“I Do Not Have a Racist Bone in My Body”: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on What is Lost and Not Mourned in Our Culture’s Persistent Racism

Case 1: “I Have Too Much German” in Me!”

This is the case of a white man, Mr. Russo, in his late fifties. He came to treatment with symptoms of depression involving a sense of defeat, trouble sleeping, and ruminative thinking about a life filled with mistakes. Having developed a work-induced lung condition, he had had to take early retirement several years before treatment started. He had worked valorously as a firefighter specializing in forest fires. He felt some guilt about the retirement because in his work he had at times been reckless: often he would not wear the protective gear that would have protected his air passages. He obsessed over whether his self-injurious tendencies were implicated in his lung condition, though his employers did not take that position and he received a generous pension and had earned many commendations. He also was a recovering alcoholic who had been clean and sober for ten years when treatment started. He was married to a woman he had met in AA; they were committed but their marriage was joyless. The treatment unfolded in ordinary ways not particularly related to my topic, but rich with psychodynamics and some important working through. For example, he came to understand that he and his wife had not really accepted their transformed selves as nondrinkers who might find joy beyond drinking. He also was able to work through his ruminative tendencies, coming to understand that they were an identification with his grudge-collecting, litigious, and never fulfilled father. He was able to engage in a mourning process of differentiating himself from his father. A more stubborn aspect of Mr. Russo’s problem involved his fits of rage, occasionally expressed as road rage. We came to understand that his premature retirement had left him without an outlet for his toughness. Without his work, he had a hard time finding meaningful ways to feel virile and manly. The road rage incidents afforded him such an outlet, but he came to realize their danger and saw that they, too, were an identification with his ghostly father.

When we began to explore the roots of Mr. Russo’s rageful tendencies, we discovered a number of important factors. He had grown up poor in the projects in the city of his youth. He was teased because he had severe strabismus and crooked teeth. When he became a firefighter, he was singled out and ostracized because he had come from the projects. What he did take pride in was being Italian. His family celebrated its proud Italian heritage, and he took comfort in that fact until one day he visited Ancestry.com. Soon thereafter he came in for a session and wondered if I was going to consider him a racist. I was somewhat taken aback because nothing racial had as yet come up in the treatment. I sought to elaborate his concern. He said that he had discovered something about his ethnicity that he did not like, and he thought I would judge him for it. I offered that I would do my best to show curiosity and respect whatever he had to say, and that we would see how it went. He then told me that he had discovered that he was “35 percent German, 50 percent Italian, and smaller percentages of other unoffensive ethnicities.” He then said, “I have too much German in me. I wish the Italian percentage was higher.” He engaged in some disavowal in saying that he never thought about being a racist before. He certainly had never connected his rage to a racial underpinning. Coming to see that they were linked was a major development in his treatment. Eruptions of road rage were disavowed hateful aspects that he needed to own and struggle with. The struggle involved his exploration of what for him was wrong with having a German heritage. He came to be able to work with his own fantasied Nazi soldier aspects. He came to recognize that he harbored considerable rage about his early experiences of rejection. He wished he had been able to snuff out the kids in his youth who teased him, and his early career colleagues who ostracized him, like the Nazis who wiped out people they hated. People acting stupidly on the road were the undersymbolized representations of those early traumas, allowing him to feel superior to those who had teased and ostracized him. He began to use the treatment to bear the pain of those developmental losses of affiliation and support, and the loss of the protective hatred that he had delinked from ethnicity and early trauma and saw only as shameful road rage. Once he could see the links among being part German and the early trauma and road rage, he was able to develop an acceptance of the German aspects of himself by working through his self-hate for having “German blood” in him. The process involved the delinking of Nazism from being German. This delinking was difficult because the most disavowed part of his dilemma was that he took secret pleasure in wishing he could have, like a Nazi, exterminated those who had mistreated him because of his social class and appearance. Unacknowledged hatred and feelings of superiority were immensely pleasurable for him.

