place without it becoming a cosy enclave. Recovery from the racist mindset is not easy. At first there was an attempt at concrete reparation – what were the other courses of action open and so on. Whether or not this is a racist backlash – interesting idea, but there actually was no other way – it certainly tries to tackle internal racism by formula, where a checklist of good and bad practice is meant to ensure “it doesn’t happen again”. An alternative, emotionally based learning, involves reflecting on the racism we are already responsible for. In Lisa’s incident that would involve a simple thought: that despite their affirmative action decision, through their collective failure to ensure a level playing field, they may have contributed personally to the self-doubt that now plagues her black colleague. “I may have stopped this torment that is eating away at her” is not an easy thought to have, and reactions to it can vary

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from feeling accused – reinstating a paranoid mode – to facing that, for all our best efforts, there is always a racist within that wants to keep the racialized other down, and that to make real progress this has to be taken into account. This is a sobering realization. Because it involves guilt at what one may, unwittingly, have done to the other, it can also be profoundly depressing. If all of that can be tolerated, then we might rely on Lisa’s commitment to equality of opportunity, which is substantial, to find creative ways of dealing with such situations in the future. In a group it is of course impossible to attend explicitly to all the work that takes place in the group mind, let alone in the minds of its individual members. Yet, part of the appeal of group work is that it can facilitate such development; as I reported, the group seemed to return to working mode without further undue defensive hold-ups. What evidence is there, though, that positive, on-task developments were indeed taking place beneath the surface? 3. The group’s reflection on its work Elizabeth’s rich, moving and thoughtful contribution, in the final session, can be heard as a description of the inner life of the group itself. Jo’s intervention, which preceded it, set the scene by acknowledging that though apartheid was over inner racism lives on and the real issue is whether, like the neighbours, we turn a blind eye to it, or whether we attend to it where we can, in the work setting – of the mind, where we do have some control. Doing so means facing guilt, which revisits the Lisa incident, but now with paranoia no longer in the ascendant. Elizabeth’s contribution, coming in the final session, can be seen as a reflection on the life of the group itself. They began in a multi-racial suburb where the atmosphere was cordial and everyone got on well enough. However, it was next door to where our event was being held: the group had not fully entered into its work – their engagement with racism was at arm’s length. Then the apartheid government, standing for their facilitator seen as having an obsession with race, broke up their comfortable coexistence, forcing them into a stressful township mindset. Here, racist denigration is the new currency and some individuals, because of the colour of their skin, are arbitrarily singled out for this abuse. This refers to the group’s initial experience of what

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I was doing to Lisa, which was met by a stunned silence – I put her on the spot as a racist, leaving no wriggle room. There was no escape, and the atmosphere was now dominated by race – who was tainted, who was free of it? I had made Lisa the “kaffirtjie” of the group. It was also at this stage that the members who did speak up in support of my intervention were exclusively black. However, Elizabeth then speaks about how the group had moved on, following the two facilitators’ subsequent interventions, to recover a more thoughtful, work mindset. In this group township, temporary projection into others was possible – the children were in and out of each other’s homes – so while Lisa was the nominated racist the group as a whole could get on with asking, what is so wrong with being racist? Elizabeth’s account, which involved the whole group very powerfully, describes this beautifully – despite minor differences they are all in the same post-apartheid boat, all carry the legacy of internal racism. Here a decisive shift occurs: in trying to manage this situation it is not what others – my interpretation – do to you that matters, but how you interpret it. That is the inner workplace of the mind where we do have control, and she describes how the group mind had moved things on by looking at its own internal racism. A description can be seen as neutral (cf. Lisa’s reaction in the group insisting that I had a post-apartheid racist agenda), the meaning attached to it subjectively by the hearer. This recognition that racism was all around in the township was a painful one to bear – it left the working mother weary and longing nostalgically for the more congenial atmosphere that prevailed early in the first session. However, the group had found the inner resources to engage with that struggle, and had been enriched by it, poverty and hardship notwithstanding. Barbara’s contribution adds to this. Not every individual has been equally involved, but all were there. This brings two sorts of pain. For those who have used it in the way that I have just described, there is the pain of losing the group as a setting that facilitated this. Can this be faced, and can the group be mourned so that it can remain as an inner resource available when needed? And for those who have not been as involved, there is the pain of regret at lost opportunity. If this can be faced, will they be able to learn through identifying with the memory of the township that they have now, for a limited time, been part of? Whatever the

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nature of their involvement, will they be able to carry it forward in their ordinary lives where that learning might be needed?

Conclusion In groups individuals come together to help each other through their collective investment in the group mind. When one person’s defences begin to overwhelm and lead to stasis, another can take up the baton and advance the work of the group mind. The opening interchanges of the group progressively lay a foundation for a deep engagement with the subject, which Lisa’s account held out. However, the collective internal racist organization was threatened by this prospect and, in response, mobilized overwhelming unconscious anxiety that was defended against by the primitive defence of splitting. Racism was now not something that could be faced but something overwhelming that had to be avoided; safety came from “understanding” that stemmed from sympathy and being in the same boat, rather than proper reflection and thought. The model of internal racism suggests that this mindset is part of a primitive defence that exists within a normal mind, which informed the intervention I made. It opened up something very painful in the form of an intervention experienced as an attack tinged with hatred and revenge, but there was also a normal mind that, with a little help, could survive this, grapple with it and eventually accommodate the experience of engaging with and owning inner racism. Doing so brought a touching description of a township where togetherness helped one to survive the horrors of racism, followed by pain at the loss of the wish to be free of racism once and for all. Internal racism is recognized, unconsciously, as a permanent feature of the mind.

Part II The Psychoanalytic Context

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Frantz Fanon: The Black Problem

Frantz Fanon is a legend. Born in 1925, he grew up on the island of Martinique, served with the Allies during the Second World War, studied medicine and psychiatry in France and, as a newly qualified young psychiatrist, became clinical director of the largest mental hospital in Algeria, a country soon to be engulfed by a vicious war of independence. He was moved to resign his position and join the struggle against colonial occupation and became a leading member of the FLN,1 serving as roving ambassador in the campaign for national liberation across Africa. A target of several assassination attempts, it was leukaemia that eventually killed him – at 36 – leaving a literary legacy instantly recognized as a unique and authentic voice from the Third World (Sartre, 1967; Caute, 1970; Sutton, 1971; Macey, 2000). This chapter examines Fanon’s contribution to mapping the psychology of racism. He dissected out a “psycho-existential complex” in the mind of the colonized where idealization leads to identification with the white colonizer, against the black/native self. This is the first detailed account of a racist relationship within the mind. Fanon recognized that this complex existed in the unconscious and looked to psychoanalysis to account for it. In the event, he was bitterly disappointed. Not only was existing theory no help at all, it also reduced inner racism to a priori essences, so reifying “psychology” and ignoring the crucial role of the context in which the problem occurred. Fanon’s psychological writing contains enigmatic assertions, such as the one just mentioned, that are pregnant with insights vital to understanding inner racism. However, while he does much to articulate the experience of the black problem he does not integrate his insights into a coherent theory of it. This leaves us with the sense of being on a journey which, though it has a 107

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distinct direction of travel, does not reach its destination. The approach taken in this book can, I think, go some way towards getting there.

The Black Problem The black problem is “a story that takes place in darkness”, and Black Skin White Masks sketches out in vivid detail what is involved in it. This is a formidable task, but “the sun that is carried within me must shine into the smallest crannies” (Fanon, 1952, p. 29; subsequent page-only citations in this chapter refer to this text). There is danger, however: “ . . . three years ago . . . these truths were a fire in me” (p. 224) and so, expecting us to be sceptical, Fanon insists that these “attitudes are real. I have encountered them innumerable times. Among students, among workers, among the pimps of Pigalle and Marseille, I have been able to isolate the same components . . . ” p. 14). The first three chapters of Black Skin White Masks describe those components, sketching out in painstaking detail the nexus at the core of the black problem. They are the most difficult chapters for a black person to read, for they enumerate Fanon’s observations of how utterly undesirable, in a colonial context, it is to be black, and, conversely, of how seductive an alienating white identification is. Projection In the colony – as in today’s post-colonial world (Treacher, 2005) – dark skin confers an inescapable psychic problem: it invites the projection of undesirable and unwanted mental content by the white other. Fanon did not know why such projective identification – in effect colonizing another person’s mind – targets the darker person so specifically. However, it is an inescapable empirical fact, facilitated no doubt by negative connotations attaching to the colour black (Berkeley-Hill, 1924; Dalal, 2002, 2006), coupled with the distribution of power in the colony: whites do what they want, blacks are done to. Fanon gives many examples of this projection easily found in public discourse: the black as animal, the black as bad, the black as the

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devil, the black as full of rhythm but short on intelligence and the black as, of course, hypersexual. The black rapist The fantasy that black men are obsessed with raping white women is a common one. Fanon notes that the black man of this fantasy is filled up with split-off aspects of white sexuality. Today we would add that violence is also involved. The mind (usually white) that sees the black man as a rapist has projected unwanted impulses from self into the object. These include urgent, uncontrollable sexual impulses (and what they represent); violent hatred of the one who stands in one’s way; and a wish to get inside, dominate, despoil and possess an idealized other, irresistibly pure and desirable. In turn, this projected constellation is felt to so threaten civilized life that the one in whom it has been lodged can be castrated or lynched with impunity.

Once the idea of the black man as violently oversexed has taken hold, a flurry of activity can follow either proving or acting on that “knowledge” (say, by lynching), or rebutting the charge – a life might, after all, be at stake. In this drama, the underlying assumption – that just being black makes one a suitable repository for the initial projection – remains hidden as it is embedded within what I conceptualize as an internal racist organization (Chapter 3). This effectively conceals the projection of unwanted impulses into the black in the first instance, which violates the integrity of another human being with impunity and leaves the white as an idealized superior free of troublesome impulses and so on. The idea of the black as rapist, then, becomes such a compelling preoccupation in the white racist mindset precisely because it is emblematic of the psychological relationship of white to black in the colony. Introjection In a colonial world the black person has to live with arbitrary and vicious projections like these, day in and day out; there is no

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escape and very little respite. Fanon notes that these projections are difficult to take because they tend to provoke one. Why should this be so? Why not recognize in a cool-headed way what is being done? Why get drawn in, trying to prove that one is not, say, hypersexual/violent, or else succumb to that stereotype? Why not shrug off a racist projection and walk away? His answer is that the relentlessness of these interchanges, in which the black self is constantly denigrated and a tantalizing picture of whites apparently free of your predicament is held out, brings about an inner change in which an unconscious longing to be white is installed in the mind. However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white. (p. 12) Longing to be something one is not is hardly remarkable. In the beginning we all idealize people on whom we depend for survival (Segal, 1964), whom we internalize and identify with. However, this state of affairs is temporary, and in time we learn from experience that our object’s limitations can be faced. For instance, a mother who acknowledges the frustration she visits on her child helps facilitate this realization. We learn, then, that there is no need for idealization – the object’s goodness is good enough. This recognition can be painful, for it involves the loss of our earlier illusion of them as ideal. If we can bear that pain, the reward of facing the truth is a richer, fuller and ultimately more satisfying inner life in tune with the way things really are. This reduces the frustration of being constantly disillusioned by the encounter with reality. Intrapsychically, therefore, the transition from ideal to real object, which helps us to know what those who matter to us are really like, provides a transition from a phantasy-dominated inner life to one that takes account of external reality. It is, therefore, the path to getting to know our world better. In the colonial situation, however, something different comes into play. The presence of whites powerfully construed as devoid of both limitations and intense disturbing feeling (e.g. hatred/violence or irresistible sexual urges) feeds an infantile delusion that it is indeed possible to attain an idealized state free of disquieting aspects of oneself. It is the ubiquitous presence of

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whites construed thus that plays on the infantile dream that an idealized state is not only attainable; it is also desirable. When this is coupled with the black person actually being subjected to a barrage of negative racist projection, this desire is fuelled even further. The wish to be white is achievable, Fanon thinks, because most of us inevitably take into ourselves aspects of the white world, with which we can identify. Sadly, such identification is at the expense of our blackness.

An immigrant friend took two brief telephone calls while I was visiting, both in English. The first was with a friend from his own community and was spontaneous, lively and in their own dialect, peppered with shared idioms, turns of phrase, and so on. The second, with a native white colleague, was slightly more strained, as if my friend was trying his best to neutralize his accent and mirror that of his colleague – to sound as English as he.

Fanon would hold that it is precisely in such everyday situations that the black problem stands revealed. The first conversation is ordinary and unremarkable – one between equals. In the second, however, there was preconscious awareness of the black–white difference between them, to which my friend responded not by expecting his colleague to tolerate, understand or speak his dialect, but by becoming as like the English as he could. This taking over of the colleague’s position in identification with him reflects what, to Fanon, is an unconscious wish to be white like the colleague. That identification is defensive in that it allows him to smooth over many awkward issues, including the ambivalent colonial attitude the host society has towards its black immigrants (we value you but if you want to live here you must be like us), and the ambivalence of the black response (I hate you for being so hostile to aspects of me that differ from you, but you are my friend), all of which becomes a no-go area. Identification with the powerful culture is thus adaptive in that it narrows the gap between black and white, the very gap across which negativity – either as projection by white into black or as hatred for it in blacks – can flow.

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Choices like these are made subliminally, but for Fanon they are manifestations of what he sees as a deeper unconscious wish to be white, a legacy left in the black person by the colonial situation. Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white. I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white . . . . Who but the white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilisation and dignity and make them mine. (p. 63) The wish to be white is deeply unconscious, and Fanon gives many examples of subtle displacements it undergoes in order to make its way into consciousness. These show just how pervasive the phenomenon may be: the mother who loves her children in proportion to their whiteness, or the straightness of their hair; the mulatto who will have only white men; the black men who will have only mulattos; those who see themselves as only “slightly coloured” rather than black; those who will not speak in their native language or dialect to their fellows, thus playing out a struggle not for freedom, but for superiority; or those who will only speak in their “own” language/dialect because of a need to prove that it is the equal of the colonizer’s. Or, “black men want(ing) to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect” (p. 12). From this account it is easy to appreciate the rich and nuanced perspective that informed Fanon’s observations. Not content to point to the ubiquity of projective processes – an external fact – he dissects out the inner situation that it cruelly exposes. But the wish to be white is constantly trumped, with all the subtle instruments of power afforded by privilege, by a real other who proves, over and over, that the white place is already taken, thereby forcing one into the black one. Because this challenges a deep inner wish, the black person cannot simply shrug it off.

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White identification sidesteps the pain of being black. There is, however, a price to be paid for this. In our world white and black are binary opposites (Dalal, 2002; 2006), and as we embrace one, we simultaneously turn our back on the other. Once white identification is in place it cannot but call into question the relative inner peace that flowed from a normal upbringing, since that was achieved in a family milieu now denigrated on account of its blackness. Whether the unconscious wish to be white is enacted or defended against, the wish is now a feature of the black person’s mind. The external colonial distinction has been internalized, together with the value attached to its binary terms.

A new Welsh surname A native English patient had occasion to phone me at home. He could not attend his next session at the usual time and wanted to see whether I might offer an alternative (which I did). The telephone was answered by a woman who, unlike me, grew up in this country and does not have a foreign accent. In the session he referred to a contented sounding child in the background, but curiously made no mention of the woman who answered the phone. My patient was usually attentive to detail, so I inquired about this omission. Embarrassed, he said he realized on the phone that I am not, after all, married to a foreigner like myself, as he had assumed. My first name suggested I was Middle Eastern, but my surname was a puzzle. Following the phone call he had the thought that I might be married to a Welsh woman – he thought he detected a Welsh twang in her accent – whose surname I adopted in order to smooth my life in this country.

This construction has many shades of meaning, one of which I want to single out. The patient was convinced he had been unplanned and unwanted. The transference version of this was that I was assumed to be completely intolerant of need in him, and thus he was never any trouble: he fitted in meticulously with whatever he thought was expected of him. On the odd occasion

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when he could not make a session, for instance, his fear of a rebuff was such that he would forego the session altogether rather than seek an alternative. We had been working on this theme, which probably contributed to him ringing on this occasion. When he asked, however, unbearable anxiety was again stirred in him, which he managed by projecting its source – the “infant” with a real need – into me so that I became an unwanted foreigner, as Mr A in Chapter 2 did. This solved the problem of anxiety, but now left him with an analyst filled up with an unbearable problem. Adopting a Welsh identity was, I think, how he imagined I solved that problem. The patient solved his problem interpersonally, but I was seen as doing so intrapsychically, by changing my surname to become less foreign. Fanon spoke of this as an inferiority complex (black as inferior to British), and saw it as . . . the outcome of a double process: – primarily economic – subsequently, the internalisation – or, better, the epidermalisation – of this inferiority. (Fanon, 1952, p. 13) As I understand it, the “economic process”2 is short-hand for the real-life external situation in the colony which allows the white person to project into the black person with impunity, as I have described. Epidermalization refers to an intrapsychic manoeuvre available to the black person to manage the resulting situation. It hints at a mechanism that involves projection into the dark skin, which I shall explore more fully later in this chapter. For now, however, I want to note that my patient sensed such an inner possibility in me: I had solved the problem of being landed with his (unbearably) needy infant by labelling it as foreign baggage to be got rid of at the earliest opportunity. It is internal racist mechanisms that turn something difficult into something foreign or other, which echoed perfectly the conviction that his infantile needs constituted an insoluble problem; without that baggage things were more ideal, hence the contented, happy infant in the background. These manoeuvres, then, suggest awareness that to be foreign/black in a colonial world where power resides with the white is, for his analyst, a very heavy burden to bear.

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Although my patient’s projected needs were intense and felt to be uncontainable, they did not in fact impact powerfully on me – I had enough room to be myself, to be curious about his omission and arrive at the analytic understanding I have just described. In the outside world, however, it is not the intensity of projected content but the sheer relentlessness of the process that makes the situation unbearable. Who, in such a situation, would want to be black? The phantasy of being white – encapsulated in my Welsh surname – is seen as an attempt to deal with this problem by projecting it into my skin, thus leaving me with a split self. The black one, with no place in the mind, is clearly the eternally inferior outsider. This institutionalizes the external colonial black–white relationship inside the mind, and Fanon argues that as long as the black person has this inner wish to be white – even if only in a limited area of functioning – true freedom from the colonial legacy is out of the question. The black problem is, for Fanon, a “massive psychoexistential complex” (p. 14) in which white is inscribed, internally, as desirable/good and black as undesirable/bad. Once inside, the inevitable human wish to be identified with goodness leads to identification with whiteness – a problem confirmed in the doll studies referred to at the end of Chapter 3. Fanon realized that this problem could not be resolved, and true freedom from colonialism won, through the logic and reason of conscious discourse alone: “I do not carry innocence to the point of believing that appeals to reason or to respect for human dignity can alter reality” (p. 224). He therefore turned to psychoanalysis to illuminate the situation. My theorization of the internal racist organization (Chapter 3) would account for the black problem, including Fanon’s insistence that it flows from “the juxtaposition of the white and black races” (p. 224). However, my conceptualization is built upon developments within psychoanalysis since Fanon’s time. What did he find?

Mannoni’s Psychology of Colonialism The most detailed psychoanalytic examination of colonial relationships available to Fanon was that of Octave Mannoni,3 the encounter with which he anticipated eagerly. Prospero and

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Caliban, first published in French in 1950, predated Black Skin White Masks by 2 years and tries to take into account the experience and perspective of both colonizer and native. At the outset Mannoni appears sensitive to the danger of imposing a racist European outlook on his analysis: “The observer is repelled by the [primitive] thoughts in his own mind, and it seems to him they are the thoughts of the people he is observing” (Mannoni, 1950, parentheses added pp. 20–21), thus distorting the picture of the native. Yet, I think it is nonetheless possible to detect a distinct though ethnocentric bias at the core of his research method. This lies in an a priori assumption that the psychology of the native differs from that of the European, and that conflict between them stems from this difference. We might note in passing that Fanon starts with the opposite premise, taking for granted that native and European share the same mental mechanisms; he expects these to account for the conflict between white and black selves. Mannoni’s orientation paves the way for a search for differences, influencing the observations singled out for attention. By foregrounding difference thus, he creates a discourse that invites the very projection that he cautions against. As his work bears out, he found in the native a more primitive version of the European.4 The Malagasy, westernized or not, “worships” ancestors as though they were living “gods”, who occupy a concrete place in ordinary life and are consulted on practically every important daily decision. In such a milieu the child internalizes a belief that for every problem an ancestor-god (an omnipotent other) has the answer, and a dependent relationship with such an authority becomes a priority. This constitutes the psychology of dependency, in which a pre-Oedipal attachment to the mother looms large. However, since omnipotent authority cannot be challenged, the failure of the ancestors to afford protection against the colonizer is avoided by the unthinking substitution of one authority for another: unconsciously, the powerful colonizer is accepted as a benevolent protector. Mannoni comments that this “psychology of the ‘backward peoples’ . . . explains the long stagnation of their civilisations” (Mannoni, 1950, p. 40). Mannoni contends that a true inferiority complex of the European sort, which I shall discuss more fully below, is rare in the Malagasy; the latter’s inferior behaviour reflects the

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dynamics of dependency, not those of inferiority. This is illustrated by the following analysis:

Mannoni and the Tennis Coach Mannoni’s native tennis coach goes down with fever and Mannoni, recognizing he has malaria, gives him quinine. The coach recovers, but does not thank Mannoni for his help. Instead, his demeanour changes. A previously equal relationship – a straightforward business partnership – is transformed into one where repeated requests are now made of Mannoni. For example, he points out politely that his shoes are worn out, while Mannoni’s are now somewhat shabby for someone of his position and standing, hinting that they would come in rather handy. Mannoni hands them over willingly. A few days later he asks for scarce cigarette papers, again without any apparent embarrassment, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Mannoni suggests that When I sent him the quinine, my “debtor” did not see the action simply as a helpful gesture which I had extended toward a sick man. He failed to appreciate its objective and impersonal nature . . . . He was aware only of the relationship of dependence thereby set up between himself and me . . . . It must not be supposed that there was . . . a desire to create such a relationship simply to exploit it: his psychology was not that far developed, or degraded. On the contrary: the relationship itself was enough for him . . . because a Malagasy who has a protector he can count on need fear no danger. (Mannoni, 1950, p. 43) Fanon’s Critique Mannoni’s Adlerian formulation is poorly theorized (Davids, 1996). In my earlier paper I drew attention to the fact that Mannoni’s position within a colonial administration trying to

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make sense of a recent native rebellion might have led him to magnify psychological differences between Malagasy and European in an attempt to help Europeans be more understanding towards “their natives” (Bloch, 1990). Today we would regard such a stance as condescending, paternalistic and racist, and I believe it was this undertone that drew a sharp response from Fanon.5 Fanon’s reaction to Mannoni is bitter and hostile, and he contests many of his propositions. These include the idea that the urge to dominate on the part of the European can be traced back to an inferiority complex, the idea that inferiority is latent in the psyche of the native, and the claim that colonial racism is practiced not by Europe’s “best representatives” but by an intermediate class of petty officials, small traders and colonials “who have toiled much without great success” (Mannoni, 1950, p. 24). Although some of these criticisms are based on misunderstandings (Davids, 1996), they do show the breadth and sophistication of Fanon’s appreciation of racist dynamics in colonial society. In addressing the last point above, in particular, he draws on first-hand experience of the ubiquity of European racism during his time as a volunteer in the Second World War (Bulhan, 1985). For Fanon racism exists in the structure of a society – it is not located in one sector alone. To maintain that it can be is to project one’s racism into another, a mechanism I described in Chapter 3. However, my understanding is built on the concept of projective identification, which Fanon’s analysis anticipates. At a societal level, it is a mechanism integral to the way institutional racism works (Chapter 9). Did this dynamic play a role in blinding Mannoni to the paternalistic racism inherent in his view of Malagasy psychology? Did his self-image as a liberal (Bloch, 1990) involve projecting the racist within into an underclass – why have a dog and bark yourself? – thereby freeing him of personal responsibility for it whilst nonetheless leaving the dog of racism barking within his broader discourse. Fanon’s most damaging criticism, however, is of the simplistic, blind reductionism at the heart of Mannoni’s project. He differs fundamentally from the sort of causal reasoning in psychoanalysis which holds that everything relevant to a problem in the present can be found in an individual’s remote past, attributed ultimately to conflict with primary objects within the family:

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Reacting to the constitutionalist tendency of the late nineteenth century, Freud insisted that the individual factor be taken into account through psychoanalysis. He substituted for a phylogenetic theory an ontogenetic perspective. It will be seen that the black man’s alienation is not an individual question. (Fanon, 1952, p. 13) Mannoni concludes that the dependency complex of the Malagasy and the prospero complex of the European (discussed below) are pre-existing structures that dovetail neatly into the colonial relationship between them. Fanon slates him for, “in defiance of all objectivity”, reducing the “bilateral totality” of their relationship to the Malagasy’s “dependency relation to his ancestors – a strong tribal characteristic”, “deliberately ignoring” that it is not the tribal Malagasy but one in interaction with the European colonizer (p. 94) under consideration. This diminishes completely the role of current socio-politicaleconomic – I would add psychodynamic – forces in colonial domination. By postulating a formative role for a Malagasy essence, Mannoni falls prey to the very criticism he levelled at his predecessors – that of projecting the contents of their own unconscious onto the “primitive”, but with one difference. While his predecessors projected a feared or detested aspect, Mannoni projects the idealized innocence of pre-Oedipal western childhood, which results in a view of the Malagasy as “sealed in his customs” (p. 94). The Malagasy is in conflict with the European colonizer – a solution to which is internalized in the black problem – because the two of them are made, quite simply, of different stuff. Fanon, on the other hand, would make conflict (and its evasion) between European and native a consequence of colonialism; they are produced by forces operating in the present: The arrival of the white man in Madagascar shattered not only its horizons but its psychological mechanisms . . . . The consequences of that irruption of Europeans onto Madagascar were not psychological alone since, as every authority has observed, there are inner relationships between consciousness and the social context. (Fanon, 1952, p. 97)

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This loaded passage clarifies an assumption fundamental to Fanon, namely that the black problem is brought into being by the colonial situation itself; real relationships of power and inequality are internalized, and it is this process that psychoanalysis must account for. It cannot, therefore, be understood as the projection into the outside world of elements of a complex (such as the Adlerian inferiority complex) shaped by dynamics within the family alone. As I understand it, this is not to deny ontogeny but to avoid premature or inappropriate recourse to it. Here, Fanon was swimming against the psychoanalytic current of his time, and his thinking is more at home in today’s clinical milieu where, for instance, we place greater emphasis on present subjective experience (e.g. within the transference) as opposed to the earlier preoccupation with origins (e.g. transference as a new edition of a primary object relationship). In addition, we are now more aware of how seemingly proper investigation of an individual’s past can be defensive against exploring awkward or difficult unconscious dynamics alive in the present (Sandler and Sandler, 1987). Fanon’s approach leads to a very different research method and resulting psychology, and in my view any similarity between them (McCulloch, 1983) is incidental, not substantial. It derives from the fact that both address the colonial relationship in a way that incorporates both parties, and both draw on the ideas of Adler. However, while Fanon accepts that unconsciously the Malagasy feels inferior, Mannoni goes far beyond that in arguing that this feeling stems from a psychological entity called a dependency complex, a fixation at an earlier stage of development than the European. Fanon does not accept this conclusion, a position that opens up the possibility of developing a psychology of the internal colonial relationship, while Mannoni’s institutionalizes the native’s inferiority in a dependency complex and thus renders such an inquiry superfluous. Deprived of a ready psychoanalytic model he could draw on, Fanon had to start afresh. In doing so he was hampered by a number of factors. Like Freud before him, he pushed at the boundaries of self-analysis in trying to illuminate an inner situation – for him, the black problem.6 However, he did not have an analysis himself (Gendzier, 1973), nor did he analyse patients systematically (Macey, 2000) – he was only in his twenties while

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writing Black Skin White Masks. These limitations deprived him of analytic data needed to build his model.

