Having chosen a title that I feel some may find controversial and may raise curiosity amongst others, there is some pressure in delivering this.
I have arrived at this premise from having published and offered talks and workshops on the traumas of racism. I am now concerned about inertia, frustration, and the paralysing nature of racism. Those who attended my talk said they felt energised and would make changes to their thinking (an all-white group). Years later, I wonder how it’s going.
The progress to rid institutional racism from psychoanalysis has been slow, and a part of me wonders if this is possible and what that would look like. In the meantime, in addition to offering talks and workshops, I have kept myself nourished through research literature, podcasts, journals, etc. I’m left feeling progress cannot come sooner, and also at a place where I couldn’t digest anymore of the horrors of slavery and colonisation.
It is easy to get re-traumatised by the problem of racism. This need not even happen to oneself. I got sent a WhatsApp message, which had been circulating amongst the black community. The details were about a black man in the current war-torn Ukraine who couldn’t get out and wouldn’t be helped. Racism becomes rife and startling in desperate situations. It wouldn’t be surprising that hate crime has gone up in relation to the heightened economic climate of austerity. There is a wish to blame the Other, and colour is a visible difference and therefore, carries the projection of all that is unwanted.
The feeling provoked is a need for action, which is often difficult to sustain, but what often happens then is paralysis. Paralysis and a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. One realises that white supremacy maintains the system of racism, and we are part of this system, which dictates who speaks, who is seen, who is invited, who gets excluded, etc.
For example, all areas of activity, be it in economics, law, education, entertainment, politics, religion, are under the social and political conditions of white domination. This means white is favoured and prioritised. White survival and power are dependent on the strategies developed to maintain this dominance, including control and non-white exclusion.
Psychoanalysis recognises the traumas of racism. At least from the perspective of the suffering and the internal world. That no one is born with a ‘racist state of mind’ that this is something learnt from the environment. Others have argued that it is merely political, that there is no such thing as race and that there is but one race – the human race.
There is a wish to maintain this divide however, in the form of black and white thinking. The consequences are detrimental to both. For the black person, the internalisation of an inferiority complex and for the white person, a false belief in a superiority that’s based on an empty categorisation.
What is more damaging is the continuous internalisation of the trauma. The transgenerational transmissions, at times spoken but more often are “ghostly transmissions,” as referred to by Frosh, S. (2013), which are the horrors of the genocide of slavery and effects of colonisation, not too dissimilar to the Jewish genocide. The remnants of the atrocities live on.
There has always been the question of whether psychoanalysis is robust enough to engage and free people from the colonial past. This question has enabled us to revisit our literature and arrive at the understanding that the literature itself excludes cultural differences. We notice that Freud’s work is mostly grounded in racist ideology and superiority. The continued use of the word “savages,” referring to tribal society.
I am also reminded here of James Baldwin, stating that a man is only prepared to face in another’s life, what he is able to confront in his.
Psychoanalysis prides itself on awareness. If we can know ourselves, through our own personal therapy, we can be more in touch with our instinctual self, i.e. the so called ‘true self’ outside of the negative indoctrination. The process allows for a return to a ‘truer self’, or at the very least, we learn to be less impinged on by our environment.
I appreciate that in this same world, atrocities are being committed in the name of religion, envy, hatred, anarchistic desire for control and power, etc. Whilst others are fighting for survival and to exist. The divide runs deep.
My wish is that we can get political leaders and heads of state, the police and other decision makers to partake in the work of psychotherapy.
Another wishful thinking.
For those that want to do the work, there are ways of thinking and as to what has been internalised about the Other. And the work – undoing a well-laid-out set of indoctrinations. The hope is that people can begin to see themselves anew.
Psychoanalysis, in my opinion, is about how to collaborate with the other. As psychotherapists, we come with skills to do the job, but when it comes to navigating life, we all hold life skills.
For those of us waiting for change, we need to remember that we need to be the change we want to see. While I agree that reparation and recognition of past atrocities need to happen, decolonising of psychoanalysis and literature, we cannot nor must we wait for that. As for the limitations of psychoanalysis, we ought to take what works.
What psychoanalysis is, is but a tool, what it strives for in any one individual is what life they want to live, or put another way, what life is possible. Through a collaborative effort, a connection, there are possibilities.
Abi Canepa-Anson
Psychotherapist, artist and writer