You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalysis, the Jewish science of Nazi lore, has traditionally had an awkward, uncomfortable relation with racism and other burning social problems. Freud, a characteristic secular, atheistic, European intellectual was himself a bit detached from his feelings on these issues but did not want psychoanalysis to become a Weltanschaung. In 1938, when asked to comment on the rise of European anti-Semitism he was reluctant to do so. Yet on that same occasion he did cast a sceptical view on the motivations of anti-racists both Christian and secular for harbouring a deeply buried racist and patronizing stance towards Jews deeply in their liberal humanistic considerations. For Fakhry Davids it was a lack of hard clinical evidence as to how racism works in the mind plus possibly the experience of his own angry counter transference to the possible causes of Freud's silence, which has pervaded psychoanalysis itself.
This book is underpinned by the author's personal experience of racism, first under the apartheid of his native South Africa, then as a brown/black foreigner in England. So, to his clinical skills and profound emotional experience we add an important element of political awareness to this book. His account of the two ‘banal’ racial incidents and of his own subjectivity undergoing a racist attack are enthralling and leave us in no doubt about the importance to know our own racism before attempting to know it in someone else's internal world.
For a long time racism has been left to the so called applied psychoanalysis. Clinical psychoanalysis applications have tended in the past to reduce racism into existing psychoanalytical models (e.g. Oedipal) or known psychological categories, and/or have relied on essentialist ideas exacerbating the polarity between the individual psyche and the social space. One of the many merits of this work is that it brings into the present the unjustly forgotten figures who are Davids's predecessors in his task like Joel Kovel, the heroi