Abstract
The June 2016 University Forum included Janet L. Smith, Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Voorhies Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Angela Hurlock, an architect and Executive Director of Claretian Associates, with Robert Galatzer-Levy as moderator. Laurence Ralph, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, could not attend but provided his paper for this report. Although the panel, held at the APsaA meeting in Chicago, wrestled with questions particular to that city, participants addressed issues equally relevant to other major cities across the country: How to revitalize inner city areas like the South Side of Chicago that suffer from under-development and lack of resources, leaving their populations underserved and impoverished? Further, can psychoanalysis help? If so, how?
A basic requirement for revitalizing a community is providing for the safety of its residents. A UNICEF statement in 2016 noted that “despite intellectual debates about the definition of childhood and cultural differences about what to expect of children, there has always been a substantial degree of shared understanding that childhood implies a separated and safe space.” Thus, within their respective cultures, children require a safe environment, free from violence and trauma, for their play and education, as well as for social connections and healthy attachments.
Patrick Bracken (2002) offers us a model for thinking about how people function within communities. Bracken states that all of us function in the world, whatever our cultural context, because we have a sense of “underlying coherence” that provides meaning through an expectable, organizing way of establishing early patterns, which get folded deeply into ourselves. As psychoanalysts we can contribute our understanding of how environmental affordances and traumas impact one’s sense of self and can offer evidence that the processes of internalization are largely unconscious.
Bracken proposes that trauma removes meaningfulness and coherence from our world and leads to the disruption of a sense of continuity in the world and in one’s self. The capacity of both individual and community to stay organized and coherent collapses, leading to despair and hopelessness. Bracken compares this “underlying coherence” to Kirby Farrell’s concept of “the magic circle of everyday life” (1998). This “magic circle” supports the capacity to make the world intelligible in symbolic and creative ways. In other words, similar to Winnicott’s transitional space (1953), Farrell’s magic circle functions as a holding environment from which we can begin to “know” the world “bit by bit,” in a non-overwhelming and protected manner.
Community, when working well, serves as a “holding environment” in everyday life by providing expectable, reliable experiences that accrue as “good experiences” to be weighed against “bad experiences.” This physical holding leads to a psychological holding by one’s community that in turn leads to the child’s first experiences of affiliation and self-identity.
As a pediatrician and child psychoanalyst, Winnicott wrote in detail about the mother-infant relationship. But Winnicott (2002) also acknowledged the larger society in which that dyad is embedded and how it serves a holding function to keep us internally and collectively organized: “the continuation of reliable holding in terms of the ever-widening circle of family and school and social life” (p. 238).
Against this background knowledge of the kind of vital community that children and families require, this panel asked: So what happened on the South Side of Chicago (and in many other neglected communities within our major cities)? While the reasons for their collapse (“devitalization”) are complex, Prager (2017) succinctly outlines a major underlying causal factor: a history of systematic processes by which various forms of institutional racism—legal, economic, political, and social—have continued to benefit white citizens, leading to a perversion of American life. This perversion exists in the transgenerational hostility and violence directed by white Americans toward African Americans.
Past injuries to African Americans stem from the earliest days of slavery, compounded by white Americans’ resistance to “apology and reconciliation.” Prager describes how “unnacceptable internal feelings that whites hold toward blacks” are projected onto African Americans. This projection serves as a denial of whites’ own aggression and impulsivity, creating the false belief that whites are “civil . . . by nature” while blacks are “incivil . . . by nature.” Prager concludes that these processes of projection and denial, defending against unconscious guilt, have led to a resistance by the white population to acknowledge the violence perpetrated on blacks since slavery. This lack of acknowledgment not only precludes mourning and reconciliation, but represents a “psychic failure of the white mind to recognize the other.”
