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This book, skilfully edited by Stoute and Slevin, is a substantial collection of essays by American and British psychoanalysts and researchers. They examine racism in America from both historical and psychological perspectives, with its individual and collective consequences. Many are papers published elsewhere but they have been cohesively brought together here. The early chapters ground the work in an understanding of the socio-economic framework which continues to support slavery’s legacy. In the clinical discussions, the authors strongly argue for the need to acknowledge the social reality of African American lives in a dominant white culture weighed down and structured by this legacy. They track how the impact of racism has been theorised and explored in the literature, in critical theory and in psychoanalytic theory. Many essays implicitly or explicitly point to the conflict between examination versus denial and disavowal of racism. It is argued that the therapeutic endeavour must also grasp how this contradiction between knowing and not knowing might operate in the clinical situation.
The authors bring psychoanalytic theory and understanding to bear to detail the mechanisms that underpin racist thinking and behaviour, but the book also critiques psychoanalysis’s earlier reluctance to confront the issue of racism centrally, despite having the tools par excellence to do so. As Stoute notes, Freud pointed the way with his observation that people can be brought together in love, providing there are other people left to receive the manifestations of their aggression – but he did not pursue this theme explicitly in terms of the anti-semitism with which he was so familiar in mid-nineteenth and turn of the century Vienna (16). This book redresses the tardiness of psychoanalysis to address issues of race and does it well.
The central argument running through this collection is that racism in America constitutes a trauma – which Freud described as a breach in the psychic