Two additional points about Mr. Russo: Once the racial dimension of his ethnic identity was unearthed, a particular transference-countertransference dimension between us could be better understood and contained. On several occasions before opening up the racial dimension, he had stormed out of the session at times that surprised me. Each time, when he returned, he said he had stormed out because he felt I did not support him enough, or that I was being critical of him. I held his perceptions and experience without challenging them, in part because I did find him taxing when he was ruminatively and rigidly self-justifying about his road rage, but I did try to pursue whether there were any other contributions to his storming out of sessions. Once the racial dimension was available, we worked to reconstruct the times he abruptly terminated sessions. We were able to determine that rupturing sessions was a compromise—in part to protect me from his rage, in part to try to assert his superiority over me as a white man, and in part to keep himself from imploding from his rage. It is important to add that his Italian heritage remained idealized. In writing this up, I realize that I was colluding with him to keep that idealization. Perhaps I was war-weary. After all, there was Mussolini. We did not discover or explore how or whether that aspect of his cultural history—Mussolini’s supposedly positive attributes—were represented in him.

Mr. Russo was able to resolve what it meant to have “too much” German in him. In doing so, he was able to claim a meaningful understanding of and a less conflict-ridden and fraught notion of what his whiteness meant. The case shows, I think, that psychoanalytic thinking and clinical work on whiteness is not the only or even the most important work to be done in therapy. The work we did before the racial issue emerged strengthened Mr. Russo, allowing him to do the Ancestry.com search that led to the recognition, unpacking, and working through of that issue. This case allows the reader to consider, as I did, the importance of the racial aspects of the work to the therapy. Did Mr. Russo’s post-Ancestry.com question to me about whether he was a racist arise because I am African American? Would the question have arisen with a white therapist? If not, would a typical white therapist have expressed any curiosity about race or ethnicity, or found access to such work?

Case Vignette 2: The “Germ” in German

This is the case of Mrs. Busch, a German American woman in her mid-seventies. She came to me with an intractable obsessive-compulsive disorder she had suffered since her early twenties. The major symptomatic manifestation of the disorder was a hand washing compulsion and ruminative and anxiety-laden thoughts about the possibility that harmful contaminants might be released into the air inadvertently. For example, a building might be rehabilitated and toxic substances, such as asbestos, would be released into the air and harm her. She worried that she might “catch cancer.” Such worries had led to personal paralysis and depression in her young adult years, resulting in two hospitalizations, each of several weeks’ duration, both occurring when one of her children was approximately two years old. Although she was a trained RN, she had had to quit clinical nursing because she became terrified that she would harm patients by overmedicating them. The experience that brought her to treatment was being unable to decide to move permanently to the city in which I saw her, in large measure because “everything would have to be disrupted in packing, unpacking, and rehabbing the new house.” Her dread was that in the process she would “catch [be contaminated by] something dreadful.” She called this her “muddledness” and recognized its negative impacts on herself and her husband, who was becoming anxious and depressed in his concern that she might have to be hospitalized again.

Mrs. Busch’s childhood was remarkable for its underpinnings to her disorder. She was raised by parents who had immigrated to this country from Germany before World War II for the ostensible reason that her father had no job prospects in Germany. Her parents left their only child, a boy, in Germany in the care of the two sets of grandparents. That child joined his parents in America when he was five years old. My patient was born ten years later. Mrs. Busch remembered her household for its strict control by her father, who demanded that everything be in order. Her mother often seemed amused and laissez-faire about the father’s strictness. Mrs. Busch recalled being a very anxious child, chronically unsettled by her father’s authoritarian treatment of her mother. The extreme paternal focus on orderliness was belied by striking elements of disorder—in particular, the older brother’s having been conceived out of wedlock and my patient’s rather aggressive mischief. Once she spit in the drink of a neighbor who was visiting her mother; another time she chopped her mother’s favorite plant to pieces; and another time she bit her best friend’s finger, ending the friendship. Seared in the patient’s memory was her father’s saying in response to one such episode, “I don’t even like you.” This rebuke, a lasting cause of shame and sorrow, made it difficult for Mrs. Busch throughout her life to recognize that her unacceptable aggression fueled her mischievousness and required the establishment of her obsessionality.

