Psychoanalysis is antiblack.

Stephen Frosh, Department of Psychosocial Studies, School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy, Birkbeck College, London, UK. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, “Psychoanalysis, Colonialism, Racism” 2013, Vol. 33, No. 3, 141–154

This article explores the prospects for a psychological contribution to postcolonial thought through the mediation of psychoanalysis. It does not attempt to deconstruct or historicize postcolonialism itself, at least to any significant extent, further than to state the need for a postcolonial theory of the subject that incorporates an understanding of affective and “subjective” issues—precisely the area with which psychoanalysis is primarily concerned. The positioning of psychoanalysis as a progressive, critical approach is not, however, a particularly secure one. The central difficulty is the way psychoanalysis has frequently aligned itself with conformist and even “repressive” tendencies that reproduce colonial and at times racist tropes, often in the context of psychological individualism, but sometimes in an explicitly political manner (Jacoby, 1983; Frosh, 1999). This is despite the existence of a contrary urge in psychoanalysis, especially reflected in the “critical theory” tradition that made use of it in the 1950s and 1960s (e.g., Marcuse, 1955) but also in the work of several followers of Lacan (Stavrakakis, 2007) and some British social reformists (Rustin, 1991). The tendency of American ego psychology to give prominence to “adaptationist” perspectives has been widely noted and has been criticized both by political radicals (e.g., Jacoby, 1975, 1983) and by Lacanians (cf. Roudinesco, 1990, p. 175: “According to [Lacan] such a psychological science had been affected by the ideals of the society in which it was produced”). The adoption of a strong antihomosexual bias by orthodox mid-20th century psychoanalysts has had particularly damaging consequences for the practice and reputation of psychoanalysis as a whole, even though recent attempts to reconcile psychoanalysis and queer theory are beginning to bear fruit (Frosh, 2006; Campbell, 2000). Psychoanalytic assumptions about the nature of a civilized mind will be briefly discussed below; but overt forms of racism, notably antisemitism, have also on occasions been evident in its institutional practices (Frosh, 2005, 2012). Most relevantly, colonialism is a deeply problematic issue for psychoanalysis, because it is engrained in much psychoanalytic thinking and terminology, and this has effects on contemporary theory and practice in ways that are not always recognized. For example, as discussed further below, psychoanalysts often draw on the language of the “primitive” to refer to unreasoning elements of people’s psychic lives. Thus, a notion that someone might be evincing a “primitive fantasy of destruction” is a very familiar one, but what is not acknowledged is that this terminology not only has its roots in a colonial opposition between primitive and civilized, but it also reproduces this division “unconsciously” when it is used. This is to say, the terminology is full of associations that position some ideas as civilized and some as primitive, reinforcing a developmental scheme that is heavily inflected by assumptions about the relationship between seemingly irrational and rational thought processes— and in particular who might “own” them. The history of this stretches back to the beginnings of psychoanalysis, reflecting the colonial and racist (including antisemitic) assumptions prevalent in the Europe out of which psychoanalysis arose. Freud deployed the idea that the thinking of what he called “savages” was not only contrasted to “civilized” mentality, but also revealed the origins of mental life both for the culture as a whole (the contemporary savage being a throwback to the precursors of modern “man”) and for the individual (the savage mind being like that of a child). For example, at the beginning of Totem and Taboo, subtitled Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, he wrote, There are men still living who, as we believe, stand very near to primitive man, far nearer than we do, and whom we therefore regard as his direct heirs and representatives. Such is our view of those whom we describe as savages or half-savages; and their mental life must have a peculiar interest for us if we are right in seeing in it a well-preserved picture of an early stage of our own development. (Freud, 1913, pp. 1) The repetitive first person plural pronoun is notable here: “we believe,” “we do,” “we regard,” “our view,” “we describe,” “us,” “our own development”. The savage is the other, the not “us”; though as will be outlined briefly below, there is quite a degree of subtlety in what this might mean. Freud also was explicit about how “savages” share attributes with children, both in terms of how they think, and how they are thought about by “we adults”. “It seems to me quite possible,” he wrote (p. 