Helen Morgan, The Work of Whiteness: A Psychoanalytic Perspective (Abingdon:  Routledge, 2021;  147 pp.)

Helen Morgan's The Work of Whiteness: A Psychoanalytic Perspective continues the discussion in recent psychoanalytic writing about the inner workings of white racism. In a series of chapters dealing with, inter alia, colonialism and slavery, racial thinking in Jungian and Freudian theory, and racialized enactments in psychoanalytic treatment and supervision, Morgan argues that the defensive process of disavowal is key to understanding racism of the ‘liberal’ - as distinct from the supremacist - kind. Drawing on contributions from a range of psychoanalytic theorists, she details how disavowal generates a cleavage in the white psyche: on one side sits an avowedly racist sentiment while, on the other, there is the need to preserve a sense of self that is decent and fair-minded. In the middle, however, exists a void - what André Green calls a psychose blanche - that resists attempts at play, mourning and, more generally, symbolization itself.

It is this lacuna that makes it difficult for many white people to think seriously about their internal racism: unsettlingly, the difficulty is apparently wilful. Involving a vertical split in the psyche, it is to be distinguished from the essentially horizontal split that characterizes unconscious repression. Ignorance, Morgan reminds the reader, is not a passive state: to ignore something requires conscious effort. Žižek's take on disavowal is instructive here: ‘I know, but I don't want to know that I know, so I don't know’ (2008, p. 53).

In Morgan's view, that is why the largely white psychoanalytic edifice has proved stubbornly immune to change on the race front - theoretically, practically, organizationally and institutionally speaking. It is not that psychoanalytic