The work of Mrs. Busch’s therapy had many elements that will be recognized as standard. For example, we were able to establish and work through the linkage of her perfectionism and obsessive-compulsive features to her need to right the wrongs of her childhood sins and to her need to make herself good enough to make her father like her again. She recognized a desperate need to be in his good graces, lest somehow she be left behind, as her brother had been. This work on her father connection led to an expanded awareness of her troubled relationship with him. She confessed to me that she felt that there were erotic aspects to their connection, and that the tension and negative affects each felt toward the other obscured and defended against these unacceptable feelings. Her family history of massive dislocation, with a child being left behind for several years, was richly informative for her regarding her near paralysis at the prospect of relocation. Given this history, she could understand why she thought moving would be wrong and could cause permanent hurt. She came to deeply understand that she had transformed worries and bad behavior (her unacceptable erotic feelings for her father, her youthful mischief) into obsessive-compulsive symptoms. She wasn’t bad; there was bad in the nonpersonal environment (e.g., asbestos hidden behind walls).

Mrs. Busch came to be able to symbolize some aspects of her disorder as personal features, as important inner states behind the “walls” of defense within herself. This was worked through in the paternal transference, in which she feared my judgment and rebuke but came to experience me as more benign and as supporting her essential worth. Maternal aspects were also critical and led to the work on the “germ” in her German self. This work emerged when she said, “Do you think that talking about all that has happened in my life is really important?” I expressed some incredulity, given that the talking had led to some easing of her symptoms and to her being able to make a more rational decision about where to live. She acknowledged this fact, but still wondered. When I queried her further about why she might be raising a question about the value of talking, she said, with a wry grin, that her mother had always warned her not to get too close to people. “What would be the danger?” I asked. Mrs. Busch responded with a riveting certainty: “People will get to know too much about you.” We were able to reconstruct what the “too much” included. Mrs. Busch and her family lived in a wealthy community that included a prestigious college. Her father worked at the college in a high-level position, but in a nonacademic, support-staff capacity. Mrs. Busch’s mother felt this made them inferior and that talking too much would reveal their true status. I asked was there any particular aspect of inferiority that would be revealed. Mrs. Busch said, “Well, we were the only Germans in the community,” and that talking might bring that fact out in a way that would lead to further isolation. Mrs. Busch and I were able to discover greater complexity to the problem. It was not just that they would be ostracized by neighbors for being German. Mrs. Busch revealed that she had never learned the German language, and that her parents assiduously avoided any celebration or inculcation in her of that aspect of her heritage.

I interpreted that the fact that she was German, and that it was kept secret in her growing up, had also been kept secret in our work, as the fact came to light a full two and a half years into the work. I wondered with Mrs. Busch whether I was experienced, and experienced myself, as the mother who thought being German an unworthy and dangerous thing. This engagement of her ethnicity led to an affirmation of my interpretation, as Mrs. Busch told me that she had been taking German lessons, but somehow forgot to tell me, though on several occasions en route to our sessions she had intended to do so. An aspect of the work involving Mrs. Busch’s German heritage was linking it to her obsessive-compulsive disorder. This happened in a session in which she was expressing pride in studying the language of her family’s homeland. She said, “Yes, my learning the language and my being German is important.” I said, “I notice you seemed to emphasize Germ in the word German, as if it were a separate syllable.” With a bit of laughter, I said, “I consider that a slip of the tongue that tells us something—namely, did you, and your mother before you, consider being German to be something like a germ, something you could catch that would hurt you?” Mrs. Busch wondered, too, if that might be so.

