Deep South racism let whites project Oedipal fears onto blacks

Evidence

This paper has been the single most important influence on subsequent psychoanalytic interpretations of racism. In Sterba’s analysis, blacks are interpreted as playing the role of an imaginary young sibling - they are unwelcome intruders and as such provide a defense against or displacement of the patient’s oedipal anxieties. Sterba argues that the repressed fear/hatred of the father associated with the boy’s passive homosexual desire for him is projected onto blacks. Why? Because in the culture of the Deep South at this time blacks were legitimate scapegoats; therefore they could be the substitute object of both homosexual desire and its aggressive disavowal, thus allowing a benign paternal imago of the (white) father to be sustained. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1281 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

As these examples show, there are “family resemblances” between different Oedipal forms but also crucial differences. It is not the case that the positive Greek Oedipus is the universal norm and all the others variants, or that where the “normal” features do not exist there are no Oedipal relations at all. Rather, within the erotically desirable circle of kin (including servants and other members of the household), a particular culture selects certain relations for Oedipalization, that is, as the source of its myths and the focus of psychic conflict, because these relations are structurally significant for its reproduction. It also follows that some relations which are erotically charged may not in fact be “Oedipalized” at all. This raises the intriguing possibility that in Western cultures where “race relations” have become increasingly sexualized, this may be the result of a process of de-Oedipalization, or rather a cultural regression to pre-Oedipal formations of self and other. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1367 (#complicates, via linked claim)

There has been no shortage of critics to argue that the attempt to create a general theory of the human condition out of an ancient Greek myth and on the basis of clinical data obtained from neurotic white middle-class Viennese is a case of blatant ethnocentrism. Freud’s defenders, whilst conceding that some of his attitudes and opinions are undoubtedly those of a “man of his culture and time,” nevertheless argue that his fundamental discoveries transcend these limitations and, with suitable modification, can be applied to other cultures and other times. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1360 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Fromm interpreted the Jewish Sabbath through the Freudian father-killing and Oedipal framework. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 213; Study of racism’s psychic roots neglected pre-Oedipal mechanisms until Theweleit. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1370; Apartheid grew out of whites’ racialized fear of contamination and extinction — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1505 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Psychoanalytic readings reduced Southern anti-black racism to displaced oedipal anxieties #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1281
• Cultures select which kin relations become Oedipalized, so no single Oedipal form is universal. #complicates (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1367
• The Oedipal theory’s universality was challenged as ethnocentric by its critics. #complicates (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1360