Hating the Self in the Other

The four preceding papers were presented under the rubric of “Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Social Consciousness of Hatred” at the 1996 APCS conference. Two of the papers (those by Alford and Glass) fall neatly into this category; two of them (those by Burack and Flax) can be interpreted from this perspective but are centered on rather different issues. For reasons that will become apparent as we proceed, I will begin with the latter.

Burack and Flax are both concerned with issues of race and gender, and both find value in postmodern strategies of interpretation. Beyond that, they have differing aims. Burack interrogates psychoanalysis from the perspectives of gay and lesbian sexualities as well as race; Flax analyzes the play of power in the second Judiciary Committee hearings on the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination.

Burack situates herself between psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and the racial and sexual issues it has largely ignored or marginalized, on the other. She attempts to play the difficult role of mediator. She wishes to encourage the psychoanalytic community to take seriously the play of exclusionary power and knowledge in its own disciplinary practices; and she wishes to encourage gays, lesbians, and those who have been assigned the role of racial (racialized) Other to bend psychoanalysis to their own purposes. She believes that, epistemologically, postmodernism is helpful because it “faciliates the challenge to psychoanalysis without establishing new forms of sexual rectitude, authenticity, and discipline,” although she acknowledges that postmodernism is not the “only route by which to criticize the virtual absence of understanding of power relations in psychoanalysis.”

Burack draws the following conclusions from her exploration of psychoanalysis, race, and sexual identities: race and sexuality are “ubiquitous in the very construction of psychoanalytic discourse”; racial and sexual meanings are “inexorably linked” to the binary oppositions t