Oedipus matters

Abstract

Using experience of working clinically in South Africa, a powerfully racialized society, this paper argues that the Oedipal period, associated in psychoanalytic theory with the formation of gender identity and the shaping of sexual desire, is also a period during which perception of racial identity affects entry into the social world. During this pivotal developmental period, marked by awareness of encounters with gender difference and experiences of erotic exclusion and inclusion, children also become aware of racial differences and their effects on class, privilege and custom. The paper suggests that the anxieties, competitive energy, hope, hate and dread that accompany the child's Oedipal strivings are frequently compounded by encounters with forms of social difference both in and beyond the family. Assumption of a gendered identity, in many contexts, is inseparable from the conscious and unconscious habitation of a racialized identity, which emerges during exactly the same period. Just as our gender identity is both simple and infinitely variable and complex, our awareness of our race is also on one level simple – ‘black/white’ – and on another extremely complex. The paper argues that the working through of Oedipal anxieties will cast light and shadow on every intimate relationship, and will also determine whether other kinds of difference, including racial difference, are met with fear or competitiveness, idealization or denigration, joyful curiosity or withdrawal. The argument draws on post-Freudian, relational and self-psychoanalytic theory, and emphasizes the variability of developmental paths and their construction in powerful social, economic and political contexts, all of which have fundamental effects on biology and bodies. Major influences on the argument are psychoanalytic gender theorists, specifically Jessica Benjamin and Jody Messler Davies, and the work of Franz Fanon.     

The talking cure: Wittgenstein's therapeutic method for psychotherapy,by John M. Heaton

This paper offers an outline of the challenges particular to intersubjective approaches to psychoanalytic psychotherapy in South Africa. Past experiences of deeply entrenched and racialized divisions between communities continue to shape the negotiation of power in therapeutic spaces, and affect participants’ capacity to engage freely with the exploration of unconscious communication. Examples are given of the ways in which race, class and gender difference may complicate, hinder or enrich intersubjective psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Some suggestions are made about the kinds of reflective work that need to be undertaken by psychotherapists in order to assume fully the burdens of history and to appreciate fully the opportunities offered by a society in transformation.     

A Relational Encounter with Race

Race remains one of the most highly charged subjects of discourse in our society. At a cultural level, white racial identity has become dissociatively split off from the rest of identity formation. A racialized subjectivity is usually carried by those with darker skin colors, whereas whiteness is experienced as an unmarked and invisible state. The author argues that whites have dissociated the historical position of the oppressor from collective consciousness, due to our inability to tolerate an identification with the aggressor. Our disavowal of race as constitutive of subjectivity ensures that race becomes a site for enactments.

This paper follows the transference-countertransference dynamics between an African American patient mandated to treatment and the author, a white analyst born in South Africa. The haunting presence of racial trauma infused the analysis. Focus is placed on the rich, often unmetabolizable experiences of race, including the ways in which the structure of the treatment recreated the racial dynamics of slavery.     

Racialized physical space as cultural product

We argue for incorporating physical space into the psychological study of race. Specifically, we review historical and sociological work explaining how physical space (e.g., houses, rivers, neighborhoods, and nations) has been used to construct race and racial hierarchy, leaving physical space structurally racialized. This structural racialization, we propose, has led people to think of physical space in racial terms, creating mental images of race that include physical space characteristics. We explain how these mental images may influence race‐related psychological processes (e.g., person perception and social identity threat). We also detail evidence that these mental images of racialized space shape how people perceive and interact with space, in ways that likely reinforce its structural racialization. We therefore frame physical space as a cultural product, situating it within the mutually constitutive nature of culture and psyche. This expanded approach to studying race can facilitate a fuller understanding of all the ways in which psychological processes contribute to racial inequality.     

