Editorial

Psychoanalysis, as the science of the human inner world of subjective experience, has had an unusually troubled history in the history of Western science. Freud's innovation of the invention of the analytic hour as an instrument analogous to the telescope and the microscope, with the fact that listening instead of seeing was the way it was used, guaranteed a hostile reception from scientific quarters. Even today, when all else fails psychoanalysis is criticized by professors of English, no less, as not being scientific.

Similarly, the fact that attention to human emotional life was denigrated as ‘women's work’ guaranteed a hostile reception in the larger culture. In the context of Western patriarchy, women's ‘intuition’ was recognized patronizingly as a property that only women have, an utterly mysterious ability to know what someone else is feeling, in a culture where feelings are like dirty laundry, to be cleaned up in private, thank you very much. Meanwhile, so-called rationality and objectivity were elevated in Western culture to be the highest form of human mental life, indubitably male. In our culture facts are objective and certain, feelings are subjective and uncertain. Thinking proceeds best when devoid of feeling.

Some years ago C. L. R. James traced the origin of emotionless ‘rationality’ to the rise of the Bristol-based slave trade in the early nineteenth century. There was a pounds and pence reality to the so-called golden triangle. Manufactured cotton goods from the Lancashire mills were shipped to West Africa, where imprisoned Africans were taken on board in shackles and chains and transported to plantations in the southern states of the USA, where raw cotton was taken on board for shipment back to Bristol. The profits were an astronomical 300%. Emerald Davis's article in this issue shows the endemic racism in our society, a continuing painful and criminal legacy of the slave trade. Rationality involved the sacrificing of human feeling to the crime of t