Denying Death: Living Madness, a Podcast Review

Steven Reisner, a New York psychoanalyst known for leading the successful effort to get the American Psychological Association to stop having any connection with torture sessions, has come out with a podcast series called Madness: The Podcast. In episode six, “The Masque of the Black Death (Racism in the Time of Trump),” Reisner speaks to us in a voice that conveys the urgency of this moment when the nation seems to be hurtling toward what could be an explosive decision point regarding Trump. One feels throughout that, although Reisner is speaking during an emergency, he again and again is making trenchant points. Urgency informed by trenchant analysis is an achievement of psychoanalytic thinking.

He begins his discussion of racism by talking about the pandemic, which also serves as a metaphor for racism. He cites the short story by Edgar Allan Poe “The Masque of the Red Death,” first published in 1842, as an uncannily accurate description of the American response to COVID-19. That response, in his opinion, is characterized by denial (in Republicans) and terror (in Democrats), both being based on an “abject fear of death.” Then we are plunged into a stunning insight, and we immediately see why he has begun with the pandemic, when he quotes from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time:

“[A]nd what white Americans do not face when they regard a Negro: reality—the fact that life is tragic. Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time…. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.

The denial of death is at the bottom of both phenomena: the inability of United States to come to grips with the coronavirus and the power of white supremacy throughout American history. In pointing to the courage and determination of Black people taking to the streets to protest systemic racism, Reisner calls on hi