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For A Sivanandan, it miglior fabbro, from whom I have learned
I tell you, they have our souls in armour. (Black woman quoted in Cottle 1978)
What is at issue is the apparent incapacity to constitute oneself as oneself without excluding the other, coupled with the apparent inability to exclude the other without devaluing and, ultimately, hating them. (Castoriadis 1992)
Addressing the question of psychoanalysis and racism, I do so necessarily as a split subject. On the one hand, I am a public citizen, abhorring the injustice of racism and the brutalities done in its name. On the other, I am also a psychotherapist trying, to borrow Spinoza's words, neither to laugh nor to weep but to understand, trying too to bear in mind Freud's distinction between thought and feeling on the one hand and action and behaviour on the other. ‘On the couch, neurosis,’ Freud once remarked, ‘In real life, swinish behaviour’.
Someone more theatrical than myself might well dramatise this split, leaping from one side of the table to the other as the parts switch or speaking in different voices. But I shall spare myself-and you-the spectacle of even attempting this.
When I agreed to give this lecture I had the grandiose idea that I would be able to do what my sub-title implies, that is if not lay down a psychoanalytic theory, then at least be moving close to it. I feel I must come clean at the outset and state that my reading and thoughts have taken me somewhere else, for reasons which I hope I shall make clear to you.
What I want to present to you are some thoughts on the relationship between racism and psychoanalysis-to look at what psychoanalysis has had to say-and more important not say-about racism and to explore the tension between a political understanding of racism and a psychological, in particular, a psychoanalytic one. I want to offer some thoughts too about more useful ways of looking at this subject.
What I have to say very much represents work in progress, a contribution to a