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M. Fakhry Davids Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2011, 254pp., $33.00, ISBN: 978-0333964576 (paperback)
A number of recent works at the intersection of cultural studies and psychoanalysis question the premium we have placed on human difference. In Flesh of My Flesh, Kaja Silverman (2009) points out that, “the notion that we cannot be ourselves unless we are different from everyone else is relatively new” (p. 1). Silverman, whose consistent engagement with psychoanalysis has defined her scholarship, reads Freud against the grain to uncover a discourse of sameness and affinity at the base of our understanding of subjective formation and relation. Vanita Seth (2010) confirms that our awareness of racial difference from the sixteenth century on diverged greatly from earlier European discourses structured around ideas of human resemblance. M. Fakhry Davids joins this discussion with a more clinically focused account, one that theorizes how difference gets both set up and deployed as a psychic structure in the normal mind.
Internal Racism presents a quite sophisticated account of how racism is inscribed in the mind as a paranoid defensive structure to ward off extreme anxiety. There are a number of radical premises in Davids’s misleadingly straightforward thesis, the first being that racism is a structure of the “normal” mind. As he asserts: “our model of the mind must be extended to incorporate a paranoid, us-them, construction involving self and racial other as a permanent feature” (p. 37). The racial other is the product of an object relationship that belongs to the same category of universal internal objects as “self, mother, father and superego” (p. 43). Davids’s second radical premise: our “sophisticated awareness of the social meanings of difference in the outside world” is not only historically produced, but has a developmental trajectory that can be mapped, for example, onto Freudian and Kleinian metapsychologies (p. 51). Weaving insights from object relations theory a