99), “that the same may be true of our attitude toward the psychology of those races that have remained at the animistic level as is true of our attitude toward the mental life of children, which we adults no longer understand and whose fullness and delicacy of feeling we have in consequence so greatly underestimated”. The adoption of a binary between savage and civilized is not perhaps intrinsically racist and colonialist, but the assumption that the latter always displaces the former and, more importantly, that the terms can be applied to different people, is. In Freud’s thought, savage societies hold to various types of irrational thinking (concreteness, mystical attitudes to death, etc.), processes reviewed throughout Totem and Taboo (Freud, 1913) and explicitly linked with children in more “civilized” societies. For instance, in writing of wish fulfillment (p. 84), Freud commented, If children and primitive men find play and imitative representation enough for them, that is not a sign of their being unassuming in our sense or of their resignedly accepting their actual impotence. It is the easily understandable result of the paramount virtue they ascribe to their wishes, of the will that is associated with those wishes and of the methods by which those wishes operate. These ways of thinking make them “primitive” in the developmental sense that they should normatively be overcome by more advanced modes of being—a theme also taken up in the analysis of religion in The Future of an Illusion (Freud, 1927). Although Freud himself does not press for political action that does this— he was interested rather in how science might overcome superstition—the general approach is consistent with the justification of colonialism and even slavery on the grounds of the inherent inferiority of the primitive. There is another subtle turn here, however, that is specific to Freud and the early history of psychoanalysis, relating to the intense antisemitism of Freud’s time. Gilman (1993) showed how deeply rooted antisemitism was in the beliefs of many Europeans, markedly so in the Viennese among whom psychoanalysis grew up, and how widespread were ideas such as that Jews were castrated (hence, feminine), that they were “oriental” and maybe even “black,” and that they were primitive in the religious sense (Christianity having displaced Judaism) but also psychologically, socially, and racially. Gilman suggested that Freud, consciously or unconsciously, constructed some of the most conspicuously radical elements of his theory in response to this. For instance, Gilman argued that the trope that Jewish men are castrated through circumcision is replaced in psychoanalysis by the idea that the castration complex is universal, so that all people— including the most gentile—follow a model set by the Jews. This Freudian impulse to disarm antisemitism by positioning the Jews as the truly civilized people (which was mirrored in the idea that as nationalism took hold in Europe at the end of the 19th century, the Jews might be the only “true Europeans” oriented toward a transnational comity) results in a shifting of the “other” of European society away from the Jew and toward the “savage,” that is, the colonized, Black “primitive” of slavery and the European imagination. This theoretical move attempts to relieve Jews from the opprobrium of primitivity (unsuccessfully, as was demonstrated unequivocally just a few years later) by passing it onto the colonized other. There is always a danger with summary accounts such as this one, that the history it sketches simplistically reduces a tension-filled and ambiguous process to a linear narrative. It is certainly the case, for example, that psychoanalysis was from the start full of impulses that challenged and subverted the assumptions of the societies in which it found itself. Indeed, this is one reason for the mixture of explosive embrace and resistance that characterized the response to psychoanalysis: On the one hand, it fuelled enormous shifts in self-perception, artistic creativity and even political and economic thought (not confined to outspoken radicals— see, e.g., John Maynard Keynes’, 1919, 1936, post-World War 1 use of Freudian ideas to argue for the importance of emotional factors in economics). In many respects, it is precisely in the tension between what Toril Moi (1989, p. 197) called, in relation to the attitude of psychoanalysis to femininity, Freud’s “colonizing impulse” and its contrary acceptance of “the logic of another scene”—the specific expressiveness of unconscious life—that the creativity of psychoanalysis inheres. Nevertheless, consideration of the rootedness of much psychoanalytic thought in colonial assumptions is important not merely to sweep away the ideological detritus, but also to identify where the investments of psychoanalysis can provide leverage for understanding the place of psychosocial theory in the postcolonial project. A further example of the “detritus” might be found in some work by Celia Brickman (2003), which offers an extensive account of how the language of primitivity infects psychoanalysis. Like Gilman, she notes how Freud’s “universalizing reconfigurations” (p. 165) turn the despised Jewish body into the model for humanity as a whole. From the perspective of postcolonialism, however, this move, which is subversive in relation to antisemitism, is “made at considerable expense,” because “the modalities of inferiority previously ascribed to the Jews did not simply disappear but were ambivalently displaced onto a series of abjected others: primitives, women and homosexuals”. Brickman elaborated on how the assimilation of the Jewish other to Europeanism positions psychoanalysis as a colonialist discipline and incorporates racism into its fabric of argumentation. Categorized as a member of a primitive race, Freud repudiated primitivity, locating himself and his work within European civilization, with both its scientific and colonizing enterprises, and replacing the opposition of Aryan/Jew with the opposition of civilized/primitive (p. 167). In relation to psychoanalytic practice, primitive usually means either or both of fundamental and irrational. A primitive impulse is never a rational one; it always arises unmediated from the unconscious and hence has not been worked over by the secondary processes of thought. The sleight of hand then is to link this kind of primitivity with the irrationality of the colonized other and then to make rationality itself the marker of civilized human society— or even of what it means to be human at all. After all, when one loses one’s power of reason, one ceases to be able to function as human at least to the degree that equal citizenship is at risk. In the colonial context, this justifies colonization: irrational primitives cannot be trusted to run their own affairs; the civilized European is justifiably superior, for everyone’s good. Commenting on Freud’s anthropological speculation, Brickman (2003) noted how the psyche comes to be envisaged as a representation of colonialism and hence how Freud explicitly parallels the structure of the mind with that of (colonial) society: [By] correlating the progression of narcissism, the oedipal stage, and maturity with animism (savagery), religion (barbarianism), and science (civilisation), Totem and Taboo transposed the racial assumptions of the cultural evolutionary scale onto the modern psyche . . . The psychoanalytically conceived norm of mature subjectivity was, by virtue of the correlation of libidinal development with the cultural evolutionary scale, a rationalism whose unstated color was white, just as its unstated gender was male. (p. 72) Even though these Freudian assumptions are mainly unstated, the terminology and the conceptual baggage of the savage” and the barbarian remained with psychoanalysis for some time and is still lying only just-dormant in those references to “primitive feelings” that often can be found in clinical psychoanalytic discussions. A certain mode of rationality is given priority here, which is attached to masculine “reason” as it has developed over the period of industrial modernity (Frosh, 1994). That which falls short of it—the “unreason” attributed to women, children, and primitive cultures—is derogated and made subject to reason’s imperialism. This is not, of course, to imply that one should fully affirm unreason as a simple alternative to colonial reason; it is rather to claim that the reason– unreason opposition is itself rooted in a colonial mentality that supports it and narrows the range of what is culturally validated. In a similar vein, Neil Altman (2000, p. 591) commented, “When Freud the ego psychologist said, ‘Where id was, there ego shall be,’ he defined the goals of psychoanalysis in terms reminiscent of the colonial mentality. In this sense, the structure of racism is built into structural psychoanalytic theory, particularly in its ego-psychological form”. This claim is itself resonant of the critique of ego psychology mentioned earlier. The argument runs that because this form of psychoanalysis assumes reason to be superior to unreason, its concurrent assumption that unreason is characteristic of “primitives” means that it is promoting a colonizing process (reason trumping unreason; civilized displacing primitive) that is embedded in a racist paradigm. As an instructive aside, it is perhaps worth noting that ego psychology itself has a complex set of origins, one of which regularly gets lost when its notions of adaptation are pronounced solely conformist and colonialist. The occlusion here is of the personal history of most of the postSecond World War American ego psychologists as migrants or refugees from Nazi Europe. Their concerns were indeed to find creative ways to adapt to a new society; in addition, they were exercised by the explosion of irrationality that had overwhelmed their lost homelands, and their impulse to find ways to fend this off and protect future societies from its recurrence was perhaps understandable.