Psychoanalytic frameworks can reframe racist violence and hatred

Evidence

Although the two approaches yield radically different accounts of mental life they both operate a general reduction of the structural properties of social institutions and groups, to the psychological characteristics of the individual human subjects who inhabit them. From the point of view of constructing a theory of racism, one of the key effects of psychoanalytic reductionism is that positions of powerlessness, inequality, or exclusion are devalorized as instances of the real; instead they are treated as the site of unconscious projections or compensations drawing on fantasies of omnipotence, castration, or abandonment. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1275 (#complicates, via linked claim)

All these examples show, however, is that in making these correlations Freudianism has not so much overcome its reductionism as diversified its effects. So how does it come about that a theory which so radically “deconstructs” the myth of the unitary subject in the clinical setting should operate with such an integrationist model of self and society when it comes to generalize its findings? To understand this turnabout we have to look at the intellectual division of labor between the various branches of the human sciences, and in particular the special relationship that psychoanalysis has come to entertain with sociology (Craib, 1998). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1297 (#complicates, via linked claim)

The unresolved question which recent critics of psychoanalysis have raised is how come that in a discipline that prides itself on such rigorous self-scrutiny, whose metapsychology boasts of its radical skepsis, and whose therapeutic endeavors are directed towards releasing the patient from the toils of compulsive repetition and the “false self,” such strategies of misrecognition persist, especially in the areas of race and ethnicity? Is there perhaps something intrinsic to the psychoanalytic method as such, something built into the structure of its hermeneutics, that not only makes such interpretations possible, but also actively generates and endorses them? — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1264 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Adorno and Horkheimer grounded anti-Semitism analysis in sadism and identification — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1421; Racism subtypes each stem from distinct psychopathologies in psychoanalytic theory — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1295; Psychoanalytic theories of racism have often been reductive and themselves racist — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1297 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Psychoanalytic accounts of racism reduce structural inequality to individual unconscious dynamics #complicates (0.88) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1275
• Psychoanalytic theories of racism have often been reductive and themselves racist #complicates (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1297
• Something intrinsic to psychoanalytic method generates misrecognition about race #complicates (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1264
• Postcolonial psychoanalytic theory builds ideal types detached from empirical reality of racism #complicates (0.80)
• A lazy psychoanalytic racism theory starts from established clinical constructs #complicates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1299
• Universal-psychology accounts of racism substitute an alibi for explanation #complicates (0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 634