Abstract
This chapter examines the personal stories, expressions, communications, feelings, and psychological patterns expressed by Frederick Douglass in all four autobiographical narratives. Such observations underwrite the concept of the interior force of being that is offered up in this project. Additionally, the concept of the intersubjective matrix is developed as well. The intersubjective milieu is a psychosocial space that represents the amalgamation of histories, heritages, cultures, religion, and other sociopolitical factors, all of which condition and inform individual and collective subjectivity. Understanding the reciprocal nature of how the intersubjective milieu affects individuals and groups and how it is in turn impacted by the same individuals and groups is essential to addressing the question of how we account for the subjectivity of Frederick Douglass in the extreme context of the slavocracy.
A man’s troubles are always half disposed of when he finds endurance the only alternative. I found myself here; there was no getting away; and naught remained for me but to make the best of it.
—Frederick Douglass ( 1881 , p. 27)
A man, without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even this it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise.
—Frederick Douglass ( 1855 , p. 247)
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Notes
- 1.
The healthy internalization of early childhood caregivers and/or significant others.
- 2.
Psychical and emotional tasks as espoused by traditional psychodynamic theory, while arguably useful to analyze various narratives in Douglass’ autobiographies , were secondary or tertiary at best. It is not that traditional psychodynamic paradigms lack explanatory power or hermeneutical relevancy. Indeed, in various pockets of existence, one could read the life of Douglass and other slave narratives through the lens of self-psychology, object relations, or relational theory. But any of the psychic tasks related to traditional psychoanalytic theories arguably would have been so severely undermined in the slavocracy that they would not yield significant discursive potentiality. Instead, I suggest that in the harsh context of the slavocracy whereby the larger psychosocial context denigrated and sought to destroy the humanity of an entire group of people, Douglass was fundamentally life seeking or in pursuit of what is defined in this project as the force of being.
- 3.
My emphasis.
- 4.
The contention that Douglass’ internal force of being was constitutional from birth is not wholly inconsistent with a key proposition of the psychology of the self and the paradigmatic shift it makes in asserting that from birth, the individual does not have to progress through developmental stages to become a self-aware being but experiences subjectivity from birth. From a self-psychological perspective, Tolpin (1989) posits an autonomous psychological construction from birth, noting that the person “is born with complexly functioning, designed-in equipment that makes for being a separate psychic entity, and independent center of initiative, impressions, and experience” (p. 309). Wolf (1991) contends that from birth, outside of any developmental scheme, the child is capable of interacting with the environment in a reciprocal fashion. For Wolf, “the nervous system is from the very beginning not a closed circuit but an interactive system in dialogue with its environment …We can now study the very early—perhaps at birth—emergence of an infant as an independent center of initiative who actively seeks selfobject experiences via interactive transactions” (p. 127). The only difference in Wolf’s and Tolpin’s position from what this project offers up is that instead of the search for objects being the primary psychological task, when the external context compels existence in extremity, one is equipped from birth with an interior force of being that seeks to experience selfhood by stimulating or effecting the intersubjective milieu in which the subject exists—thereby constituting an experience of self. In a cultural ecology that was constructed to dominate the sociopolitical, economic, religious, and theological imagination of the nation with the ideology of slavery (while simultaneously stifling black subjectivity ), the conception of an organic force of being, outside of any developmental scheme or interaction with the environment , best explains Douglass’ capacity to imagine and experience a selfhood that the broader environment rendered unimaginable.
- 5.
My emphasis.
- 6.
My emphasis.
- 7.
Hyper-arousal is considered a key symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. See Judith Herman (Herman, M.D. 1997).
- 8.
My emphasis.
- 9.
Another way of understanding this observation is to recognize the inverse relationship between a substantive interior force of being and the exterior grandiose usage of God-talk to explicate the mundane. That is to say, the more fortified one’s interior self-structure is, the less likely they are to engage God-talk to casually reflect upon the commonplace aspects of their life.
- 10.
My emphasis.
- 11.
Klein (1975) goes on to distinguish the close alliance between greed and envy noting that “greed aims primarily at completely scooping out, sucking dry, and devouring…whereas envy not only seeks to rob in this way, but also to put badness, primarily bad excrements and bad parts of the self into the mother … in order to spoil and destroy … in the deepest sense this means destroying her creativeness” (p. 181). Summers (1994) goes further in describing the inner workings and practical effects of envy arguing that “envy goes beyond hatred to the desire to injure … the most useful initial defense against envy is devaluation because denigration involves denial of the need for the object” (p. 81). Douglass’ depreciating description of Nelly actually demonstrates his need, desire, and subsequently, envy for the psychic capacity she displayed. While he recollects this incident in both books 2 and 3, his conclusion of the incident in book 2 is slightly more detailed and reflects extent to which Douglass was psychically and spiritually invested in this violent intersubjective space.
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Gibson, D.G. (2018). Reimagining Black Subjectivity: A Psychoanalysis 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_3
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