How psychoanalysis can contribute to understanding racism.

Abstract

In this article I hope to highlight what psychoanalysis has to o ff er to an understanding of racism and to point to its potential to contribute further. Psychoanalysis has an impressive reach in relation to its understanding of mental phenomena, and particularly of pathological states, investigating at a deep level the unconscious drives, motivations and phan-tasies that shape our inner world and colour our emotional experiences. It was one of Freud ’ s signi fi cant contributions to demonstrate that the ego is not master in its own house. We are not just creatures of reason, being in fact propelled by all sorts of unconscious thoughts and memories. These unconscious forces may also limit our development – compromising the stability of our sense of self, our identity, and restricting our ability to engage not only with ourselves but with our objects and our external environment. Even when we are able to achieve greater emotional maturity (which we could think of in terms of the depressive position described by Melanie Klein), in the face of certain deprivations, frustrations or other unwelcome a ff ects arising from within, we are prone to retreat to a paranoid-schizoid world of splitting and projection. This is a world where terrifying objects are created in phantasy and through projective identi fi - cation, in which symbolic functioning gives way to concrete thinking (a marked feature of the racist state of mind). In serious pathology, defensive systems and pathological organisations are erected, a fortress against knowledge of reality and associated anxiety. Whether we think of deep-seated racism as a manifestation of Freud ’ s “ death drive ” or as part of the deeply embedded early anxieties that belong to the paranoid schizoid position, it surely re fl ects the primitive hatred and aggression that need to be expelled outwards into the object world, the “ not-me ” world. All of these aspects of unconscious life, developed within psychoanalytic theory, lend depth to an understanding of racism at a psychological level (perhaps expanding political and socio-economic