Chicago’s “tale of two cities” is the result of many years of projection of hatred by whites onto blacks. This “tale” can also be seen across countless American cities where disenfranchised people and communities have been segregated and split off from the “whole” of resourced neighborhoods. This panel’s discussion was focused on the projected undesirable aspects of the more resourced neighborhoods of Chicago onto the more “undesirable” South and West Sides. An added function of such psychological splitting is to keep a power differential in place, where one of the “two cities” maintains a superior position over the other. Powerful unconscious defenses create and maintain a vertical split of two cities, existing side by side; the “undesirable” side carries certain disavowed functions so that the dominant side can continue under the “guise” of one city (Kohut 1972).
Both the panel and the audience engaged in a discussion of what contributes to a “two-city system,” as well as addressing solutions that have been attempted and what more might be done. Mixed income housing was highlighted as providing a facilitating environment where residents from varied backgrounds have to interact as a part of daily living. In such environments, individuals are forced to create a diverse sense of community, which would generate opportunities for working through unconscious biases toward “others.” This model is ambitious, with no guarantees. However, trying to heal splits in communities through creative housing and community design may be the type of “therapeutic intervention” needed to work through institutional biases that have become fixed and habitual.
By way of example, Hurlock outlined her agency’s mission “to build community within the culturally diverse community of South Chicago by working with community leaders, residents, and organizations that provide affordable housing and related services for low-and-moderate-income people; build resident-based leadership; and serve as a catalyst in creating innovative solutions to improve the quality of life.” Smith and Hurlock have a history of collaborative projects over many years dealing with affordable, integrative, and progressive housing on Chicago’s South Side.
Smith grew up in a racially mixed South Side neighborhood in the early 1960s. By the 1970s this same neighborhood had become predominantly African American. Between Smith’s childhood neighborhood and Downtown Chicago to the North were three miles of visible poverty, including the public housing tragedy of the Robert Taylor Homes. That project was the largest in the country: twenty-eight high-rise buildings, each sixteen stories. Heralded as an innovative initiative to provide affordable housing on the South Side, the project came to be seen as a failed social experiment; in 2007 the last building was finally demolished. (As noted above, there are no guarantees when attempting to address such complex and entrenched problems!)
Having lived through school busing, Smith conveyed Chicago’s “deepening divide” due to “white flight,” which was occurring at a dramatic rate across the country. Failed attempts at “mixed” neighborhoods, Smith believes, have created a vicious cycle of withdrawal of resources and finance from what once were viable neighborhoods. The resulting segregation in Chicago preserved white children’s privilege, academic and financial, but left African American children behind.
Lack of empathy for the “other” is a key obstacle to revitalizing disenfranchised communities. Whites would need to own their aggression and accept the violence, torture, and destruction perpetrated on blacks in order to develop an empathic response capable of supporting sustainable neighborhood investments that address affordability, safety, and security. Some of the sustainable projects Hurlock has creatively developed are urban farms, open play areas, and other cost-effective programs providing positive living experiences for local residents. As Hurlock sums up her approach, “There is working on the brick and mortar and there is working on the human soul.”
Hurlock’s comment provides a perfect segue to Laurence Ralph’s interviews with the “Grandmothers” of Inglewood on the South Side and how they function as a holding environment for young people regarded by unempathic outsiders as merely destructive. Ralph reminds us that it is the view from within the community that should be privileged in deciding how to develop, invest in, and revitalize Chicago’s South Side. The use of empathy to look from “within” another’s experience, so familiar to us as a method of psychoanalytic data-gathering and understanding, should be the central guide for effective and respectful intervention at the community level.
Hurlock then raised the issue of trauma, as many families on the South Side have endured murder, drug use, family violence, and teen pregnancy. In response, one participant referred to Isabelle Wilkerson’s seminal work, The Warmth of Other Suns (2012), which provides a vivid account of African Americans’ migration to the North, including Chicago’s South Side, in search of a better life. Unfortunately, this “better life” was not necessarily found. Wilkerson’s book illustrates the daily segregation and racism Southern blacks experienced in their new home.
