The Winter/Spring 2005 issue of TAP featured four articles addressing the need for a greater degree of racial and ethnic diversity within the American Psychoanalytic Society. Each of the articles (by Michelle Morgan, Dorothy Holmes, Mark Smaller, and Sandra Walker) made eloquent pleas for increased cultural diversity in training institutes, curricula, and communities served. All argued for the importance of working towards the goals of diversity and cultural competence.
While these goals are of crucial importance, they are also circumscribed in ways that merit consideration. Diversity and cultural competence are ahistoric terms that cast the question of race and psychoanalysis as a contemporary demographic one. But in addition to its contemporary urgency, the lack of diversity in psychoanalysis has a history that is tied to vexed conceptions of racial difference woven into psychoanalytic theory. Thinking about the problem solely in terms of demographics avoids investigating how psychoanalytic theory itself may have colluded in the psychoanalytic community's exclusion of raced others.
Furthermore, once nonwhite candidates make it to the institutes, they are expected to accommodate themselves to the psychoanalytic canon without consideration as to whether the history of exclusion of nonwhites from psychoanalysis might be reflected in certain aspects of psychoanalytic theory and practice. If we think of the influx of women candidates over the past generation and the critical rethinking of key issues of gender and sexuality that resulted, we can begin to imagine the kind of theoretical challenges that are entailed when a population historically excluded from psychoanalysis begins to enter its community.
While psychoanalysis has played an important role in many critiques of racism, it too conceals within itself an unacknowledged and problematic racial subtext. This can be seen most clearly in Freud's work which, because of its foundational status, continues to wield its influence in contemporary psychoanalysis.
While psychoanalysis has played an important role in many critiques of racism, it too conceals within itself an unacknowledged and problematic racial subtext.
Freud borrowed liberally from a 19th century anthropology uninhibitedly racist in its ranking of all cultures along a color coded scale, according to which the most primitive cultures were those of the darkest skinned peoples, while the most advanced cultures were those of the whitest. Freud made use of this anthropology in his works on culture and society, but their implications found their way into his metapsychological and clinical works as well.
The nodal point at which assumptions about race converge in psychoanalytic theory is the concept of “primitivity,” which functions simultaneously as a psychological and an anthropological category. On the one hand, Freud affirmed the universality of the psyche through his affirmation of the universality of primitivity: He saw the primitive psyche at work in us all. Nonetheless, his use of the term itself retained its racial inflections, and “primitivity” remained the pejorative term for discrediting the pretensions of civilization.
The unfortunate but unavoidable implication of the conflation of the psychological and anthropological meanings of primitivity was that the psychology of “primitive” (nonwhite and non-Western) peoples was held to be equivalent to the “primitive” (infantile and/or unconscious) psychic register of the modern, Western adult.
This can be seen most clearly (although not exclusively) in Freud's so-called cultural works, such as Totem and Taboo and Group Psychology. Now, it is conventional among psychoanalysts to regard Freud's cultural works as peripheral and irrelevant to the practice of psychoanalysis. Yet such marginalizing of Freud's cultural works keeps us from facing the racial issues embedded in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis itself has given us the insight that seemingly irrelevant elements—of a dream, a text, or a body of work—often hold the key to understanding otherwise repressed desires and inclinations. Freud spells out his views on broad social and historical issues in his cultural works; thus they provide the key to the otherwise hidden (repressed) relationship between Freud's metapsychological ideas and social issues such as race.
In his cultural works we can see how Freud mapped the development of the psyche onto the racially conceived stages of cultural evolution developed by 19th century anthropology, adopting the popular, but now discredited, notion that individual psychological development recapitulated human racial evolution. The generally unrecognized implication was that as the modern individual moves up the developmental scale, s/he simultaneously recapitulates, or moves up, the racial/evolutionary scale, towards maturity and civilization and away from qualities held to characterize the cultural and psychological worlds of dark-skinned, “primitive” peoples.
Conversely, regression was believed to retrace not only the steps of individual development but also of racial evolution. Consequently, when we regress, we become re-immersed not only in the “primitive” processes of childhood, but also in the “primitive” stages of evolution.
Celia Brickman, Ph.D., an APsaA research associate, is senior fellow at the University of Chicago's Divinity School, and practices psychotherapy at the Center for Religion and Psychotherapy of Chicago. She is author of Aboriginal Populations of the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press).
Psychopathology and racial difference, conceived of as evolutionary inferiority, were linked together as regressions to primitivity.
As the individual moved up the developmental/evolutionary scale, primitive processes were repressed in the unconscious. “The man of prehistoric times survives unchanged in our unconscious,” wrote Freud; and throughout his texts the unconscious and the id are commonly described in terms of the primitive or prehistoric mind. But while the modern (white) self developed the secondary processes of consciousness, so-called primitive peoples were believed to remain limited to the “primitive psyche,” i.e., to the unconscious itself.
None of this implies that Freud was, or that psychoanalysis is, intentionally racist. But like other disciplines that arose at the turn of the last century psychoanalysis was influenced by racist ideas pervading the social and scientific thought of those times. While contemporary forms of psychoanalysis differ in important ways from Freudian psychoanalysis, the history of the feminist encounter with psychoanalysis demonstrates that issues of difference, even if buried deep within the bedrock of Freudian theory, will continue to persist in contemporary forms of analysis until they are acknowledged, confronted, and worked through.
The implicit racial identity of the normative psychoanalytic subject as white needs to be questioned; and the supposed racial neutrality of the ubiquitous idea of primitivity needs to be repeatedly problematized. Such theoretical rethinking is required above and beyond the necessary remedies of diversity and cultural competency if psychoanalysis is to truly open itself up beyond the cultural and racial confines to which it has been, historically, limited.