Traumatic and Cultural Distortions of Psychoneurotic Symptoms in a Black Ghetto

In the first of a sequence of papers, “Contributions of a Ghetto Culture to Symptom Formation: Psychoanalytic Studies of Ego Anomalies in Childhood” (1970), I presented findings on the surprising absence of manifest psychiatric symptoms in children known to be traumatized and severely deprived. From both an observational study of academically retarded ghetto schoolchildren, and from the first year and a half of analysis of two “representative” children, I concluded that ego functions appeared defensively regressed, if not developmentally impaired. In a second paper, “Crucible of Ambivalence: Sexual Identity in the Ghetto” (1972), I questioned the readiness with which children and adults of the ghetto make use of the “street culture” as a defense against instinctualization of family relationships. The impact of the “street culture” appeared as a group-psychological interaction that both sustained and seduced ghetto residents into shared (normative) behaviors and attitudes that obscured individual conflict.

A third paper, “Aggression and the Psychoanalysis of Ghetto-Reared American Negro Children: Structural Aspects of the Theory of Fusion-Defusion” Meers & Gordon, 1972 reviewed the maturational fate of aggressive drives as this relates to the cultural shaping of libidinal-phase characteristics, defenses, identifications, and precocious struc-turalization. In a fourth paper, “Psychoanalytic Research and Intellectual