Theory From Jung to Adler In seeking a theory that would not reduce the internal colonial relationship to individual psychopathology, Fanon found Jung’s explicit emphasis on collective psychic experience promising. European prejudice that casts the black as a suitable repository for unwanted, detested aspects of the self is indeed a “collective” matter, as is the experience of “alienation” at the heart of the black problem. However, he rejects out of hand the idea that these derive from inherited archetypes; instead, he thinks they are brought about by the shared material reality of colonialism. Jung’s concept of a collective unconscious, comprised of the archetypes, is thus of little use to him. Fanon turned instead to Adler, attracted by the centrality of inferiority in his theory. Unlike the Malagasy child described above, the European child grows up in a milieu where a unitary God is worshipped; in addition, worship of God is separated from day-to-day life, where one’s dependence on parents – mother in the first instance – is recognized as crucial for survival and well-being. The parents are thus seen as superior, and the scar of inferiority in relation to them motivates it to compensate through achievements in the external world. In the colony there is a further twist in the form of what Mannoni calls the prospero complex – the assumption of superiority, in identification with the parents, and a projection of the inferior child onto the colonized. Acceptance of inferiority, then, leads to compensatory activity that both develops the ego and links it into the social world; it leads to adaptation. In Mannoni’s view, as outlined earlier, the Malagasy child does not reach this stage of development. Fanon maintains that Adler’s chain of events cannot work for the colonized, where acceptance of inferiority can lead only to false adaptation. If the child accepts that he or she is inferior and moves on to compensate with activity in the outside world, as any human must, that very psychological advance will

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be cruelly exploited in a further struggle that lies in wait. In the cross-race encounter, the dark skin will be revealed as the mark of true, hopeless inferiority – because of projection into it – rather than the ordinary inferiority that facilitates entry into the human condition. The equation white-powerful-superior-good marks the white skin as the true badge of victory over inferiority; in doing so it uses the very psychic scaffolding that drove the black child’s normal development to undermine his or her very being. This is an inescapable problem. Do they continue to “accept” their inferiority, en passant installing white as superior? Or do they fight against the notion of black as inferior, which can lead to overcompensation – an obsession with proving that despite a black skin, one is, at the very least, the equal of the white. In the colonies this impossible choice ensures that a straightforward acceptance of “inferiority” on the part of the black person cannot lead to successful adjustment. Adler’s model cannot account for this and Fanon observes that Antillean society is a society of comparison, and adds that in the colony the shadow of the white hangs over the black child’s attempt to resolve inferiority; the drama of compensation for inferiority is played out on the minor stage of comparison among powerless (or “objectively” inferior) blacks. A struggle that provides a path from the family into society for the white child does not do so for the black one. The latter’s transition into society not only bypasses those same psychological achievements within the family but also overrides and thus undermines them. Fanon’s addition, however, is ad-hoc, and he fails to consider its theoretical implications. For example, inferiority in relation to parents matters because the parents are cathected as significant objects. Why should comparison with whites come to matter to the black child, more especially if white authority is discontinuous with that of the parents? I shall not pursue these matters further, for I think Fanon’s real problem with Adler lies elsewhere.

Fanon, Adler and Freud When Fanon followed Mannoni into the arms of Adler, I think he took a wrong turn in that he unwittingly looked to a

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revisionist theory (Jacoby, 1975) for an account that lies beyond the scope of such models. Adler’s theory substitutes a singular will to power for Freud’s more complex and nuanced theory of motivation in which, over the course of development, sexual and aggressive drives are transformed from a primitive state into entities that we are more or less able to live with as social beings. Endless accommodations and compromises mark this process, and our inner life carries the unique imprint and tensions of these struggles. Disturbing as they are, conflict and turmoil over what is acceptable – socially in the first instance, later to the superego – are seen as endemic. Revisionist psychoanalytic theories, on the other hand, bypass this by substituting benign and socially acceptable formulations for more disturbing classical ones. This allows theory to conform to the sensibilities of our shared world, but the price paid for inscribing social convention in its very fabric is the ability to shed light on the processes by which the social comes to be installed within: it is already there, a priori. Where classical theory has a broad metapsychological reach – the ontological evolution of instinctual life covers all aspects of one’s being (as a living creature), past and present – the drive for power reduces all mental life to compensating for infantile helplessness. While this may work in the consulting room – patients can as readily be shown to be empowering themselves as, say, struggling over unacceptable sexual and aggressive impulses – the theory struggles to travel beyond it. Fanon’s wrong turn, then, was to seek an explanation of how an external divide is internalized in a theory ill equipped for the task. Why did Fanon avoid Freud’s classical theory? I think this was because the Oedipus complex is recognized as the seat of the neuroses, and he had already decided that the black problem was not a neurotic one (pp. 9–10 above). I myself went further (in Chapter 3) and brought together evidence showing that internal racism belongs to the defensive organization, a pre-Oedipal configuration. Nevertheless, the assumption of Oedipal involvement remains widespread. Because of the theoretical importance of this debate, a detailed digression from the main thread of this chapter is required to examine fully whether the race/class divide can be said to be internalized Oedipally.

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Race/Class Difference and the Oedipus Complex Oedipal Theory: A Synopsis Oedipal theory maps out how we come to position ourselves in relation to the biological fact that one is either male or female. In the outside world gender is not neutral: authority and power cleave along sexual lines, with Culture decreeing this as the man’s domain. The Oedipus complex charts an inner journey that begins when, as a child, we first register that longed-for gratifications are consistently withheld by our parents. Early on, this would not have been the case, and love would ensure that a child’s plea, provided it was sufficiently heartfelt, did not fall on deaf ears. At the very beginning this allows the infant to construct the phantasy of infantile omnipotence – an illusion that, because the needs of the very young infant are prioritized, its wishes in fact make things happen – vestiges of which would, for years, ensure that a plea in the name of that special love might just succeed in bending rules: “Won’t you do it just for me?” With the Oedipus complex, however, its time has finally come and rules must, now, be accommodated. The sequence is initiated by the child seeking pleasure for pleasure’s sake, rather than that to be had incidentally – say, from feeding. The wish for genital stimulation is emblematic of this development, and the parents’ refusal to go there is interpreted, in the first instance, as signalling that the sexual relationship is their exclusive domain – genital stimulation is reserved for each other, and excludes the child. This sets in train a raft of unconscious phantasy that constitutes the Oedipus complex proper, including the wish to possess the parent of the opposite sex, to get rid of the same-sex rival, phantasies of being the mother’s or father’s partner and so on. Over the next several years the Oedipus complex is played out unconsciously, with only the occasional manifestation breaking through to consciousness: a 4-year-old, deeply attached to his mother, helpfully informs his father that his breath smells, another time suggesting that he marry a colleague; or, a 7-yearold who just has to “jump on daddy”, with whoops of delight, whenever she chances upon him lying down during the day. The larger canvas from which these fragments emanate remains hidden, but even such brief glimpses reassure us that, in the deeper

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recesses of the child’s mind, the Oedipal journey is continuing apace.

Gender in the Oedipus Complex Almost all Oedipal phantasy gratifies wishes in opposition to what is accurately perceived as a prohibition on the part of the parents. It is as if the child insists defiantly, “if you won’t let me have what I want, you can’t stop me from having it within the privacy of my own mind!” By the end of the Oedipal period, however, the passions associated with such phantasy dies down as the child comes to accept “that is just the way it is”: s/he is excluded from the parents’ intimate relationship, constellated around their sexuality. This is a momentous development – a rule initially experienced as external and hence alien and arbitrary, and which occasioned deep, protracted rebellion, is finally installed in the mind. The superego, heir to the Oedipus complex (Freud, 1933),7 reconciles the child to the idea that its interest – the gratification originally sought – is best served by identifying with the parental union, not opposing it. Oedipal desire towards the parents is repressed, postponed and redirected, eventually outside the family, thereby installing the incest taboo internally. Naked passion is sublimated and this, rather than an autonomous drive to power, drives achievements in the world. None of this would be possible without recognizing, in the first instance, that genital sexuality is located between two different parents; in all known human cultures that differentiation is saturated by the values of a patriarchal order (Mitchell, 1974). The incest taboo is signified as an instrument of power, which belongs to the domain of the father. 8 Because of the child’s intimate, passionate involvement in this drama, these meanings attached to male and female come to be installed in his/her mind, henceforth providing an array of identificatory possibility. The above understanding of the Oedipus complex is based on Juliet Mitchell’s (1974) landmark inquiry into the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism. In her hands Oedipal theory – up to that point in danger of being dismissed as a tool in the oppression of women – emerges as a rigorous account of how the broader taboo against incest is internalized, utilizing

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the culturally inscribed loadings attached to male and female. These cultural loadings come to appear to us, as fully signed-up members of human culture, as “natural”, thus enjoying a new inner lease of life. Oedipal theory, then, accounts for the internalization of the gender divide, including the external loadings attached to gender (man/woman; son/daughter), the positioning of the self in relation to these, and the rules governing contact across gender and generation (permissible/prohibited). Race/Class in the Oedipus Complex Let us now turn to the racial divide. Yesteryear’s colonial order was nakedly racist (Adi, 2007), and today’s world is marked by a post-colonial global order in which power, economic and military, continues to reside with the West. It is in this divided context that citizens, descended from European masters or their colonized subjects, have to take their place (Treacher, 2005). We know that the neo-colonial divide present in our world comes to exist within the individual mind (Fanon, 1952; Kovel, 1988), but can the theory of the Oedipus complex account for its internalization? Two recent papers argue that these differences are so intertwined with gender ones that the former can be regarded as a hidden constituent of the Oedipus complex. Luz Calvo (2008) argues that unconscious racist fantasies permeate our post-colonial world, one of which is that of miscegenation. He suggests that we internalize these loaded fantasies not only with the same passion as gendered ones, but as part of the same Oedipal process. Sally Swartz (2007) makes this case even more explicitly in her attempt to explore the paralysing silence that surrounds the topic of racism and racialized therapeutic practice. She notes that race involves a relationship with a visibly identifiable other, which is difficult to approach because “our anxieties about otherness and the forbidden . . . mingle and amplify each other in a constant flow”. . . . the Oedipus complex . . . is where one of our first encounters with difference, exclusion and identity is formed. Its working through will cast light and shadow on every relationship, determining whether difference is met with fear or

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competitiveness, idealization or denigration, joyful curiosity or withdrawal. Reactions to racial difference are as fundamental . . . Just as our gender identity is both simple and infinitely variable and complex, our awareness of our race is also on one level simple – ‘black/white’ – and on another extraordinarily complex. (Swartz, 2007, pp. 362–363) Swartz goes on to argue that gender and race are both bodily and psychically intertwined. At exactly this period of turmoil and entry into a gendered identity another deep identification, equally unquestioned, equally powerful, is formed . . . she is inserted into a world of race as well . . . . The little girl notices that she will never grow up like her father, because she has no penis; she notices too that she will never grow up to look like her friend, or her uncle’s girlfriend, because she is one colour, and they are another . . . Just as a girl knowing she cannot grow up to be a man affects her development in a world that privileges men, so too knowing that she will be a woman of colour in a world that privileges whiteness, changes everything. The internalization of society’s racism will shape her life as inexorably as her gender . . . . (Swartz, 2007, p. 366) Calvo (2008) begins clinically. He thinks a miscegenation fantasy lies behind a white woman’s inquiry as to whether her black analyst (Leary, 1997b) is married to a black man. The real question, he thinks, is whether the husband is white, but this is defended against because it is located in that racist fantasy. The idea of intercourse across the racial divide is present in the patient’s mind (she thinks Leary herself is the product of a cross-race union), as is the idea of racialized violence (the patient makes reference to the film Pulp Fiction). How are such fantasies internalized? Calvo (2008) goes back to the case of the Wolf Man – Freud’s first detailed clinical illustration, in an adult patient, of the theory of the Oedipus complex and the infantile neurosis seen as lying at its core (Freud, 1918) – to argue that both race and class components are present in that narrative. Freud revealed to Ferenczi that the Wolf Man saw him as a Jewish swindler whose head he would have liked to

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shit on, and whom he had a fantasy of sodomizing. This powerful racial transference remained unanalysed and, Calvo argues, therefore reappears at the end when the Wolf Man gave Freud as a parting gift a dark Egyptian figurine with a mitre-shaped headdress, . . . shaped and colored like feces . . . [which] harkens back to the opening transference. In addition, as a statue of a racial and gendered Other, the meaning of the statue to the Wolf Man may be linked to Grusha, the socially devalued servant woman of his childhood . . . the gift is a metaphor for the exchanges between the two men and one that – like their relationship itself – contains racial, sexual and class significations. (Calvo, 2008, pp. 60, 61) For Freud the primal scene involves the parental intercourse, but Calvo argues that because it is by no means certain that the Wolf Man actually witnessed this (which Freud acknowledges) it must be thought of as having narrative rather than historical truth. If so, why ignore the race/class elements in favour of those pertaining to the nuclear family constellation? Especially as the Wolf Man’s presenting symptom of seeking out degraded women (from an inferior class) could be linked with something he did see, which was sexualized: When he saw [Grusha] upon the floor engaged in scrubbing it, and kneeling down, with her buttocks projecting and her back horizontal, he was faced once again with the attitude which his mother had assumed in the coitus scene. She became his mother to him; he was seized with sexual excitement owing to the activation of this picture; and like his father (whose action he can only have regarded at the time as urination), he behaved in a masculine way towards her. (Freud, 1918, quoted by Calvo pp. 92–93) Freud sees Grusha as standing for the Wolf Man’s mother. Calvo asks, why regard his mother, rather than Grusha, as the primary constituent in his Oedipus complex? The latter reading would allow for the cross-race/class relationship to have a role in structuring his desire. Since Freud provides no explicit argument for

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prioritizing gender9 – other than the hypothesis that the Wolf Man witnessed the parental intercourse in infancy – Calvo, . . . by identifying the positions (servant girl and Jewish analyst) and the embodied exchanges (sex, shit, money, and statuette) that structured the analytic relationship, . . . find[s] Freud’s analysis dependent on race and class links that are then erased in his final formulation. While Freud attempts to contain the Wolf Man’s case history within a bourgeois oedipal family structure, the case history and its surrounding documents are steeped in racial, class, and sexual fantasy and associations of dirt, darkness, and degradation. (2008, p. 63) A fuller reading of this Oedipal narrative, therefore, reveals that “the subject is constituted through fantasy scenarios in which difference is conceived as a tangled web of sexual, racial and class positions” (2008, my italics, p. 57). Is Race/Class Internalized Oedipally? If race/class distinctions were properly Oedipal, then the meanings attached to them should be internalized alongside those attaching to gender. Let us examine the evidence. Both Calvo and Swartz base their case on the observation that, in the present, dynamics pertaining to gender and race/class difference appear intertwined. This is beyond dispute, but being intertwined with gender does not, in itself, make the race/class strand Oedipal. For example, a girl’s obsession with her father may appear Oedipal because of the archetypically Oedipal crossgender, cross-generation element. In the course of an analysis, however, a wish to possess and control her object – in order, say, not to face the experience of loss – might be revealed as lying at its core. In this case, elements of her pre-Oedipal relationship with the mother (as primary object) would have been displaced onto the Oedipal father.10 Theoretically, a sharp distinction can be drawn between the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal: the normal Oedipal situation assumes that pre-Oedipal issues have been successfully contained, and the child arrives at the Oedipal moment with an ambivalent, more

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or less equivalent, relationship to each parent. The hypothetical child above clearly fails this criterion: she has excessive aggression towards her mother for abandoning her, which fuels the obsessive attachment to her father. Although refracted through an Oedipal lens, their relationship contains a pre-Oedipal problem. The idea that the child enters the Oedipus complex with an ambivalent relationship with each parent does not mean the pre-Oedipal child relates to each parent in isolation. Freud himself did not address this problem explicitly, but his successors have clarified the nature of pre-Oedipal awareness of the couple. Melanie Klein (1928, 1932) identified early stages in the Oedipus complex, linking their emergence with more familiar infantile issues such as separation and loss. Ronald Britton (1989) argues that the infant and young child’s capacity to tolerate awareness of the couple is in fact central to the development of an inner space in which phantasy and thinking can emerge (see also O’Shaughnessy, 1989). The fact that the pre-Oedipal child must learn to tolerate awareness of the couple adds to Oedipal theory, whose central elements – withholding of gratification by the parents and the phantasy activity that follows – remain unaffected by this more complete understanding of earlier development.

The Evidence Examined 1. Quality of feeling Let us return now to the question of whether race/class elements encountered clinically as intertwined with gender elements can be thought of as Oedipal. Normally, phantasy belonging to the Oedipal period remains unconscious, and comes to light mainly when things go wrong. When this happens, it becomes apparent that the problem resides in the patient’s fear of letting those feelings in, rather than an inability to experience them, which would be associated with pre-Oedipal pathology. For example, the boy fears that if he allows in his murderous hatred of his father, the sheer intensity of Oedipal passion will put his father at risk. This matters precisely because his father is not expendable: we enter the Oedipus complex with love and hatred towards both parents, and by now it is no longer possible to simply obliterate an unwelcome feeling – as once, in

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the grip of an infantile mindset, we could. Oedipally, we are thus exposed to conflict between feelings, and Oedipal symptoms are an attempt to avoid this. In analysis, it is conflict between intense feelings that stands revealed once more – conflict, that is, at the normal-neurotic rather than the borderline-psychotic level of organization. The Oedipus complex brings these into play across the gender divide – in the form of a relationship with parents – and is thus regarded as the seat of the neuroses. The feelings involved in race/class conflict do not appear to fall into this category. As I pointed out in Chapter 3, when accommodations across race/class divides break down, the result is usually conflict and battle in the outside world rather than inner turmoil and suffering. For example, the break-up of Yugoslavia was followed by the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, including, at Srebrenica, the worst act of genocide in Europe since the Nazis. And on a more private, individual canvas, the incident involving Sanjeev Bhaskar at the beginning of Chapter 1 suggests a psychotic element – a rupture in the continuity of his being, when someone else took control of his mind – in the problematic crossrace interchange. This implies that “feelings” not belonging to the normal-neurotic part of the mind are more typically involved in accommodations across the race/class divide, and thus stand revealed when they break down. 2. Calvo’s argument Let me now examine more closely Calvo’s argument that the race/class divide is internalized Oedipally. First, I have already noted that he finds evidence to suggest that Leary’s patient has fantasies about the role of cross-race intercourse in the life of her analyst, which might involve violence. However, he presents none to suggest that the patient regards that cross-race intercourse as degraded, a characteristic of miscegenation. That fantasies of cross-race intercourse in our post-colonial world carry this shade of meaning seems, for him, a matter of definition.11 Second, when he identifies race/class elements in the Wolf Man case, he argues that Freud ignores them in favour of the gender elements because of an assumption that the Wolf Man saw the parental intercourse in his infancy. Without this, according to

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Calvo, the case for the primacy of gender is undermined. Moreover, his competing race/class formulation has the advantage of involving a scene that was actually witnessed, and in relation to which there was sexual phantasy on the part of the child, which he says Freud dismisses as a displacement. Here I think Calvo misunderstands Freud. For Freud the question of whether the parental intercourse was witnessed is a theoretical problem that he acknowledges freely. He can do so precisely because his reading of the Wolf Man’s infantile neurosis does not depend on it.12 Calvo, on the other hand, makes this primary, suggesting that Freud relies on this questionable piece of history to establish the truth of constructions centred within the “bourgeois Oedipal family structure”. In fact, Freud relies on narrative, not historical, truth to support his reading. Interpretations drawn from this narrative resulted in the Wolf Man’s symptoms lifting. It is the narrative coherence of that case that is most compelling. Calvo is at an obvious disadvantage as he cannot know whether a similar therapeutic outcome would have followed had Freud interpreted along race/class rather than gender lines. His race/class narrative must, therefore, be regarded as no stronger than plausible, its validity yet to be established. To do so, he would have to bring forward clinical material of his own that shows that Freud’s outcome can be achieved by working on a race/class, rather than a gendered, primal scene. Without this, we have a competing narrative of the Wolf Man case history that can be articulated but not put to the test. To accept it as is would mean that every plausible narrative would be equally valid but none would be true. 3. Swartz’s argument The case advanced by Swartz is less detailed on the grounds for an Oedipal link. She relies on the observation that the child is inserted into the world of race “at exactly [the] period of turmoil and entry into a gendered identity” (2007, p. 366). Citing Foster’s (1994) excellent review and synthesis of the findings of doll-study research (Chapter 3), she notes that “between the ages of 3 and 5 years – during the Oedipal period – children begin to notice skin colour” (p. 366, my italics). However, this is misleading since the youngest group of children in the studies reviewed are in the 3–5 year range, and by then they are already aware not only of skin colour

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but have also internalized the negative value attached to darker skin (Foster, 1994). I have been unable to find systematic evidence of what obtains before age 3, and below report anecdotal observations (see pp. 135–136; and Chapter 3, pp. 58–59 – box) of even younger children’s awareness of such categories (Davids, 1996, p. 227). In any case, if they are already aware of the negative value attached to darker skin at 3–5 years, the beginning of the Oedipal period proper, it is unlikely that it is internalized as a consequence of the emotional work of that phase.

Fanon, Oedipus and Internal Racism I suggested that Adler’s is an Oedipal level theory that lacks the depth and rigour to account for the internalization of an external divide such as that involved in the black problem. Although elegant arguments have been advanced that classical Oedipal theory can do what Adler can’t, the evidence supporting this proposition does not stand up to scrutiny. It is, therefore, more likely that the black problem is internalized as internal racism – following a trajectory parallel to the Oedipal line – as the model presented in this book suggests. In addition to the actual appearance of an external divide internally, the model of internal racism can, within a single theoretical formulation, account for further aspects of racist functioning Fanon observes – for example, concreteness, the (split) Manichean division between black and white, projective identification, murderous hatred, idealization and denigration and so on – which his own modification of Adler can’t. Fanon himself was unaware of the significance for his project of the debate around processes of internalization within psychoanalysis, which his work predates. He began by rejecting the idea of central Oedipal involvement in the black problem, but then settled on an Oedipal-level theory now recognized as revisionist (Jacoby, 1975), depriving it of the metapsychological reach to straddle clinical and developmental realms. This is necessary to account for the internalization of a societal divide. Nevertheless, there is a further valuable contribution in Fanon, and I must now return to his attempt to account for the origin of the black problem.

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Fanon’s Theory Fanon’s Alternative to Adler Fanon’s alternative is based on the idea of a “collective catharsis” – an inappropriate term for the process he has in mind. The term implies a release of psychic energy (especially deriving from aggression), but Fanon really means a process whose result is a particular set of internal object relations. Children’s games, stories and comic books provide the means whereby this takes place, the outcome of which is identification with the hero (a projected good part of the self) who engages in battle with assorted villains (bad parts of the self). Fanon notes that in colonial society, the hero (of games, stories and the like) is almost always white, the villain black and the child’s natural identification with the hero results in white identification. In this way, the dynamic at the core of the black problem is established in childhood. “Collective” refers to the fact that all black children in the colony face this dilemma.

Difficulties with Fanon’s Model I see two specific difficulties with this account. First, Fanon uses the thermodynamic language of drive theory, which was dominant in psychoanalysis at the time. It is possible to redress this difficulty by bringing out the object relations implicit in Fanon’s analysis, as I have just done. Elsewhere I showed how the tennis coach incident (p. 117 above, box) could be cast in object relations terms that restores the analysis to its “proper time and place” (Fanon, 1952, p. 104), in which conflict between colonizer and colonized is endemic13 (Davids, 1996). Here I would like to reframe Fanon’s developmental sequence from the language of catharsis into its object relations equivalent. By way of background, it is worth noting that dealing with forces of love and hate within – not the more abstract psychic energy – is an ongoing human task. At the earliest stages bad parts of the self (associated with hatred) are expelled and then avoided, and the good that remains within is idealized (and exclusively linked with love). Play and an imaginative involvement with stories, comic books, films and so on provide the

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vehicle by which an interaction between projected good (loving) and bad (hating) parts of the self becomes possible. The roles of hero and villain allow these respective aspects of the self to be personified and for a child to become emotionally engaged in the ensuing battles. In this way the vital developmental step of bringing together idealized and denigrated objects is achieved. This is a normal part of every child’s development. In the colony, however, the fact of the hero’s whiteness and the villain’s blackness creates particular difficulties for the black child. All children identify with the hero, but whiteness comes as part of the package, and this gives rise to an unconscious belief that the good hero within is white. Such a belief is strengthened if the child can participate in “white” activities, more so if there are other blacks who cannot and may thus be perceived – with considerable social reinforcement – as the ones at a real disadvantage. For example, if one can speak English “well” when others have an accent. The black child thus becomes “duped” into believing he is something that he is not – a white hero – only to be coldly dis-illusioned when, as must happen, the fact of blackness is thrown directly in his or her face. Fanon’s account places the responsibility for the above state of affairs exclusively on colonial society, which offers models for identification split along racial lines: the hero is usually white. This focus leads to a vital omission in his model: Fanon’s is a passive, idealized child, the victim of a malevolent split permeating down from the social. He does not address the question of how aware the child is of skin colour, and how it uses that awareness to solve psychic dilemmas. This is my second and more important difficulty with Fanon’s account, which I think precludes the individual-society dialectic he otherwise favours. I can compensate for this omission of Fanon’s through another example. But first I must consider young children’s awareness of difference:

Awareness of difference in very young children Example 1: A 2-year-old reared bilingually shares a home with a unilingual uncle. To everyone’s delight she never makes a mistake in choosing the right language in which to address

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him, despite the fact that she is only in the process of learning to speak. She seems perfectly able to act appropriately on the basis of a perceived and remembered difference. Example 2: In his third year her brother was sent to nursery school where they listened to nursery rhymes, stories etc. on cassette tape, all in English. At home tapes in English and other languages were often played, and it soon became apparent that he made a distinction between those that could be taken to school, and those for home-listening only – all without any indication from his parents that the non-English material was exclusively for home use. This same child developed a category, urdu shop (urdu was spoken at home), marked out by the smell of spices, clearly differentiating them from “English” shops and supermarkets, for which he did not as yet have a name.

The everyday examples above indicate that young children do indeed perceive difference in the world around them and are capable of quite sophisticated categorization based on them. Given its obvious visibility, one would be surprised if such children were unaware of differences in skin colour. Epidermalizing Inferiority: An Instance of Internal Racism Let me now describe an incident that illustrates how a young child used his awareness of a difference in skin colour psychically. It is my attempt to flesh out Fanon’s perspicacious observation, cited earlier (p. 114 above), that the inferiority emanating from the social is “epidermalized”. Dark skin as dirty In the bath, Sunil, a three-and-a-half-year-old child of Indian descent, remarked to his mother that his skin is grey, and they had better scrub it properly to get it clean. In conversation with his mother it emerged that he thought his skin was dirty while that of the white children in his class was clean. He was adamant that a teacher (a pale blonde), from whose class he

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and some friends had recently been moved, was absolutely clean, rejecting out of hand any suggestion that like him she, too, sometimes got dirty.

This material illustrates the longing for a white skin, a very early version of the wish for a partially white/Western identity encompassed in the black problem, and sheds light on the dynamics that underpin it. Moving from the class of a loved teacher echoed earlier separations from his parents and stirred up hostility in Sunil. Usually, a child deals with such hostility in a paranoid way, by projecting it into the object whose departure triggered it, so that the abandoning object, not the child itself, is experienced as hostile. When normal mothers say, “I am a bad Mummy to leave you at nursery all day”, they intuitively understand and acknowledge this. Were Sunil to project his hostility, he might feel that the teacher must hate him to visit on him the pain of loss. However, the school had taken steps to ease the transition between the two classes in order to minimize the jolt: he was moved along with a handful of his closest friends; they spent some time with the new teachers before the move; they were prepared well in advance of the actual move; and they anticipated it with some eagerness as it was cast as desirable – they were to be in the class for big children. Such positive steps made it harder for the child to experience the move as a hostile one, let alone to hold the teacher responsible for it. Deprived of this opportunity for projection, he was therefore left with hostility uncontained within. I think he dealt with this problem by packaging the hostility as unwanted psychic dirt, which was then split off from his mind and projected into his dark skin. Previously his skin colour was noticed but had no value – either negative or positive. It was simply the colour his skin happened to be. Following the projection, however, it became dirty. By the same token, his mind was now free of the bad, destabilizing thoughts, impulses and feelings stirred up by the move, which allowed him to be just like his little white hero friends – in identification with an idealized teacher – thus allowing him to cope well at school notwithstanding the disruption of the move. By now both his dark skin and his teacher’s light one had been racialized (Dalal, 2002). Using his

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dark skin as a repository for bad feeling brought the additional problem that whenever he caught a glimpse of it he was once again threatened with the return of the dirt lodged there. Dislodging one’s psychic dirt from the mind and lodging it in the skin is not an efficient projection – a successful one would locate the unwanted aspect much further away. Sunil’s white friends were, of course, in the same emotional predicament and, should they too associate bad feeling with blackness, they could split off as mental dirt and project it into him – an efficient projection. In ethnically mixed societies, particularly where the ghost of colonialism has not been fully laid to rest, the white person can project psychic dirt interpersonally, across the colour divide. This option is not open to the black person, who thus has to resort to intrapsychic projection into the skin. Once such projections are in place, the white person may interact with the black person in accordance with the perception of him or her as “psychically” dirty. Such interpersonal transactions are likely to prey on the black person’s fear that he or she is dirty, recreating the very crisis that the original projection was meant to avert. The black person can respond to this by redoubling their efforts to prove they are not “dirty”, that is, that they are as “white” as anyone else,14 which was Sunil’s solution. In more developed forms this usually includes projecting one’s blackness into other blacks, felt to be blacker by one criterion or another; hence Fanon’s insistence that the black problem can affect the black person’s interactions with both white and black. Or one can accept that one is, truly and concretely, black and dirty, which opens up afresh painful wounds to the sense of valuing oneself involved in negotiating narcissism. The black person’s own struggles in this regard might be added to by projections from whites. Thus, while the white person can evade a mental problem by projection across the colour line, the black person’s use of skin colour for that purpose is doomed to failure. This is the crux of the black problem.

