Abstract
With wrecking effects on personality, relational competencies, and citizenship, racism is ubiquitous. No one, victim or perpetrator, escapes significant contortions of self and function. In this essay, I will explore racializing processes in psychoanalytic enactments and the ways in which transgenerational traumatic histories and contorted views of self/other, shame, and relational rupture emerge and shift in each participant.
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Notes
Altman (2000, 2013), for example, has pointed out how the concept of ego strength, once used as a measure of analyzability, presupposes personal characteristics that are culture and class specific. Deviations from the related standards are viewed as deficits. He argues that the splitting of the psychological from the social can lead to erasures of experience and differences and a tendency toward victim-blaming and for a recognition of the social embeddedness of the self and a less authoritarian, relational form of analysis.
These laws mandated de jure segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former Confederacy with, starting in 1890, a “separate but equal status” for African Americans. The separation in practice led to conditions for African Americans that tended to be inferior to those provided for White Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. Northern segregation was generally de facto, with patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory union practices for decades. State-sponsored school segregation was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. The remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which, to the amazement of many, has been partially reversed by the Supreme Court in 2013.
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to acknowledge and sincerely thank the following colleagues, friends, and family members whose many close readings and helpful feedback were so essential to the realization of this project: Neil Altman, Marilyn Charles, Mark Chesler, Julia Davies, Harvey Falit, Dorothy Holmes, Lynne Layton, Kimberlyn Leary, Joanna Hassinger Parnes, Marvin Parnes, Joan Sarnat, and Amy Saldinger.
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Hassinger, J. Twenty-first-century living color: Racialized enactment in psychoanalysis. Psychoanal Cult Soc 19, 337–359 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.39
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.39