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Dr. Numa courageously steps up in the debate on the contribution of psychoanalysis in understanding racism and offers reflections on how psychoanalysis can contribute further to this area.
The author recalls how unconscious forces are always at work, at best restricting our ability to engage with our environment and at worst seeing this very same environment populated by terrifying objects created by our own projections. Deeply embedded in early anxieties belonging to the paranoid-schizoid position, we expel outwards primitive hate and aggression into the “not-me” world, the “other's world” where shameful and despised aspects of the Self can be located. The racist has a weak identity constructed on “who I am not”, on difference, on radical disidentification that denies human sameness. Group behaviour influences that individual mechanism and alien groups become groups to hate. The author invites a reflection on our own identity and group belonging, beyond that of psychoanalysts, and on that of our patients.
In the section “Transgenerational communication and trauma”, Dr. Numa highlights how traumatic dislocation caused by migration, forced migration or being a refugee may impact the emotional availability and capacity for containment of primary objects. These experiences shape the meaning of separation, loss, belonging and home, and may be transmitted transgenerationally. Some patients may be haunted by historical trauma and repressed family secrets that are “encrypted” and communicated as unprocessed and traumatic information. Psychoanalysis has a fundamental role to play in the elaboration of historical and personal memory and in finding truth.
In the section “Words and language”, the author correctly affirms that “race” is a social construct which shifts with the need to maintain power structures. The attributes that society ascribes to certain specific groups denote that the persons belonging to those groups are part of an historical legacy; their inner world is