It is time for psychoanalysis as a profession to reckon with its conscious and unconscious racism. We need to reject the status quo and engage in a self-study of our own prejudices. The membership of the American Psychoanalytic Association does not reflect the proportional racial diversity of the United States population, but rather reflects years of insufficient attention to the psychological issues of people of color and the psychodynamics of racial prejudice, in our conferences, our teaching, and our publications.
No psychoanalytic institute, as far as I know, claims to be racist. However, it is not enough to say, “We don't discriminate.” We can also ask, “How much do we actively support candidates of color? Do we welcome them? Do we actively train our candidates to have expertise in working with issues of race and prejudice? To what degree are we anti-racist? Do we passively accept the status quo?” Every one of our organizations and institutes must engage in an interrogation of conscious and unconscious racism. We must grapple with such questions as: How are issues of race and culture addressed in our courses? In our journal articles and our reading lists? How many members of racial minorities hold positions of authority and power? What is the proportion among administrative leaders and training and supervising analysts? In the day-to-day operation of psychoanalytic institutes and organizations, how much and in what ways are issues of race addressed? Are any issues bypassed or given short shrift?
The relationship of psychoanalysis and issues of race has been complex. What can psychoanalysis teach us about the psychology of racism? How does racism affect psychoanalysis today, and how can racism in psychoanalytic institutes be lessened or ameliorated?
Today, we hear the statement “Black Lives Matter.” Some respond “All Lives Matter,” but that rejoinder misses the point that all lives should matter equally, no matter the skin color, religion, ethnic heritage, or other factors. Essential to racist tradition and maltreatment is the idea that some human groups are not fully human or not people at all. In pre-Civil War America, Black people were counted as 3/5 human. In December 1945, a question asked by a Polish child was written about in the underground press: “Mommy, was it a human being that was killed or a Jew?” In Rwanda in 1992, Leon Mugesera, a Hutu, preached that Tutsis were cockroaches and should be killed, which led to the genocide in which hundreds of thousands were murdered. When Australia was settled by ex-convicts from Great Britain, the settlers developed a law that said the land was uninhabited by humans, so that the whites could take the land. This law came off the books only in 1993, when aboriginal people were redefined as human beings.
That some people are not humans leads to the acceptance of inferior or evil “races,” who can then be murdered and mistreated without guilt. These days the notion that one race of people is not fully human is being lived out in the United States, consciously and unconsciously, in regard to people of color, most egregiously toward African-Americans, and pervades our thinking and action. We disavow this idea even while we tolerate it, until a picture of a white police officer with his knee on a Black man's neck captures, viscerally and emotionally, the outrage of a man murdered as if he were not human.
A psychoanalytic view of racism would naturally look at the psychological tendency of human beings to categorize people according to groups and to presume that some groups are inferior to others. In 1985, Erik Erikson called this “pseudospeciation.” According to Erikson, “The term denotes that while man is obviously one species, he appears and continues on the scene split up into groups (from tribes to nations, from castes to classes, from religions to ideologies, and I might add, professional associations) which provide their members with a firm sense of unique and
Mark J. Blechner, Ph.D., is the author of The Mindbrain and Dreams: Explorations of Dreaming, Thinking, and Artistic Creation . He established scholarships to fund the training of candidates of color and transgender candidates at the White Institute.
superior human identity.” Harry Stack Sullivan thought that racist prejudice protects us from feelings of inferiority and resultant psychopathology. He wrote in 1940: “It may be said of the practice of disparaging others and the entertaining of active prejudice to whole classes of people that, like the use of alcohol, they protect the person concerned from a more serious disturbance of personality; they are, in a word, the lesser of two evils for the person who manifests them.”
It is not enough to say, “We don't discriminate.” Also ask, “Do we actively support candidates of color? Do we welcome them? Do we train candidates to have expertise working with issues of race and prejudice?… Are we anti-racist? Do we passively accept the status quo?”
Belonging to a privileged racial group allows a person to believe that she or he has heightened value by virtue of birth. This is true of all racisms, not only the version of “white racism” most familiar to Americans. In China, for example, westerners are called “big-noses” or “white devils.” By developing a field of “comparative racism,” we would be able to consider how notions of race are used the same or differently by different groups and the role that prejudice plays in human personality functioning.
Adolf Hitler wrote in his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf that he admired the United States as the world leader in devising strict laws to maintain racial purity. Nazi legal scholars looked to American racial laws as the model for the Nuremberg laws which limited the civil rights of Jews (who were considered an inferior race), separating them into their own neighborhoods and eliminating their right to marry outside their racial category. Yet the Nazis, at least in 1935, thought American race laws were too extreme, as documented by James Whitman in his 2017 book Hitler's American Model. The Nazis based their definition of a Jew on the number of Jewish grandparents. They did not go so far as the American “one drop principle,” which stated that one drop of inferior blood stripped a person of his belonging to the superior race. The Nazi lawyers argued that the American miscegenation laws were also too harsh. While the Nazis made it illegal for Jews to marry non-Jews, they did not at first make already consummated mixed-race marriages a crime, as was the case in the United States until 1967.
While the United States race laws were harsh, they were balanced by a liberal, egalitarian streak underlying the United States government. The Declaration of Independence stated in 1776: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness….” Many of the authors, including Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves. Equality of men was stated in clear terms. In practice, however, equality applied only to white men.
The idea that Black people are not fully human continues today among many white people, despite the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution conferred to all people “equal protection of the laws.” The last time I served on jury duty in New York City, all defendants were Black or Hispanic. It seemed that I was in a court for people of color. A year later, one of my white patients told me when he was a teenager, he was stopped by a policeman, who searched his car and found marijuana. The policeman gave him a warning and let him go. I said to him, “Do you realize that if you were Black, you would have been put in jail for 10 years?” The “average expectable environment” is clearly different for white and Black people in the United States. We know this racial disparity exists but allow it to continue.
The two conflicting strains in American culture — human equality vs. maintenance of racial purity — continue to compete in the contemporary United States. Their disjuncture allows for various forms of splitting and dissociation. In the psychoanalytic literature, there are examples of unabashed racism. For example, in 1914 John Lind studied the dreams of 100 African-Americans and concluded that their dreams were undisguised wish-fulfillments, as Freud said was characteristic of children's dreams. Lind stated that Negroes had childlike minds and childlike dreams. He did not take into account that many were in jail, reporting dreams to white investigators, so likely less than fully candid about their dream content.
There are many other examples of sanctioned racism in the psychoanalytic past, but change in the present is more
important. At the William Alanson White Institute, we have established scholarships for candidates of color (and for transgender candidates) in the hope of attracting future leaders who may correct for past blind spots in our thinking and training. That is just the beginning of a vast task. Systemic racism tends to accommodate perturbations in society, give lip service to justice for a while, and then re-establish the status quo. Can we as psychoanalysts outline psychodynamics that will lead to genuine long-lasting change?
If we really want to engage in self-study on this issue, we must welcome feedback from the members of our community who have been the targets of prejudice and invite the opinions of people outside our community. Psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz said that you cannot see your own back. If you show it to another person, he can see it, but you can't. If you are white and want to fully understand latent and unconscious racism, you must ask the opinion of people who are experiencing discrimination to tell you what you cannot see about yourself. Psychoanalysis needs a thoroughgoing analysis of the ways racist and other prejudices are silently, perhaps unconsciously, imprinted on its theories and practices.
If we really want to engage in self-study on this issue, we must welcome feedback from the members of our community who have been the targets of prejudice and invite the opinions of people outside our community.