Interrogating Whiteness in Psychoanalysis

In memory of Toni Morrison, February 18, 1931-August 5, 2019.
American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, truth-teller…

Dr. Morrison has been my favorite author since I read “The Bluest Eye” in 1984. Her writing forced me again and again back to my forgetting, toward remembering.

Here is one of my favorite pieces of her writing, the end of her 1987 novel “Beloved.”

Submitted by Julie Leavitt, MD
President, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, San Francisco
August 8, 2019

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind–– wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.

“Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her all away.

“It was not a story to pass on.

“They forgot her like a bad dream. After they made up their tales, shaped and decorated them, those that saw her that day on the porch quickly and deliberately forgot her. It took longer for those who had spoken to her, lived with her, fallen in love with her, to forget, until they realized they couldn’t remember or repeat a single thing she said, and began to believe that, other than what they themselves were thinking, she hadn’t said anything at all. So in the end, they forgot her, too. Remembering seemed unwise. They never knew where or why she crouched, or whose was the underwater face she needed like that. Where the memory of the smile under her chin might have been and was not, a latch latched and lichen attached its apple-green bloom to the metal. What made her think her fingernails could open locks the rain rained on?

“It was not a story to pass on.

“So they forgot her. Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep. Occasionally, however, the rustle of a skirt hushes when they wake, and the knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seem to belong to the sleeper. Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative––looked at too long––shifts, and something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can touch it if they like, but they don’t, because they know things will never be the same if they do.

“This is not a story to pass on.

“Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there.

“By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamour for a kiss.

“Beloved.”

Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 274-5.

Melanie Klein, a founding parent of psychoanalysis, writes in “Early Stages of the Oedipus Complex”:

The early feeling of not knowing has manifold connections. It unites with the feeling of being incapable, impotent, which soon results from the Oedipus situation. The child also feels this frustration the more acutely because he knows nothing definite about sexual processes. In both sexes the castration complex is accentuated by this feeling of ignorance. (1928)

The desire to know can be linked to a desire to overcome helplessness and achieve mastery over bodily sensation and environmental happenings. The epistemophilic impulse is a response to feeling powerless against what Winnicott describes as “falling to pieces.” But what happens when society itself privileges the epistemophilic drive to categorize over the complexity of difference and multiplicity of viewpoints? A desire for mastery over our environments and bodies easily translates to a desire for mastery over other types of unknowns, including differences between cultures and communities by way of patriarchy, colonialism, the “doctrine of discovery”, and racism. The United States has a long history of colonizing the body of the “other” in the service of privileging those admitted into the category of “white” which separates and categorizes people in a way that can be reified, codified, and upheld by law.

Whiteness as it exists in America is a structural, social, political, economic phenomenon which creates and perpetuates violent and exploitative hierarchies for the sake of maintaining power for those associated with European descent and white skin color. Whiteness can be internalized, it can be interpellated, it can shapeshift to determine who is white and who isn’t in order for some to maintain their power. It is used to dehumanize, other, categorize, and separate. It maintains its power by remaining invisible and unquestioned. We live in whiteness in this country. Founded on genocide and the psychic and physical enslavement of generations of people, our cultural millieu is saturated with messages about race and othering. Our psychoanalytic institutes and theory are not immune to this phenomenon. Psychoanalytic institutes and other psychoanalytic spaces are, generally speaking, white spaces, and the whiteness of these spaces is not often acknowledged by its members. Instead, we move toward a desire to diversify the representation of bodies in our spaces, even though the same patterns of whiteness continue. I argue that it’s not enough to invite diverse representations of people into these spaces and call them diversified. Rather, the spaces themselves, and the unconscious assumptions psychoanalysts hold about whiteness via our theories and sociocultural millieu, must be interrogated in order to dismantle the beliefs and systems that have privileged whiteness in our field. This paper describes the author’s personal journey on interrogating whiteness in their psychoanalytic training program, as well as what it will require from our institutes and members in unpacking internalized systems of power and white supremacy.

contributed by Molly Merson