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Culture is “the learned system of meanings that are shared by people in a particular context, where the meanings are transmitted from generation to generation” (Carter, 1995, p. 12). As Whitson (1996) notes, culture consists of “whatever it is that one has to know or believe in,” in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members” (p. 144). What one has to learn is not immutable—the ideas, belief systems, and behaviors socially acceptable in one era may become totally unacceptable given the contextual changes that may occur in the power dynamics of a society. In looking at the history of the idea of race, those who defined the racial hierarchies determining the treatment of other groups were those who were the most powerful. Dalai (2002) notes that “after all, it cannot be coincidental that the column lines drawn to name the races matched so exactly the power relations during the epoch of colonialism. The most impressive of these being the great divide between the colonizer and the colonized, which fell neatly onto those designated as whites and the rest, i.e., the coloured, the black” (p. 12).
In psychology, early studies regarding African-Americans and pathology generally attributed psychopathology to the primitive nature of the black psyche (Thomas & Siller, 1972). The civil rights struggle and the emergence of identity politics in the late 20th century would not allow such obviously racially biased ideas to be openly expressed today.
This paper will explore the space that the African-American psychoanalyst inhabits at the intersection of three cultures: psychoanalysis, African-American,