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Events of the last 10 years or so since my original article was published can leave no doubt of the continuing power of racism, of the terrible consequences of treating people not just as different but as other to ourselves and less than human. They leave no doubt either as to how easy it seems to be for ordinary people, given the ‘right’ context, to slip into being not just bystanders to evil but active participants in it.
There is, I think, a certain naivety at work in my original article, a belief that psychoanalysis might help us to address this terrible problem. Since writing it I have moved a long way from such a position. Having started out trying to use psychoanalytic ideas to think about social and political matters, I have come to accept a division between the world of the consulting room and clinical practice and the political and social world. Whatever insights psychoanalysis might have, whatever validity its theories may hold, these are not to be applied to the world at large but are limited in application to the clinical encounter and to the immediate context of the individual.
Freud, it is often remarked, could be somewhat disdainful of clinical work, and his attempts to make a larger mark on the world through general theories of culture and society are understandable. But this does not mean we have to accept them as true. Freud's work moreover, it should be added, is often tainted with its own racism, something I had not addressed in this paper.