Abstract
African Americans have been acquainted with prolonged, massive, and repeated trauma since the first ship arrived in the “New World” with shackled black bodies bound in its bowels. Stolen from Africa and transported to colonial America under brutal and inhumane conditions, enslaved Africans suffered the loss of homeland, family, and a sense of the world as a secure place. For many black people, their worldviews and structures of meaning were disrupted and radically changed. Trust in others was undermined. Basic structures of the self were assaulted, producing profound alterations in identity. The shock of being forcibly pulled from one’s home, eliminated from one’s community, and ousted from one’s homeland has had enduring effects. Brenner concurs,
It is a massive trauma that viciously assaults one’s identity and all the basic assumptions one has about one’s place in the world…. The murder of loved ones, the confiscation of property, the violent atrocities, the starvation, disease, beatings, torture, and slave labor, along with the lost hope for rescue due to feeling utterly forgotten by the world, further the decimation of one’s psyche…. For ethnic and religious groups with a long history of repeated attempts to annihilate them, we find elements of their pasts incorporated into their cultural identity.1
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Notes
Ira Brenner, Psychic Trauma: Dynamics, Symptoms and Treatment (New York: Jason Aronson, 2004), 115.
Freud, as a European Jew, personally experienced the trauma of cultural imperialism and suffered as a racialized “Other.” His experience as a racialized “Other,” I believe, informs a trauma theory that sheds light on the collective transformations and adaptations that occur in relation to the imposition of disruptive hegemonic cultural ideals. In so doing, Freud also provides a psychoanalytic rationale for psychocultural resilience and sociopolitical resistance. The development of Freud’s thought cannot be divorced from his own traumatic encounters with racism and imperialism. However, Freud’s work, like that of any other scholar, has been informed by a diverse set of factors, including the larger society in which he lived. These forces, along with others, created the unique social context out of which Freud’s thought emerged and was given meaning. See Celia Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
Also see Sander L. Gilman, Freud, Race and Gender (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) and
Janet Liebman Jacobs and Donald Capps, eds., Religion, Society, and Psychoanalysis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997).
Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (New York: Verso, 2003), 27.
Gordon R. Dodge, “In Defense of a Community Psychology Model for International Psychosocial Intervention,” in Handbook of International Disaster Psychology , vol. 1, ed. Gilbert Reyes and Gerald A. Jacobs (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 54.
Neil J. Smelser, “Psychological and Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 38.
See Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 1.
Piotr Sztompka, “The Traumaof Social Change, ” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 162.
Erik H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 298.
Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society , trans. and ed. J. Matthew Ashley (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2007), 89.
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence— from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 8.
Yael Danieli, ed., International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), 4.
See Joy Leary, Post-traumatic Slave Syndrome (Milwaukie, OR: Uptone Press, 2005);
Omar Reid, Sekou Mims, and Larry Higginbottom, Post Traumatic Slavery Disorder (Charlotte, NC: Conquering Books, 2005);
Na’im Akbar, Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery (Tallahassee, FL: Mind Productions, 1996).
See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012).
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle , trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 24.
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 6.
Kareen Ror Malone and Stephen R. Friedlander, eds., The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 191.
James J. DiCenso, The Other Freud: Religion, Culture and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1999), 44.
See Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Homi K. Bhabha, Location of Culture (New York: Routledge Classics, 1994), 63–64.
Ashis Nandy, “The Uncolonized Mind,” in Exiled at Home , ed. Ashis Nandy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 109.
Richard Majors and Janet Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (New York: Touchstone, 1992), 59.
Freud came to realize that his earlier formulations did not suf- ficiently explain the mechanism of repression and how the self was protected against traumatizing stimuli. Repression could not be based in the instincts, since the instincts were precisely what were being repressed. Some entity or structure within the person had to be capable of transcending and censoring external stimuli and internal impulses, allowing them to be repressed, sublimated, or expressed. In response, Freud puts forth a “structural model” of the “self” comprised of three different kinds of agencies—the ego, id, and super-ego. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents , trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961).
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion , trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 14.
Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 186.
Wade Nobles, “Introduction,” in Psychological Storms: The African American Struggle for Identity , ed. Thomas A. Parham (Chicago: African American Images, 1993), x.
Sharon D. Welch, Communities of Resistance and Solidarity (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1985), 19.
See Fanon’s discussion in Wretched of the Earth , trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
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© 2016 Cedric C. Johnson
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Johnson, C.C. (2016). Forgetting to Remember. In: Race, Religion, and Resilience in the Neoliberal Age. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137526144_4
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