Internal Racism: A Hypothetical Extension Sunil’s parents, both of Indian origin, were initially wounded by the description of his skin colour – also theirs – as dirty. Helped by psychoanalyst friends, they spoke to him of the pain

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of separation and got the school to discuss these issues in class. In time Sunil’s skin colour became normal again – for instance, he began to draw himself as brown-skinned once more – which seemed to confirm the formulation that he had racialized a separation problem. Projection into dark skin is not uncommon (e.g. Erikson, 1964; Thomas, 1992), but I want to explore further what happened to his internal racism. It is tempting to think that because his skin was no longer seen as dirty the problem of internal racism had been resolved. However, I think this indicates only that his skin was no longer actively being projected into, not that he had stopped using racist mechanisms altogether. Since internal racism does not result from developmental failure, his parents’ success or otherwise in attending to the emotional state that originally fuelled it cannot be a decisive factor. I would therefore like to revisit his story in order to bring forward further considerations of how his internal racist solution may have been transformed into a more sophisticated and well-organized system in which the naked racism, so visible and troubling at the outset, may have been repressed and institutionalized. These are speculations – Sunil was not my patient and I did not have privileged access to his mind; we must, therefore, keep an open mind. Consider what might have happened had the parents been unable to grasp Sunil’s emotional predicament – obstructed, say, by unprocessed negative connotations that a dark skin carried for them. They could have tried to persuade Sunil that his skin is not dirty, a step that would, because the emotions that feed the projection into the skin remain unnamed and uncontained, paradoxically confirm that belief. Sensing his parents’ unease, Sunil might now keep the problem to himself, and the negativity lodged in the skin might seep into his identity as an Asian, leading to dis-identification with his background. Initially, the parents blamed the school for inculcating racist attitudes against himself in their son. What if they turned this into a political battle, say, by pressurizing the school to eradicate whatever institutionally racist practices were deemed responsible? In a general climate of racial/cultural tolerance, political correctness would demand that the school acquiesce, but unconsciously Sunil would be hated for touching on such raw nerves. Such hatred would not be conscious, and probably manifest as

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a subtle institutional resistance to change, whose source would remain mysterious and unknown (Chapter 9). Sunil grew up in a liberal, multi-cultural and multi-racial metropolis, where many daily interchanges that told him that the colour of one’s skin did not matter – he was just like his friends. What could be more normal, therefore, than if he began to think of himself as English – factually correct as he was born and raised in England – and, in time, Sunil might become Sonny. Years later, the only hint of the complex, unconscious manoeuvres that lie behind this might be Sonny’s slight embarrassment when his sari-clad grandmother collected him from school. Or if the Indian dishes prepared at home were a little too spicy for his taste – he might just prefer pasta or pizza, like “everyone else”. From such ordinary likes and dislikes might develop character traits and preferences, quite normal by any standard, which, when examined analytically, reveal a set of internal object relationships organized around the initial racist projection into the skin. Fanon, of course, recognized the corrosive effect of such negative self-identification, hence the formulation of the black problem. The internal racist stereotyping that underpins such manoeuvres exists in all societies, and may be assimilated into complex but often hidden racialized categories that suffuse a child’s emerging identity (Phoenix, 1999). In our post-colonial world, the doll studies discussed in Chapter 3, which involve not an ordinary but a forced-choice situation, have repeatedly confirmed such negative self-identification among minority group children (Foster, 1994). Let us examine the hypothetical situation with his grandmother in some detail. Sunil’s internal racism targets his dark skin, saturated with unmanageable emotions, condemning them as dirt; this is then projected into his Asian self, which is then projected into his grandmother who, attached as she is to her traditions, is the most suitable container in his inner circle for that projection. A brown skin inalienably part of him becomes “grey”, then “Indian” before it is safely lodged in her, while he is then free to identify more and more with what is in essence the idealized white teacher. It is worth underlining the racist nature of the initial projection, for in the organized object relationships that flow from it no trace of racism will be visible. If ever confronted over his embarrassment at his grandmother’s sari, Sunil would surely laugh off any idea that he hates Indians – he loves not only

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his parents but many other Indians, has black friends and so on, how could he possibly be seen as racist against them all? It is the sheer normality with which internal racist object relationships can be organized that enable them to avoid detection. And if, in later life, he were to end up on an analytic couch, an analyst attempting to access these matters would be vulnerable to the charge of imposing stereotyped racist views on an Asian patient – should all Asians wear traditional dress? Must they love curry? In this way, he would project his internal racist into the analyst, and if she is unaware of her own, the two racisms would join together in her, constituting a burden that bogs things down. This could paralyse the analyst’s ordinary functioning. Playing the race card thus would thus freeze the analytic situation, making it the perfect defence; it would also constitute a serious obstacle to analysing his internal racism. Let me end this discussion with a crucial point about Sunil: whether or not he continued to use racist mechanisms along the above lines, in the grey skin projection he will have discovered internal racism as a way of solving urgent psychic issues, and this capacity will be immensely reassuring to him. I am suggesting that if this capacity, including the object relationship in which it is enshrined, is not owned as part of his self (a likely scenario), it will be located in a racist internal object in his mind (e.g. a bigoted relative/friend, politician, etc.). It will therefore continue to live on as an internal racist, tucked away in a corner of the mind. Tragically, however, under external conditions of intense anxiety and uncertainty, this can turn a perfectly good neighbour into a racist enemy. And aspects of the internal racist can be powerfully projected into the organizations we live and work in, making for a particularly resistant form of institutional racism. I discuss these links in Chapter 9. That is why Fanon insisted that An authentic national liberation (from the black problem) exists only to the precise degree to which the individual has irreversibly begun his own liberation. (Fanon, 1970, p. 114, parentheses added) And: The black man must wage his war on both [personal and social] levels: Since historically they influence each other,

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any unilateral liberation is incomplete, and the gravest mistake would be to believe in their automatic interdependence. (p. 13)

Conclusion Fanon’s contribution to the study of internal racism is considerable, and this chapter highlighted a number of his contributions. First, he brought forward a body of evidence to show that a specific instance of it, the black problem, existed in the mind of the black colonial subject. Because that problem occurred largely in the unconscious, he looked for a psychoanalytic account of it but found only models that reduced lived experience to a psychological essence seen as primary. That would make the black problem a matter of individual pathology rather than a psychological response to material conditions in the colonial world. Fanon was convinced that such pathologizing of the black person was unwarranted, and brought forward a sophisticated perspective that it results instead from projections in our world that are utterly relentless. This acts as a counterweight to the narrow reductionism already noted. Having insisted that the problem was located between individual and society, he set out a direction of theorizing it. Fanon pointed to the dynamics of epidermalization – projection into a dark skin – which I integrated into a theory of internal racism that allowed us to appreciate how accurately his idea captured an emotional dilemma in a black child. In addition, I underlined how problematic a projection it is, while the same projection on the part of a white person would be psychically efficient. Fanon’s account, however, is confined to the position of the black person. In our early example (Chapter 1), it would suggest that Bhaskar’s reaction flows from a painful tension between his identity as British and his black/Indian self, which his assailant expertly put a finger on. Fanon thus accounts for why a remark touching that spot should be experienced as an attack and, though he recognized the profound existential crisis this provokes, he cannot account for the psychotic nature of the breakdown that follows. Nor does he shed light on what goes on in the mind of the white assailant to provoke the interchange. There is no ready-made theory that can do this, which is why the

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work contained in Part I of this book was needed to fill in detail that allows Fanon’s formulation to grow into a more general theory of how a race/class divide is internalized into the mind, what place it occupies there, and the characteristic anxieties and defences that flow from its psychic location.

7

Psychoanalysis and Racism: Anti-Semitism

This is the first of two chapters that give an overview of how race and racism have been approached in the psychoanalytic literature. There are many psychoanalytic perspectives on race and I am going to concentrate on those that bring forward clinical or empirical evidence in support of their formulations. This chapter begins by reconsidering the psychoanalytic silence on race, and goes on to examine findings with respect to anti-Semitism. I highlight Otto Fenichel’s early insights into the limits of what applied psychoanalysis can yield and examine contributions from succeeding generations. This reveals an initial difficulty in studying or reporting on anti-Semitism clinically, which I consider, before examining Ackermann and Jahoda’s influential early findings and moving on to more recent attempts to engage the elements of anti-Semitism in the consulting room.

The Psychoanalytic Silence on Race Freud Psychoanalysis has been slow to engage with the subject of racism. This reticence can be traced all the way back to Freud who, when asked for a contribution to an issue of Time and Tide, a London newsletter, that was to be devoted to anti-Semitism, responded: I came to Vienna as a child of 4 years from a small town in Moravia. After 78 years of assiduous work I had to leave my home, saw the Scientific Society I had founded, dissolved, our institutions destroyed, our Printing Press (“Verlag”) taken over by the invaders, the books I had published confiscated or reduced to pulp, my children expelled from their professions. 144

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Don’t you think you ought to reserve the columns of your special number for the utterances of non-Jewish people, less personally involved than myself? (Freud, 1938a, p. 301) That letter was dated 26 November 1938. Ironically, however, a piece by Freud on anti-Semitism did indeed find its way into print – a day earlier in a Paris-based “German émigré weekly” edited by Arthur Koestler – giving a unique insight into how Freud saw such “utterances”. Commenting on protests against the “excesses of the day”, he writes: All these protests, I think, might be preceded by a particular introduction, which would run: “Well, it’s true, I don’t like Jews either. In some sort of way they seem strange to me and antipathetic. They have many disagreeable qualities and great defects. I think, too, that the influence they have had on us and our affairs has been predominantly detrimental. Their race, compared with our own, is obviously an inferior one; all their activities argue in favour of that.” And after this what these protests do in fact contain could follow without any discrepancy: “But we profess a religion of love. We ought to love even our enemies as ourselves. We know that the Son of God gave His life on earth to redeem all men from the burden of sin. He is our model, and it is therefore sinning against His intention and against the command of the Christian religion if we consent to Jews being insulted, ill-treated, robbed and plunged into misery. We ought to protest against this, irrespectively of how much or how little the Jews deserve such treatment.” (Freud, 1938b, p. 291) These comments were not confined to the Christian’s relationship with the Jew, for Freud adds that the protest of secular writers is, likewise, framed in terms of a gospel – that “of humanity” – embedded within which the same patronizingly racist stance towards the Jew can be detected. It is worth noting that even as he articulates it, Freud partially distances himself from this view, presenting it as the précis of an author whose identity eludes him. Both Ernest Jones, his biographer, and James Strachey, editor of the Standard Edition, reject this and consider Freud to be the real author, Strachey (1964) adding that it is consistent with Freud’s known positions

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on related topics (e.g. in Moses and Monotheism). More recently, however, Marion Richmond (1980) shows that it is indeed likely to be Freud’s brief account of a much more substantial piece by Mark Twain. Either way, why was Freud so reluctant to be associated with this perspective, publicly, in his own name? Why not repeat it or elaborate when invited to do a second piece in the very city that welcomed him as a refugee from the Nazis? This is not an academic matter, for psychoanalysis, as a discipline, stands accused of following Freud’s lead and remaining silent on matters racial (e.g. Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1987; Young, 1994; Leary, 1997; Suchet, 2004; Morgan, 2008). This silence operates on a number of levels. There is the absence of black people from psychoanalytic discourse, as well as the relative absence of black psychoanalysts and therapists and of black people as patients . . . . Above all there is the absence of comment on the subject, reflecting a lack of thought. The silence in the literature . . . is truly staggering. This is especially so given that racism, in the form of anti-semitism, was the source of the major human tragedy of this century and one which had devastating consequences for those involved in this “Jewish science” as the Nazis described psychoanalysis . . . . Individual analysts were harassed and arrested; many, the best minds of their generation, including Freud himself, were driven into exile, and Freud’s texts were burned . . . . Psychoanalysis can also be said to be blind to what may be before it. I wonder if I am the only person to have read Winnicott’s The Piggle and entertained the possibility – I put it no more strongly – that the little girls’ “black mummy and daddy” had some racial meaning. But this was not something that Winnicott (or his many followers) addressed. In the same vein psychoanalysis also stands accused of distorting the experience of black patients, seeing in what they say of racism and racial discrimination evidence of splitting and projection . . . being black in a racist society was translated into a feeling of persecution by some internal object, yet another example of psychoanalysis trying too hard to define a patient’s pathology, rather than getting at her experience. (Gordon, 1994b, pp. 66–67)

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Silence and blindness – why? Paul Gordon has two suggestions: First, he points to “a racism of much psychoanalytic theory” (1994b, p. 67), citing the forensic dissection by Dalal (1988) of Carl Jung’s work that lays bare its openly racist strands. Racist assumptions, Gordon argues, are equally to be found in Freud’s “anthropology”,1 which contains a developmental fallacy: events seen as having occurred in the prehistory of mankind are conflated with current practices in tribes labelled explicitly as primitive or savage, hence less developed than their civilized European counterparts (e.g. Freud, 1913). This a priori assumption of inferiority, it is argued, prepared the way for early psychoanalytic contributions that reframed naked prejudice as disinterested science, a tendency most clearly visible in Octave Mannoni’s theory of an inferiority complex, involving the psychology of dependency, in colonized black people (Mannoni, 1950). First published in 1950, this theory, which I discussed more fully in Chapter 6, can now be seen as an attempt to account for a revolt against colonial occupation in Madagascar with a pseudo-scientific justification for the colonial status quo (Bloch, 1990): Mannoni knew little either about the Malagasy in general or the causes of the revolt in particular. In fact, much of the elaborate theory we are presented with may be little more than an attempt to make up for this lack of comprehension by relying on psychoanalytic theories that supply facile motivational explanations for actions that at first sight are meaningless to the foreign observer . . . these ad hoc explanations can themselves become excuses for not bothering to find more straightforward explanations. (Bloch, 1990, pp. vi–vii) Although that particular debate belongs to the colonial era, the issues raised remain relevant, not least because globalization in today’s world can be shown to lie on the same trajectory as European colonialism of yesteryear (Treacher, 2005). Let us note that Gordon’s charge of racism against Freud rests on the latter’s speculative archaeology. Although I am unable to discuss it in detail here, we must ask how central those formulations are to Freud’s evolving model of the mind. It can be argued that Freud turns to archaeology when in need of a postulated

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given – akin to an axiom in any theoretical system – upon which to build his depth psychology, and invokes the maxim that ontogeny repeats phylogeny. For example, in the Oedipus complex, I show it is when Freud cannot account for why the penis should be seen as possessing power, thus creating the phallus – an equation both boy and girl have to make in order to drive the respective identifications that help them negotiate the complex – that he invokes the hypothetical murder of a primal father (Freud, 1913). If in the developmental prehistory of the species this event did indeed take place, then a faint imprint of it can be assumed to exist, unconsciously, in the individual. These primal phantasies – species memories independent of individual lived experience – provide the purchase onto which the passions of lived experience can be grafted, yielding an outcome to the Oedipus complex that can be satisfactorily explained. Without them, a key element in Freud’s account of the Oedipus complex is missing (see Davids, 2002).2 If these matters seem overly abstract or technical, I touch on them here in order to draw a distinction between Freud’s clinically derived theory – an evolving project whose aim was to illuminate the general principles of mental functioning3 – and his archaeological speculations. It is in the latter work that it becomes apparent that, radical thinker though he was, Freud was also a man of his time, subscribing to its racist picture of far-distant “others” he knew little of and could thus freely characterize as primitive or savage. He was either blind to this a priori racist assumption or he lacked the intellectual and/or moral courage to subject it to the same critical scrutiny he applied to other internal issues. I do think, however, that it is possible to accept this criticism of Freud without it compelling us to set aside the body of psychoanalytic theory on account of it. Continued use of that theory, however, requires a critical reading to ascertain whether the formulations we use are supported by an adequate evidence base, allowing them to stand without recourse to the more speculative writings now revealed as imbued with ethnocentric elements, or whether they are crucially dependent on them. My brief foray into his theory of the Oedipus complex shows that it is possible to rescue hard-won insights about the mind by freeing them from the link with the archaeology posited by Freud (Davids, 2002). Sadly, however, the laudable wish not to

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be tainted by racism sometimes leads to an impulse to walk away prematurely from well-established theoretical concepts, which can deprive us of the very tools we need to understand the phenomenon of racism as a component of the mind. Questionable Universality of Concepts Gordon goes on to argue that, on account of an implicitly racist strand within it, when we look to psychoanalysis for insights as to how the mind – a universal human entity – functions, we find that psychoanalytic concepts based on Western middle-class experience and values (have) been applied to others not of this background, . . . (leading to) non-Western cultures . . . (being) seen as “more neurotic”. Psychoanalysis, we must remember, is limited in time and place, the product of European minds, based on the experience of Europeans, at a particular point in European history. Claims to wider application, let alone universality, should be viewed with some scepticism. (Gordon, 1994b, p. 67 parentheses and italics added) This is a more general charge that, on account of its origin within Europe, psychoanalytic discourse is so suffused with ethnocentric bias as to be ill-equipped to understand others from different backgrounds. Rather than recognize this fact psychoanalysts take refuge in theory, applying it as if its concepts were universally valid – a practice that amounts to a latter-day colonization of mind of the other. This position informs much of the writing on work with minority-group or ethnically different patients, which I examine in Chapter 8. Psychoanalysis as an Establishment Discipline For now, let us return to the question, why the psychoanalytic silence on race? Gordon’s second suggestion is that it flows from the discipline’s assimilation by the status quo: the “privileged social and economic position” psychoanalysis now occupies has been achieved at the price of “the repression of its radical core” (1994, p. 67). Freud’s psychoanalysis was revolutionary in that

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it created a method for placing the disowned and dispossessed in the foreground of its discourse. That this had a profound impact on the world of ideas is well known; lesser known is an “activist, community-oriented profile of some of the earliest participants in the psychoanalytic movement” who worked in Vienna’s free clinics, translating the theoretical primacy of the dispossessed into hands-on work with society’s dispossessed. That such a profile should strike us today as unexpected (Danto, 1998, p. 287) underlines the extent to which psychoanalysis has become mainstream. Today, we imagine psychoanalysis as taking place in cosy consulting rooms in the comfortable, leafy suburbs of London, Paris or New York, untroubled by real suffering in the world wrought by arbitrary and cruel inequality that exists within society at large. Indeed, for the psychoanalyst suffering is reduced to the level of individual lived experience, its site of intervention confined to the inner-world constructions implicated in it. The individual psychoanalyst can therefore feel that she does what she can to alleviate suffering. But such peace of mind comes at a price. Narrowing the focus of suffering (Brenman, 1985) can reflect an identification with the mainstream’s cruel, if unconscious, contempt towards the dispossessed, society’s out-groups among them. Psychoanalysis then ends up with little access to the minds of these victims of inequality and injustice, thereby abandoning the “possibilities as societal critique” (Gordon, 1994b, p. 67) that, as a revolutionary new system of thought, Freud’s psychoanalysis once held out. Fully assimilated into a privileged position in the West, its theories, despite the narrow range of individuals from which it is drawn, are smugly viewed as universal truth, the cutting edge that once drove it to interrogate certainty blunted by an exclusive focus on narrow theoretical or clinical matters that, to the outsider, resembles nothing more than esoteric canonical debate far removed from the reality of ordinary life. Passing off culture-specific constructions of the mind as universal may, even more cynically, be viewed as an instance of extending Western bourgeois hegemony in a neo-colonial world. Meanwhile, using a piece of research that highlights the tardiness of psychoanalytic therapy organizations in the United Kingdom as regards equal opportunities policy and practice – a requirement in law – Gordon asks whether the profession

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of psychoanalysis plays its part in keeping white, middle-class power and privilege in place by marginalizing patients (and trainees) from black and other minority ethnic groups (Gordon, 1994a). What has happened to the pioneering, revolutionary spirit in a discipline founded upon the struggle against repression at the level of the individual when it seems complicit in practicing it at the level of society?

The Need for a Theory of Internal Racism These forces may well be alive within psychoanalysis and contribute to its collective silence on matters racial. There is, however, a further factor that must be considered. If we revisit Freud’s refusal to contribute to Time and Tide, having published his earlier response in Koestler’s journal, I think it possible that he may have had second thoughts on the viewpoint he had just aired. If we take the précis as representing a view of Freud’s, we would today recognize that he must have been using his countertransference to construct that picture of what goes on in the liberal, anti-Nazi mind. Stephen Frosh (2003) gives a vivid account of a strand of hostility towards Jews present within the psychoanalytic movement itself during the Nazi era, notwithstanding its characterization as “the Jewish science”, which Freud would no doubt have been sensitive to. For Freud, however, countertransference was not the legitimate source of analytic data4 it has become today. Instead, it indicated an unresolved problem in the analyst (Racker, 1988), and I am suggesting that by the time of the second request he may have recognized that his earlier comment was emanated from this source. He had therefore strayed beyond what was acceptable to him. He had become too personally involved. Let us return to the content of the précis: it suggests an unconscious strand running counter to the conscious liberal mindedness of the opponents of Nazism, some of whom had helped secure the freedom of Freud and his daughter, and many of his generation of psychoanalysts. It is possible that tact or cowardice, depending on one’s point of view, may have played a part in dissuading Freud from republishing the précis in English in London, although it is worth recalling that Freud was not one to steer clear of the truth on account of personal discomfort.

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Nevertheless, the thought of bringing others pain on account of what may well have been an embittered mindset – brought on, say, by the extent of persecution he had suffered – that coloured his perception of his sponsors and rescuers, would have been unacceptable. If he was going to follow this route he needed hard evidence to support the view set out in the précis and this, I think, he did not have. I suggest therefore that the absence of hard clinical evidence leading to a coherent, clinically based understanding of how racism works in the mind was a factor in Freud’s silence. It may well continue to be a factor in the collective reluctance of psychoanalysts to engage publicly with racism. I would like now to examine the clinically based literature on anti-Semitism with a view to ascertaining what progress we have made in deepening our understanding of what is involved in racism in the mind in the 70 years since Freud’s comments.

Anti-Semitism In April 1937, some 18 months before Freud’s comments, Otto Fenichel gave a lecture in Prague that addressed directly the upsurge of anti-Semitism in Germany (Fenichel, 1940, 1946). His analysis was preceded by a caveat, succinctly put by another early commentator: There are many factors that cause people to look for a scape-goat, for someone to hate and blame; there are social and economic pressures, threatening and problem situations of any sort, and beyond all these there is the demagogic technique of organising hatred against a minority group for some ulterior purpose. All these, I assume, are external factors with which psychoanalysis does not especially concern itself. (Brenner, 1948, p. 20) By way of background, therefore, Fenichel emphasized that psychoanalysis was no substitute for a properly historicized understanding of what was going on. Psychic forces had not produced anti-Semitism; that was primarily the result of a political strategy on the part of the Nazis that succeeded in articulating real, everyday difficulties suffered by the German populace, and then proceeding to offer a spurious explanation for them that

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scapegoated the Jews. How did so extraordinarily simplistic an analysis come to exert such a hold over the popular imagination? This was the question he looked to psychoanalysis to illuminate.

Hatred and Projection Fenichel argues that the foreignness of the Jew stirs up the antiSemite’s hatred, and: “One can put it in one sentence: one’s own unconscious is also foreign” (1940, p. 31). Whatever is problematic and hated in the unconscious can be projected onto the Jew, and Fenichel examines popular stereotypes of Jews to reveal a range of projections. These, he argues, centre around two main themes: Jews are murderers – they poison wells, they killed Christ and they murder Christian children, usually by dismemberment and mutilation (Loeblowitz-Lennard, 1947); and Jews are filthy and debauched. The projected themes, he argues, are universal and archaic and emanate from early stages in the child’s development. The fear that the wells are poisoned, for example, stems from the very young infant’s experience of frustration that is felt as intolerable; a wish to poison – the oral modality is the only one available to the infant for picturing its experience, including aggression – the frustrating breast is split off and relocated in the breast, resulting in a poisoning breast. But this creates profound confusion: how is the infant to feed? By displacing the poisoned feed in the wells, this infantile predicament is solved, and a way forward presents itself: find the culprits who did it and the problem might be solved. In a similar way, the themes of murder, filth and debauchery can be traced back to the anal and phallic stages, and give expression to powerful impulses that are so disturbing that the growing child tries to disown them. For example, that the perception of the Jew as filthy belongs to an anal complex is borne out by the fact it coexists with the notion that Jews are good with money and believed to control the economy, all explicit elements in the Nazi mind. The richest array of projective possibility is found in the phallic stage, where the Oedipus complex is central (see also Grunberger, 1964). This brings together a nexus of important unconscious psychic themes: awareness of genital impulses and, through it, of the sexual relationship between the parents, from which the child is excluded; unrequited infantile desire towards

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the parent of the opposite sex and intense hostility towards the same-sex parent; an encounter with authority and power, vested in the father, resulting in the castration complex; and finally, the internalization of the father’s authority as a superego, an inner component of the mind that places limits on desire and channels it to facilitate identification as a man- or woman-to-be. Fenichel, along with other early psychoanalytic commentators, saw in this psychic sequence numerous possibilities for projection onto the Jew, of which one example will have to suffice: Locked away behind closed doors in the ghetto, Jews represent the parental couple engaging, with gay abandon, in an intercourse seen as filthy and debauched, a picture reinforced by the Jews’ archaic oriental origin, their darker skins, their big noses, their unruly beards and their strange language and customs (Loeblowitz-Lennard, 1947). The picture of filth and debauchery combines excitement, curiosity and intrigue stirred by awareness of the parental intercourse with hatred at the child’s exclusion from it, which may be of murderous intensity – the Jew as murderer appears uncannily often in anti-Semitic stereotypes. In addition, this picture of the ghetto contains a people who somehow manage to evade the forces of repression – in defiance of the dictates of the superego – a picture reinforced by the fact that the Jews have their own, mysterious laws. The German citizen’s wish to rebel against the powers-that-be responsible for his own abject misery can then be projected onto the Jew. Such unconscious identification with the Jews’ defiance might, in turn, be linked with an upsurge in castration anxiety – given impetus by awareness of the Jewish practice of circumcision – observed in the anti-Semitic mindset (Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford, 1946). This brief exploration allows us to see how the anti-Semite makes multiple projections onto the Jew, who ends up hated on multiple counts, some of which are contradictory. This underlines the irrationality, from the point of view of ordinary reality testing, of the processes involved. For example, the Jew is hated because he gives vent to forbidden sexual impulses in defiance of the authority of the superego, making him a rebel; as a rebel he represents the citizen who wishes to rise up against authority (the state that failed him) and is to be viciously suppressed by that state; finally, he is held responsible for the very difficulties within the state that might provoke unrest and rebellion; he now

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stands for the authorities who really are responsible for the suffering of the masses, and has to endure an attack displaced from the state itself. There is a secondary problem: if all of this is loaded onto Jews but they nevertheless survive, let alone thrive, it is bound to provoke envy, stimulating further attacking impulses that can be refracted through the lens of sibling rivalry, a theme common enough in the inner life of the individual – the Jew becomes a sibling hated on account of being favoured (by God). In the psychology of the anti-Semite, then, it would seem that practically every difficult emotional issue – that is, idor superego-projections (Evans, 1951), or fixations from every stage of development – can readily be projected onto the Jew. If, to all these intra-family conflicts – in which the Jew can represent either side or both sides – there is added the Jew’s traditional mastery of money . . . and his queer practices about food . . . one may question whether there is any important interest of the unconscious which the Jew cannot be used to represent. (Brenner, 1948, p. 29) Scapegoating the Jew Why should scapegoating have come to exert such a powerful hold over the anti-Semitic mind in the Nazi era, blinding it to crimes, each utterly ego dystonic, being committed in the individual’s name? Fenichel (1940) and Brenner (1948) think of racism as a social disease analogous to neurosis in the individual (see also Simmel, 1946). Just as the apparent calm of the normal mind conceals hard-won compromises between competing inner forces whose fault lines are revealed in neurotic illness, so normality in society is equally delicately balanced, revealing the fault lines of racism when it breaks down. In both individual and society, therefore, conflict is never far from the surface, and was brought to the fore by the upsurge in tension associated with the prevailing situation in Germany. This resulted in the Jew being seized on as racial other, fulfilling the role of scapegoat. At this point Fenichel takes what, to me, is a false turn when he goes on to ask, why the Jew? He suggests that the “obstinacy with which the Jews have resisted assimilation”, a feature

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of their psychology (1940, p. 28), helped set them apart, making them an easy target for racist projection. Yet, he acknowledges that those projections would “not to be changed by any real experiences with Jews” (p. 32): an individual Jew whose conduct runs counter to the stereotype becomes an exception – a human being behaving normally – and not really a Jew; either way, therefore, the stereotype remains stubbornly intact. More importantly, Fenichel acknowledges that Berlin Jews were, in fact, very well integrated into mainstream society, a difficulty that he deals with by suggesting that there must somewhere be a more archaic memory (in the mind of the anti-Semite) of the Jew as other, which Nazi propaganda seized on and exploited. This theoretical turn is reminiscent of Freud’s problematic use of primal phantasy when in search of a missing element in his theory of the Oedipus complex, which I discussed earlier. Loeblowitz-Lennard (1945, 1947) approaches this same question in a different way. Invoking the idea of myth to capture the apparently enduring power of anti-Semitic stereotyping, he sees the Jews’ identification with monotheism – God’s chosen – as playing a central role. Following Freud’s archaeological footsteps, he sees the achievement of monotheism as a key moment in the development of civilization when animism – many gods each containing a projected aspect of man “in the semblance (image) of man, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile to man, never unreachable for him, never above his critique” (LoeblowitzLennard, 1945, p. 359) – was replaced by one God, representing the superego. Just as the individual child’s achievement of the normal superego as an internal structure (towards the end of the Oedipal period) heralds sublimation as a dominant defence that ushers in the leaps in development observed during the latency period, so mankind’s achievement of a superego God paved the way for the advancement of civilization. However, this achievement is underpinned by intense conflict and tension (unlust) stemming from the pull of the once dominant primitive elements that remain opposed to the new compromise – as in the individual. As God’s chosen, the very presence of Jews stirs up unconscious discontent at a primitive, mythic level, which may be reinforced by the dynamics of ordinary sibling rivalry. Neither of these answers is entirely satisfactory. Although he recognizes the difficulty with the idea that the “psychology of the Jews” contributed to their selection as the object of the