The trauma endured by these migrants in Chicago and many other American cities has been chronic and acute. The repetitive overwhelming of the psychological capacity to cope and function adaptively has been destructive to individuals, families, and entire communities. The violent assault on individuals and communities has been tragic for the South Side of Chicago and beyond. Just as Winnicott famously stated that, in regard to the “mother-infant” unit, there is no baby without the mother and no mother without the baby, so it is with community. There is no individual without community and no community without the individual. It is here, in the gaping disruption of that unit, that the trauma occurs, and its consequences are the destruction of a sense of self and of a communal way of life.
Is it not our responsibility as psychoanalysts to offer our “interpretation” of these deep levels of trauma and through that understanding to facilitate responses that are sustainable for the South Side of Chicago and other urban areas with similar challenges? At its core, one interpretation is the continued projection of hatred of whites onto blacks, requiring acknowledgment, mourning, and reconciliation as a way station on the road to empathy. Only through an empathic process can communities begin to feel “held” and “contained” within the greater whole of the city, as opposed to remaining split into “two cities.”
Hurlock highlighted how the South Side, abandoned by the greater whole and left to “hold” itself against insurmountable odds, has adopted alternative strategies from within its own community. An example Hurlock shared were individuals known as “interrupters,” key gang leaders/members who assist in ending violence and “squashing” cross-gang conflict. Smith noted that these “interrupters” tend to be the few older gang members who have survived into older life and who are seen as wise by the younger members. To connect Hurlock’s example to Ralph’s direct experience, a grandmother conveyed how residents of Inglewood consider “gang” members to be “grandbabies,” thereby speaking to the experience of local residents, in contrast to the view of outsiders. Further, these “gang members” are seen as intrinsically resourceful and capable, albeit violent in their behavior. It is this perspective from within the community that gets lost, according to Ralph, and leads to an “injury of development.” These “Grandmothers” speak of being neighborhood “soldiers” who keep the integrity of a neighborhood alive without the typical and traumatic displacement that occurs for families. Concluding his thoughts about South Side neighborhoods and redevelopment, Ralph sought “to make sense of the forms of knowledge produced by people about their households and homes . . . to gesture toward a larger argument.
It is this: in reducing the messiness of neighborhood life to measurable, scientific categories, government officials erase many residents from the full spectrum of the neighborhood for the sake of the “new” community they envision.” In other words, the way we measure what something is and how we “redevelop” it is dependent on who is the one measuring and looking. This can have a devastating impact on those families who reside in these neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago as well as other areas across the country.
It is a challenge to summarize the complexity of the information provided by the presenters and other participants on this panel. Moreover, no simple or linear solution will meet the overwhelming challenges of revitalizing areas of collective neglect like the South Side. At the end of the day, progress begins with acknowledgment, acceptance, and repair of the historical and ongoing projection of white hatred onto blacks as a start to developing a sense of connection and empathy. Empathy, a basic step in the service of understanding, promotes motivation for social change. Understanding requires exploring both intrapsychic dynamics (e.g., unconscious defenses of splitting and projection, denial and disavowal) and recognizing the developmental and interpersonal needs of individuals and communities (e.g., for safety, holding, empathy, idealized others) in order for social change to occur. Perhaps this is where psychoanalysts can contribute.
In the process of writing this report I was reminded of another core developmental need: to have a voice, to be listened to and heard. I recalled one particular medium for meeting that need while providing an integrative community experience for adolescents from all sides of the city. This medium is the city competition Louder than a Bomb, about which a documentary film was made in 2010. In this annual spoken word / poetry event, Chicago’s adolescents participate in a collaborative exchange of their poetic and emotional work. It seems apt to highlight the common theme among the group of 2008 seniors featured in the film. In preconscious refrain, this theme captures having a “voice” that cuts across neighborhood, class, and race lines while transforming emotional plight into shared and performed art. Whether this transformation is sublimation or consolidation, it leaves the viewer with the rare experience of seeing intrapsychic, interpersonal, and neighborhood splits made whole again.