It's clearly time that we, as a society, confront white heterosexual hegemony that “normalizes” racism and other forms of prejudice and discrimination. Such prejudices are antithetical to what should be our society's aspiration to be inclusive and pluralistic.
Cultural hegemony is the cultural influence exerted by a dominant group over a culturally diverse society. The dominant group's subjective world views become the accepted cultural norm, inhibiting alternative views.
Cultural norms are the result of social constructions. They are related to conscious and unconscious identifications, and to the historical place each of us has occupied within society. To be an inclusive pluralistic society, which embraces cultural diversity, we need to encourage the articulation of alternative world views and cultural norms. That calls for deconstructing the existing hegemony. Psychoanalysis has much to contribute to that process.
As part of that contribution, psychoanalysts need to question, explore, analyze, and confront prejudice in themselves and their patients. Psychoanalysts must also distinguish between popular discriminatory stereotypes and patients' personal anxieties wrapped in prejudice in order to differentiate between social ideology and personal pathology.
Socially shared prejudices represent an unconscious part of the ideology of a society, feelings that provoke and justify discriminatory measures, including exploitation of one group by another. Psychoanalysis holds that racism and hate toward “The Other” are universal characteristics of individuals and societies predicated on the need to construct one's psychic self by excluding, devaluating, and hating the Other.
As it develops, the undifferentiated, primitive, and narcissistic ego projects outside of itself that which it experiences as unwanted and dangerous, thereby making the external object into something foreign and evil. In that fashion, the process of projection renders strange what is in fact old and familiar. That “strange”/“otherness” is part of our unconscious, and therefore is an inherent part of us (Freud, 1919, “The Uncanny”).
In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud (1930) states that just as we maintain a cohesive sense of self by projecting onto the Other our own unacceptable aspects, so too we can love one another as a group as long as there are outsiders we can hate. That projective process takes place at both the individual and social levels. It encompasses both the individual psychic and the social imaginary, that include the values with which each society constitutes itself. As an example, consider this probably apocryphal anecdote from 1870. Argentine president Domingo Sarmiento, was meeting with an indigenous chief. Sarmiento opened a window complaining “it smelled of horse” and the indigenous chief opened another window, complaining “it smelled of cow.” Both were indirectly accusing the other of having barbaric eating habits, and hence being barbaric.
The Mexican sociologist and anthropologist Roger Bartra wrote in his 1992, El Salvaje en el Espejo that the creation of the myth of the savage man is a fundamental ingredient of the European culture. The savage man is Western man's alter ego, an artificial savage who preserves the civilized identity of the European man and justifies racism. In other words, a constructed Other becomes the depository of our unwanted repressed aspects. This captures how psychoanalysis' notion of the unconscious connects the social phenomenon of racism with our individual psyches. Given that racism stems from the projection onto the Other of unwanted aspects of ourselves, owning those unwanted aspects would mitigate our impulse to ascribe them to others.
The 2020 summer's social protests were about racism. The year before, in June 2019, APsaA apologized to the LGBTQ community about homophobia. Without minimizing their differences, racism and homophobia are both forms of discrimination and devaluation of the Other.
In its capacity to combat racism and other forms of discrimination by fostering an understanding of the unconscious construction of the Other, a psychoanalytic perspective can contribute to the larger society. By promoting an integrative process of owning unwanted aspects, understanding them, and changing them, psychoanalytic practice helps and supports individuals as they do their own work combating their own prejudice.
As Julia Kristeva says in her 1988 work, Strangers to Ourselves, acknowledging our “otherness,” allows us to stop perceiving “the Other” as a threat. In her words “If I am a stranger, then there are no strangers.”
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Margarita Cereijido, Ph.D., a training and supervising analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, has written and taught on gender, culture, and prejudice. She is on IPA's Women and Psychoanalysis Committee and is in private practice in Washington D.C.