Abstract
Like many (too many) white colleagues, I spent many (too many) years attending psychoanalytic meetings in a sea of white faces without stopping to say, “Something is terribly wrong here.” The Trauma of Racism: Lessons from the Therapeutic Encounter invites us to consider the culture of organized psychoanalysis (e.g., why have our meetings been so white?), the assumptions that pervade our consulting rooms (e.g., the idea that race is an issue only for our patients of color), and the larger social order (e.g., the pervasiveness of white supremacy and how it impacts our work and our thinking). Beverly Stoute and Michael Slevin have done a masterful job of pulling together twenty-two papers—some scholarly articles, some personal testimonies, and some mixtures of the two—that capture important information and points of view in a conversation that is coming late (though better late than never) to psychoanalysis.
The book is organized into five parts: Historical Perspectives; Living with the Trauma of Racism; Learning and Re-Learning Race; Being Aware of White Privilege; and Interpreting Racism in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Though I think it would be fine to sample from parts of the book in whatever order one might want, nothing in the book should be skipped; each essay offers much to the reader. For the purpose of this review, I will be selective in what I mention, but that is not meant to imply any diminution of what I don’t mention; it’s all worthwhile and important. I will say there are many clinical examples drawn from the authors’ practices, most of which I won’t repeat in this review.
Stoute and Slevin undertake to present multiple perspectives on phenomena that get grouped under the rubric of “racism.” In the contributing authors’ work, racism is both a description of individual attitudes and behaviors, conscious or unconscious, and a characteristic of systems that tilt to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others. It is the latter characteristic of racism that strikes me as the most interesting and the most difficult to get our theoretical arms around. How do we explain how well-meaning people of a dominant racial grouping participate in systems that tilt to their advantage, in spite of their professed commitment to social change? Psychoanalysis should be able to bring its liberatory potential to this question, and Stoute and Slevin undertake this task. As Stoute writes in her opening chapter, “analytic understanding could be a radical tool of individual and social change” (p. 14). Richard Reichbart cites Peggy McIntosh’s definition of racism, “not as invisible acts of meanness but as an invisible system that confers dominance” (p. 280).
Many of the contributors to this volume address the history of race in the U.S. (especially Stoute, Dionne Powell, Kirkland Vaughans, and Annie Lee Jones) and explore how this history gets internalized and passed down intergenerationally. Stoute also points to the importance of the transgenerational transmission of dignity and defense (p. 222). This transmission of dignity takes place in the context of the systematic transmission of elements of white supremacy to us all. While I was writing this review, Henry Louis Gates Jr. published a piece in the New York Times titled “America’s Long Tradition of Rewriting Black History” (February 19, 2023). Gates reflects on continuing efforts to limit the teaching of U.S. history from a perspective that acknowledges the shaping influence of racism. He cites the work of Mildred Lewis Rutherford in the early twentieth century. Rutherford was “the historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy,” who undertook “a systematic campaign to redefine the Civil War not as our nation’s war to end the evils of slavery, but as ‘the War between the States’”; she wrote that “‘the negroes of the South were never called slaves.’ And they were ‘well-fed, well-clothed and well-housed.’” As one who grew up hearing the Civil War described as the “War between the States” and remembers being taught that the Civil War was not primarily about slavery, I can attest to the hidden power of Rutherford, whose name I’d never seen before reading Gates’s piece. These messages are pernicious; it’s time we face them and view our history more clearly. This book is a part of that important process.
Stoute and Slevin include Anton Hart’s discussion of the “discriminatory gesture,” described as the “non-extraordinary event of racially biased treatment,” which carries with it “the personally annihilating power embedded in the existence of the entire destructive-subjugation-oriented enterprise of racism” (p. 105). Hart also describes a clinical stance of “radical openness,” which he advocates in place of “multicultural competence” (pp. 244–246). Beverly Stoute contributes her description of “Black rage,” which she traces through history, linking it with Freud’s challenge in confronting antisemitism, up to the present. This construct, connected with the experience of ongoing oppression, “if mobilized in a functional way, has a culturally specific adaptive potential that can be transformative” (p. 173). There are sensitive and painful reflections on white privilege (Michael Moscowitz, Richard Reichbart, Alexandra Woods) and an interesting reflection on working in a city hospital emergency room (Slevin)—an example of taking psychoanalytic thinking into the community, which requires sensitivity to difference and tolerance for being perceived as representing the social order associated with white superiority.
From my position as a white psychoanalyst who has worked for some years to examine my own privilege and the accompanying blind spots and missteps, I want to focus on three papers in the book that provoked new thoughts and experiences for me: Jyoti Rao’s “Observations on the Use of the N-Word,” Mark Solms’s “Psychoanalysis by Surprise: An Ad Hoc Experiment in Community Psychoanalysis on a South African Wine Farm,” and Grant Shreve’s “Get Out of My Head: Experiencing Cultural Paranoia in Jordan Peele’s Get Out.”