Mrs. Busch is a case of ordinary and stubborn neurosis. Before her treatment with me, she had had a variety of pharmacological and talk therapy interventions, and even two hospitalizations. Each time she experienced some benefit, but always her symptoms returned. In the treatment with me, elements of her racial-ethnic heritage were able to reach the surface and be worked with. Learning of her family’s self-hate regarding their German heritage, a feeling she shared, and learning how it had been incorporated, though disavowed, in her illness, was an important aspect of her recovery. I think the race-based work was irreducibly important in that it allowed her to own, and come to appreciate, more of her whole self, thereby making her stronger in her work with her ghosts, including being able to mourn her hated German self and to find and embrace her valued German self.

Case 3: Hating One’s Beloved Black Nanny as a Defense against White Self-Hate

This vignette is taken from the twice-weekly exploratory psychotherapy of Mr. Smith, a white man who, when he first consulted me, was a thirty-seven-year-old computer scientist who had a high-level job with a major corporation; he was married and the father of two boys, ages six and three (for an expanded presentation of this case, considering social class and larger cultural issues, see Holmes 2016b). Mr. Smith, who grew up in a large city in the deep South, had been cared for by a Black nanny for much of his remembered childhood. He came to treatment for depression that was aggravated by a freak accident in which he dropped his toddler while trying to lift the boy out of his car seat. The patient was shaken, though the toddler was not injured. The mishap seemed more the product of the patient’s haplessness than of malice.

Mr. Smith’s tendency to get discombobulated came to be understood and worked through in typical psychoanalytic ways. In addition, the psychodynamic meanings and uses of his whiteness were addressed. First, his discombobulation was understood as an identification with a passive, ineffective father and a mother who devalued the father and often hinted to her son that there were more important pieces to the family puzzle than she wanted to share. The patient discovered one of those pieces. Namely, his mother had had an aborted pregnancy before being married, a fact he deduced from a close examination of his birth certificate. He kept secret his personal trauma of finding out he was not his mother’s first pregnancy, thereby joining her in disavowing an important historical event.

Mr. Smith showed no curiosity or concern at the beginning of treatment about his whiteness and my Blackness. When I noted that we were racially different and wondered if he had any reactions to that fact, he firmly asserted that it was not an important difference. In my question, I was trying to convey openness and respectful curiosity about our racial difference. Connections to race emerged in the treatment as follows: In about the sixth month of treatment, as trust built, he told me for the first time that his younger sister was married to an African American man, and that they were about to have their first child. He said that his parents disapproved of the marriage. When I asked about his own feelings, he said, with some unease, that he, too, did not like his sister’s choice of a mate, but that he felt ashamed about his feelings about Black people. I asked him what those feelings were. He said he felt that Blacks were powerless, poor, and undesirable. He quickly countered that he knew that was not accurate as a generalization, and that his sister’s husband was as prosperous and well-educated as anyone in his own family. He noted that he also had Black colleagues in high-status positions like his own. He then looked at me very intently and eventually, with a wry smile, said, “And so far, I have not found you deficient.”

My countertransference to Mr. Smith’s revelation of his racial feelings was mixed. I was relieved for the moment to be spared his wrath stemming from his veiled claim of white superiority, but I also experienced some anxiety, signaling a sense of danger that I think is inescapable when anger and white privilege are commingled, given that it is a social and, for many Blacks, a deeply personal historical and present fact that white anger toward Blacks is often expressed violently. While I knew rationally that Mr. Smith would not perpetrate physical violence against me, a scenario of hatefulness was impossible to exclude from prospective transference-countertransference manifestations. I think that Mr. Smith and I intuited the subjective dangers of our racial difference and his white privilege.

