Psychoanalysis abandoned race as a topic after its founders fled to the West

Evidence

Issues of race and ethnicity were thus current, if largely disavowed within the psychoanalytic circle itself. Long before Kristallnacht and the book burnings, long before the trains began carrying Jews back from their asylum in the West to torture and death in the East, race was the largely unacknowledged touchstone of the early psychoanalytic debates. Yet with the fall of Vienna to the Nazis and the dispersal of the founding psychoanalysts to other countries, mainly of course to Britain and the USA (but also in some cases further afield to Latin America and South Africa), race paradoxically disappeared from the agenda. In so far as psychoanalytic concepts were applied to the analysis of racism it was largely by others, by sociologists, anthropologists, or historians, themselves often Jews and exiles from Nazism (viz. the Frankfurt School/New School for Social Research) who were sympathetic to Freud’s ideas. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1254

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School’s Adorno et al. applying psychoanalytic categories to racism while Freudian analysts themselves dropped the topic — ties to the reader’s wider sociology-of-knowledge and critical theory interests. — connects to: Race was central to early psychoanalysis but vanished from it after the Vienna dispersal — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1254
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: which specific mechanisms explain psychoanalysis dropping race at the very moment its practitioners were escaping fascism? The claim that refuge and assimilation motivated the erasure invites follow-up.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that a discipline born of Jewish emancipation erased race precisely when its practitioners emigrated from racial persecution is a multi-layered, somewhat counterintuitive historical claim worth sitting with.