Against “Transracialism”: Revisiting the Debate

This article critically reflects on some of the themes and assumptions at stake in the “transracialism” controversy, and connects them to important works in critical race theory: namely Rey Chow's notion of “coercive mimeticism” and Sara Ahmed's critique of white liberal multiculturalism. It argues that the analytic account of “race” that Tuvel draws upon in her article—Sally Haslanger's—is politically problematic, both on its own terms and in light of broader reflections on racialized and gendered power relations. In particular, I critique Haslanger's assumption that all racial identities exist on the same conceptual plane: that a single variable definition of “race” can be applied to any particular racialized group—including white and nonwhite racial identities. This erases racialized power relations, especially where, in liberal “multicultural” nations, whiteness constitutes the implied standard against which an appearance of “racial difference” is conjured. Finally, I extend my argument to the issue of treating “race” and gender analogously. Rejecting this move, I propose an alternative way of conceptualizing these as analytically distinct, yet constitutively interdependent, phenomena. In order to situate the debate historically, I consider an example of “racial transgression” from twentieth‐century China.     

Discussion of “Unraveling Whiteness”: Commentary on Paper by Melanie Suchet

In this discussion I consider several influences on the contemporary project of deconstructing racism and the concept of racialized subjectivity. This discussion applauds the turn in Suchet's work toward self-examination in a consideration of the experience of race and racism. Suchet's work moves the debates about racialized subjectivities into a deeper and more complex understanding of all the ways in which identifications and attachments cross race and class lines for many individuals. This discussion focuses on Suchet's treatment of the power of hybridic and biracial identifications, beginning with autobiographical material from Suchet's own childhood in South Africa. In this discussion of “Unraveling Whiteness” I integrate psychoanalytic concepts of enigmatic signification (the work of Laplanche) into a discussion of early attachment, and relational configurations with children and nonparental caretakers. The question of trauma or potential transformation in interracial experience is discussed, and some distinctions between American and South African experience are considered.     

The Ties That Bind

In this paper, I define a psychoanalytic object broadly, as an object that “matters” to an individual. My focus is on how someone becomes a psychoanalytic object and how our ideas about this process lead us to a particular conception of an analyst’s mutative role. Further, I examine the function of a psychoanalytic object in one’s inner world. One view of the object leads to a “dynamic” emphasis, examining the object’s role in a system of unconscious conflict and compromise, whereas a second, overlapping line of thought leads to a “structural” focus, emphasizing the object’s role in developing, stabilizing, and often maintaining compromised internal psychic capacities. These capacities are developmental achievements that form the context of conflict and compromise. Dynamic and structural emphases lead to different clinical stances. In considering the object and evolving conceptions of the object within Freudian psychoanalysis (my focus), we simultaneously review the evolution of Freudian psychoanalysis itself.     

Racial Enactments in Dynamic Treatment

The aim of this paper is to discuss racial enactments for what they might contribute to our understanding of the intersubjectivity of race and racial experience. “Racial enactments” designate interactive sequences embodying the actualization in the clinical situation of cultural attitudes toward race and racial difference. I present examples of racial enactments in several social contexts, as well as in an extended clinical vignette. I consider racial enactments in the light of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and suggest that collaborative methods facilitate the effective analysis of racial material.     

The Problem of Thinking in Black and White: Race in the South African Clinical Dyad

Race, as it presents itself within the clinical dyad as an aspect of the relationship between therapist and patient, has scarcely been written about from an experience-near perspective within the South African context. This paper focuses on the difficulty of speaking and writing about race. It contends that race as a construct and as an aspect of subjectivity has the potential to interrupt the therapist’s capacity to think, in Bionian terms, and to prevent entry into the reverie that is crucial to the creation of an analytic third. Written through a relational psychoanalytic lens and drawing on the concepts of the normative unconscious and the anti-analytic third, the paper refers to clinical vignettes to illustrate the collapse in thinking and the progression to beginning to think, anew, about the race-nuanced, intersubjective space between patient and therapist.     

