I offer for consideration, ideas about the paranoid-schizoid position state of mind using the dynamics of the impact of enslavement on the development of the US psyche. Specifically, the evolution of two perspectives: a superior white self, and inferior non-white other. One of the most remarkable psychological processes examined, which originated during colonial America, was the morphing of the black person into the “black body.” This morphing of a people was essential to enabling the American psyche to use one group of human beings to build the US and its white citizens' egos and wealth. The maintenance through disavowal and other defensive operations of this type of traumatic morphing is shown to support disintegration and suffering in the psyche of the infant, later adult, and object-relationships.

Psychoanalytic theory is offered as uniquely useful to analyze the complexities of, and historical linkages to, the dynamics of splitting and disintegration using as example, US race-relations. This particular psychic framework, constructed by and within US culture, is useful to explore because it explains, in detail some of the inexplicable occurrences and underlying dynamics, which obviate understanding and healthy interactions between self and others to date. Melanie Klein's object relations theory of infant development, primitive defensive operations, and early relationships with objects, are used here to describe early dependency needs, and relationship formations between white and black people in early colonial America which recapitulates to date in various ways.