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Nazis’ racism, Fenichel does not fully retract it. As I argued in Chapter 3, following the ethnic violence attending the establishment of the state of Pakistan in 1945, and the genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s, we now know that even a well-integrated society is not immune to fracturing along racist lines, no matter how spurious the inter-group distinctions invoked. Freud’s (1930) observation that minor differences are overemphasized for narcissistic purposes, which taps into a primitive need to distinguish “me” from “not-me”, are clearly relevant in this regard. Loeblowitz-Lennard’s formulation, on the other hand, runs the risk of concretizing in theory a construction – Jews as special – that is in fact integral to racism’s strategy of setting its intended target apart from other human beings. Building on a contemporary recognition that the notion of race is devoid of objective meaning, which makes its categories eminently available for filling up with projected content (Rustin, 1991), Dalal (2002) argues that we should consider the process by which they are saturated with meaning – “racialized” – as integral to racism itself. He shows that the categories are in fact created by racist discourse rather than predating it as, once reified, they appear to. This reconceptualization emphasizes that, for the purpose of racist projection, certain features of the Jews were selected by Nazi discourse as central while others that might emphasize their common humanity were set aside. The notion of the Jews as God’s chosen is one aspect of their historical identity which, when racialized in this way, becomes part of a strategy to set “them” apart from “us” in a way that seems real and credible: we are persuaded that the selected differences are indeed significant. Following this line of thought, therefore, one could see the selection of Jews as the designated out-group as arbitrary5 – they just happened to be there and identifiably different from the idealized Aryan. I think, therefore, that the question, “why the Jew?”, is the wrong one. Here Fenichel’s systematic, materialist approach to constructing a psychoanalytic account of anti-Semitism as a form of racism in the mind gives way to something else. Before this, he argues that propaganda associated with external political events creates a social stereotype which, at the individual level, revives psychic issues that had long been put to bed in the delicate accommodations that constitute normality. Reviving anxiety and conflict enables racist projection to be presented as a fresh, better

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and, as the world was to discover, potentially a final solution to these tensions. At this point, however, I think Fenichel is drawn into the Nazi construction and speaks as a Jew from within it, asking “What have I done to deserve this?” Nazi propaganda succeeded in persuading him that, as a Jew, he is to blame. I want to flag this up as an issue that needs to be addressed: in analysing the psychological roots of anti-Semitism – which he does admirably – guilt was stirred up; why should this be the case? If that was a false turn, I think the real questions opened up by Fenichel’s analysis are: How is it that ordinary Germans, and other Europeans, could give their minds over to a delusional construction at odds with the level of ego functioning they otherwise appeared to have achieved? Why is the ego’s reality testing, which up to that point kept all the tensions belonging to more primitive elements successfully contained in the unconscious, bypassed? What is it in the mind that renders the ordinary individual so vulnerable, as we might now say, to the lure of a racist construction that is so evidently simplistic? What gives these constructions the power to revisit and call into question all previous compromises, exposing their emotionally laden elements afresh, in order to substitute a more primitive solution that the mind as a whole had long moved on from? Was the anti-Semitic stereotype a feature of the “normal” mind, occurring, as Freud’s précis implies, even in opponents of anti-Semitism? Did it play a part, at the individual level, in establishing the Nazi phenomenon so widely? Or was it a more superficial attempt to rationalize an evil that is quite simply utterly banal (Arendt, 1963)? By the time of a later reworking of his paper, Fenichel (1946) recognized that he had reached the limit of what could be achieved through applying pre-existing psychoanalytic knowledge to stereotypes in the world at large. Fresh clinical observations of the anti-Semitic mindset were needed. But would anti-Semites see their anti-Semitism as a problem and thus seek help? If they did, would they turn to practitioners of a “Jewish science”? And could a Jewish clinician, in the years following the Holocaust, be expected to seek out anti-Semitism in the consulting room? There is a substantial psychoanalytic literature on antiSemitism.6 As the extent of the atrocities of the Nazis became apparent, anti-Semitism could no longer be regarded as “just another prejudice” and the literature records psychoanalysts’ attempts to elucidate its inner components. Important research

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asked whether there were psychological features that clustered together to form an anti-Semitic personality (e.g. FrenkelBrunswik and Sanford, 1946), and the work of the Frankfurt School succeeded in opening up a new way of inquiring into the relationship between the individual and the state, informed by a psychoanalytic view of the mind and a Marxist perspective on socio-political reality. The authoritarian personality (Adorno et al, 1950), quantifiable through the F-Scale, is its most-cited formulation, although this group made far more creative, radical and problematizing a contribution than the prominence of a single instrument in social psychological research would imply (Young-Bruehl, 1996). The pressure to identify inner dimensions of anti-Semitism was such that by the time of a review in the mid-1960s, the analogy between social disease and individual neurosis, so carefully drawn by earlier writers, had virtually disappeared and antiSemitism became the individual’s disease: “not simply a moral evil, but usually a symptom of psychic pathology” for which “proper upbringing may be the best prophylaxis” (see Zilboorg, 1947; Schoenfeld, 1966, pp. 34–35, for a more nuanced discussion). What is truly astonishing is that the only clinical evidence adduced to support this proposition came from Ackerman and Jahoda (1948, 1950). Yet, the latter authors explicitly see “antisemitism in whatever form it appears is a symptom of social pathology, indicating a form of social disorganisation that menaces the stability, if not the very foundation of a culture, even beyond the suffering that it entails for its victims” (Ackerman and Jahoda, 1950, p. 2, my italics). A slippage between individual and social pathology, first noted in Fenichel, had become widespread. I want to dwell briefly on Ackerman and Jahoda’s seminal study which, although an early one, lays an excellent foundation for building on Fenichel’s model of the inner racism implicated in anti-Semitism.

Findings Ackerman and Jahoda

Ackerman and Jahoda’s study was the first to bring forward hard clinical data on anti-Semitism. They interviewed 25 psychoanalysts regarding a total of 27 patients (Jews, Catholics

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and Protestants) who had expressed anti-Semitic sentiments, examining the nature of that anti-Semitism – did it have a transference dimension, how did the patient see it, etc. – as well as the patients’ psychopathology and psychodynamics (Ackerman and Jahoda, 1950). Anti-Semitism, they found, was not associated with any particular diagnostic category, although there was a notable absence of depression in the sample: “When the focus of hate is directed against the self, the basis for an externalisation of aggression in anti-Semitism no longer exists” (1948 p. 242). There is a general absence of guilt in these patients’ inner worlds. Two types of anti-Semitism were distinguished; one a defence against anxiety based on “conformity to the attitude of the dominant group”, the other “patterned by some basic distortion” in the patient’s “personality structure”. In the composite picture of the mind of the anti-Semite emerging from this study, “the crudest and most irrational forms of the anti-semitism . . . [are] linked with psychopathic and paranoid personalities. Milder expressions . . . occur in less sick personalities” (p. 243). All have incipient anxiety (i.e. anxiety not consciously experienced as such) that results in a constant fear of “injury to their integrity as individuals”; they “fear being overwhelmed by powers they do not understand” reflecting a self that “is confused and unstable”, a difficulty into which they have no insight. Some compensate for this basic inner problem by conscious life choices – “the main trend is self-aggrandisement [in which] they exploit their economic position . . . for the reinforcement of such illusions. Even here there is an obvious contradiction between the conspicuousness of their social anxiety and their alleged mastery of the environment” (pp. 244–245). Almost all are successful in work, while their close relationships tend to be more conflicted. Their underlying difficulties have the usual pathognomic antecedents – uncontaining (insensitive or unavailable, authoritarian) parents demanding conformity; a child superficially compliant and submissive, concealing a smouldering rebellion and hostility, which leads to fixations at each succeeding stage of development. These inner issues, unresolved developmentally, leave him vulnerable to using anti-Semitism as a way of ridding himself of their components through projection. Primitive sexual and aggressive elements, now located in the Jew, produce stereotypes that confirm, as theorized by earlier writers,

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elements that can readily be traced back to every stage of development: The Jews are dirty; they stink; they are vulgar, low class, debased, deformed, ugly, greedy, overaggressive, overbearing, noisy, and excitable. They exploit people and push them around. Yet, often, they are said to be intelligent, shrewd, ambitious, industrious, successful. They are social climbers. They are arrogant. They are superior, know too much, and are too ethical. They are either oversexed, or impotent. Socially, they are cohesive, powerful, wealthy, control Wall Street and the Government. They are also dirty Communists, internationally minded and unpatriotic. (Ackerman and Jahoda, 1948, p. 242) The end product of such projection is that the patient is identified with an idealized Aryan parent, while the despised, infantile qualities reside in the hateful Jew. This accounts both for the demand that the Jew conform and for “the excessive reaction to difference” characteristic of these anti-Semitic patients. “Every evidence of individuality in another person7 becomes a painful reminder of the sacrifice the prejudiced person has made in disowning parts of the self” (p. 249). Ackerman and Jahoda’s understanding of these projections anticipates today’s concept of projective identification (Rosenfeld, 1987; Spillius, 1988): the central dynamic involves “renunciation of parts of the patient’s personal identity, the elimination of these unwanted parts through projection, and, parallel with this, the partial substitution of a borrowed identity through introjection” (Ackerman and Jahoda, 1948, p. 248). Today we think that a psychotic mindset is implicated in the use of these mechanisms, and that they are underpinned by a fear of psychic catastrophe. Is this what lay behind these patients’ use of them? Ackerman and Jahoda pose the question thus: . . . must [they] deny [all] primitive sexual and aggressive urges per se, or do they have a secret partial acceptance of such urges, but object only to an open display of them, because “it isn’t polite”. The evidence in many cases points to the latter conclusion. (1948, p. 248)

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I want to underline this observation, for it suggests that if we look only at the intensity of the projection alone we might conclude that we are dealing with a psychotic emptying out from the mind of specific content; yet the authors find that this is not so. I shall return to this. The obvious criticism that can be made of this study is that the authors are describing elements of psychopathology in general, rather than features specific to anti-Semitism: might a comparable group of patients, from the same analysts, but who do not hold anti-Semitic attitudes not yield largely the same profile?8 In their defence, however, Ackerman and Jahoda stress that they are talking about psychodynamics in the anti-Semitic mind rather than about anti-Semitism as a form of pathology. Nevertheless, though unintended, the question of why it has been taken up in this way is a matter that I shall return to. Ackerman and Jahoda’s study provided the first clinical data on anti-Semitism from patients in analysis. It confirmed that projective mechanisms were central, as suggested by the earliest psychoanalytic commentators using the indirect method of applied analysis, and added that the projections were in the service of ridding the self of unwanted parts. Anti-Semitism was also shown as not specific to any one diagnostic group, but depression and guilt were notably absent. Dynamically, it was related to disturbances in the establishment of the self, with its intensity varying from person to person in direct proportion to the weight of the inner issues involved. This study raises a number of further questions: for example, how fixed is the second type of anti-Semitism; does it yield to analysis? If so, must a transference dimension be present for that work to succeed? Must it be addressed directly, or does it remit spontaneously as the underlying emotional issues are worked through? And, given that compliance with parents is an etiological factor, how would one guard against the danger that a transference version – compliance with a Jewish/liberal analyst – rather than real inner change might underpin any apparent remission?

Direct Clinical Findings

A cross-sectional clinical study such as Ackerman and Jahoda’s can raise but not answer questions like these; that requires

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detailed accounts of the analytic process with patients in whom anti-Semitism occurs. However, in the literature “ . . . analysts have with few exceptions . . . steered clear of writing about . . . [the] existence and treatment [of anti-semitism] in the clinical milieu” (Knafo, 1999, p. 36). Knafo argues that this is not because the phenomenon does not occur there; it does but is not a therapeutic focus.

Countertransference as obstacle

Commenting on a group of psychoanalysts who, despite meeting 75 times over a 9-year period, failed to generate sufficient case material on anti-Semitism to permit its analytic study, Knafo wonders whether women analysts (there was only one in the group), already denigrated in patriarchal society, might more easily elicit racist projection. And, comparing their experience with that of visiting European analysts, Mortimer Ostow, the group leader, noted that they appeared to find it difficult to access these issues (Knafo, 1999, p. 37). We must consider that this difficulty may flow from the relevant communication being not in the patients’ verbal material but in the countertransference, as suggested by the model of internal racism. Today we see countertransference as a legitimate source of evidence as to what may be alive within a patient, yet so intensely disavowed – more so than that involved in repression – that it is disowned, split off and relocated in another, a perspective that flows from our fuller understanding of the mechanisms of splitting and projective identification. However, countertransference remains a preliminary source of data about the patient and always requires further investigation to unpick what is involved; this, in turn, requires an ability on the part of the analyst to stay with the subject matter. If we remember how emotionally charged the topic of antiSemitism must have been for our analytic forebears – Freud reminds us that most of the first generation of psychoanalysts were hounded from their homes in Europe and, we might add, had relatives, friends and whole communities wiped out in the Holocaust – it is not surprising that it proved hard to engage. Today we can appreciate just what those clinicians were required to open up, since we now know that it involves a

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trauma so intense as to overwhelm, its dimensions incapable of being fully processed by the mind and left, unconsciously, as a task for succeeding generations (Kogan, 1995). In the early days such personal involvement on the part of the analyst with issues brought by the patient was seen as a problematic countertransference, an obstacle that had to be resolved in the analyst before racism could be opened up in the consulting room. Reconceptualizing countertransference as containing relevant communication about the patient was a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for progress. To succeed as communication in the countertransference, the patient’s anti-Semitic hatred must be perceived, not avoided, by the analyst, and Knafo (1999) thinks the silence around the topic conceals difficulties in this area. Because of the intensity of feeling stirred in analysts, the patient’s anti-Semitic communication becomes concretized and loses the usual “as if” quality needed to process it clinically: its meaning becomes so fixed to a specific social phenomenon, the Holocaust, that there is no room for manoeuvre. She gives a vivid example of how, in graduate school, she found it impossible to work with a perverse patient – visibly excited by a fantasy involving “naked women about to die in Nazi gas chambers”, into which he incorporated her. She could not process his hostility therapeutically since “it was made apparent in the most abhorrent imagery from the Holocaust” (Knafo, 1999, p. 38). Many clinicians will be aware of how easily concreteness attending the trauma of the Holocaust is stirred, even in the second generation, so that, for example, a non-Jewish analyst using the term “Nazi” to characterize a particularly cruel and ruthless aspect of a patient is easily experienced as the analyst visiting a racist attack on the patient. This reverses the situation and cruelty is now relocated in the analyst, thus impeding clinical task of engaging the patient’s cruelty. Yet, it also raises an important question: though the Holocaust bursts onto the scene at a most inopportune moment, does its appearance nonetheless draw attention to it as something in the patient’s mind that has not been properly attended to? Should it be attended to? If so, when? In order to be able to hear these communications – of a patient’s inner dilemma refracted through the imagery of the Holocaust, or of the legacy of the Holocaust as a concealed inner aspect of a patient – let alone work with them, the analyst needs

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to be emotionally prepared to face what it stirs within. Knafo gives several candid examples of issues she had to grapple with – for instance, the internalized anti-Semitism implicit in “passing” as a non-Jew in the United States – in order to equip herself, subsequently, to work with anti-Semitic material such as that brought by her early perverse patient.

The Nazi father

I would now like to consider two clinical papers that consider the significance of a Nazi father in the internal world. Both were presented to the 1985 IPA congress held in Hamburg, the first in Germany since World War II, and both are by German analysts. Neither the Nazi nor the Jewish object of his racism was therefore directly present in the room. Anita Eckstaedt (1986) describes two patients in both of whose inner lives the father looms large. Her first patient was born during the war, but his father left for military service in his third year, and during the turbulent period following Germany’s defeat, his mother and two children fled to a remote and “bleak” part of Western Germany. When his father eventually returned he more or less had a breakdown, never working again, and became completely dependent on his wife and, eventually, the patient. His father refused help from the post-war government, suggesting a failure to mourn the defeat of the Nazi Party of which he had been a member. The patient was a successful professional in whom inner conflict was somatized and relationships, both intimate and work-related, proved difficult. He carried intense inner hatred towards his father, linked with being displaced by a younger brother, which he managed through triumph – over his father in the work sphere; and over his dependency needs in relation to his mother. Eckstaedt postulates a link between this denial of dependency and his father’s denial, after the war, of his prior “total reliance on Hitler and the ensuing disappointment” (p. 319), which created a bond of identification between them: because the father could not grieve the passing of the Nazi era (presumably on account of unbearable guilt), the son was also stuck. Eckstaedt’s second patient, Mr M, switched his mind off in identification with a father who, in his childhood, beat him

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severely and then locked him in a shed. There is no information on his mother – where was she when this was going on? His father was a clergyman, but when, during the Nazi era, the German Protestant Church split into pro- and anti-Nazi entities, whose side was he on? This question lay at the heart of his father’s opposition to all inquiry – and presumably the physical attack on his querulous son. “Telling the truth” equated with the more paranoid “rubbing people’s noses in it” (p. 321) and brought unbearable guilt, and Eckstaedt suggests that the father’s inability to take a stand deprived his son of an inner figure that could help him face his own inner hatred and cruelty. Eckstaedt focuses on the fact that both fathers withheld something from their sons, and thus “failed to be a source of integration and continuity between past and present . . . . They sensed the lack of freedom behind their father’s evasive behaviour . . . ” (p. 325). The second account presented at Hamburg was that of Eickhoff (1986), who discussed a female patient with an idealized, erotized relationship with her father, a high-ranking member of the SS. The patient’s early history was traumatic: her mother died of an incurable infection when she was one, followed by unstable care – grandmother, aunt, nuns and finally stepmother – until that marriage broke up some years later. In her teens she “felt capable of murder”, which she managed through depersonalization, had an encapsulated psychotic episode (in which she communicated magically with her dead mother) from which immersion in academic study extricated her. Success was crowned by a Fulbright scholarship, upon whose award she relapsed: “While taking a shower, she was overcome by panic in which the old anxiety returned, temporarily accompanied by the wish to turn into a skeleton” (Eickhoff, 1986, p. 37). In treatment, the infantile nature of her problems stood revealed in a maternal transference of psychotic intensity, an element of which was a wish for an exclusive relationship with the analyst that bordered on the delusional. As a result of analytic work, an earlier diffuse sense of being culpable of murder – an omnipotent infantile assumption of responsibility for her mother’s death – gave way to the idea of the mother having died as a victim of the Nazis. If this seems straightforward, Eickhoff’s discussion of the “father transference” is more complex. The distinction between

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what belongs to the daughter and what belongs to the father breaks down in the narrative. “A transitory love delusion” developed in the transference, “an important aspect of the pathogenesis [of which] . . . is that for the father, his daughter . . . embodied ‘concretistically’ something of the magnificent past shared with the dead mother. The grandeur withheld from her . . . was associated with this archaic and terrible side: if Hitler had won, there would have been ponies and horses to ride, and certainly not a world of work, which never suited her father” (p. 38–39). Eickhoff concedes that “the Nazi side of her father” was difficult to tolerate in the countertransference, and its emergence ushered in a period of “annihilating attacks” on him. He felt, “I must be of stone in order to stand this”; and she had a recurring dream of her father denazifying the family. Meanwhile, she became subtly anti-Semitic – she voiced admiration for the Hitler character in a George Steiner novel, and expressed pride at her family’s purportedly high status in Nazi society. Looking at the narrative of this treatment from a distance, we can question whether something went wrong during the father transference phase. By then it was clear that the disturbance in her very early object relationships was severe and contained psychotic elements, and it is likely that during the ensuing phase projection of intense primitive aggression, uncontainable internally, became possible because of her evolving trust in the analyst-as-mother. However, instead of containing them, the analyst’s head turns to stone; the dream confirms that she sensed this reaction of constantly cleansing his mind of her projected “Nazi” elements. This failure of containment is likely to account for her increasing desperation and thus for the escalating intensity of her projections (Rosenfeld, 1987). If we follow the clinical narrative in these courageous presentations with an eye to seeing how they advance the psychoanalytic understanding of anti-Semitism, the feature that stands out is how, when these authors discuss the Nazi father, the thinking about their clinical material becomes concrete and lacks fluidity. It is, I think, an instance of the concreteness attending material related to the Holocaust (Knafo, 1999), and suggests that there is comparable work to be done by German analysts if they are to process properly patients’ material relating to the Nazi past. Unlike the Jewish analyst, for whom this involves work around victimhood, for the German analyst it is likely

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to involve the themes of guilt and complicity. Addressing this9 is complicated by the fact that holding Germans collectively responsible for the Holocaust may itself reflect the operation of racist mechanisms (Zilboorg, 1947). Without this, however, the analyst remains less than optimally available to help patients find themselves credibly in material that touches on the Holocaust. For example, Eckstaedt’s clinical narratives end with a discussion of the role of the father in the pathology, and we hear little about the nature of work done to move things on – in Mr M, was the analytic church’s complicity in the Nazi past the no-go area? If so, could progress be made on this? What was involved? A deeper understanding of the place and significance of the Nazi father in the patients’ minds would involve such elements, which, I think, it is possible to investigate in the transference. Likewise, in nearly 20 years under his care Eickhoff’s patient made substantial gains, which he mostly passes over, in order to focus on the role of her introjection of her father’s guilt (“borrowed guilt”) that left her stuck. In his thinking this becomes a nexus not solvable by the patient, and she moves on only after her father’s involvement with the Nazis is publicly revealed: then there is no more guilt to “borrow” from him. I think this formulation is mistaken: her guilt is her own and stems from excessive projection – into her father in the past and analyst in the present – but she fears this guilt is unbearable. Whether Eickhoff explicitly addressed this or not, the fact that he persevered with her and did not reject her on account of projections that turned his head to stone would have helped to mitigate it; when she speaks in a later session of her father’s guilt being in the open, it is therefore a symbolic communication that, her analyst having borne it, she can now face her own guilt for what she had put him through. My way of looking at the problem of guilt therefore makes the work on the patient’s mind central; Eickhoff’s compels him to argue for a resolution by projective identification – the problem of guilt is solved in the father. All of this suggests that unconscious complicity in the Nazi past may be an obstacle within analysts that required further attention. Internally, thinking – to take up a theme from one of Eckstaedt’s patients – is recognized as belonging to the realm of the father, and I was struck by how turgid and almost impenetrable Eickhoff’s paper is, its narrative constantly interrupted by appeals to authority – good analytic fathers – so that it takes a number of readings to get a clear picture of the work that lies at

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its heart. Is thinking still too closely associated with a Nazi father and, if so, what would be required to free it from this association in the German mind?

Jewishness

Danielle Knafo (1999), using case material from three patients, demonstrates her observation that “anti-semitic sentiments . . . emerge in associations, fantasies, and dream material as part of the patient’s transference, conflicts, and resistances; when analyzed the anti-semitism often subsides or becomes more clearly linked to the patient’s underlying conflicts” (1999, pp. 40–41). In the first, Jews, with whom she had an encapsulated obsession, contained the patient’s projected murderous and sexual impulses – her “dark, instinctual side” – which, though they repelled her, she was not wont to obliterate. The analyst was idealized, as a Jew, since the latter were seen as able to manage such inner feeling states. Knafo’s countertransference, which “involved a partial identification with Jews as superior race” (p. 43), had to be unpicked before the analytic work could proceed. In time the analyst became less idealized and philo-Semitic comments took the place of anti-Semitic ones, indicating that she was now on better terms with her underlying instinctual life. Knafo’s second patient was Jewish, and an initially idealized transference – she was seen as “more together”, which concealed a picture of her as a remote Greek goddess – kept real feelings of anger, superiority, envy and competitiveness at a safe distance. On examining her countertransference Knafo found that she distanced her patient as not her kind of Jew, which concealed a superior, judgmental attitude. She notes that in order to treat the patient’s prejudices, she had to confront her own. Once the idealization broke down (after the patient discovered the analyst was a Jew “like me”) feelings previously kept out, such as contempt, disdain and so on, surfaced and were dealt with in a more ordinary way. Her account shows how, in the treatment, all these themes were interwoven with Jewishness – now in the analyst, then in the patient. Knafo’s third patient was more disturbed. At eight, her Jewish father abruptly abandoned her Catholic mother, who was psychotic and abusive; in her mind “Jew” was associated

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with traumatic abandonment, which the analyst addressed in the transference. The analyst also began to be linked to Israel, which allowed in a whole host of situations – a constant state of war, a longing for peace, the murder of Rabin, the forgiving attitude of his widow, and the racism between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews – which were both present and also kept at a distance, so that their elements could gradually come into the light of day. She gives a poignant transcript from a session where the patient describes how, as a 16-year-old, she was told by an orthodox member of the faith that she was not a Jew (her mother was not one), which made her hate Orthodox Jews: They are so rude. You feel as though you’re not Jewish. So you’re a nonperson to them. You’re a woman so they won’t touch your hand lest you be at the unclean time of the month. And who’d want to touch them?! They look so greasy and dirty. They’re Ashkenazi, of course. They’re revolting looking physically, particularly the men. Then I’ve lumped Orthodox Jews with extreme right-wing Jews. I can’t believe a Jew would behave that way. I idealized Jews growing up. My Uncle B got to me that way. Jews were – I don’t know – special when they didn’t have their own country. And when they had their own country, they became like everybody else. They torture people. They caricature Arabs with hooked noses. Forty years after World War II. They’re doing stuff like that in the papers. I did think Jews were superior, in the sense that they didn’t kill or hurt people. They might be strange, but not that. And they’re interested more in reading than anyone else in the world as a group. Arts and music. More than anyone. And I felt a kind of reflected glory that in some small way – even though I was not as smart as I thought every Jew was – I belonged to that group. . . . And then I found out I didn’t. I was kind of a nothing. Like when you go into an Orthodox store and buy something: “You want it or you don’t?” [mimics accent]. They don’t give a shit about you. They don’t really look at you – at me. I’m sure it’s not your experience. (Knafo, 1999, p. 49) Later in the session the patient refers to how idealizing her father concealed cold loathing, felt as complete indifference, towards him – for, we might surmise, abandoning her to a psychotic

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mother. There is an obvious link with the analyst who makes her feel that she can never fully belong – she can never be her real daughter. The material from the patient is of course multi-layered, but it is worth noting that it came up spontaneously in the session, which speaks of the analyst’s ability to create a setting safe enough to allow it to be verbalized. Its significance is that it ushered in a new phase in the treatment – the patient herself felt that a wall had come down – in which angry feelings were more directly present. Knafo notes that, beneath her initial denial of countertransference feelings, she soon realized that the patient’s very intense transference feelings did indeed touch on profound and deeply personal conflicts within her concerning her Jewish identity: It demanded that I try to answer the very questions she was posing: What kind of Jew was I? Was my Judaism destined to be defined by my parents, or could I find a definition that suited me? And, being an immigrant who came from a very different background, did I too not struggle with bringing together within myself the different sides of what often felt like an irreconcilable cultural rift? (Knafo, 1999, p. 53)

Evaluation

Although few in number, the clinical studies just described add significantly to our knowledge of anti-Semitism in the mind. Ackerman and Jahoda’s (1948) observation that there are two types of anti-Semitism, one that recruits the social stereotype in a more or less normal-neurotic defence, the other in which elements of anti-Semitism are more hard-wired into the personality, is upheld by Knafo’s work: her first two patients belong to the former category, her third to the latter. In addition, this study deepens our understanding of this distinction: if the racism is addressed directly (i.e. its meaning explored with the patient rather than avoided), in the first category, this brings relief and the focus of therapeutic work shifts to more ordinary and familiar themes. The racism has been properly contained. In the second category, the relief also moves things on, but in time it becomes clear that the racism has gone underground, and will

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resurface gradually, usually with intense affect, and have to be worked through repeatedly. This would suggest it is part of a more ingrained defensive system, such as those described in the material in Part 1 of this book. Knafo adds a further important observation, namely that antiSemitism involves an area of functioning that is concrete; the symbolic function that analysis usually relies on is not readily available. Concreteness is a clinical feature of psychotic functioning, yet Knafo shows that if the analyst is willing to engage, on a deeply personal level, with the meaning that the racism in question has for her, this contributes to things moving on; we can note, in passing, that it also breaks the professional silence on the subject. The observation that the analyst can, through work in the countertransference, facilitate relatively rapid progress on an evidently psychotic phenomenon supports my contention that internal racism is part of a psychotic defensive system, but in the normal mind. When analysts address their own internal racism, they are better equipped to facilitate an engagement with such material on the part of the patient. In the accounts of the two German analysts, it is at the point where the patients’ identification with their Nazi fathers is described that the narrative turns concrete, and we might question whether the absence of details of its transferencecountertransference dimension, which involves identification with the Nazi, played a part in this. Are the patient’s phantasies of guilt or complicity in mass atrocities on the part of analyst harder to tolerate and work with than the dynamics of victimhood? Is it easier for a Jewish analyst to know the ways in which, like her patient, she hates (some) Jews who make her feel an outcast than it is for a German analyst to know the ways in which, like his patient, he may wish that Hitler had not been defeated and Germany humiliated?

Conclusion This chapter reviewed nodal points in the evolving psychoanalytic approach to anti-Semitism, and brought out a number of observations consistent with the model of internal racism proposed in this book, and which can be further illuminated by it.