Nevertheless, I encouraged my patient to continue to be as openly curious as possible about his puzzling discrepancies regarding Blacks. I proposed that in doing such work we could resolve the discrepancies. My patient became very emotional, shedding what seemed to be tears of relief, sadness, and hope. In that period of work he also mentioned for the first time his African American nanny, who had taken care of him from kindergarten through most of elementary school. Mary, as I will call her, at first was remembered warmly, and as greatly influential in his life. He particularly remembered that he exclaimed to Mary how much he hated girls, particularly a younger sister, and that she calmly said to him it was okay not to like girls, with the exception that he had to love family.

Erotic feelings toward Mary and me in the transference began to emerge that made him anxious and guilty. His discomfort in sharing such feelings was relieved when, by a sudden associative shift, he began to speak excitedly about a favorite young white woman teacher from his school days. He resisted understanding the displacement, given the internalized dangers of having erotic feelings for Black women. He soon disavowed any positive feelings for me and Mary and protested that neither of us could have any deep or lasting meaning to him. After all, we were Black, and Mary was a working-class servant. Given our low place in society, in terms of race and class, we could not have power and authority in his eyes, or in any way be attractive to him. His swift and complete shift to disavowal was remarkable and stung me.

As long as the erotic aspects were not conscious, Mr. Smith could empathize with and idealize Mary as the dignified and principled person he experienced her to be, and with whom he longed to identify. Mary empathized with the patient around his angry feelings toward girls, but that empathy was eclipsed. As she said to him, you have to love family. I propose to you that Mary’s restriction on whom he could hate was in part a projection of the limitations on whom she could hate deriving from the effects of racism on her. For example, Blacks being angry at whites is often delegitimized as baseless, as if we have no cause to feel anger toward our oppressors. This issue of Blacks being angry is a loaded subject, beyond my focus here, but a worthy topic for further psychoanalytic inquiry and theorizing. One question to explore would be how much psychoanalysis colludes with the general white cultural point of view that regards anger in Blacks as a flaw delinked from the historical and current oppression of Blacks by whites.

In treating Mr. Smith, I thought my job was in part to become an even more emboldened Mary, one who did not hasten him to set aside his strongest hostilities, even when he felt them toward his sister and toward me and Mary. Considerable work was done around his need to protect himself from the hatreds reawakened in the treatment, including the ones stemming from white privilege and focused on Mary and me. He was able to see that in part his casting of Mary and me as powerless Black women was a projection onto us of the powerlessness he felt that derived from his weak and devalued internalized parents, and from the fact that their powerful whiteness was tainted. How so? Mr. Smith’s derisiveness toward me and Mary stemmed also from his belief that Blackness was morally inferior. We were able to trace that construction of us to his feelings of being tainted by having been spawned by a white mother who had, in his estimation, shown herself to be unworthy by becoming pregnant out of wedlock. According to the patient, that was the family’s “dirty secret.” But the treatment unearthed from its disavowed, underrepresented realm an even deeper secret—that his whiteness was not as pure as his claims to superiority made it out to be.

Mr. Smith’s treatment helped him resolve his culturally induced intrapsychic tendency to “other” his nanny and thereby to restore the love he had for her. Specifically, it was important for Mr. Smith to achieve understanding of his various uses of Mary, and of her influence on him. It was particularly important for him to unpack how he had relied self-protectively but damagingly on her warning that he not be angry at family. In that working through process, Mr. Smith reclaimed his anger; by owning and taming it, he no longer needed to use it to disparage those racially different from himself. Nor did he have to become discombobulated to disengage from his anger. He came to recognize his discombobulation as a damaging defense that produced the potentially dangerous accident with his son. Through our work together his personal woes were healed, while his racism was reduced by his owning the heretofore disavowed self-hate that was part of his whiteness. Once the self-hate was recognized and worked through, as in resolving his view that he and his family were tainted white people because his mother had had a pregnancy out of wedlock, he could give up and mourn the loss of his defensive practices against that self-hate. That is, he could give up hating his nanny and me in the transference. Thereby, he could recover and sustain his love for Mary and for me in the transference.