Narendra Keval is a psychoanalyst who teaches at the University of Essex in England and conducts a full-time analytic practice. Raised in Zambia, in Southern Africa, he grew up hearing terms like “colored quarters” used by English colonial masters in what was then Northern Rhodesia. Those early experiences of racist ideologies and their entanglement with naked exploitation helped shape his book, Racist States of Mind: Understanding the Perversion of Curiosity and Concern. Because these social and political realities persist in most cultures, this book and its exploration of patients willing to share their often taboo thoughts on race are valuable. (A related, recent book is Neil Altman’s Psychoanalysis in an Age of Accelerating Cultural Change: Spiritual Globalization. Routledge, 2015. See also Narendra Keval’s blog posts.)
Patients do not, typically, bring their racist ideologies for therapeutic examination. Rather, Keval discovered “racist states of mind,” which generate unconscious convictions of inherent superiority to others and which, if not analyzed, contribute to the deadening of one’s personality. In this way, racist states of mind harm both overt victims, the Others and the victimizers. An empathic encounter with these states of mind requires a great deal of analytic tact. Because individual and cultural narcissism are wrapped around core identities of alleged superiority (for example, European, rational, cultured, civilized and, for many in the U.S., Christian), challenging these defenses evokes first anxiety, and then rage. Keval astutely notes Freud’s struggles with anti-Semitism and the catastrophe of the Holocaust—manufactured by Europe’s “greatest civilization”—have shaped how Jewish and non-Jewish psychoanalysts view the ubiquity of racist ideologies. Beyond these American and European examples of racist states of minds are similar ideologies in caste societies, such as traditional Hinduism. (For example, the Sanskrit word for caste, varna, means “color” or “tribe.”)
Some therapists may believe the book is less relevant to them because their practice is not as heterogeneous as Keval’s. However, even within a seemingly homogeneous culture lay the ingredients of narcissistic pleasures in disdaining others and the inborn propensity to idealize one’s tribe, no matter how defined. Among white Americans, for example, one finds income, training, parental status, educational attainment and dozens of other markers of difference sufficient to make invidious comparisons. Alongside racist terms for Africans and Native Americans are terms like “cracker” and “white trash” that are uttered with great disdain for poor whites.
Racist States of Mind: Understanding the Perversion of Curiosity and Concern
By Narendra Keval
141 pages
London: Karnac Books, 2016
Keval explicates the creative idea of the “racist scene.” This is a version of the classical concept of the “primal scene” (Urszenen) that Freud first announced in a letter to Wilhelm Fleiss in 1897. The former pertains to fantasies of disruption members of a racially distinct group feel when their pristine sense of home, body and the motherland is “invaded” by foreigners who threaten to ruin what was great, even virginal. Those “M … f … blacks” (Pakistanis or others) are penetrating and despoiling one’s sacred past. Keval’s psychoanalytic formulation struck home for many Americans during this election year. Rather than name, experience and mourn the losses that change brings, some Americans respond to these threats with “the additional excitement of hatred and violence.”
Keval’s case histories, in Part II, are models of analytic brevity and clinical richness. Each merits careful reading and teaching because in each we find a thoughtful analyst struggling to evoke his patients’ strongest feelings, especially their sadistic pleasures and their manic-like defenses to keep from recognizing narcissistic wounds against which those primitive defenses are erected. A common countertransference response among white therapists with black patients is guilt; among black therapists with black patients it is unconscious condemnation of those who are “acting white.”
Chapter 9, “Reason and Racism,” speaks to the idealization and use of Enlightenment ideas to impose control over “lesser” human beings. Even Immanuel Kant, the greatest European ethicist of the 18th century, began as an ordinary European racist. He altered those views after he wrote his masterpiece, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in 1785. During the same period Americans were writing the U.S. Constitution. Like them, Kant struggled to disown the common pleasures of racist superiority and in-group narcissism. And like them he faltered until he could purge himself of the anxiety and thrills embodied in racist states of mind.
…we would do well to look inside ourselves for those hidden pleasures of pomposity and superiority.
Issues of race, racism, nationalism, postcolonial theory and similar topics dominate contemporary intellectual circles. Using different names for similar concepts, the same issues dominated Freud’s explication of what he called the “psychoneuroses.” When he investigated the maladies his female patients brought to him in Vienna, he found they originated in female servitude and oppression.
During that period of discovery, as psychoanalysts see it, Freud also battled against all forms of religiosity. No doubt there were personal, unconscious reasons why he did this. However, there were intellectual and scientific reasons as well. Central to those reasons was Freud’s concern that if religiosity were permitted equal footing to psychoanalysis his new science would disappear. Freud designated religion as the great enemy because it alone threatened to displace insight and the critique of self and cultural narcissisms. Freud viewed his parents’ religion, Judaism, and Viennese Catholicism in the same light. Within each tradition, numerous people found solace, identity and relief from the
anxieties of everyday life. However, for Freud these benefits came at too high a price. Although Keval says little about religion per se, his critique of racist habits extends to many, if not all, forms of religious orthodoxy.
Keval discusses the perversion of Enlightenment principles when it was used to subjugate and conquer other peoples. Freud, of course, saw himself as an heir to the Enlightenment. We, his descendants, cannot escape the universalizing tendency of that intellectual movement. Among its ideals is Immanuel Kant’s (post-racialist) demand for ethical self-examination, the categorical imperative: We must act upon rules we wish to see enacted universally and everywhere, regardless of persons’ rank or color. That demand is not located in either individual or corporate identity. On the contrary, it is disembodied, desexualized and deidentified. As Keval notes many times, this demand strikes at the heart of traditional forms of group narcissism and group identity. The vast majority of people I know in Tennessee, for example, are rooted in self, family, and religious and national identities that feel permanent to them.
This brings us back to the issue of race and racism. The core values of antiracism and other progressive movements—including psychoanalysis—are Kantian in this sense. We favor diversity, fairness, equal justice, progress and other values. Prior to championing those values, we would do well to look inside ourselves for those hidden pleasures of pomposity and superiority. A natural reaction to those who challenge one’s embedded identity is anxiety which in turn evokes anger. Negotiating those strong feelings is the task of good governance and humane political efforts. It appears we cannot escape the search for universals, especially for a universal ethic. Just as other people in other historical epochs struggled with their dichotomous categories of understanding, we do too. Toward that struggle the author’s book contributes a great deal.