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Firstly, a collective psychoanalytic silence on the topic of racism was noted. Resistance to investigating the topic may be a manifestation of a collective, institutional defence aimed at keeping an unconscious racist system in place, a problem I explore more fully in Chapter 9. Reduction to psychological essences may also serve this purpose, as can the tendency to reduce antiSemitism to a form of individual psychopathology. In addition, my model of internal racism suggests that communication of racist dynamics often surfaces first in the countertransference, and that progress is dependent on the clinician’s ability and willingness to work with this aspect of the analytic situation. I trace Freud’s ambivalence about commenting on anti-Semitism to this source. Secondly, when anti-Semitism has been addressed in the literature, the approach of applied analysis has been favoured over the full-blown clinical study of the phenomenon. This suggests resistance to hands-on clinical work that might bring the phenomenon alive in the consulting room. This too can be seen as serving the interests of a racist defensive system. Thirdly, applied studies reveal that the Jew contains not just one stereotyped projection but multiple ones. This confirms that individuals make their own unique projection into the Jew; it is not therefore the content of the projections into the Jew that is distinctive; rather, anti-Semites share an internal racist system that powerfully keeps the Jew in the position of the racial other. Fourthly, clinical studies reveal two types of anti-Semitism: one yields readily to analysis, the other is more ingrained and resistant to analysis. A prerequisite for the quality of clinical work that leads to this development is a willingness, on the part of the clinician, to address their own internal racism. Where this is done, it enables anti-Semitism to come alive in the consulting room, following which its function can be properly scrutinized. In cases were the patient’s racism can be successfully analysed, and things move on, I think we can see the analyst’s fear of racism as the main obstacle that impeded progress. Internal racism can then be seen as one of many normal defences a patient may deploy to obstruct analytic work. Studies reporting on work on the inner Nazi father show the obverse: where it is difficult for the analyst to deal with their own inner Nazi, their ability to analyse it in the patient is limited.

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In the second category, where the patient’s anti-Semitism does not yield to analysis, something more problematic is revealed, as in the case of Dr B in Chapter 4. Here the most striking observation is that parts of the self are projected into the object – the first step in the process of setting up an internal racist organization (Chapter 2). The formulation of internal racism suggests that this is not an isolated psychic mechanism, and that understanding the detailed operation of the defensive system of which it is a part is essential in analysing that defence successfully – as suggested in Chapters 4 and 5. The final clinical finding I want to highlight is the absence of depression and guilt in patients in whom anti-Semitism is prominent. This supports the idea that anti-Semitism belongs to a paranoid defensive system that successfully protects against the pain of guilt and depression seen as absolutely overwhelming, as described in Chapter 3. This increases the individual’s need for, and reliance on, the racist defence.

8

White–Black Racism

This chapter examines the psychoanalytic literature on white– black racism, paying particular attention to supporting evidence. It begins with the equation between dark skin and faeces, and proceeds to the ways in which psychoanalysts, overwhelmingly white and privileged, have approached patients across the boundaries of race, class and colour. What sorts of difficulties arise, and how do clinicians account for these? The chapter then examines clinical accounts of encounters across the racial divide, beginning with Wulf Sachs’ classic, “Black Hamlet”. It traces the developmental trajectory of clinical interest in the difficulties marking this encounter, clinicians’ views of these difficulties and how these link with the model of internal racism that I propose.

Anti-Black Racism In a world of white privilege and power, possession of a darker skin “naturally” marks black people as other, something the Nazis could only achieve by compelling Jews to wear the Star of David. Does dark skin have a deeper psychological meaning? Brown – the Colour of Faeces? The equation between the dark skin and the colour of faeces occurs frequently in the literature and in general psychoanalytic discussions of racism. In the material of a patient (e.g. Thomas, 1992) this would be unremarkable and constitute evidence of a racist mindset in which contempt of the black person leads to their being regarded quite literally as shit. When raised in psychoanalytic discourse, however, it appears as an unfortunate 175

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fact that the dark skin, through the colour link, unconsciously triggers disgust and other feelings attached to faeces in the child’s eyes during the anal phase. The dark-skinned person is thus damned by nature in a way that the paler-skinned one is not. Unlike a patient’s clinical material, this is a statement of theoretical fact. What evidence is there to support this link? The equation with faeces does not appear in the earliest psychoanalytic comment on the meaning of skin colour. Berkeley-Hill, a British member of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society (Kakar, 1994), concluded from anthropological material that “at all times and among all races, no matter what their colour, ‘blackness’ has a very sinister connotation” (1924, p. 248). He offers the psychoanalytic interpretation that darkskinned individuals come to embody the very young child’s terrors of the night, together with all the associated psychic tensions . Curry (1964), too, thinks that evil connotations associated with blackness attach to the darker skin, but he does not think individual psychic conflict is involved in the process. He sees good and evil, symbolized by white and black respectively, as archaic constituents of the mind, independent of individual experience, that demand expression. These motifs are inscribed in myth, where the link between black and evil is fully revealed. Darker skin, because of its proximity to the colour black, attracts meaning along the black-evil plane. Curry’s line of argument follows the same trajectory as Loeblowitz-Lennard’s – that, as God’s chosen, Jews attract projections related to the evolution of the species – whose limitations I discussed in Chapter 7. However, neither author finds a specific role for the colour of faeces in the way darker skin colour comes to be signified in the mind. One study that does produce evidence for the equation with faeces is that of Hamilton (1966). Using newspaper reports, typographical “slips” and municipal records, he investigated the nature of the anxieties driving the violent opposition to desegregating residential housing in the United States. In one case, a couple were convinced that having black neighbours next door would depress the value of their own property. Accepting Freud’s argument that the wish to play with faeces, which becomes forbidden during toilet training and is sublimated into dealing in money (Freud, 1908), Hamilton thinks the focus

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on the monetary value of property reveals anal-stage anxieties. Unconsciously, the prospect of Negro neighbours produced a strengthening of the forbidden instinctual wish to play with feces . . . plus a threat to the defensive sublimation – a lowering of property values. This combined to produce a hostile response . . . which at times took on a distinctly paranoid flavouring . . . the Negro represents the original body product – the feces – of which money is a displacement or sublimation. (Hamilton, 1966, p. 8) Hamilton produces five pieces of evidence to substantiate this assertion. First, a letter in the local newspaper published whilst legislation to desegregate council housing was under consideration, which argues that the proposed anti-discrimination policy in housing amounted to trying to walk while the good citizens had not yet learned to crawl: “We have not yet learned to protect the simplest right – the right of a citizen to walk in his yard without stepping in a mess left by a neighbour’s dog” (Hamilton, 1966, p. 9). Second, a typographical slip in the same newspaper some 6 months later when policemen had been injured in clashes with black militants. In one report “in that suit” was misspelt “in that shit”. Third, the idea that stoning – white mobs generally stone blacks moving into formerly segregated areas –represents the child’s use of his stool as a weapon. Fourth, once the housing controversy had died down there was a concerted drive to arrest and prosecute homosexuals, invoking a concern with anal intercourse. Finally, around this time there was a civic drive to “clean up” in pursuit of an award as the “Nation’s Cleanest Town”. This case, that in the mind Negroes are equated with faeces, is plausible but not compelling; in order to demonstrate it conclusively Hamilton would have to show either that other, non-anal themes do not occur in anti-black racism, or else that anal ones predominate. This could only be done clinically, which his applied study stops short of. In addition, his argument is undermined by other evidence he does present: for instance, in the same newspaper where “suit” is misspelt “shit”, a statement from the mayor referred to demoncracy, not “democracy”; and he notes that, in addition to stoning, white racist mobs often blaspheme. Both observations bring in an unconscious link with the devil, which he discusses in some detail. If we add to this the

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clinical evidence regarding white racism available at that time, it becomes clear that the overall picture is not as exclusively focused on anal themes as Hamilton needs it to be. Using material obtained from white patients in analysis during the 1943 Detroit race riots, Richard Sterba (1947) investigated “unconscious motivations” associated with anti-Negro racism. He elegantly demonstrates the link between a white patient’s violent hatred of Negroes and his hatred of siblings in the following dream: A big boat approaches New York harbour. The patient is on a small raft nearby. Some Negroes jump from the port-hole of the boat into the water. The patient drives his raft toward them and crushes the Negroes between his raft and the side of the big boat. (Sterba, 1947, p. 414) Anti-Negro race riots, Sterba argues, build on this theme, with the Negro standing for the father responsible for producing siblings. In support he brings the dream of a patient who, though not a participant in the riots, nonetheless “favoured the aggression against the Negroes to some extent”: . . . a Negro was trying to climb into the window of his bedroom on the second floor, while he was lying in bed. The patient grabbed his favourite shot gun, which was lying beside him, and shot at the Negro. He shot his head off, the body fell down outside, and the head rolled onto the floor in the room, where it began to cry: “What did you do to me? I can’t go home without my body.” (Sterba, 1947, p. 421) The dream is set, by association, in his mother’s home, and Sterba goes on to suggest that decapitation stands for castration, further supporting an Oedipal reading. Another “very liberal” patient dreamt he was hunting and shooting down a few white birds at a time when hatred of his father was particularly alive in the analysis. On waking the patient himself immediately recognized that white was a disguise for black, and that the dream placed him – contrary to his conscious position – as a participant in the riots, clearly showing the displacement of aggression from father to Negro. Another patient dreamt, during the riots, that whilst out hunting, he lies in wait. He hears crackling and

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prepares to shoot. When the leaves part, however, it is not a moose that steps out but a large, powerful Negro, who has a scar on his right cheek. The scar is recognized, on waking, “as that which his father had on his right cheek” (p. 425). Murderous impulses had been displaced from his father onto the Negro, and Sterba goes on to argue that the dynamics of hunting – seen as an atavistic vestige of the murder of the primal father postulated by Freud (1913) – feature prominently in anti-Negro riots. The riots play out the Oedipal configuration of murderousness towards the father coupled with an unconscious wish to own the black “mammy”, a love object of many a white southern baby, but one destined to be disowned as that baby grows gradually into a white racist. Sterba’s picture of the mental themes implicated in anti-black racism is deepened by Terry Rodgers’ (1960) discussion of a white patient whose powerful obsessional defences kept at bay sexual impulses feared as dangerous. The analysis took place in the segregated American South, and the patient saw Negro sexuality as uninhibited, free and easy, though his disdain towards sexuality in general lent it a degraded colouring: “Negroes were like animals about sex” (p. 240). The patient’s racist attitude ran so deep that he was willing to use the death penalty order to ensure that they were “kept in line”, even though he opposed capital punishment in principle. This concealed a profound determination to project his dangerous sexuality into his object in order to subdue and control it in them. In time, the analysis succeeded in lifting the inhibition on his sexuality, and he ended up being seduced by a young widow. Anxieties over Oedipal triumph now set in. He dreamt that his mother was lying on the ground about to be gored by a huge bull with black horns which, with a feeling of almost unlimited strength, he rips off with his bare hands, which leaves him with an indescribable sense of triumph and exhilaration (p. 242). His now irrepressible sexuality had once again been projected into Negroes with renewed force, solving the problem of both Oedipal triumph and the sexual impulses behind it, but he also had to terminate analysis with an analyst seen as pro-integration – Rodgers had taken him too close to his dangerous sexuality. In the months that followed he was to take on a leadership role in an organization campaigning against integration, which “would lead to miscegenation, intermarriage and ‘mongrelization’ of the races” (p. 242).

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These two contributions provide strong evidence that Oedipal themes can underpin an individual’s anti-black racism. If, in addition, we consider Sterba’s point that many white racists in the South would have been raised by black nannies, it is possible that oral themes, associated with a more disturbed, pre-Oedipal internal situation, may lie concealed behind overtly sexual ones. For example, the intensity with which Rodgers’ patient disavows his sexuality suggests that the more primitive defence of splitting, rather than repression, underpins the projection into Negroes. Pre-Oedipal issues may be refracted through an Oedipal lens. Where does this leave us with respect to the question of whether an unconscious link between the dark skin and the colour of faeces is implicated in anti-black racism? There is no clear-cut evidence for this, and it appears that almost every psychic theme – that is, issues emanating from every developmental stage – can be recruited into a racist mindset, a finding consistent with the anti-Semitism literature (Chapter 7). In addition, Dalal (2002, 2006) gives an alternative, historicized account of how negative connotations have come to be attached to the colour black, and hence to darker skin, locating it within the symbolic order of language (thought of as a social unconscious). This is part of a racializing process that serves broader societal aims rather than narrower intrapsychic ones. What, then, does one make of the psychoanalytic equation between the colour of faeces and that of darker skin? For the psychoanalyst, the equation may speak of a preference for tracing psychically difficult issues back to fixations at earlier developmental stages, whose conflicts are thus revived under stress, such as when a white person feels threatened by blacks. The persistence of such a notion in the collective professional mind, in the face of evidence to the contrary, however, suggests something else may be at play. I would suggest that this is unconscious racism that has found an acceptable refuge by being institutionalized in theory. Under the cloak of scientific truth the psychoanalyst can say to a black person’s face what would otherwise be completely unacceptable – “Terribly sorry, old chap, but nature has made you the colour of shit.” This is done without the individual concerned having to take responsibility for the racist projection that lies at the core of this assertion.

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Psychoanalysis and the Racial/Cultural Other Colleagues working across the boundaries of race, class and culture note that psychoanalysis does not extend seamlessly beyond its traditional white, Western, middle-class home. This difficulty is attributed primarily to the cultural specificity of psychoanalysis: As psychoanalytically trained clinicians, we carry a secret shame. While being members of a field that prizes the value of all human life . . . . Our hidden shame is that psychoanalysis has a very defined view of life and how it should be lived, and it is this perspective that determines who is to be treated, who is analyzable, who has adequate ego strength, who can meaningfully relate to objects, and who is capable of exploring his or her deep inner self . . . . The bold fact is that we work best with those people who are most like us, the middle class and educated who basically think and live the way we do. (Perez Foster, 1996, p. 3) The Minority Patient Misunderstood The difficulties for the minority patient begin at the assessment stage, where culturally alien ways of showing distress can lead to a heavy-handed approach on the part of the mainstream Western clinician who unwittingly plays “a colonialist game” in which the unfamiliar is seen as inferior, a value judgment concealed by apparently neutral and objective diagnoses (Acharyya, 1992). Compared to a mainstream patient, the minority one is thus more likely to be diagnosed as suffering from severe psychopathology, and less likely to have their psychological distress recognized – “ . . . GPs have an uncanny tendency to under diagnose psychological problems when confronted with West Indian patients . . . ” (Burke, 1983, cited by Fletchman Smith, 1994, p. 53). More punitive treatment (heavy medication, detention orders, etc.) follows and psychotherapy referrals are rare (Bhugra and Bhui, 1998). Minority patients who do make it into traditional analysis/therapy are likely to encounter the further problem of feeling misunderstood by the clinician: issues important to them are

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not properly explored and understood while issues seemingly irrelevant to them are prioritized. Jafar Kareem, founder of the intercultural therapy tradition in the United Kingdom, gives a vivid account of his own experience of such misunderstanding at the hands of a Viennese clinician whom he consulted on account of depression. Although he was an experienced UK-based clinical psychologist, he found his capacity to manage the “sophistication” of the therapeutic process, together with his intelligence and his “familiarity” with the complex ideas of psychoanalysis, all explicitly called into question. To crown it all, the therapist checked whether he knew how to use a telephone – in case he should need to cancel – since “the telephone is a western thing”. Despite these racist slurs, Kareem’s desperation persuaded him to continue; as an English-speaker in Vienna his choice was, in any case, limited. In the fifth session things came to a head. He dreamt that during the uprising against the British [in India], he is on a march with his fellow students when they are confronted by a mass of policemen with red turbans. Suddenly, they open fire and the friend by his side is shot and lies bleeding on the ground. Kareem himself is dragged away by police to a waiting black van. He associates the red turbans with the therapist’s red scarf. After first reprimanding him for going on a march (“Didn’t your parents tell you not to take part in such things?”) the therapist interprets his rebellion against authority as directed against the father he had lost within a month of his birth, triggered unconsciously in the transference. Kareem doubts this, and insists on his sense that in the dream it was the therapist who was “behind the police” in a vague sort of way. This brings the interpretation that he holds all Europeans responsible for his oppression (“Maybe you think we all shot your friend”) and that he wishes to take revenge on her (Kareem, 1988, pp. 58–62). Following that session Kareem terminates the treatment, eventually finding his way to a second therapist who, in contrast to the racism of the first, openly acknowledges what is unknown and addresses him as a collaborator in the task of analytic exploration. Based on informal accounts by minority psychotherapists of their experience as patients, patients’ own accounts (to intercultural therapists) of their attempts at obtaining help within the mainstream (Kareem, 1992), difficulties that become

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apparent in the supervision of cross-race psychotherapeutic work (Omand, 2009) and the general silence regarding racial and cultural difference in our public forums (e.g. Morgan, 1998, 2008) interculturalists maintain that, though largely unreported, experiences such as Kareem’s are widespread (Kareem, 1992; Perez Foster, 1996). They take the view that the breakdown in understanding is due to mainstream clinicians being less than adequately equipped to manage therapeutic encounters across the race/class boundary. Two analyses of this problem have been put forward: the first arguing that psychoanalysis itself is culture-specific, the second that ethnocultural factors have crept into psychoanalytic theory, blunting its ability to reach patients from non-mainstream groupings.

Psychoanalysis as Culture-specific Roland Littlewood (1992) questions whether the psychoanalytic project is as universal as it claims. Although psychological distress is indeed recognized universally, he argues that its conceptualization as psychological and hence its treatment by psychotherapy are specifically Western. We cannot therefore assume that psychotherapeutic intervention is applicable to the minority patient from non-Western (middle-class) settings. Psychoanalytic practice, however, is founded on just this assumption, which is hidden behind its claim to scientific objectivity. This is questionable; he insists that our formulations are mythical in the anthropological sense – these vary from culture to culture – with insight into mental processes as its organizing principle. Patients from cultures that do not share these myths are likely to experience our interventions as alien; they experience psychoanalytic treatment as the cultural imposition that it is. I have two criticisms of this position. First, Littlewood holds that the therapeutic claim of psychoanalysis hinges on the patient attaining insight into the dynamics behind symptoms. This picture of the aims of analysis dates back to an earlier era and takes no account of developments over the last several decades (e.g. Steiner, 1996). Today, psychoanalytic technique focuses on clarifying a patient’s experience, usually in the present, following

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which the task of making sense of it can begin. This is a complex process that may result in insight or self-understanding – the place of insight in psychic change remains controversial – but the focus has shifted decisively to the processes involved in such “reflection”. Far from wanting to sell the patient a particular theoretical formulation, the clinician’s primary concern is whether the patient’s own picture of her/himself makes a proper place for the experience lived in the present (e.g. as observable in the transference), or avoids it. Secondly, Littlewood assumes too direct a link between theory, on the one hand, and transactions in the consulting room, on the other. Ethnocentric bias in psychoanalytic theory – for him, the pursuit of insight – explains the clinician’s failure to make meaningful contact with their minority patient. I think this logic is flawed. Clinicians rely to a great extent on their clinical judgment to decide which aspect of theory applies in a given clinical situation. It is now widely accepted, for instance, that a “correct” interpretation (i.e. one that correctly describes internal dynamics in a patient) given at the wrong moment (say, when the leading anxiety has shifted onto a different issue) becomes an incorrect interpretation. Kareem’s example above provides one instance of this. The therapist’s interpretation of his dream is clearly informed by the psychoanalytic formulation that Kareem’s depression is linked with unconscious aggression – against an unavailable object. However, this idea is used defensively, to cover over even greater anxieties alive between them at that moment, which the model of internal racism can illuminate. Kareem’s does indeed derive from aggression, but it is towards an object that fails him (rather than accept him as he is, she made racist attacks on him), not an unavailable one; her anxiety concerns whether she will be able to understand her foreign, brown-skinned patient which, rather face directly, she projected into him, thus creating an ignorant, angry and uncivilized foreigner. This projection adds to the original anxiety. Kareem’s second therapist consciously tolerates and articulates the anxiety about facing what is unknown and different, which enables the same formulation regarding disavowed aggression to be approached successfully. This shows clearly that the very formulation that appeared so wrong when used defensively turned out to have a significant therapeutic effect when approached appropriately. Before getting there, however,

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the question of what was alive but defended against between them required urgent attention and it is here, rather than in the underlying theoretical formulation of the presenting problem, that the first therapist failed. The problem, therefore, is not with psychoanalytic theory in general, but a more immediate one of containing racist anxieties mobilized in the cross-race encounter. I think the same applies to the more psychoanalytically sophisticated intercultural criticism, namely that there is ethnocultural influence within our theory, to which I now turn. Psychoanalytic Theory as Ethno-culturally Biased Like Littlewood’s, the second strand of criticism also holds that psychoanalysis contains a bias against the minority patient. However, these authors do not see the psychoanalytic project as a whole as biased, but rather that “potent ethnocultural factors . . . [that] shape the body of psychoanalytic thought” (Perez Foster, 1996, p. xiii) limit the ability of psychoanalysis to reach the minority patient. They question neither the assumption of an unconscious nor the psychoanalytic method of accessing it via the transference. However, they maintain that the resulting theory, since it is socially constructed, is bound to be imbued with context-dependent assumptions to which the clinician may be blind since they constitute what is just takenfor-granted-as-true within her/his own cultural milieu. It is these specific formulations that lead to the problems that arise in the consulting room. The Cultural Self

A comprehensive account of an ethnocultural factor is given by Alan Roland. Drawing on his extensive experience with Indian and Chinese patients, he argues that psychoanalysis is built around a core of “individualism”, a set of values (whose trajectory he traces back to the Reformation) that permeates Western society, underpinning a mode of living in which the individual is the ultimate self-contained unit of society. If individuals are set on their own in society in a way never before done, then psychoanalysis is oriented toward enabling

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them to be on their own by resolving all kinds of inner conflicts and deficits. What other psychological theory is so thorough-going in its exploration of the individual psyche, or is so oriented toward individuals taking full responsibility for their lives through resolving the dictates of the unconscious? (Roland, 1996, p. 7) Roland maintains that psychoanalytic theory charts psychological processes specific to individualist cultures, and then assumes these apply universally. In Asian cultures generally, both group relatedness and spirituality play a more central role than in the West. To make sense of the psychic experience of individuals from such cultures, Roland argues, our concept of the self must be expanded to take account of a cultural, as distinct from an individual, self. Blinded by unwitting individualist assumptions, however, psychoanalysis not only mistakes the latter for the whole, but also takes it to be universal, thus pathologizing organizations of the self different from the Western norm. Overcoming our individualist bias requires a properly comparative psychoanalysis, and he goes on to suggest that for the Asian social relationships play a more central role in “selfregulation” than it does in the West. Nurturing a network of dependent relationships is a central psychic preoccupation; hierarchy (based on the need-fulfilling capacity of the object, which lies at the root of self-regulation) and rules of etiquette governing relationships within it assume prominence. Since the network is part of the self structure, threats to it generate anxiety of the intensity associated with threats to self-regulation, a central psychic function. For example, the displeasure of the other generates far greater anxiety than it would in the Westerner since respect for a superior earns affirmation, a central component of selfregulation. For the Westerner it simply threatens internal conflict with an other; for the Asian1 it threatens the core function of self-regulation. The “we-self”, observable in Indians, and the “public-” and “I-selves”, of the Japanese, are different versions of the cultural self, which Roland sees as a universal aspect of the self that goes unrecognized in psychoanalysis. Instead, psychoanalysis mistakes a part of the self prominent under individualism in the West – the personal self, derived from relationships with

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primary objects in the family – for the whole. This, in turn, informs what is addressed therapeutically.

The Bicultural Tightrope, Ethnocentrism and Internal Racism

The brief outline I have given of Roland’s approach suggests that the issues he raises are central in the emerging field of crosscultural psychoanalysis. Although this is a complex field, we might hope that it will, in time, help us to distinguish between cultural artefact, on the one hand, and elements of the mind that are truly universal, on the other. For the present, however, I want to focus on Roland’s assertion that psychological conflict in the Asian immigrant is due to a clash between his or her cultural self and social expectations in their new milieu. Such patients, he argues, walk a “bicultural tightrope” in the West, where there is the danger that the treatment itself may be part of the patient’s attempts to acculturate and become someone who can be seen through an individualist lens. This may coincide with an unconscious wish on the part of the Western clinician to see the patient as “one of us”, thereby bypassing the conflict between the weself and the host society’s individualist one (I-self). Unconscious envy, on the part of the analyst whose individualist socialization has produced a less-developed internal we-self, of the richness of an extended Asian family network, may also play a part in this. Is it necessary to posit the notion of a cultural self to understand the conflict involved in the bicultural tightrope? I think not. Roland’s way of formulating the problem flows, I think, from using self psychology as the frame of reference within which to make sense of the observation that Asians rely to a greater degree on a network of others than do Westerners. In self psychology others in the outside world play a vital role in providing self-esteem, but only early on: in the course of development the Westerner makes an inward transition; inner “others” gradually take over this function. The concept of the cultural self becomes necessary to avoid the conclusion that Asians remain more regressed than their Western counterparts. However, self psychology narrows motivation to “needs throughout life for others to be empathically attuned, idealisable, and to share in

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the comraderie of skills for the maintenance and enhancement of self-esteem and a cohesive self” (Roland, 1996, p. 101),2 and I think it is precisely because motivation has been narrowed in this way that the observed difference is magnified so as to become problematic. In an object relations framework, motivation would be seen as multi-faceted – ranging from the gratification of pressing innate drives through to object seeking in the most general way – with an inner world of phantasy relationships mediating contact with the outside world (which we all need). Roland’s finding would, therefore, raise a different question: Do the differing relationships of Asian and Westerner in their respective worlds reflect a difference in the internal world, in either content or structure? Working in another time and place (which I describebelow), Wulf Sachs observed a non-Westerner constantly deferring to a world of others – the departed spirits of dead parents in this case – and came to the prima facie conclusion that he had not properly outgrown childhood dependency on his parents. However, with his deepening understanding of the mind of his analysand Sachs came to see this as a culturally appropriate way of voicing his own choices. In his internal world the same instinctual drives and prohibitions existed as in his Western counterpart, creating a conflict which his ego resolved in a culturally acceptable way (Sachs, 1937, pp. 76–93). The concept of the self is an abstraction. In practice we think of ourselves in specific and concrete terms: the abstract is given a particular shape using content from the surrounding culture. We cannot “see” the self without its cultural clothing, whose nature remains invisible to us since, in a given grouping, everyone draws from the same pool. The bicultural tightrope problem arises when a new external reality repeatedly draws attention to new cultural elements since they differ from the ones we take for granted, thus emphasizing that “I” and native context have been painfully separated. The most common defence against this is idealization (Grinberg and Grinberg, 1984) – either of the lost culture or of an aspect of the host culture. The character of the Bengali father in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane¸ who identifies so ingratiatingly with Englishness, typifies the latter. Idealization defends against conflict brought about by unconscious hatred generated by the loss of one’s home: it is also a way of dealing with racist hatred on the part of the host society

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towards the foreign newcomer through identification with the aggressor. Roland makes the important point that it is easy for the Western clinician to collude with the patient’s wish to be seen as “one of us”. Thomas (1992) argues that this stance, on the part of the clinician, is defensive against recognizing the reality of racial/cultural difference and I see this defensiveness in the clinical situation as the real problem. In my reformulation, it is migration itself that produces a splitting of the self, which suggests a transference version between émigré patient and host analyst, in which émigré is denigrated and host idealized. This can be analysed, and the model of internal racism provides a direct point of entry into doing so. By contrast, in Roland’s examples, the analyst is sympathetic to the patient’s cultural self, which could enact further idealization of the Western analyst that reinforces the split. The price paid for not analysing this split is that the “I” and “we” selves of Westerner and Asian respectively are reified in theory, which could reinforce stereotyped thinking (Omand, 2009) in which Asians are seen as collectivist, Europeans as individualist. I would like to end my discussion with a final observation that in the intercultural literature there are numerous examples where it occurs to the clinician to inquire after a patient’s native meaning context only after analytic work has reached an impasse. Given how basic an element of clinical technique it is to inform oneself fully about a patient, its omission on the part of experienced clinicians suggests that the assumption that “we are all the same” (Thomas, 1992) is very pervasive indeed. This paralysis of functioning (Dalal, 2008) is, I think, symptomatic of the mobilization of internal racism. Recognizing this fact underscores the importance of analysing the idealization– denigration polarity that stands at the heart of the bicultural tightrope (see Chapter 6).

