Beyond Community Analysis: A Response to Dr Borg

Dr Borg utilizes the interpersonal method to analyze his experience as community healer in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. As he enters into a community that has been traditionally victimized by social disadvantage and racism, he narrates his experience dealing not only with the understandable impact of the group's distrust, but also with his own fears and distortions. Dr Borg's approach is useful for community practice because it illustrates some of the junctures facing the practitioner who enters a diverse community as a symbol of external or alien power. Through his intervention, Dr Borg helps the community to restructure itself in order to correct stereotypical distortions and utilize its own power of organization and negotiation in order to access community sources and resources. Technically, at the level of psychoanalytical intervention, Dr Borg succeeds in illustrating an approach that clearly proved successful by its outcome, yet, being that the problem is also political (allocation of power) and sociological (group structures), besides ethical (rightness), there are questions that still loom large when the psychoanalytic method is applied alone. What do the riots mean, for example? And why in 1992?

Let's take as our starting point the powerful metaphor “white cancer” that Dr Borg sees as the unconscious object of rioting. The word white makes reference to the historical experience of that alien force that institutionalized racism in North America, from colonial slavery to present-day “profiling.” The word white in this case is a metonymy, a displacement from capitalism, the true force behind modern oppression. However, the latter signifier - capitalism - is not readily available to most people; it remains opaque; it is not in the preconscious readily accessible for retrieval. It is instead in the unconscious of society. It makes itself available only through displacements and condensations that need further analysis. Such signification is not av