Psychoanalysis, Race, and Racism: Introduction to Japa 69/2

“Maman, look, a Negro; I'm scared!” Scared! Scared! Now they were beginning to be scared of me. I wanted to kill myself laughing, but laughter had become out of the question.

Fanon is on a train, and there is the matter of where to sit. In a voice that is unmistakable—-aghast is the word that comes to mind—-he tells us, “I couldn't take it any longer, for I already knew there were legends, stories, history. … As a result, the body schema, attacked in several places, collapsed, giving way to an epidermal racial schema” (1952, p. 92).

Fanon's work, published mainly in two books over the course of his brief adult life, confronts the reader with the fact that he lives what he describes and theorizes, and that autobiography and sociography are coextensive; they are inextricably linked. The “psycho-affective” realm that Fanon writes about is neither subjective nor objective, but is a place of social and psychic mediation. This point, as we know, is not entirely foreign to psychoanalysts. Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Nancy Chodorow, and more recently Lynne Layton and Nancy Hollander (among others) have each ventured into the nexus of the effects of social structure, ideology, and power relations on the individual psyche. We might call these efforts, following Layton, “social psychoanalysis” (2020).

In truth, mainstream analysts, working in their offices and other clinical settings, have never comfortably embraced this work of social psychoanalysis. One finds a history of marginalization of both the ideas and the scholars who wrote in this vein (Erik Erikson comes immediately to mind). And yet the deep penetration of ideology, racism, and power relations into seemingly the most neutral notions of analytic theory and practice is a plain fact. Consider the psychosexual stages of development and the patently heteronormative biases that underwrite them. Or the appellative “homosexual.” Or the term “borderline.” Or think about the ubiquitously