Clinical Encounters Across the Racial Divide If racism is, as I suggest, a universal feature of the mind, its dynamics should be mobilized and hence directly observable in the cross-race/class transference. Wulf Sachs’ (1937) account of the psychoanalytic exploration of the mind of a black man

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in Johannesburg in the 1930s is the earliest record of such an undertaking I have been able to find. Black Hamlet Sachs was born in St Petersburg where he trained as a psychiatrist before moving to Cologne and London for further study, finally immigrating to South Africa in 1922, at the age of 29. As a young hospital psychiatrist he observed that white and black patients appeared to share the same psychopathology, prompting him to ask whether the normal African mind also shared features that psychoanalysis had revealed in the European. He proceeded to have an analysis – not the lengthy undertaking it is today – with Reik in Berlin, following which he began to look for a black analysand with whom he might investigate this question. The result is the research analysis reported in the psychoanalytic biography Black Hamlet (Hayes, 1997). “John Chavafambira” was an “ordinary” black man – not a patient – who, as the title implies, had lost his father in infancy, and whose mother married the brother of her deceased husband, whose mantle as medicine man he took over. This was rightfully to pass to Chavafambira – but only once he reached maturity. Sachs tells the story of his analysand’s life, pointing out how, despite the fact that his subject hails from a very different external world, his mind can nevertheless be shown to be struggling with the same psychic issues, and in the same way, that a European does. Reviewing the work, a contemporary of Sachs’ offers the following summary: John’s œdipus complex shows no striking differences from what might be expected in an individual under similar circumstances in our culture. John grew up in a society in which the father and father-substitutes play an authoritarian rôle. He had also to face the problems of sibling rivalry and aggressive competition. These problems and others are common to his society and to ours. He violates paternal and tribal precepts, develops a severe sense of guilt, and spends years seeking punishment for these derelictions. After a final catastrophic frustration, resulting from his failure to observe a certain tribal ritual, he feels at peace with the world and ready to start life anew. (Lander, 1938, pp. 575–576)

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If Lander was convinced by Sachs’ uniquely psychoanalytic evidence, a second mainstream reviewer was more circumspect, noting only that Sachs had “satisfied himself that the normal fundamental principles of the mind in European and African are the same”. However, since Sachs does not “deal with the transference”, it is not “true” psychoanalysis – despite the fact that he used a couch, had daily sessions for 2½years, used the free association method and explored dreams – and she praises it instead as “of interest as a sociological study of the Negro problem in South Africa” (Yates, 1938, p. 252). Lander, too, picks up on the racial dynamic alive between them, but notes that this would be of interest to Marxists. I want to suggest that one factor influencing this split was that psychoanalysis was, at that time, a relatively young discipline preoccupied with the question of whether its claims to universality were valid – the question Sachs himself began with. Yates, I think, was frustrated that Sachs’ method was not sufficiently robust to pursue this question at the same depth at which European analyses were beginning to be conducted. By the time Black Hamlet was republished nearly 60 years later, this climate had changed, and the new editorial introductions open up the possibility of examining racism in the text in a critical but sensitive way. The new reviewers, too, speak openly of those elements (e.g. Phillips, 1997), with Hayes (1997) noting that Sachs’ account is sufficiently detailed to allow today’s reader to revisit the racial dynamic in it and to see how Chavafambira is revealed as Sachs’ racial other. However, he does not theorize this racial other adequately. These contributions lay the groundwork for a new psychoanalytic exploration of what had earlier been left to sociologists, work that has yet, to my knowledge, to be undertaken in the detail it merits. However, I want to suggest that the absence of a psychoanalytic theory specifying the place racism occupies in the mind, and how it functions, may be a factor in this omission, depriving us of one of the tools needed to inform such an inquiry.

The Racial Transference The tendency to place the “Negro” problem outside of psychoanalysis was not confined to Sachs and his early reviewers. As a left-wing liberal (Hayes, 1997), it may have

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been difficult for Sachs to probe more deeply into the inner dimensions of racism, which was bound to involve mistrust and hostility towards whites. This may also be a problem for our profession at large, which is firmly located in the white establishment. In our world white, Western hegemony and its subset, white racism, are direct successors to the slave trade (Adi, 2007) whose psychic trauma, though frequently acknowledged, is yet to be fully charted (Fletchman Smith, 2000, for a thoughtful clinical contribution). This is a heavy burden to open up in the transference, and it is perhaps no surprise that the early response was to try to locate the problem elsewhere. Three phases can be identified in the clinical engagement with race and racism: first it was seen as an obstacle to true analytic work; then tentative steps were taken to correct this perception and integrate it; and finally, the way seems open to a fuller engagement with the topic. I shall describe each briefly.

Phase I: Race as Obstacle

In 1951 Kardiner and Ovesey painted a depressing picture of how deeply white racism came to mark the psyche of the American Negro. Their composite account, based on a combination of 25 case studies, analytically informed interviews and projective tests with adults and adolescents from across the socioeconomic spectrum, revealed “a conviction of unlovability, a diminution of affectivity, and uncontrolled hostility” (1951, p. 290) which led to suspicion, mistrust, and excess sexuality. This was seen as an adaptation to life within a racist world. It was not easy for psychoanalysis as a discipline to accept this depressing picture, and the sole mainstream reviewer rounded on the study’s methodological shortcomings for not supporting the level of generalization in the authors’ conclusions. Yet, their “statements about the pernicious effects of being a Negro in America are not incorrect, but those statements could almost have been made without reference to case material” (Axelrad, 1954, p. 114). I think this reading reflects a temptation to locate the problem of racism elsewhere, as I have just discussed. In 1954, the President of the American Psychopathological Association argued for the provision of segregated treatment facilities for

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minority ethnic groups on the grounds that “transference in its positive form is most likely to be easily established and examined (analysed) between patient . . . and physician if their psychological biases do not differ too widely” (Oberndorf, 1954, p. 757). Compared to their white counterparts, “the Negro patient in our culture uniformly enters treatment with fear, suspicion and distrust of the therapist”; “ . . . his specific life experiences are only secondarily elaborated and the development of the individualised ego is blurred by the phenomenon of color” (Kennedy, 1952, p. 313, italics in original). Viola Bernard also noted that cross-race analysis was a complex bi-personal field in which a number of factors from the outside world readily impinged on the unfolding transference and countertransference. Since both parties were members of a world of racial tensions, it was difficult for the analyst to strike a balance between acknowledging and overemphasizing race: if he blinds himself to it, he “may play into the patient’s resistances as well as deny some of the social realities of his current existence”. If, on the other hand, he interprets too much in terms of race he may “deprive the patient of thoroughly reaching and working through his basic conflicts” (Bernard, 1953, p. 262). Kennedy speaks explicitly of the patient’s specific life experiences – interchanges with primary objects in the family leading to internal conflict – which Bernard sees as the more basic issues that are the proper focus of analysis. In these views the touchy race area is regarded as an obstacle that could easily derail the real work, and was something of a minefield the analyst had to negotiate if they were to reach the better-charted “psychoanalytic” terrain. Some patients, unsurprisingly, didn’t get there. Kennedy (1952) describes two in whom a wish to be white represented a longed-for white ego ideal that was defensive against pain experienced in the early mother–child relationship – one patient had a cold mother, the other a cruel one. As we would today expect, intense hostility was mobilized in the transference, and while one treatment survives and proceeds to a satisfactory conclusion, the other breaks down. Kennedy suggests that the absence of an early “black” ego-ideal – the feature that distinguished one case history from the other – is a crucial factor. Leary (1995) notes that this is tantamount to asking the patient to solve the problem so that she can benefit from the analytic help on offer. However, it does reflect a general mood of the period that most blacks were so damaged by societal racism, which stirs up hostility towards

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the white analyst (or to analysis itself) so intense as to present an insurmountable obstacle. Today it is not difficult to see how the conceptualization of what constitutes analysis proper – the analysis of defences and resistances against inner drives – made it difficult to regard the psychological effects of societal racism as a legitimate area of study. The few analytic studies of the psychology of racism that did appear were more indirect in that they involved white clinicians reporting on the nature of anti-black racism in the minds of white patients (e.g. Bird, 1957; Rodgers, 1960). The black–white transference seemed not to be regarded as a possible source of relevant data; it was almost completely bypassed. In this period, I think, clinicians equipped to analyse in the classical way came up against the deployment of a racist defence that was mobilized powerfully in the consulting room. They had no way of conceptualizing this, and could make no headway other than to blame society for the fact that the more familiar analytic terrain could not be accessed with these patients.

Phase II: First Steps

The tendency to want to work with intrapsychic rather than interpersonal themes continues in the next phase, but with a significant new development. The deployment of racial stereotypes now began to be seen as a way into the prized intrapsychic terrain rather than the almost insurmountable obstacle it had been previously. Schachter and Butts (1968) were the first to challenge the earlier view. They presented two cross-race analyses – one a white man and a male Negro analyst, the other a Negro man analysed by a Jewish woman – showing how the clinician had no choice but to address the racial difference in the transference. Ignoring or overestimating racial stereotypes, they argued, can hinder the analytic process, while attending to them – by analysing them – facilitates it. While stereotypes could indeed be used defensively, engaging the defence actively opened up areas lying at the core of the patient’s pathology. For example, a patient dreams that he is holding his analyst’s hand in public, and withdraws it, wordlessly conveying that this would offend public racial sensibility. The analyst, however, tells him to put his hand back. Schachter shows how it is the patient’s increasing

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feeling of intimacy with the analyst, together with his shame of this dependent side of himself, that are externalised in the racial construction. One of the few analysts of this period to track racist themes emerging in a patient’s material and then to pursue it in the transference as race (rather than something else seen as core) is Fischer (1971). He reveals how his light-skinned black patient’s sexuality, condemned as evil, is projected into darker skinned blacks, while her wish to wear pink lipstick expresses a wish to be white in identification with her idealized white analyst. However, he goes on to show how this idealization, in turn, conceals a deeper transference in which, as a Jew, he is denigrated. Despite this sophistication in clinical technique, however, his formulation of her problem reduces it to the psychoanalytically respectable formula that the wish to be white stands for a longing for the penis/baby. That it is a Jewish, white man’s penis/baby that is involved seems almost incidental, and the potential of the biracial transference to shed light on the phenomenon of racism itself is thus thwarted; race is reduced to the familiar. A transitional paper to partially buck this trend is Holmes’(1992) discussion of race in the transference. Noting that racial difference is probably the most powerful trigger/container for unacceptable impulses, she demonstrates clinically her conclusion that working with race can provide powerful points of entry into the transference. This required an attitudinal shift from the mainstream view that racial difference obstructs analytic contact which, in turn, requires the ability to tolerate intense feelings mobilized in cross-race encounters, including those between black patient and black analyst identified with a white mainstream profession. Despite these developments, for Holmes, too, the point is not to explore the racial transference in itself, but to use it as a point of entry into something more familiar. Race is treated as a “content” whose symbolic meaning is already established . . . , the therapist does not set out to learn about the patient’s experience of race but looks at the patient’s encounter with racial meanings that appear to have an autonomous life of their own. In my view, this way of thinking represents a peculiar distortion of analytic work. Such a perspective emphasizes static, reified meanings and not the

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fluid productions of a treatment process involving the elaboration of psychic reality and idiosyncratic fantasy. (Leary, 1995, p. 130)

Phase III: Active Engagement

The difficulty with taking race seriously in its own right was, in part, a consequence of the dominance of drive theory in American psychoanalysis. The gradual shift, over the last two to three decades, towards interpersonal paradigms there has produced a new conceptual neighbourhood (Leary, 1995) characterized by greater openness to exploring different aspects of the relationship between patient and analyst, including the meanings attached to any racial/cultural difference between them. In Britain, where the object relations tradition holds sway, the analytic contribution showed that it is projective identification, rather than projection, that is involved in racism. This involves processes that are dominant in the normal infant and in psychotic states of mind in the adult (Sandler, 1988; Spillius, 1988; Steiner, 1989; Bell, 2001), and accounts for the urgency and force of racist projection. The prospect of the return of such projected content goes beyond the aversion to inner conflict typical of neurotic functioning and threatens, instead, psychic catastrophe and is thus resisted at all costs (Rustin, 1991). This observation is consistent with those of American psychoanalysts engaging race in the consulting room (e.g. Bird, 1957). The formulation of internal racism was first presented as a clinical description of an organized racist defence (Davids, 1992). Others have recognized that race can function as an organized system of defence against unbearable anxiety (e.g. Keval, 2006), and my formulation is consistent with general observations on race made within the object relations tradition. For example, based on extensive clinical experience, Fletchman Smith (2000) suggests that slavery remains embedded in the minds of British patients from an African-Caribbean background, and underpins general problems in object relating. This suggests an enduring racist (master–slave) structure in the mind, organized along the lines discussed in Chapter 6. Richard Tan (1994, 2006) demonstrates paranoid-schizoid elements in racial interchanges in the consulting room, confirming the location

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of the racist organization. And Frank Lowe (2006) notes the concordance between racial phenomena observed clinically and mechanisms characteristic of borderline pathology; the theory of the pathological organization, on which the model of internal racism is based, had its origin in work with such patients (Chapter 3). In general, psychoanalytic papers on race are now more likely to include descriptions of racialized interchanges between analyst and patient, which are discussed with more openness and creativity and a greater willingness to question perceived orthodoxy (e.g. Davids & Davidson, 1988, 1992, 2003b; Thomas, 1992; Kakar, 1994; Tan, 1994, 2006; Leary, 1995, 1997a, 1997b; Gorkin, 1996; Thompson, 1996; Dalal, 1997, 2008; Altman, 2000; Fletchman Smith, 2000; Keval, 2001; Hamer, 2002, 2006; Hopper, 2003; Suchet, 2004; Layton, 2006; Morgan, 2008). Many of these contributors are members of minority ethnic groups who are, thereby, beginning to find their collective voice within the profession and often bring a unique angle on the subtle ways in which race and racism are no-go areas in the profession at large (e.g. Thomas, 1992; Leary, 2000; Hamer, 2002; Lowe, 2006; Tan, 2006). There is, however, a danger that this development might encourage the issue of race to be seen as a minority issue and hence to remain marginalized within a largely white profession (Lowe, 2006). From this point of view, contributions by white clinicians (Morgan, 1998, 2008; Altman, 2000, 2006), which build on Kovel’s (1988) seminal insights on the ubiquity of white racism, play an especially significant role. Clinicians tend to view racialized interaction from within their own frames of reference, yielding a rich tapestry of interweaving themes and perspectives on how racial and cultural themes might be engaged therapeutically. On the whole, they report that working with their own internal racist dynamics is a prerequisite to addressing this material, and many papers include moving descriptions of this process. Some go further and consider the implications of their work for our general theoretical concepts (e.g. Roland, 1996). Although the overall number of contributions remains small, there is nonetheless a climate of greater openness, reflected in conferences, symposia, task groups and so on focusing on the topic, books (e.g. Adams, 1996; Perez Foster et al., 1996; Mason and Sawyerr, 2002; Foster et al., 2006) and guest-edited journal numbers

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addressing issues relevant to the race/culture divide (e.g. MillerPietroni and Thomas, 1988; Leary and Smith, 2006; McGinley and Varchevker, 2006; Borossa and Ward, 2009). These developments raise the profile of race and begin to reverse the paralysing institutional silence noted earlier. Welcome as these developments are, one question that remains is whether the engagement with race is conducted at sufficient depth to fully illuminate the dynamics of racism. Sometimes, at a crucial point in the unfolding narrative, clinicians seem to retreat from the potential of the material at hand to yield a deeper understanding of the place of that dynamic in the patient’s mind. Suchet’s (2004) exemplary paper demonstrates this difficulty. Her patient, a black lesbian woman, was a highly successful professional who abused her partners and fell foul of the law. Therapy was, in part, court-mandated. There was open violence between the parents – a brother was accidentally stabbed during an altercation between them. They divorced, after which her mother was hospitalized, probably on account of a breakdown. The oldest of seven, the patient took on a parental role. Resources were scarce and proper care absent – the older son of a carer fondled her breasts for years, during which period she learned an aunt had been gang raped. She became obsessed with avoiding such a fate herself, primarily through identification with the aggressor: “The family history is replete with alcohol abuse, violence, criminal behaviour . . . . She first became physically abusive at eight when she hit her sister, who had called her ‘ugly’ . . . ” (p. 425). The formulation of the patient’s pathology as underpinned by identification with the aggressor means that power and control loomed large, which could lead a clinician to ignore race as a factor. Suchet carefully avoids doing so, and shows expertly how, in the transference, the choice of her as a love object is skilfully ruled out by the patient’s determination that she “goes” only for black women. She analyses this situation with skill and courage, opening up areas of conflict, guilt, shame and so on, all the while alert to the racial component – it links with slavery on account of the involvement of the courts. The work therefore deepens until the patient inquires after her country of origin, which happens to be South Africa. This question is accompanied

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by rising tension in the countertransference, as Suchet distinctly remembers the referrer telling her that she had informed the patient of this fact. The patient, however, denies it. How to proceed? After a pause for reflection, Suchet tells the patient that she was born in South Africa, and I quote her description of the ensuing interchange in full: Her reaction was horror; she remained speechless, visibly recoiling for a few seconds. “Did you grow up racist? ” she asked. Silence. A long silence ensued. “Yes,” I responded. I no longer felt calm; I felt drenched in shame. Haunted by my ghosts, I felt exposed . . . . I was the oppressor – the evil, hated perpetrator. In a matter of moments, I felt myself lose my footing; I was spinning into the domain of self-loathing. I wanted to proclaim my innocence, to explain a life’s struggle against apartheid, culminating in my emigration. Emigration was the mark of my inability to tolerate an identification with the aggressor, simply by being white. When I had come to the United States, I had thought, quite naively, what a relief it be would not to have to deal with race all the time . . . . Sam was asking me a barrage of questions: “Why did you come here? Is your experience of race in America different? Do you have black friends? How do you understand blacks in the United States?” I answered some . . . directly. Yes, I did have black friends, and my experience of race in the United States was complex; there were both differences and similarities. I refrained from discussing my reasons for emigrating, because I was aware of how defensive and unstable I already felt. I struggled to find my self-reflexive skills, feeling caught in the headlights, unable to think. Slowly, I regained a modicum of my professional posture. We were able to talk about her concerns, what the South African part of me would mean for our relationship. She pondered for a moment and said that she had not experienced me as racist in the room, although now she worried that she wouldn’t know if I was harboring prejudicial

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stereotypes. I told her that if I had felt that working with her was a problem for me, I would not have continued the treatment. (Suchet, 2004, pp. 430–431) There is indeed pain and poignancy in “embracing race in the room”, as Suchet notes, but I think this understates the real significance of this interchange. Suchet’s openness to grappling with issues of race encouraged her patient to reach deep and bring out the racist dynamic alive between them, namely that of white racism. However, this engagement was ambivalent hence the scotomization of the information, from the referrer, about Suchet’s origin. At the point where Suchet answers the question about her origin, the model of internal racism would suggest an interpretation: that the patient knew, but may well not have registered, that she was South African, which brought the fact of racial hatred directly alive between them. Could this be faced and thought about, or must the subject be changed to whether or not she had been told? In other words, I think there is something loaded about the white–black transference that came alive, and which the patient was ambivalent about exploring at depth. This could open up the question of what role racializing hatred (Moss, 2001) played in the patient’s psychopathology, along the lines described in Chapters 2 and 4. For example, it is likely that the patient’s violent hatred of her object existed internally in the relationship between black and white which, up to that point, had been kept out of the room – the patient did not “go” for white women. Intrapsychically, it was projected across the racial divide, producing the white racist, but the fact that it was now present in the room presented a possibility of proper containment; her therapist might explore the nature of that relationship – who hated whom, how, why and so on. It was the prospect of this work that generated anxiety flowing from the threat to her racist defensive system, which therefore immobilized things by “playing the race card”. Recognizing this as symptomatic of a powerful racist defence is a necessary step to moving things on. The patient’s insistent questions could be seen as an attempt to project the anxiety into her therapist (which she succeeded in doing). Understanding this would, in turn, help one to interpret it rather than

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give in to it in an enactment, thereby keeping on track the inquiry into the patient’s anxiety. If my hypothesis above is correct, that process would lead to understanding the components of her racial organization and how this fits into her overall strategies for managing the violent hatred deposited in her by her deprived and abusive upbringing. This is likely to be a long and complex process of facing and disentangling race and violence/hatred from each other, as in the case of Dr B in Chapter 4. This brief example allows us to see that while the emergence of relational approaches has succeeded in reversing the clinical silence on race, they have thus far made a limited contribution to developing a coherent theory of race and racism in the mind, the need for which becomes ever more apparent (Leary, 2000). The model of internal racism is such a theory, and it may be that our psychoanalytic understanding of race and racism might benefit from a critical dialogue across the Atlantic.

Conclusion There has been a general silence on matters racial, but this chapter reviewed the literature on white–black racism that is available in psychoanalysis. The model of internal racism holds that racism is a universal feature of the mind, and the review identified two ways in which this may be present in the profession: first, in the general complacency about investigating racism, and second, in the idea that brown skin is denigrated because it is the colour of faeces, for which there is no supporting evidence. Psychoanalytic interest in the cross-race/culture encounter has been slow to develop, and the idea that the racially/culturally other patient could not be reached analytically was examined and found wanting. Instead, I suggested that the crossrace/culture encounter mobilizes the dynamics of internal racism which, when properly attended to, can deepen contact across those boundaries and thus enhance the clinical encounter. The work can therefore remain within well-established analytic principles. This should raise the question in the minds of clinicians of whether separate models of treatment across boundaries of race, class and culture are really needed. Answering that question fully is beyond the scope of this book.

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Finally, the review of analytic work across the race boundary revealed a developmental trajectory from regarding that contact as impossible and thus locating the problem elsewhere, to showing that addressing racial matters can lead to “proper” analytic contact and work, and finally to exploring and working with the dynamics of race in the here-and-now as the proper work of analysis. I showed how the model of internal racism, by deepening that work, can help it to be carried forward.

Part III Application

9

Institutional Racism

The model of internal racism holds that using racist mechanisms generates unconscious guilt which, because it is felt to be unbearable, leads us to turn again and again to the racist organization as a psychic refuge. This chapter brings forward evidence that our public institutions can be recruited into playing the role of repositories for racist guilt. Institutions cannot process feelings in a way that a human being can, but do so in a concrete way using the mechanism of repetition of the original act. This effectively dilutes and spreads responsibility and guilt, but this in turn can become a real obstacle to change. I demonstrate how this operates via two case studies, and go on to show how the racist defence is revealed when institutionally racist practice is challenged.

The Racism of Everyday Life Racism’s natural habitat is the outside world. On the street, racial incidents occur frequently and are, occasionally, reported in the media. But by then they have been transformed into headlines, from which it is difficult to get back to the small print of what was really going on. What are the elements out of which a racial incident is fashioned? Paul Haggis’ 2004 film Crash, set amidst the vibrant ethnic mix of Los Angeles, captures beautifully the very real racial tensions that exist just beneath the surface of everyday life in a multi-cultural city. It also brings out how just a little extra stress can tip an individual over into enacting a racial incident. For example, in an early sequence a policeman whose father is “in pain and cannot sleep” finds his medical insurance company completely oblivious to the problem – his father has already been to a clinic and there is nothing more to be done. But, he insists, “my father is in pain and cannot sleep”, only to be stonewalled 205

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with “I am not a doctor, sir”; on the other hand, if he has a problem with his policy he is welcome to come over and discuss it with them at any time. Frustrated, angry and impotent, he now sees a chance to racialize the situation – why should he, the all-conquering white, American hero, be in this fix? Can he speak to her supervisor? No, she is the supervisor. What is her name? Chiquita Johnson. “I should have known you’d be Chiquita Johnson,” he says. She slams the phone down on him and his racist slur. Mission accomplished, says the self-satisfied half-smirk on his face. Not quite. Back on the road, they receive details of an expensive car stolen by two black youths. An identical one passes by, driven by a black man whose passenger, just as the spotlight falls on them, appears to be straightening herself back up into her seat. The second officer implores him to back off – these are not the suspects. “They have done something,” our hero replies, undeterred. Things move rapidly. The couple realize they are being entrapped in a racial incident, and in the war of words that follows both end up manhandled against the side of their car. She accuses our hero of racism – he couldn’t bear the idea of an attractive white woman (for whom she could be mistaken in the dark) giving a black man a “blow job” – but this inadvertently hands him the evidence of their wrongdoing. He expertly uses the threat, later made explicit, of embellished criminal charges to launch a racial assault. She is in a skimpy evening dress, and he runs his hand all the way up her leg, proceeding to molest her sexually. Her partner, trapped with his hands raised above his head as ordered, recognizes this as an attempt to provoke him to violence. He knows the score, remains in control, and is reduced to watching helplessly. In the process he is publicly humiliated, the deeper dimensions of which I described in Chapter 1. Later, she will goad him over this. It is easy to see how interchanges like these might escalate into full-blown racial incidents, of which the LA Police Department is involved in many (LA Times, 31 January 2006). How is internal racism involved? I have already flagged up the use of a racist mechanism by the policeman in which, faced by anxiety, he tries to project his powerlessness across the colour line, using a conventional stereotype. This follows my model in which racism is mobilized in response to anxiety. However, there is a

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further detail brought out non-verbally on film, namely the feeling of entitlement (Weintrobe, 2004). Why should he, a white policeman, have to endure this ordinary human situation in his country? Empowered as a white man, he feels entitled to triumph over a human situation that none of us would enjoy, but most of us would accept as ordinary. It should not happen to one who, as a descendant of the conquerors of this new frontier, is entitled to freedom from such strife, and thus it should be forced into someone else. Putting Chiquita in her place should have seen to this but, in the narrative, it doesn’t. Why not? I want to suggest that unconscious guilt is associated with using racist mechanisms in this way. Although the policeman was not psychically as desperate as my patient Mr A (Chapter 2), the guilt is nonetheless unbearable and compels him to repeat the act as a concrete alternative to becoming aware of what he did to Chiquita (Freud, 1914). The film thus brings out two aspects of the model of internal racism in everyday life: it demonstrates the ubiquity of racial mechanisms and tensions that exist beneath the surface in a multi-cultural metropolis; and it brings out the triumph involved in the “kick ass” mentality – once one knows about “the race card”, it can be played with impunity, becoming an addictive way of evading guilt at having done so in the first instance.

Institutional Racism Compellingly nuanced as it is, the portrayal of racist interchanges in Crash is nonetheless fictional. It is much harder to come by factual accounts of what exists beneath the surface to turn an ordinary cross-race interchange into a racial incident. In real life things also move very fast, which makes it difficult to construct a reliable picture of what is involved, a task further complicated by the lack of detailed and reliable evidence as to what has actually gone on. Two cases that did turn into public incidents in the United Kingdom and gained a great deal of publicity were those of Stephen Lawrence and Victoria Climbié, two black citizens whose deaths were untimely. Did public institutions, whose aim is to protect and preserve the life of all, fail in their duty of care to them because they were black? Was racism implicated?

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In the Climbié case an investigation followed as a matter of course, since, in Britain, there is probably no higher public priority than child protection, and a failure in the extensive system in place would automatically trigger an inquiry at the highest levels. Lord Laming, who chaired the official inquiry into her death, kept an open mind on whether racism played a part: Much has been made outside this Inquiry of the fact that two black people murdered Victoria, and a high proportion of the staff who had contact with her were also black. But to dismiss the possibility of racism on the basis of this superficial analysis of the circumstances is to misunderstand the destructive effect that racism has on our society and its institutions. (Laming, 2003a, p. 12) However, Laming’s overall conclusion was that widespread organizational, managerial and system failures were responsible for not identifying properly the risk Victoria was at (Laming, 2003a, 2003b). An exhaustive list of recommendations designed to ensure better centralization of information, improved monitoring, communication and so on accompanied these findings. Although Laming appeared to keep an open mind on matters racial, his de facto focus on the breakdown in professionalism had the net effect of passing over the possibility of racism as a contributory factor. It therefore received little further public consideration. I have suggested that a paralysis of our ordinary professional functioning is a key symptom of the deployment of internal racist mechanisms, and I therefore propose to revisit the record to investigate whether those mechanisms, along the lines outlined in this book, may have played a role in the widespread systems failure. The inquiry into how the police handled the investigation into the death of Stephen Lawrence had a different history. Here the system could not have prevented a life being lost since his assailants had struck a fatal blow. However, it was known from the outset that it was a racist murder, and a new question of how seriously the police treat racist crime arose. The mysterious death of young black men, though mostly unreported in the mainstream press, is much more common than that of children, with many remaining unsolved. The Lawrence family were, therefore,

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determined to obtain justice for their son, but felt that they were being treated in a racist way by the police – as Duwayne Brooks, Stephen’s companion when he was attacked, had at the scene of the crime. Was this a factor in the police failure to bring the case to trial? The police denied it, echoing the attitude I described in Chapter 1 (in relation to the police harassment incident), but without the explicit threat I described there – the media were watching. It is not unusual for these situations to end in stalemate, and things might well have been left there were it not for one extraordinary aspect to the case. A lack of credible evidence meant no one was tried for murder. Legal hands tied, a leading national newspaper took the unprecedented step of publishing the names of the alleged killers, challenging them to sue for defamation. The hope was that the ensuing court hearing would bring to light details of the murder and the investigation into it. Of course, those named did no such thing. Accusations of official indifference to, or complicity in, such racism, brought only an internal inquiry by a neighbouring force, which exonerated the police, a finding endorsed by the government of the day. In progressive circles the failure to prosecute – or even to investigate that failure independently – was seen as an example of the indifference of a state that espouses the principle of equality for all, to the existence of anti-black racism. It was to take a long, concerted campaign – supported by, among others, no less a figure than Nelson Mandela – as well as a change in government, to bring about a public inquiry into the affair. That inquiry identified a long series of blunders in the way the case was handled, for which it held institutional racism within the Metropolitan Police Force responsible (Macpherson, 1999a, 1999b; Norton-Taylor, 1999). Institutional Racism: A Legal Definition The Inquiry report defines institutional racism as follows: The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount

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to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people. (Macpherson, 1999a, para 6.34) Although there was a collective sigh of relief that institutional racism was recognized as a problem in the police force, the report went no further than outlining its symptoms and describing its attitudinal dimensions: Unwitting racism can arise because of lack of understanding, ignorance or mistaken beliefs. It can arise from well intentioned but patronising words or actions. It can arise from unfamiliarity with the behaviour or cultural traditions of people or families from minority ethnic communities. It can arise from racist stereotyping of black people as potential criminals or troublemakers. Often this arises out of uncritical self-understanding born out of an inflexible police ethos of the “traditional” way of doing things. Furthermore such attitudes can thrive in a tightly knit community, so that there can be a collective failure to detect and to outlaw this breed of racism. The police canteen can too easily be its breeding ground. (Macpherson, 1999a, para 6.17) Acknowledging manifestations of institutional racism (lack of understanding, ignorance, etc.), recognizing what it is associated with (unfamiliarity, stereotyping, etc.), how it breeds within closed cultures (the overwhelmingly white, tight-knit police canteen) and identifying that it interfered with the way the investigation unfolded are all important. Yet, this stops short of outlining what specific aspect(s) of racism influenced the events as they unfolded. The report, of course, could not be expected to incorporate an understanding of the unconscious elements involved in racism and this, I think, makes it difficult to know precisely what the police are being asked to accept responsibility for. Far too general a notion of responsibility flows from it to be truly helpful. Thus, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police would say: The debate about defining this evil, promoted by the Inquiry, is cathartic in leading us to recognise that it can occur almost unknowingly, as a matter of neglect, in an

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institution. I acknowledge the danger of institutionalisation of racism. However, labels can cause more problems than they solve. (Macpherson, 1999b, p. 2) He went on to reject the idea of there being institutional racism within his force – the key finding of the Inquiry – which I mentioned briefly in Chapter 5, since it would have meant labelling every member of the force as not only having a racist attitude, but also of acting on it every day of their working life. However, it cannot be right that institutional racism, in the context of the inquiry into the police investigation, had this meaning and I want to revisit the record to see whether a psychoanalytic reading can contribute to understanding what is involved.

