Abstract
Psychoanalysis as a discipline has been slow to engage with the topics of race and racism. This chapter sets out a clinically derived model of how racial difference is processed in the mind. It argues that the mind relates to racism not as an abstract category but on the basis of a perceived difference between self and socially stereotyped other, which is enshrined in a specific internal object relationship. That relationship exists within a defensive organisation that is best conceptualised as a normal pathological organisation, which is seen as a universal feature of the human mind. The chapter brings forward clinical and other evidence to illustrate and support these propositions and goes on to consider their theoretical and metapsychological implications. It concludes by considering ways in which my formulation is consistent with clinical findings reported from analyses across the boundaries of race and culture and goes on to show how it may help to deepen and enrich such work.
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Notes
- 1.
This account, including quotations, is from a report of evidence given to the inquiry in The Guardian, 16 May 1998.
- 2.
It was the involvement of his countertransference feelings to the opponents of Nazism that, I argue, persuaded Freud to step back from the position he outlined in the above quotation on anti-Semitism .
- 3.
A derivative of this closer to consciousness is the idea of me as a foreigner trying to find my way in the terrain, alien to me, of his internal world .
- 4.
She was reassured that there was nothing more she could do.
- 5.
Mother and self are the first two.
- 6.
All of this was confirmed later, at a systemic level. It was to take extraordinary measures to eventually bring the killers to justice; and the police did place the victim’s family, including Brooks , under surveillance, a fact that they successfully concealed from the various Inquiries into these events, perjuring themselves in the process (Evans 2015).
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Davids, M.F. (2017). Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset. In: Mintchev, N., Hinshelwood, R. (eds) The Feeling of Certainty. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57717-3_5
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