Abstract
This chapter characterizes the psychosocial environment of the slavocracy. Far more than a historical account of the context, this chapter intentionally seeks to draw the reader into the world of fear, horror, trauma, paranoia, and the grotesque—a world which in many ways was normative for Frederick Douglass (but foreign to his humanity). Unless the reader is able to empathically imagine the range of human emotion and experience that was normative for Douglass, the psychodynamic question of the etiology of Douglass’ selfhood cannot be adequately investigated. In order to address the primary question of “where did Douglass come from,” we must understand his location and imaginatively feel the context that he experienced. Affect or emotion, embodiment, and cognition, engaged collectively, are at the heart of any substantive qualitative investigation.
I have been frequently asked how I felt when I found myself in a free State…I was yet liable to be taken back, and subjected to all the tortures of slavery… But the loneliness overcame me… I was afraid to speak to any one for fear of speaking to the wrong one, and thereby falling into the hands of money-loving kidnappers, whose business it was to lie in wait for the panting fugitive, as the ferocious beasts of the forest lie in wait for their prey…The motto which I adopted when I started from slavery was this—“Trust no man!” I saw in every white man an enemy, and in almost every colored man cause for distrust. It was a most painful situation; and, to understand it, one must needs experience it, or imagine himself in similar circumstances.
Frederick Douglass ( 1845 , pp. 107–108); My emphasis for Douglass’ call for a hermeneutic of affective-attunement
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Notes
- 1.
My emphasis.
- 2.
Judith Herman’s last stage, reconnecting with ordinary life, is problematic in the context of understanding the selfhood of Douglass or for that matter, any other enslaved person. For Douglass, the definition of trauma must extend beyond a violation from normal life, as African Americans were born into a life of extremity. They lived and died in a world of violence. This violence perpetrated by the slavocracy was not the exception, but the rule. It begs the question then of how to expand our understanding of trauma beyond a baseline of normativity.
- 3.
Term used by Heinz Hartmann (1939). Psycho-Analysis and the Concept of Health. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 20: 308–321.
- 4.
My emphasis.
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Gibson, D.G. (2018). The Intersubjective Matrix of the Slavocracy: Experiencing the World of Frederick Douglass. In: Frederick Douglass, a Psychobiography. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75229-7_2
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