Identifying Hidden Racism Case Study 1: Stephen Lawrence On 16 May 1998 The Guardian carried the following report from the Inquiry: The inquiry . . . heard that, on the night of the attack in April 1993, Mr [Duwayne] Brooks and [his best friend] Stephen had been searching for a bus in Eltham, south-east London, when six white youths had approached. The ringleader had called out, “What, what, nigger”, and then pulled from his jacket a weapon of steel or wood, the size of a rounders bat. “I saw [him] raise his right arm in the air . . . . I saw him strike a blow towards Stephen. I heard Stephen scream as if in pain [and] fall,” Mr Brooks said. They began running, but Mr Brooks heard Stephen call out, “Duwayne. Look at me. Tell me what’s wrong.” “I looked back and saw blood on his jacket. I said, ‘Just keep running’, and he said, ‘I can’t. I can’t’.” When Stephen slumped to the ground, Mr Brooks rushed to telephone for an ambulance, and tried to flag down cars. He said: “I was pacing up and down. I was crying. I was desperate for the ambulance. It was taking too long. I was frightened by

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the amount of blood Steve was losing. I saw his life fading away.” He said that the police arrived but seemed to be “repulsed” by the blood, and they refused to drive Stephen to a hospital two minutes away. When he pointed out the road where the attackers had run, PC Linda Bethel “did nothing”. Reading this report makes one angry. Away from the heat of the incident, it seems to us that any reasonable person coming upon such a scene would get help to the wounded boy urgently, and then pursue any lead that might allow those responsible to be apprehended. The inquiry was told that the police officer is a conscientious and valued member of the force. If this is true, then something happened at the crime scene to block her capacity to act in the rational way normally expected of her. On the receiving end of it, Duwayne Brooks was quite clear what was going on: “It was like she didn’t believe me . . . she was treating me as if she was suspicious of me, not like she wanted to help,” he said . . . “I am sad and confused about this system where racists attack and go free, but innocent victims like Steve and I are treated like criminals.” [italics added] Brooks felt something specific at work in the officer: both he and Stephen were being seen through a racist lens, a point pursued at length in the inquiry. They were seen as two violent black boys who ended up in a fight that went too far. He was thus under suspicion. Being repulsed by the sight of Stephen’s blood together with the lack of urgency in getting him to hospital were, for him, manifestations of this. Had she not lost perspective in this way, the possibility that Stephen might be bleeding to death or that possible suspects were making good their getaway might have been paramount in her mind. This strand of racist functioning ran counter to her conscious position as someone who is not racist, one of the findings of the inquiry. Following this lead, I want to suggest that internal racist mechanisms had been mobilized in her, outside of her conscious awareness, which paralysed her professional judgment and functioning. Henceforth, the ordinary capacities of judgment and

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perspective, which she did possess, were neutralized and thus unavailable to her. On the morning after the murder, the police officer visited the hospital where Stephen was taken, to find out whether she “could have done more” (Norton-Taylor, 1999, p. 30). At that point the situation might have been rescued: Stephen could not be brought back to life, but everything might yet have gone into bringing his killers to justice, an act of reparation that might have mitigated guilt. Drawing on the theory that internal racism can defend against unbearable guilt, I want to suggest that the idea that something racist may have occurred at the murder scene – as spelled out above – could not be faced. Instead, the subsequent investigation was fatally undermined by a series of further blunders, including a failure to follow up relevant leads, a failure to gather and hold on to vital evidence, failures of surveillance, the failure to arrest suspects and so on, which led to Macpherson’s finding of institutionalized racism. This follows Freud’s (1914) conclusion that what cannot be worked through psychically is destined to be repeated. This occurred not in one individual, but within the social system as a whole.

Case Study 2: Victoria Climbié On the afternoon of 25 February 2000, Victoria Climbié, a 10-year-old girl from the Ivory Coast, died in a London hospital as a result of multiple organ failure caused by prolonged and systematic child abuse. The victim of “almost unimaginable cruelty”, in the last few months of her life, Victoria was “transformed from a healthy, lively, and happy little girl, into a wretched and broken wreck of a human being” (Laming, 2003b, p. 2). A swift criminal investigation followed, resulting in the successful prosecution of her great aunt and guardian, MarieTherese Kouao, and her lover, Carl Manning. Both received life sentences. An official inquiry was immediately launched into the failure of the extensive child protection system to identify Victoria as at risk, which found widespread organizational, managerial and system failures responsible (Laming, 2003a). Victoria had been entrusted into Kouao’s care by her parents in the hope of a better life in Europe. Kouao took Victoria home

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to France in late 1998. For some 5 months Victoria attended school, where her repeated absences, together with the fact that she was often tired and fell asleep in class, resulted in her being identified as at risk. A social worker identified problems in the “mother–child” relationship. By the spring of 1999 the two of them had moved to London freely (as EU citizens), and within weeks something seemed out of place. Social services staff noted that whilst Kouao was always well dressed Victoria was far scruffier, one commenting that Victoria looked like an “advertisement for Action Aid” (Laming, 2003b, p. 19). In that early period worrying marks were noticed on Victoria’s body by individuals who came into contact with her, but no one ensured that the authorities were alerted (anonymous telephone messages were left but not followed up). By July that year, however, Kouao had moved into Manning’s bedsit, and from then on things began to deteriorate – the systematic abuse, involving “unimaginable cruelty” had begun in earnest. On the night of 13 July, just over 7 months before her death, Kouao brought Victoria to her childminder, imploring her to take the child permanently as her lover would no longer tolerate her in his flat: When she arrived, Victoria was wearing a baseball cap pulled down over her brow. When [the childminder] removed it, she saw what she took to be a burn the size of a 50 pence piece on Victoria’s face. [Her husband] also noticed three circular marks on Victoria’s lower right jaw which looked to him “like injuries that had been healing for a little while”. Both he and [his wife] noticed Victoria’s eyes were bloodshot, and [she] also observed a loose piece of skin hanging from her right eyelid. [Her] opinion as to the likely cause of these injuries is shown by the fact she asked Kouao who had burned and beaten Victoria. Kouao replied that all the injuries were selfinflicted. (Laming, 2003b, p. 22) Such was the childminder’s concern over her physical state that, the very next morning, she took Victoria to hospital. Previous observations of her condition were incidental – made by teachers, social workers and others who happened to come into contact with the couple for other reasons (e.g. a distant relative responsible for the anonymous phone calls). Now, for the

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first time, she was being formally presented to have the specific question of whether she had sustained non-accidental injury professionally assessed. Without her guardian present, an independent opinion free of her influence was possible. And on this occasion the child protection system worked as it was meant to – at least in the first instance. The report reveals the essential details of that contact with the hospital to be as follows (Laming, 2003a, pp. 239–250). Victoria was seen by a casualty officer who, because she could not rule out non-accidental injury, followed protocol and called on the duty paediatric registrar, a locum doctor who happened to be West African herself, for an opinion: [The paediatric registrar] . . . discovered a large number of injuries to Victoria’s body . . . [and] formed the view that at least some of Victoria’s injuries might be non-accidental . . . . [She] arranged for Victoria to be admitted overnight and called . . . . Social Services to inform them. The police were told and Victoria was placed under police protection at 5.20 pm. The medical notes record the instruction that there were to be no unsupervised visits by Victoria’s mother. (Laming, 2003b, p. 22) The registrar’s opinion was backed up by a physical examination, whose findings were fully recorded in the medical notes; it included a body map detailing specific sites of injury. Victoria, she noted, was secretive and gave an unsatisfactory account of her injuries, seeming reluctant to talk about them. In the light of the seriousness of the case, the consultant paediatrician responsible for child protection was informed. Kouao, meanwhile, discovered that Victoria had been hospitalized and, infuriated, made her way there and was present at the ward round conducted later that evening by the consultant. The consultant, a more senior doctor, formed a different opinion. She thought that Victoria’s injuries had two causes: the scratches were self-inflicted, to relieve itching caused by scabies, and the bruises on her body were the result of the rough and tumble of play in Africa, whence she believed Victoria had recently come. On these grounds she set aside the diagnosis of abuse, as a result of which a further note, “no child protection issues”, was entered into the medical record and police protection was

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withdrawn. The consultant was clearly influenced by Kouao, who had previously explained marks on Victoria’s body as due to itching and scratching to the childminder. A new set of child welfare issues was now identified. As relatively recent arrivals in this country they had not yet secured adequate accommodation, nor was Victoria in school, and the active intervention of social services, to attend to these matters, was now sought. This was the outcome of Victoria’s first contact with medical experts whose specialist job it is to assess risk. As the tragic death of Victoria confirmed, a breakdown in judgment occurred here – a serious diagnosis, later revealed to be correct, was overruled in favour of a less serious one. As I understand it, standard medical protocol requires that the possibility of a more serious diagnosis (especially a potentially life-threatening one), once raised by a colleague, should be systematically excluded rather than simply dismissed on the basis of a differing clinical judgment. To do so all possible sources of evidence have to be followed up, which was not done in this case. Laming rejects the scabies diagnosis, but he does give the consultant the benefit of the doubt over whether there were grounds for making it. He accepts that had Victoria been infected with a mild or early form of scabies, mites (or their burrows) might not have been clearly visible. He points out, however, that the diagnosis was based on a number of assumptions about Victoria which, had they been properly tested, could have been easily dispelled, thus cutting the ground from under that diagnosis. To act with conviction on the basis of untested assumptions suggests that one is under the sway of powerful internal forces, which I want to suggest consisted of the dynamics of racism. I think the consultant may have “seen” not the young child in serious trouble that the registrar saw but, encouraged by Kouao, an innocent African villager laid low by a skin infestation rife back home. This picture is the product of a projection: she is a primitive, tribal child, which is then idealized, yielding the innocent villager. Once this projection was made Victoria could not be seen as the victim of something nasty happening here, in a Western city. Why might the doctor make such a projection? We cannot know for sure, of course – I know only what is on the public record – but it might represent a longed-for phantasy solution to the consultant’s own plight as an overworked doctor – acknowledged in her evidence – in an

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under-funded health service: to be an innocent child once more playing happily down in the woods. One aspect of racist projection is the force with which it is made. Once it has taken place, and its naked racism organized away, ordinary reality had almost no chance of being allowed back in. Therefore, there could be no routine investigation of the differential diagnosis. The consultant did not ask Victoria whether she had scratched herself, nor check whether her fingernails were long enough to have produced the marks, nor whether the age of the scratch marks and bruises was consistent with how long Victoria had been in Europe (some 8 months by then), nor ensure that further standard medical investigations to establish a definitive diagnosis of scabies (for example, through consultation with a dermatologist) were carried out, nor did she discuss the case with the registrar who initially diagnosed abuse, a doctor familiar with the condition from her practice in Lagos (Laming, 2003a, p. 241). At the level of conscious discourse alone, these failures are inexplicable. An understanding of the unconscious elements involved in internal racism, on the other hand, suggests that the omissions had the active aim of keeping in place the initial projection. Not investigating a differential diagnosis cannot serve a medical aim; it can serve a psychic one. From that point on things started to unravel. It is therefore worth pausing to reflect on how pivotal a moment this was, and on the significance it was bound to have on the further care Victoria was to receive. Social workers with whom she subsequently came into contact may reasonably have been expected to signal concerns about possible child abuse, but the expertise for assessing whether it has actually occurred rests with doctors. They have the training to examine young bodies and the expertise to assess the likelihood of injuries being non-accidental. In under-resourced social services departments up and down the country, the fact that concerns of child abuse had been raised in the past and resulted in a hospital admission where she had been fully assessed by respected National Health Service paediatricians, the outcome of which was to set aside the diagnosis of abuse, would have given professionals who came into subsequent contact with her a powerful message: while it is reasonable to suspect this child of being abused, when fully investigated that suspicion turns out to be without foundation.

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The failure to ensure that the outcome of that assessment – the final diagnosis flowing from it – was properly based on the examination that was indeed carried out cannot, in my view, be sufficiently underlined. While Laming does criticize the consultant’s intervention as based on untested assumptions and hence of failing her patient, I think he underplays the pivotal role it is likely to have had in the unfolding catalogue of further neglect that followed. There is a further question involving racism that is worth considering. The registrar was an experienced paediatrician, but she was black, and a locum doctor. Black doctors are overrepresented in locum and clinical assistant posts in the National Health Service, and, more generally, report widespread racist attitudes towards them within the profession (Cook et al., 2003; Singh, 2003). We must therefore ask, was the registrar seen through a racist lens, and did this contribute to her expertise and clinical acumen being devalued or undervalued?

Individual and Institution In 1959, Isabel Menzies Lyth published the results of a pioneering piece of action research that brought new insight into the relationship between institutions and the individuals who work in them. The study examined the high level of stress among nurses in a large general hospital. Menzies Lyth notes that nurses had to bear the full, immediate and concentrated impact of stresses arising from patient care . . . . Nurses are often in constant contact with people who are physically ill or injured, often seriously. The recovery of patients is not certain and will not always be complete. Nursing patients who have incurable diseases is one of the nurse’s most distressing tasks. Nurses are confronted with the threat and the reality of suffering and death as few lay people are. Their work involves carrying out tasks which, by ordinary standards, are distasteful, disgusting and frightening. Intimate physical contact with patients arouses strong libidinal and erotic wishes and impulses that may be difficult to control. The work situation arouses very strong and mixed feelings in the nurse: pity, compassion, and love; guilt and anxiety;

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hatred and resentment of the patients who arouse these strong feelings; envy of the care given to the patient. (Menzies Lyth, 1959, p. 46) This is a considerable emotional load, and over time the hospital culture evolves characteristic features that can be seen as institutional defences against such anxieties. Impulses stirred up that may lead, for example, to an emotional or sexual entanglement with patients are split off and projected down the hierarchy, creating a picture of wildly irresponsible or promiscuous junior nurses, while a “painfully severe attitude to these impulses and [a] burdensome sense of responsibility are attributed to her seniors” (Menzies Lyth, 1959, pp. 56–57). Projection, of course, does not address the problem causing the anxiety – it merely relocates it – and further defences are necessary to manage residual anxiety that the work continues to stir up in the nurse. For example, the defence of splitting allows the nurse– patient relationship to be split up into constituent parts so that it is not a whole patient being nursed, but rather a series of tasks that are performed, such as tending “the liver in bed 10”. This way of doing things allows the nurse to detach from feelings that might otherwise trigger anxiety, and because she is going along with the organizational culture her own emotional investment in them as strategies for managing anxiety slips by undetected. By following “the way things are done around here”, she makes unwitting use of an institutional strategy of defence. Organizational Defences against Racial Anxiety The nurse–patient encounter generates anxiety of normal intensity which, because it is stirred up continuously, becomes excessive, forcing the organization’s defensive system to address it. The cross-race encounter is likely to stir up anxiety to an even greater extent since it touches on an internal racist accommodation, located on a primitive plain in the mind, that exists in us all. I have argued that our internal racist organization provides a final resting place for intense anxieties endemic to psychic life itself, and recruits the racial other as a repository for impulses that lie at its root (e.g. Mr A’s terror of dependency

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in Chapter 2). If one’s racial other is directly involved in the cross-race encounter, having an ordinary interchange with them threatens the racist structure. If, on the other hand, it does not involve one’s racial other directly, it nevertheless stirs up unconscious guilt, through identification, since we all make use of racist mechanisms. Either way, therefore, an ordinary, psychically unruffled cross-race meeting is difficult to achieve. It is the threat of anxiety stirred up by this that any good institution must provide the individual with defences against. The organizational solution is usually located in what can be called the equal opportunities unit (EOU) – the department or committee responsible for managing issues related to racial/class/ethnic diversity. Anxiety mobilized by the cross-race encounter, which stems from the self-racial other relationship in the mind, is managed by lodging that relationship in the EOU, where it is to be managed. Its function is analogous to the hierarchical structure of the nursing profession described by Menzies Lyth. In the latter, however, dangerous impulses stirred up by the close physical proximity of nurse and patient are embodied in the sexy young nurse, where they are tolerated and controlled – no hospital, on account of this projection, refuses to employ pretty young nurses. Racial anxiety, however, is not dealt with in such a benign way. Firstly, whilst the nurse projects impulses that lie at the root of her anxiety, in this projection it is a part of the self – the self-racial other relationship – that is ejected into the EOU. This makes the projection psychotic. Secondly, the aim of that projection is not for the EOU to tolerate and control the projected content, as in the case of the nurse, but to obliterate this problematic relationship completely and free the organization of racism. Its role is reminiscent of the irony in the lunatic asylums of old – originally a place of asylum from the demands of ordinary life – becoming the last place where, following the advent of psychotropic medication, lunacy is actually tolerated. Instead, the moment symptoms of the “illness” surface they are ruthlessly extinguished with drugs. Racism, too, has no legitimacy in the EOU; it is to be hunted down and its blemish removed from the fabric of the organization’s being. There is, therefore, a contradiction between its official/conscious role of ensuring equality across divisions of race and so on, and the Unit’s unconscious task of containing members’ racist projections and the anxieties that go with them. Once lodged there, internal racism mobilized

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during the individual’s working day is redefined as a problem for the EOU. Menzies Lyth observed that . . . the social defence system represented the institutionalisation of very primitive psychic defence mechanisms, a main characteristic of which is that they facilitate the evasion of anxiety but contribute little to its true modification and reduction. (Menzies Lyth, 1959, p. 77) This is even truer of institutional racism, where projection of the internal racist does not address the real problem. Thus, racism within the organization remains and is inadvertently revealed when, for instance, an Asian colleague is summarily told she cannot park in the car park reserved for staff of a psychotherapy service. A white individual might be asked whether she works there or is aware the parking spaces are reserved; a dark face is assumed, at best, to belong to a patient. It is also why black professionals often draw attention to the fact that apart from themselves the only other dark faces belong to cleaners or secretaries. Or why, in isolated enclaves such as the canteen in the police force there exists a culture that is felt to be all-white (Macpherson, 1999a). Taken in isolation each one of these may be an innocuous coincidence, but to those sensitized to the institution’s resistance to real change as far as diversity is concerned they are signifiers of a racism hidden deep within, and are symptomatic of the lack of effectiveness of the institution’s official ways of dealing with the anxiety at its root. The lack of effectiveness is, in turn, an essential component of the defence of repetition, which I shall discuss below. Tackling Institutional Racism: A Vignette If the dynamics of internal racism are indeed involved in institutional racism, they should – like defences in the individual patient – come to the fore during attempts to remedy the situation. When the issue is forced onto the agenda – as it must be in progressive private institutions or eventually in all public ones (since racial discrimination is outlawed) – some of its characteristic defences can be observed.

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A patient, who was concerned that her profession did not reflect the multi-ethnic make-up of the general population in London, was relieved that her organization had scheduled a meeting to discuss this issue:

A meeting on race and equity P, a woman with considerable expertise in matters of diversity and equality of opportunity, presented a sensitive and thoughtful psychoanalytically informed account of institutional racism. This was well received, but in the discussion a senior colleague thought that P wanted more minority ethnic practitioners in the organization "simply because they’re black", suggesting that E, a black colleague, might take offence at this idea. My patient felt that E was being abused in public, which enraged my patient to such an extent that she could not think, and the incident was passed over by the meeting as a whole. My patient was deeply disappointed and angry with herself for not challenging this gross oversimplification of the issues, and wanted to understand why she had been immobilised.

In the session, I could not discuss this incident in its own right, as I felt I had to take the matter up in the transference – my patient believed that, like the senior colleague, I would hate some aspects of her experience of me and thus deny them an equal opportunity of being known. Here, however, I would like to return to that incident as it illustrates the way in which the dynamics of internal racism may be deployed to paralyse thinking. Immobilizing others with rage is one way in which this can be achieved, which can therefore serve the function of bolstering racist strands in the status quo. My patient, in identification with the presenter, felt that the wish to open up the problem for proper discussion was dismissed as naive racism (in the form of mindless affirmative action). In addition, this accusation was expertly put into the mouth of E, and it was this racist use of the latter (“because she was black”) that provoked my patient’s outrage. There could probably be no more effective way of pulling the rug from under the attempt to take the problem of racism seriously.

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Using the model of internal racism one could say that the selfracial other relationship, which I argue is normally the preserve of the EOU, was mobilized in this disturbing experience. Because the original projection of the problem into the EOU is a psychotic one, the defences mobilized when one opens it up afresh are indeed psychotic. First, everything happens at breakneck, manic speed, creating a concrete lump out of discrete ideas and issues. While the latter could potentially be thought about, a lump can only be hurled, which it was as an accusation of racism. However, we have learned that the different elements involved in psychotic interchanges like this can, away from the heat of the moment (in the consulting room), helpfully be teased apart. This is a tried and trusted way of learning from our experience of them. In this vignette, too, it is possible, in hindsight, to identify a number of discrete strands: 1. A thought – we should have more black people in this organization. 2. That thought produces guilt associated with the “return of the repressed”: a problem that should have been taken care of by the EOU has returned to haunt them. 3. The guilt is unbearable, and a paranoid defence is mobilized against it: we are being accused by P of being racist. By now P’s invitation to think about the problem has disappeared from view. 4. The accusation of racism is now turned on P (in the way I described earlier), who is accused of wanting the organization to abandon its standards and let any dark face through the door, “just because they are black”. However, P may have sensed that this proposition needed further work. There was a real danger that she might open it up for debate and discussion, so a further step became necessary. 5. The capacity to think had to be immobilized, which the remark involving E achieved. Now the only way forward was for the presenter to make an interpretation – “you are projecting something into me”; or, “I did not say that, so where did that idea come from?” This clinical intervention would have been inappropriate in that setting, which leaves a problem analogous to the situation in the group I described in Chapter 5 – if one leaves it be, the problem is not addressed; however, if one gets involved it

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is on the paranoid-schizoid plane rather than one where thinking and discussion is possible. The question of how to proceed in such situations is, therefore, a complex one in need of further consideration and debate in the profession as a whole. Does one address this defence, or does one try to counter the manic speed and rescue, instead, the thought that brought on the psychotic manoeuvres? Let me now turn to the thought that, in the heat of the moment, could not be taken further. An organization serving the public should, as my patient suggests, more or less reflect its population demographics, which hers does not. Neither, incidentally, does the psychoanalytic/psychotherapy profession in the United Kingdom. The model of institutional racism that I have outlined suggests that the problem of hidden racism implicated in this is not properly engaged because racial anxiety, together with the self-racial other relationship from which it emanates, is not tolerated but projected into the EOU. Individuals who could, therefore, in their normal practice address the problem do not do so. When one draws attention to this it is usually experienced as an unwarranted attack on colleagues, accusing them of racism; one then becomes embroiled in an allegationcounter allegation mould from which it is very difficult to break free. Meanwhile the issue remains unaddressed, unconscious guilt at using racist mechanisms (which evade, rather than modify, racial anxiety) increases, in turn necessitating further use of those mechanisms. One is therefore in a closed loop, therefore in a closed loop from which it is difficult to break free, and concrete evidence of what really keeps things as they are is therefore hard to come by. However, in this respect I am able to bring an example that can help to take things forward.

Evidence

An African-Caribbean supervisee of mine applied for a position on the tenured staff of a psychotherapy service. It had in place an equal opportunities policy, which was meticulously followed throughout. She “ticked all the boxes” and made a short list of

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three. However, in the end a white male colleague, recognizably a member of the establishment, was appointed although, in some respects, her professional profile was superior to his. In a debriefing interview with a member of the appointments panel afterwards, she was reassured that she had come very close indeed to being appointed. In fact, all three applicants were eminently appointable and in the end he had just pipped the other two at the finishing line. It could just as easily have gone another way. She was reassured there was nothing more she could have done to improve her chances and it would, of course, be a breach of confidentiality to reveal what it was that gave him the slight edge on the day. Ordinarily, one would accept that this is just the way things go with appointments. But if we bear in mind that we are talking about a psychotherapy organization, and profession, in which minorities are chronically under-represented in senior positions, this was a situation where a black person could have been appointed not because she was black and unsuitable, as the senior colleague in the above vignette implied. She was in fact eminently suitable. However, to do so the organization’s need to address its ethnic profile had to be prioritized over the more usual considerations of what extra this or that candidate might bring to the job. It is almost certain that this issue was not on the table at that point – it is the province of the EOU, whose instructions in the matter of appointments procedures had, of course, been carried out to the letter. And, of course, it would be quite inappropriate for a minority group applicant herself to put it there. Incidents like these, in the ordinary everyday life of an institution, are manifestations of the fact that racial anxiety is not faced and modified, but projected into the EOU and evaded, leaving vestiges of it alive within individuals’ practice. Individual and organization therefore carry a burden of guilt, which produces a hypersensitivity to situations that might mobilize it. Because that guilt is located on the primitive plane of internal racism, it is psychotic in intensity and produces an overwhelming fear that it cannot be faced and is unbearable. This in turn mobilizes the dynamics of concrete repetition (Freud, 1914) in preference to remembering, reflection and thought. In the above vignette, therefore, the very racial issues that the appointments committee did not face head-on are reproduced: the same

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mechanisms that immobilize the possibility of bringing proper, joined-up thinking to the question of appointing black staff are replayed, dramatizing the organization’s problem before our very eyes.

Guilt, Reparation and Repetition The failure to face guilt therefore appears to lie at the heart of institutional racism. In both the Lawrence and Climbié cases, following the racist act of projecting into, and then stereotyping the other, incidents of further racism occurred. The Lawrence family felt this almost straight away but, without a proper family to feel it on Victoria’s behalf at the time, we had to wait for the Inquiry to bring it to light. Our observations in these two cases suggest that organizations have an extraordinary capacity to sense unconscious racial guilt in their members, and act almost immediately to close ranks and to cover up the original transgression. This means that acts of repair to limit the damage are out of the question. Without effective relief from guilt, which stems from reparation, individuals are driven deeper into the arms of the racist organization for protection. This in turn adds to the burden of guilt, which gives rise to the fear that it is unbearable. The defence against guilt offered by the institution is repetition, in which further racist acts are perpetrated as a concrete way of processing the original one – using the mechanism I described in the Crash sequence earlier in this chapter. Everyone feels accused, rightly so since they are indeed guilty of relying on institutional racist defences, and thus the foundation is in place for the concrete cover-up through enactment observed in the two cases. Underpinning all of this is the fear that the guilt is unbearable, which necessitates the primitive internal racist defence. But is it unbearable, or is it feared to be so? Andrew Cooper, a colleague with considerable experience of addressing institutional racism, relates how his mother “used to make a delicious hot pudding comprising a suety dark chocolate base covered by a layer of pale, creamy meringue . . . called, without irony I fear, ‘South African pudding’ ” (p. 487). Later, he writes

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When she was about 84 I sat having a conversation with her one day, and out of nowhere she began to tell me that she had been a member of Anti-Apartheid for many years, and through them had a regular correspondence with a black woman called Ruby who lived in Soweto. She showed me a photograph of her and some of the letters. I think this may have been the first time she had ever spoken to anyone in our family about this. It was a kind of secret life she led. She may have manifested a baffling lack of awareness about the naming of her chocolate meringue puddings, but on the other hand she was engaged in a small, compassionate, secret and for her, rather subversive political project. When I reflect on my own disposition during my life to become involved in this area of work, I sometimes therefore wonder whether this disposition is not an unconscious continuation of some unfinished project of my mother’s. (Cooper, 2010, p. 500) This is a beautiful, subtle and multi-layered story, of which I want to draw out one element. Doing something about racial injustice in the world, rather than turning a blind eye to it, does not abolish one’s inner racism, but it does mitigate guilt and allows one to live more easily with it: the pudding can be on, rather than under, the table. That is to say, there is a dialectical relationship between engagement and internal racism. Failure to engage allows the internal racist organisation to claim that to do so would be just impossible, and its protection is therefore the only way. Engagement, on the other hand, shows the task to be not impossible, but – as illustrated in my patient’s vignette – just very difficult, at times.

