You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
For those interested in psychoanalytic reflections on the pernicious forces of racism, homophobia, and misogyny, this book is an invaluable resource. The conceptual driving force behind this collection is Moss's formulation of the psychodynamic processes via which individual conflictual desires are subject to an especially dangerous transformation: from “I want” to “we hate.” One of Moss's most interesting observations emphasizes the fact that we do not hate as isolated individuals, rather, we hate as a group (“in the first person plural”). Such hatred has a psychologically binding impact and becomes an essential constituent of identity by serving as a means of linkage to others. We enlist hatreds in a struggle for self-definition, Moss tells us, and the mechanism proceeds in two directions simultaneously: via a disidentification from the objects that stir anxiety-provoking and disavowed desires, and via identification with others who provide a sense of solidarity through a shared hatred.
Hating in the First Person Plural is organized into four sections.
On Racism: Four chapters comprise this section of the book (in addition to Moss's excellent introduction), with contributions by Maurice Apprey (“Repairing History: Reworking Transgenerational Trauma”), Alan Bass (“Historical and Unconscious Trauma: Racism and Psychoanalysis”), David Marriott (“The derived Life of Fiction: Race, Childhood, and Culture”), and E. Victor Wolfenstein (“Race, Rage, and Oedipus in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man”).
Apprey's chapter theorizes that trauma is transmitted from one generation to the next and analyzes the implications of such “deferred” history as it contributes to an aggrieved group remaining “disfigured, dehumanized and traumatized as a people” (p 13). This is the basis for a transgenerational haunting that is unacknowledged, but like all unconscious processes, highly potent and influential.
Alan Bass is also interested in how traumatizing history becomes transmitted, and how the v