Mixed Race and the Negotiation of Racialized Selves: Developing the Capacity for Internal Conflict

The author uses contemporary psychoanalytic theory in further understanding the negotiation of conflict and dissociation in biracial patients who are both African-American and White. Drawing on the work of contemporary theorists who have made efforts to navigate the relationship between inner and outer worlds in our understanding of race from a psychoanalytic perspective, the author examines the relationship between race, culture, and internalized self-other relations—how they interact with each other and impact splitting and dissociative processes among self-states. The author argues for a notion of the unconscious as one that contains historical trauma related to race relations that influences the developing capacity to sustain internal conflict between opposing self-states borne out of this trauma. The author shows how society works against the integration of racialized self-states and interferes with the capacity to contain conflict. Through an extended clinical vignette from an analysis of a mixed-race patient, the author looks at the interplay of self-states between a White analyst (author) and a mixed-race patient (African-American and White) as manifested through a series of enactments and the unconscious “mating” between dissociated self-states in both patient and analyst. The author argues that the analyst's engagement of his or her own dissociated self-states and containment of internal conflict is critical to aiding the patient in moving toward greater integration.     

Beyond Racial Visibility and Invisible: Reply to Hartman and Sheehi

In responding to the rich discussions from Stephen Hartman and Lara Sheehi (this issue), the author builds on the ways each discussant explores how invisibility and visibility shape phantomatic obstacles to reckoning with race in psychoanalytic theory and practice. A struggle with the nexus of racial and other discursive hierarchies of interpellation can serve to liberate clinical movement, otherwise infected by incarcerating categories. This effort is demonstrated to challenge both patient and analyst to find ways to trans-form racial stereotypes of rescuer and victim. Escape from such discursive traps as understanding, empathy, containment and/or recognition challenges the analyst, as Hartman reminds, to embrace vulnerability as a guiding muse and nonrecognition as a source of learning. Such efforts are offered to facilitate a trans-formation process for both clinical participants as intersubjects, complexly constituted by conscious and unconscious ideological (Sheehi, this issue) histories and affiliations.     

A shadow concept

The author focuses on the signifi cance of preconscious thinking, and its relationship to what we think of as unconscious fantasies. He reopens Freud's forgotten struggle with preconscious thinking, while he explores preconscious thinking as the basis for thinking about psychoanalytic treatment. This includes our goals in bringing an idea to the analysand's attention, and the role of transitional space where thoughts and feelings can be played with.     

Fanon’s Vision of Embodied Racism for Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice

This text is built around a clinical encounter illustrative of the challenge/struggle for recognizing and working in terms of race. The author employs perspectives and terms emerging from a vision developed by Frantz Fanon to represent issues of race for psychoanalytic practice that have begun to be recognized and discussed recently. These issues open up unprecedented challenges for theory and practice, particularly as they reveal the myopia of the terms and discourse with which we make meaning and practice clinically. The author examines the experience of his own need to perform in the role of rescuer, in tension with surrendering to the limits of an attempt at recognition within the discursive terms of a racist social order. In particular, the author points to the limitations of verbal re-presentational categories/models in currently accepted psychoanalytic discourse as well as in the capacities of both analyst and patient to re-present complex, emotionally difficult to bear, racialized experience. The author demonstrates the clinical value of expanding analytic attention to embodied registrations as one way of surrendering to this myopia of theory, and the effects of amnesia and/or erasure that racist discourse can have on re-presentations of traumatic histories for both patient and analyst.     

A Country of Two: Race and Social Class in an Immigrant Therapeutic Dyad

This paper explores some of the ways in which social structures and fantasies organized around race and social class emerge in the intersubjective space created by a patient and a therapist who emigrated from the same country. Incorporating some of his own experiences of identity and otherness, the author discusses, through the lens of his countertransference, how communicating with the patient in their native language allowed for access to early internal object-relations, unconscious threats to his sense of belonging, racialized self-states, and feelings of shame associated to some of these dissociated self-states rooted in historical oppression and trauma. The author suggests that the “country of two” populated by patient and therapist is a dynamic co-created space, that emerges from the dialectic interplay of sameness and difference along the lines of race, social class, and culture.     