Conclusion This chapter addresses a question opened up by the idea that internal racism is an integral part of the mind that has thus far gone unanswered. If racism is a feature of normal psychology how does one live with the guilt generated by the projection into the racial other that is involved in it? I have already suggested that this is felt as unbearable, persecutory guilt, which further bolsters the racist organisation’s claim to the subject’s loyalty and makes one’s racism unavailable for ordinary scrutiny.

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This chapter suggests that the problem of guilt is avoided by projecting the self-racial other relationship into our institutions. The individual does not therefore feel responsible for that racism and, indeed, will feel the opposite – that he or she subscribes fully to attempts on the part of the institution to combat racism. Racism and concerns over it thus become a collective matter, whether on the smaller canvas of the organisation, or the larger one involving agencies of state or government. Within the institutional structure responsible for race and equity matters there is a contradiction between its conscious task of managing change with respect to racist practice, and its unconscious one of providing a container for the racist object relationship of its members. Institutions manage guilt through the mechanism of repetition of the original act, and if this is finally revealed ranks close in a cover-up, which can include politically correct action, whose aim is to prevent proper engagement with the real issues.

Concluding Remarks

This book began with a description of two racialized incidents, and the need for the inquiry contained in it stemmed from the inability of existing psychoanalytic formulations to account for the inner dimensions of these in a way that does not reduce the experience to a priori inner essences. The model of internal racism developed in the book suggests that the deep impact of those assaults stemmed from the fact that they touched on internal racism, a universal component of the mind, in both parties. Internal racism operates unconsciously. It involves a relationship in the mind between self and socially stereotyped other – in these incidents the white native and the brown-skinned immigrant. My inquiry suggests that their relationship is located in a sharply divided paranoid (us–them) structure that reflects, in the inner world, the disparity between their positions in the external world of power relations in “fortress” Europe. For the white perpetrator, the ordinariness of the racial other in the encounter – in the restaurant or on the road – was, in itself, provocative since it challenged an unconscious racist construction asserting his otherness. The attack was designed to project otherness forcibly into the victim, and was thus experienced as such. The deeply disturbing impact that the attacks had on their victims, on the other hand, demonstrates a vulnerability that emanates from the existence in their minds of the same internal racist structure. Within it the self was unconsciously identified with the white/native inhabitants of these islands, which the assaults powerfully called into question. Because it is located in an internal racist structure that operates in a polarized, split way, that identification inevitably carried with it a dis-identification with the brown-skinned immigrant identity, which the attacks cruelly exposed. The two parties therefore do not occupy identical positions within the racist structure built around the white native-brown skinned immigrant polarity – they make different projections across the us–them divide. However, they share the 229

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use of a system that is organized in a characteristic way and was mobilized on this occasion. This is what binds them. Psychoanalytically, it is not enough to state that an external division also appears in the inner world and to show it to be implicated in an interchange between subject and object. The construct must also be shown to have validity, and the work of the book sought to establish this in a number of different ways. From the crucible of the analytic session I brought forward clinical evidence to demonstrate that a racial attack emanates from a pre-existing structure in the mind, demonstrating the processes by which it is instituted – splitting, projective identification and regulating the relationship between subject and object. This draws on the theory of the pathological organization, and I brought forward further clinical evidence that led to the conclusion that the racist defensive structure was a normal variant of the pathological organization. I argued that this is a universal feature of the human mind, and pursued the theoretical and metatheoretical strands that flow from this conclusion, bringing forward developmental evidence in support of the formulation. One important element of the model is that it specifies the exact nature of the link between the racist organization, an inner structure, and external reality. In the first instance, it is the other of social stereotyping that is targeted for racist projection. This allows the individual’s picture of that other to be presented as an accurate perception of external reality. Since there is consensus about the otherness of that figure in one’s social milieu, this is readily passed off as fact rather than the fantasy construction that it is. That the object is saturated with projected intrapsychic content remains hidden but nonetheless provides the individual fuel that keeps that figure “other”. Secondly, the individual is able to evade responsibility for projection into the object, thus bypassing guilt. Institutions in the outside world have the task of managing this guilt, which they do through the mechanism of repetition of racist stereotypes or acts. The individual is thus unconsciously invested in the perpetuation of racist stereotypes and practices that flow from them, in a way that creates a profound entanglement between inner and external reality. Psychoanalytic formulations aspire to be true and need to be tested. I tried to show how the model of internal racism, especially the idea of an organized racist defence, can be used to

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advance clinical analytic work at awkward or difficult moments when the “race card” has been played. I also pointed to instances where our engagement with race in the consulting room stops short of the depth that we generally aspire to in our work, and how the model can deepen that work. The same is true in group work, a particularly important setting for addressing difficulties that arise in the cross-race/cultural encounter. And there is a particular challenge in addressing the problem of institutional racism where, unlike the settings just mentioned, psychoanalysts have little ready expertise that can help move things forward. However, the understanding advanced here of the role our institutions play in providing an external resting place for elements of our individual, inner racism, is a new development that opens up an important avenue for further investigation. Internal racism can be seen as a psychological vestige from a bygone era when we could stereotype members of an outgroup at will, safe in the knowledge that their distance from us meant our paths rarely crossed other than in circumscribed ways. Our racism could remain safely hidden in the mind, with anxieties attending it rarely returning to haunt us. Today we live in a post-modern global village where, in our day-to-day lives, these “othering” processes are more easily revealed; we are much more readily caught in the act. Flashpoints around such incidents can easily spiral out of control, turn violent and generate new enmity and hatred that fuels the maintenance of polarized us–them categories. These, in turn, can be seized upon by regressive movements – for instance, contemporary terrorism and its powerful imperialist counterpart – that threaten the very achievements of our hard-won attempts to live by human values rather than animal instinct. I hope that the psychoanalytic model outlined here might, in its limited way, identify points of intervention that can make a helpful contribution on this broader canvas.

Notes Foreword 1. Feldman, M. and Spillius, E. (eds) (1989) Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change: Selected Papers of Betty Joseph. (‘General Introduction’, p. 2). London: Routledge.

Chapter 1: Introduction 1. Sherwood (1980) speaks of it as a misuse of racial difference. 2. Kovel gives another variant: “ . . . a distinguished professor during my residency [remarked] . . . that racism is caused by the masochism of blacks – an obnoxious and, one might even say, racist remark and yet one authenticated by a strict reading of the Freudian canon on aggression and the internalization of a death drive. The Freudian view never seemed to escape a nullifying biologism. History and the moral exigencies of the human condition could be seen only defensively in relation to the drive” (2000, p. 581). 3. I address this problem in Chapter 3 (p. 37). 4. Today, this term is widely used to denote a response – affective and cognitive – elicited in the analyst by the patient, as distinct from a response that emanates solely from within the analyst him/herself.

Chapter 3: Theoretical Considerations 1. See my notes on the use of this term in Chapter 1. 2. The term borderline has been used in different ways. I use it to refer to patients whose normal/neurotic functioning conceals the existence of a problematic, disturbed inner core – a “psychotic” core – that lies at the heart of their psychopathology (Rey, 1994). The pathological organization usually defends against this inner situation. 3. http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/historical/a/holocaust_chain.htm for the facts in this email (March 2010). 4. A black teenager killed on the streets of London in 1993 by a group widely regarded as white racist thugs. 5. I am aware that this term has derogatory connotations, and its use can, in itself, be a manifestation of hidden racism. Here, and elsewhere in the book, it appears simply as the term used in the original writings of the authors concerned.

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6. For this reason, the Clarks’ findings formed an important plank in the campaign for civil rights, including the integration of schools.

Chapter 4: An Established Racist Organization 1. She once overheard her friend’s mother disparage Jews, which she found extremely wounding. 2. For example, she was not drawn to its vocal contemporary incarnations, such as the movement that views opposition to the conduct of the state of Israel as latent anti-Semitism. 3. Describing me as black showed a nuanced understanding of the debate around how to denote the identity of minority ethnic communities in a white majority society. 4. British National Party, a right-wing political party in the United Kingdom widely regarded as racist. 5. This is reminiscent of Sunil’s identification with his racialized white teacher (Chapter 6).

Chapter 5: Analysing Racism in a Group 1. The flyer made it clear that this was not an intellectual exercise. 2. The National Party, which had been responsible for the apartheid policy, was a largely Afrikaner party. 3. The diminutive of “kaffir”, a term of white racist abuse for black Africans. 4. Apartheid on the trains involved segregation of white from nonwhite groups; within the latter there was no further segregation, except an economic one between first- and third-class carriages. Well-to-do “coloureds” seldom used third class; poorer people had no choice but to use third class, hence there was a degree of mixing of “non-white” groups there. 5. During the final battles against apartheid it was in these very townships that many of the battles between the police and the forces for democracy took place.

Chapter 6: Frantz Fanon: The Black Problem 1. The Algerian National Liberation Front. 2. It invokes the Marxist view that the economic base determines material relationships in the world. 3. Mannoni’s qualification and clinical practice as a psychoanalyst are both questionable, especially by today’s standards. An ethnologist by profession, he started an analysis with Lacan in 1947, around

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5.

6. 7.

8.

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the time of writing Prospero and Caliban, but almost immediately broke it off. “After an interruption I began again in 1952 . . . Lacan didn’t prevent me from undergoing psychoanalysis, but I wasn’t interested in it since, in Madagascar, I had cured myself of an obsessional neurosis . . . dislocation can do the job of analysis. Being a white man among the blacks is like being an analyst among the whites” (quoted by Elisabeth Roudinesco, cited in Macey, 2000, p. 188). I think Mannoni’s surprising blindness to this stems from a use of the term “civilization” in early psychoanalytic writing. For example, when Freud argues for the inevitability of archaic, instinctive mental content being repressed in the course of civilization, he frequently slips into using life in “primitive” tribes to illustrate an alternative scenario where, say, instinctual life is more readily tolerated (e.g. Sigmund Freud, 1913). Here “primitive” civilizations are equated with earlier stages in the development of Western civilization, and in turn, with earlier stages of individual development. This construction precludes such civilizations from being seen as alternative but equivalent modes of social organization. Freud gets away with it because such speculative social Darwinism is not central to his ontological focus on the development and functioning of the individual Western mind. However, the slippage between these two discourses – ontogeny and the evolution of society – creates difficulties for Mannoni precisely because the study of people presumed, a priori, to be primitive is his central focus. McCulloch sees Fanon’s “antipathy toward Mannoni [as] part of the contempt for what he believed to be the covert project of most social science in the colonial world” (1983, p. 213). I prefer to judge his critique of Mannoni on the merit of its case, rather than reducing it to paranoia. See especially the chapter “The fact of blackness” in Black Skin White Masks. Later analysts would go on to show that the superego has earlier origins (e.g. Klein, 1928; Spitz, 1958); it is, therefore, not the existence of the superego but its transformation into an autonomous structure that takes place during the Oedipal period. A crude infantile superego becomes a more stable and sophisticated inner presence. I have suggested that Culture compensates the male with power to mitigate unbearable envy towards the female for her Natural childbearing capacity (Davids, 2002). The transition towards an Oedipal resolution requires not acceptance of the patriarchal division of power, but only the existence of its categories within. Once they exist internally one can take up different positions in relation to them.

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9. Gilman (1993) presents a more detailed argument that Freud substitutes gender for race. 10. Such a turn of events would no doubt impact on how the Oedipus complex itself is negotiated. It also touches on the complex issue of how one distinguishes between pre-Oedipal and Oedipal stands in clinical material. 11. “In Colonial Desire, R. Young (1995) describes a shift from ‘amalgamation’ to ‘miscegenation’ in nineteenth-century scientific discourse (p. 9). He finds that amalgamation signified the idea that mixture between different races would produce a new ‘mixed race,’ a blend with distinct physical and moral characteristics. Miscegenation, on the other hand, is the ‘negative version’ of the amalgamation thesis: a mixing that ‘produces a mongrel group that makes up a “raceless chaos”, merely a corruption of the originals, degenerate and degraded, threatening to subvert the vigour and virtue of the pure races with which they come into contact’ (p. 18)” (Calvo, 2008, p. 56). 12. Freud had a theoretical problem with what role seeing – either the genitals or the parental intercourse – plays in development. I have suggested a Lacanian reading can obviate these difficulties (Davids, 2002). 13. Briefly, his obsequious conduct expresses an unconscious phantasy that he can be Mannoni – stand in his shoes, breathe the air that he breathes and so on. The phantasy that he is the superior idealized white protects him from being troubled by disturbing feelings: gratitude and indebtedness for having been cured by someone else; hatred of the colonial master who has everything, and so on. The deftness of this defensive system is that hatred (and conflict flowing from it) engendered by colonialism – a systematized taking from the native – is turned around so that Mannoni is the one “robbed”. It is all the more effective if one is perceived simply as acting in a normal, culture-specific way (Bloch, 1990). 14. The first half of Black Skin White Masks is replete with examples of this, some of which I have given above.

Chapter 7: Psychoanalysis and Racism: Anti-Semitism 1. These works are more accurately characterized as speculative archaeology as they delve into events in the supposed prehistory of mankind, relying solely on psychoanalytic argument without recourse to any established archaeological evidence. Sometimes his argument is circular. 2. I go on to suggest that a perspective drawn from Lacan’s insights into the subject’s accession to the symbolic order can obviate the need for this device, rescuing Oedipal theory from its reliance on Freud’s

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5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

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archaeology, the aspect of his work most vulnerable to the charge of ethnocentrism. Although Samuels (1988) makes the general point that Jung’s use of objectionable terms is symbolic, there is no similar attempt to place Dalal’s critique of Jung within the general corpus of the latter’s work (Andrew Samuels, personal communication), and hence to judge whether the charge of racism damages that body of thinking centrally. Freud thought of this as his metapsychological project – it would account for manifestations of both normality and pathology. The first two sections of Chapter 1 illustrate contemporary instances outside the consulting room; in Chapter 3, I show how indispensable my own of feeling of having been racially attacked was to understanding what was going on clinically. This idea is supported by the fact that the Nazis targeted other groups that did not conform to their ideal – the mentally ill, the disabled and the Roma. And, industrializing the extermination of the Jews was to be the forerunner for a plan to rid Europe of Slavs, and hence return the continent to its purported native Aryan owners. A search on the digital psychoanalytic resource, PEP Web (http:// www.pep-web.org), in early April 2008 yielded 639 articles in which anti-Semitism was referred to or discussed. I would say “in the racial other”. There was no control group. Unlike Knafo, neither author alludes to this in their papers. Such work has been done in the “Nazareth” conferences (Erlich et al., 2009).

Chapter 8: White–Black Racism 1. I am using the designation “Asian” to distinguish these patients from their Western counterparts. Roland himself does not stereotype Asians to this extent. For example, he finds that Indians have a “we-self” that incorporates significant others directly into the selfstructure, whereas the Japanese have a dual self-structure to manage dependent (amae) relationships: A public self (omote) which, like the Indians’ we-self, is subject to hierarchy, and an intensely private self (ura) which is accepted as just “being there”. This private reality is different to that available in the public self (which creates a problem of how to access it analytically). Roland suggests the dual self-structure is related to a stronger superego and ego ideal in Japanese compared to Indians. 2. “One can even assert that self psychology specifically addresses the psychopathology – involving problematic selfobject relationships with its resulting deficits in structure building – that arises from extreme American individualism with its heightened mobility and tenuous relationships” (Roland, 1996, my italics, p. 12).

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Index 9/11, 15, 44 Acharyya, S., 181 Ackermann, N. W., 144, 159, 161–2, 171 Adams, M. V., 197 addressing race clinically, 200 Adi, H., 126 Adorno, T., 159 African-Caribbean, 44, 74, 196 children, 61 supervisee, 224 aggression, 11, 78–80, 134, 153, 160, 178, 184, 232 primitive, 167 Altman, N., 197 ambivalence, 9, 111, 173 anger, 5, 20, 23, 25, 31, 91, 92, 94, 169, 171, 184, 206, 212 black, 49 anti-Negro hatred, 178 anti-Semitism, 144, 152, 235–6 clinical findings, 162–71 latent, 145 as opposition to Israel, 233 research findings, 159–62 social vs individual pathology, 152–9 anxiety, 10, 20–1, 31–8, 44, 50–8, 64, 68–9, 74, 84–5, 95–9, 104, 114, 141, 157, 160, 166, 184–6, 196, 200–6, 218–20 castration, 154 evasion of, 221 primitive, 48 projected, 200 Arendt, H., 158 Asian, 236 children, 61 colleague, 221 cultures and we-self, 186, 189

identification as, 139 self and brown skin, 140 awareness of difference in children, 58, 127, 135 Axelrad, S., 192 Beland, H., 236 beliefs, 51, 116, 139, 210 stereotyped, 64 unconscious, 135 Bell, D., 196 Berkeley-Hill, O., 108, 176 Bernard, V., 193 Bhaskar, Sanjeev, 1, 7, 64, 131, 142 Bhugra, D., 7, 181 Bhui, K., 7, 181 bicultural tightrope, 188 Bion, W. R., 72, 95 Bird, B., 194, 196 black children, 60, 61, 62, 134 Black Hamlet, 191 black problem, 12, 64 Bloch, M., 118, 147, 235 Borossa, J., 198 Brenman, E., 150 Brenner, C., 152, 155 Britton, R., 69, 76, 77, 130 Brooks, Duwayne, 47–9, 209–11 Bulhan, H. A., 118 Butts, H. F., 194 Calvo, L., 126, 127, 128, 235 castration, 154, 178 Caute, D., 107 Chasseguet-Smirgel, J, 146 child abuse, 50, 206, 213, 217 sexual, 206 children, 34, 58–63, 66, 69, 94, 103, 112, 127, 132–7, 140, 144, 153 Chinese and collectivism, 185 Christ-killers, 72, 80 Clark, K. B., 59–63, 232

249

250

INDEX

Clark, M. B., 59–63, 232 Climbié, Victoria, 50, 207 case study, 213 container, 140, 195, 228 Cook, L., 218 Cooper, A., 226, 227 countertransference, 12, 20, 24–8, 51, 91, 100, 151, 163–5, 167, 169, 171–73, 193, 199 Crash, 205, 207 cross-race analysis, 193–4 cultural self, 187–9 Curry, A. E., 176 Dalal, F., 7, 8, 9, 33, 46, 108, 113, 137, 147, 157, 180, 189, 197 Danto, E. A., 150 dark skin as target for racial projection, 140 Davids, M. F., 8, 15, 41, 42, 44, 117, 118, 133, 134, 148, 196, 197, 234, 235 Davison, S. C., 42 denial of difference, 189 dependency complex Fanon’s critique, 117–21 Mannoni’s theory of, 116–17 depressive, 14, 48, 56, 57 depressive position themes in racism, 49, 82, 83 despair, 89 developmental, 13, 54, 57, 134, 135, 139, 175, 202 evidence, 230 prehistory, 148 research, 58–9 stages, 180 theory, 37 development, early, 55–6 difference, 3, 12, 26, 28–32, 51, 61, 93, 98, 103, 116, 126, 157, 194–6 excessive reaction to, 161 magnified, 188 doll studies, 59–63 dreams, 69, 70, 78, 167, 169, 178, 179, 182, 194 Dylan, Bob, 24

Eckstaedt, A., 165, 166, 168 Eickhoff, F. W., 166, 167, 168 EOU – equal opportunities unit, 220 epidermalising inferiority, 12, 114, 136 equal opportunities policy, 150, 224 Erikson, E. H., 63, 139 Erlich-Ginor, M., 236 Erlich, H. S., 236 ethnic difference, 37 ethnocentric bias, 149 in Freud’s Oedipal formulations, 148 in psychoanalytic method, 116 in psychoanalytic theory, 184 ethnocentrism, 187, 235 Evans, W. N., 155 Fanon, F., 3, 7, 11–14, 64, 107–23, 126, 133–42, 234 self-analysis, 120 fantasy, 80, 109, 127–9, 164, 196, 230 Fenichel, O., 7, 144, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159 Fischer, N., 195 Fischmann, T., 13 Fletchman Smith, B., 181, 192 Foster, A., 197 Foster, D., 61–2, 132–3, 140, 181 Foulkes, S. H., 9, 10 Frenkel-Brunswik, E., 154 Freud, S., 12, 13, 32, 34, 48, 50, 79, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 127–32, 144–52, 156–8, 163, 173, 176, 179, 207, 213, 225, 234–6 Frosh, S., 151 Gendzier, I. L., 120 Gordon, P., 7, 8, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151 Gorkin, M., 197 Graf, V., 2 Grinberg, L., 188 Grinberg, R., 188 Grunberger, B., 153

INDEX

guilt, 2, 5, 49, 50, 65, 68, 75, 80, 92, 98, 100, 102, 158, 166, 168, 174, 198, 213, 218, 223–8 absence of, 162 borrowed, 168 unbearable, 165 unconscious, 205, 207, 220 Halford, S., 218 Hamer, F. H., 197 Hamilton, J. W., 176, 177 hating in the plural, 53 hatred, 7, 33, 44, 49, 65, 67, 90, 98, 104, 109, 130, 200 accessing, 69 of blacks, 178, 188 of Jews, 153 of minority groups, 152 of patients, by nurse, 219 racialising, 200 Hayes, G., 190, 191 here-and-now, 12, 21, 69, 84, 96–9, 202 Holmes, D. E., 195 Hopper, E., 10, 197 hostility, 46, 137, 151, 154, 160, 164, 192, 193 identification with Englishness, 188 identity, 61, 98, 126, 140, 142, 161, 171, 229 gender, 127 Jewish, 71, 75, 157 multi-ethnic, 70 professional, 87 Welsh, 114 western, 137 Indian, 136–40 patients, 185 Psychoanalytic Society, 176 self, 142 we-self, 236 individualism, 185, 236 and I-self, 186 inferiority complex, 114, 147 in Malagasy, 116 instincts, 35, 56, 123, 169, 177, 188, 231

251

institutional racism, 8, 15, 49–50, 118, 205, 209–11, 221, 226 intercultural therapy, 182 internalization, 9, 38, 55, 63, 83, 110, 114, 119, 120, 123, 143, 165 internal racism, 12, 28, 30, 36, 42, 43 I-self, 187 Islamophobia, 15 Jacoby, R., 123 Jahoda, M., 144, 159, 161–2, 171 Kakar, S., 176, 197 Kardiner, A., 192 Kareem, J., 182–4 Kennedy, J. A., 193 Keval, N., 196, 197 Klein, M., 57, 130, 234 Knafo, D., 163, 164, 167, 169–72 Kogan, I., 164 Kovel, J., 8, 126, 197, 232 Lacan, J., 11, 56, 233, 235 Laming, Lord, 208, 213–18 Lander, J., 190, 191 Laplanche, J., 12 Lawrence, Stephen, 49, 207–8, 226 case study, 211 Layton, L., 197 Leary, K., 127, 131, 146, 193, 196–7, 198, 201 Lemaire, A., 56 Leonard, P., 218 Leuzinger-Bohleber, M., 13 liberal self-image, 118 Littlewood, R., 183–5 Loeblowitz-Lennard, H., 153, 154, 156, 157, 176 Lowe, F., 197 Macey, D., 107, 120, 234 Macpherson, W., 209–11, 213, 221 Malagasy psychology, 118 Mannoni, O., 115–22, 147, 233–5 Marriott, D., 60, 63 Mason, B., 197 McCulloch, J., 120, 234 McGinley, E., 198 mental pain, 94

252

INDEX

Menzies-Lyth, I, 218–21 metapsychology, 13, 55, 123, 133 migration, 189, 199 Miller, L., 59, 198 miscegenation, 126–7, 131, 179, 235 Mitchell, J., 12, 125 Monica Ali Brick Lane, 188 Morgan, H., 146, 183, 197 Moss, D., 53, 200 mourning, 67, 103, 165 narcissism, 14, 53, 138, 157 Nazi father, 165–9, 172–3 Negro children’s awareness of race, 59 in dreams, 178 entering treatment, 193 as hated sibling, 178 as Oedipal rival, 178 pernicious effects of being, 192 pre-Oedipal projections into, 180 representing faeces, 177 sexual projections into, 179 as unwanted neighbour, 177 neuroses, 123 seat of, 131 neurosis, 127, 155 infantile, 132 Norton-Taylor, R., 209, 213 Oberndorf, C. P., 193 Oedipal hatred, 8 rival, 7 theory, 124 Oedipus complex, 12, 59, 123, 156, 178–80 and Fanon, 133 and gender, 125 and race/class, 124–6 Omand, L., 183, 189 O’Shaughnessy, E., 130 Ovesey, L., 192

paranoid-schizoid position, 14, 28, 48, 83, 95, 101, 196, 224 pathological organizations, 39–41, 82, 197 failure of, 41 in pathology, 51 racist attack in relation to patient’s, 36 racist organization as normal variant of, 230 Perez-Foster, R. M., 183, 185 phantasy, 38, 45, 46, 58, 67, 73, 82, 110, 115, 124–5, 130–2, 156, 188, 216, 235 Phillips, S. L., 191 Phoenix, A., 140 police with red turbans in dream, 182 unbearable guilt, 49 police harassment, 3 of blacks, 5 countertransference of, 24 political correctness, 49, 50, 72, 85, 90, 99, 228 Pontails, J. B., 12 pre-Oedipal, 119 pre-Oedipal attachment, 116 projection into dark skin, 139 into hero and villain in the colony, 134 into institutions, 141 into Jew, 173 of unwanted aspects of the self, 121 projective identification, 29, 43, 82 Proshansky, H., 58 psychotic anxiety, 55 paranoid solution to, 57 in a group, 99 as normal, 64 psychotic experience in normal mind, 56 psychotic mechanisms in borderline pathology, 39–40 involvement in racism, 2, 22, 29, 81, 83, 99, 131, 142, 161–2, 167–8, 169, 172, 196, 220, 223–5, 232 Pushkin, I., 58

INDEX

race addressing clinically, 200 silence on, 149, 201 race awareness/identification in doll studies, 59–63 race card playing the, 141, 200, 207, 231 racial other, 13, 37, 57, 191, 219, 220, 223, 224, 227, 229 definition, 15 and hatred, 82 Jew as, 155, 173 relationship with the self, 47, 64 stepping out of line, 64 as universal, 43 See also self-racial other relationship racial spirals, vicious and benign, 10 racial transference, 191 racist attack, 6, 12, 19, 27, 28, 35, 36, 64, 80, 81, 164 on Asian patient, 184 on Jewish pupils, 80 and paranoid anxieties, 48 sensed in the other, 64 Racker, H., 151 Reid, S., 59 reparation, 213, 226 repetition, 225 as defence, 50, 205, 221, 226, 228, 230 return of the repressed, 223 revenge, 26, 33, 48, 100, 104, 182 Rey, H., 39, 40, 232 Richmond, M. B., 146 Rodgers, T. C., 7, 179, 180, 194 Roland, A., 183, 185–9, 197, 236 Rosenfeld, H. A., 31, 81, 161, 167 Rustin, M., 29, 157, 196 Sachs, W., 10, 175, 188–92 Sandler, A-M., 120 Sandler, J., 29, 120, 196 Sanford, R. N., 154 Sartre, J. P., 107 Sawyerr, A., 197 Scapegoating the Jew, 155

253

Schachter, J. S., 194 Schoenfeld, C. G., 159 Segal, H., 14, 28, 35, 56, 110 self-racial other relationship, 64, 82, 220, 224, 228 sexuality, 11, 109–10, 123–32, 153–60, 179, 192, 195, 219 Sherwood, R., 10, 44, 232 silence on race, 149, 201 Simmel, E., 155 Singh, D., 218 Smith, H. F., 198 Spillius, E. B., 161, 196 Spitz, R. A., 57, 59, 234 splitting, 22, 29, 35, 41, 43, 55, 57, 59, 77, 82, 97, 104, 109, 135, 146, 153, 163, 166, 180, 189, 219, 229 Steiner, J., 13, 14, 38, 40, 48, 51, 76, 183 Steiner, R., 196 Sterba, R., 178, 179, 180 Strachey, J., 145 stranger anxiety, 57, 58 Suchet, M., 146, 197–200 superego, 43, 91, 101, 123, 125, 154 Sutton, H., 107 Swartz, S., 126–9, 132 symbolic, 28, 50, 56, 168, 172, 176, 180, 195 symbolism, 81 Tan, R., 196, 197 Thomas, L., 8, 139, 175, 189, 197, 198 Thompson, C. L., 197 tolerance climate of racial/cultural, 139 transference, 22, 24, 28, 32, 34, 54, 69, 80, 113, 120, 128, 162, 166–2, 182–9, 192–5, 198 white-black, 200 trauma, 63, 91, 95, 164, 166, 170, 192 Treacher, A., 63, 108, 126, 147 Tuckett, D., 12 unconscious racism, 180

254

INDEX

Varchevker, A., 198 violence, 1, 22, 30, 35, 109, 110, 198, 201, 206, 212, 231 racial, 127, 157 Waddell, M., 59 Wallerstein, R. M., 13 Ward, I., 198 Weintrobe, S., 207 we-self, 186, 187, 236 Western, 182, 183, 185 asociety, hidden racism in, 8 clinicians’ assumption of sameness, 187 development of civilisation, 234 exploitation of Third World, 32

hegemony, 150 identity, 137 individualism, 186 mind, 234 multi-cultural settings, 63 norm, 186 psychoanalysis as, 149, 181 See also I-self white guilt as unbearable, 49 Yates, S. L., 191 Young-Bruehl, E., 159 Young, R., 8, 62, 146, 235 Zilboorg, G., 159, 168