In her paper, Rao challenges the idea with which many of us were inculcated during our training, that psychoanalysts can and should speak boldly the unspeakable, daring to give voice to our own, and our patients’, most hidden thoughts. Her discussion of white analysts speaking “the N-word” in white spaces considers the real hurt (see Anton Hart’s discussion of the discriminatory gesture) and the naked assertion of power inherent in such a scene. As for the apparent obliviousness to the transgression of speaking the word, Rao notes that those in positions of social dominance enjoy invisible protection from the profound social wounding they may inflict with their speech, as “one tends not to notice the absence of hostile attacks in one’s life if such attacks have always been absent” (p. 195). Acknowledging the destructive, hurtful impact of uttering a word associated with white supremacy, slavery, violence, sadism, and dehumanization—and restraining oneself from doing so—creates a possibility of change in the dominance dynamic. “A white person who demonstrates sensitivity to the destructive potential of the word,” she writes, “signals to the hearer that something new and different is taking place” (p. 211). This “newness” is what we aim for in the clinical situation, as we invite patients to engage in a dialogue that is not governed by social convention or conventional assumptions of hierarchy. Can we find ways to do this with each other and notice ways in which white privilege and dominance assumptions creep unbidden into our discussions?
Mark Solms tells the story of his efforts to engage the Black families who were living and working on the wine farm that he inherited, and to which he relocated in 2001. His hope that he could persuade these families that he represented a new social order—one that would hold them in higher esteem, undoing centuries of dominance by white owners—proved to be naive. “I wanted to make a citizen-sized contribution to the reconstruction and development of the country by fixing the social fabric of just this one farm” (p. 311). To his dismay, he found himself frightened by stories of the murders of white landowners. What if the racist characterizations of indigenous peoples that he heard from other white landowners were correct? He tried to think like an analyst, to work his way out of the uncomfortable position in which he found himself: “Don’t just do something, stand there,” he told himself (p. 313). He brought in historians and archaeologists to discover the histories of the people who had been living on the farm for generations. One of the residents, upon sharing in the learning of the history of this land, asked Solms: since his people had lived on the land long before Solms’s, “How come you own it now, and why am I working for you?” (p. 315). “Racism,” Solms realized, “is a rationalization we have constructed in order to avoid looking at the real reasons why things are distributed so unequally” (p. 318). Then Solms acknowledges a feeling that strikes me as the starting point for honest inquiry: “Even though I knew the farm came to me and my kind via a process that was wrong and indefensible, still I didn’t want to let go of it. I just didn’t. And I wouldn’t” (p. 319). The end of the story, as of this telling, was that Solms worked out a way to give the residents ownership of an adjacent farm and to join in the profits of a consortium of farms, allowing for improved housing conditions and education for the children of the workers. Analogues for race relations in the U.S. are plentiful. What are we to do about our unearned (white) privilege? How many of us are likely to give up what amount to unfairly gotten (if not outright ill-gotten) gains? Can we at least acknowledge that there is much about current distributions of wealth that is unfair, and engage in a process that will allow those who have gotten less to get on a track that will be more fair in the future?
Grant Shreve’s discussion of Jordan Peele’s movie Get Out makes the point that in its rendition of the horrors of white people’s admiring, envious assaults on Black bodies, this movie allows white viewers to identify with the Black hero and then to feel at a visceral level what it is like to exist in a world that constantly puts your existence at risk. Professional writings, Shreve says, “are sanitized in ways that inevitably dilute the visceral skepticism and historical trauma seething beneath African American expressions of cultural mistrust” (p. 328). The movie offers an “inside view” of what cultural paranoia feels like (p. 332). Shreve’s essay opened my eyes to what I experienced, but couldn’t necessarily articulate having experienced, in watching the film several years earlier. I knew the white liberal parents of the protagonist’s girlfriend appeared silly declaring, on first meeting him, how much they liked Obama; but the fact that these people were involved in bizarre plots to steal the bodies of Black people and obliterate their minds came as more of a shock to me, I dare say, than it might have to Black colleagues. We white people need to avail ourselves of opportunities to taste the terror this culture dishes out to Black people on an ongoing basis. Shreve allowed me to see how Peele’s movie accomplished this. It needs not to be forgotten.
The project of understanding racism or racialization is massive, as well as critical to understanding our cultural milieu. We must take a microscopic and macroscopic look at what keeps us from achieving a social order in which there is no priority or dominance based on race, class, gender, able-bodiedness, sexuality, or any other element of identity, and we must also be willing to face the costs of the failure to achieve such an order. A vision of true equity involves not just a thoroughgoing self-examination, but an unflinching examination of culture and the social order, and a willingness to call out institutional or systemic elements of bias. Stoute and Slevin have given us a gold mine of ideas and observations to further such an examination. I hope we, as a profession, will continue to push forward in pursuit of equity; this book is a great place to start.