Living Entities that Join and Separate Us: A Discussion of “Trump Cards and Klein Bottles: On the Collective of the Individual”

González’s paper (this issue) strives to deepen the field of psychoanalytic thinking and the growing body of theory bridging psyche and society, by reaching to group theory and fashioning an unconscious internal structure for the social links alive within us. His paper represents an incredibly ambitious, rich, and highly complex synthesis of aspects of classical theory, object relations, relational, neo-Kleinian, Winnicottian, intersectional, feminist, multiple group, link, and critical social psychoanalytic theories. In my discussion I will position González’s ideas within the matrix of the Bionian psychic apparatus and field theories; followed by a response to his personal and clinical examples of the collective in the individual in the aftermath of the Trump election, and the challenges before us.     

The resistances to psycho-analysis: an old devil in modern clothing?

This paper addresses the organizational resistance to psychoanalytic thinking within the public services. The paper begins with a look at Freud's proposal that resistance to psychoanalytic theory is provoked by his assertion that sexual impulses underlie much of human activity. The author suggests that similar unconscious resistance to psychoanalytic thinking is present in organizations today, but that which we in the modern world find more unacceptable than sex as such is to be confronted with our own essential vulnerability. It is argued that because psychoanalytic therapy makes us aware of the limits of our ability to control our emotional experience, it evokes resistance at the individual and organizational level. Therapies that promote mastery and control are more acceptable because they allow these defences to be maintained and sometimes reinforced. The consequences of this in terms of loss of creativity are explored.     

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Education–Occupation Mismatch Status Among Immigrants in South Africa and the United States

In this study, a comparative–international approach is used to examine race–ethnic disparities in education–occupation mismatch status among immigrants. Using data from the USA and South Africa, this study finds that immigrants are most likely to be undereducated, or have less schooling for their jobs, when their racial characteristics are similar to those of the local racial majority. Black immigrants in South Africa and White immigrants in the USA are the most likely to be undereducated. Having racial characteristics similar to those of the local racial majority is associated with a lower likelihood of overeducation among immigrants.     

Role taking in online "classrooms": what adolescents are learning about race and ethnicity

Adolescents recruited from chat rooms were interviewed via instant messaging about their interracial and interethnic experiences online. The types of messages participants sent and received about race on the Internet were identified using thematic analysis. Of particular interest within these online exchanges was what and how participants learned about racial issues. Data revealed that racialized role taking--the adoption and enactment of race-related identities--was a primary means of learning about race in the online settings adolescents visited. Participants assumed these identities in 6 capacities: as sympathizers, advocates, discussants, witnesses, targets, and friends. In doing so, they learned a wide range of information from their interracial and interethnic interlocutors, including various cultural practices and belief systems, the consequences of racial prejudice, and the ways in which racial oppression affects the lives of people of color. Participants were also exposed to negative stereotypes and racial prejudice against their own and other ethnic groups online. Findings underscore the need to counter online racial prejudice and promote the more positive aspects of what adolescents learn about race and ethnicity online.     

‘The Inner Citadels of the Color Line’: Mapping the Micro‐Ecology of Racial Segregation in Everyday Life Spaces

The role of racial segregation in perpetuating racial prejudice and inequality has been widely investigated by social scientists. Most research has concentrated on the macro‐sociological organization of institutions of residence, education and employment. In this paper, we suggest that such work may be usefully complemented by research that investigates the so‐called ‘micro‐ecology of segregation’ in everyday life spaces – the dynamic, largely informal network of social practices through which individuals maintain racial isolation within settings where members of other race groups are physically co‐present. Developing this argument, we discuss some historical examples of research on the micro‐ecological dimension of race segregation in the United States. We also draw examples from an ongoing program of work on everyday practices of contact and segregation in post‐apartheid South Africa. The paper concludes by exploring some conceptual and methodological implications of treating racial segregation as a micro‐ecological practice.     

On the alpha-function, chaotic cats, and unconscious memory

Wilfred Bion, the noted psychoanalyst, introduced the term “alpha-function” to refer to mental operations that transform raw sense data into elements of experience that can be stored as unconscious memory. The paper weaves a theoretical thread between supposedly orthogonal fields of inquiry (Bion's psychoanalysis, chaotic systems, biology, Peircean semiotics) to (a) suggest that the alpha-function may be interpreted in terms of a chaotic transformation known as “Arnold's Cat Map” and (b) present a novel conception of unconscious memory.