Freud grounded racial paranoia in displaced homosexual desire for the father

Evidence

The key authorization for this move is to be found in Freud’s 1922 paper “Some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality.” In this essay, centered on a clinical study of the Daniel Schreber case, Freud argues that in paranoid states of mind socially taboo impulses are transferred from the subject to the object where they can become the focus of aggression. In the case of men, the forbidden subject is the boy’s submissive homosexual desire for the father, which covers over the underlying parricidal impulse; in the case of the paranoiac this repressed hatred is displaced into a generalized hatred and urge to destruction randomly expressed against socially undesirable objects. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1279

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader knowledge of Freud’s Schreber analysis and the history of psychoanalytic social theory. — connects to: Fromm’s early social psychology critiqued Freud’s purely libidinal account of authority — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 417; Freud resolved the social bond as brotherly identification plus father-love — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 147