Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice

A Psychoanalytical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Dynamics of Social Exclusion and Discrimination

Lene Auestad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367102753
• eBook ISBN: 9780429918643
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book helps us understand the current resurgence of social prejudice against ethnic minority groups, the logics of scapegoating and the resulting violence. Our time is characterised by a growth in expressed hostility and violence towards people who are perceived as 'others'. Hatred towards and discrimination against minorities is on the rise. This book presents a new understanding of prejudice, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, islamophobia, sexism and homophobia. It combines philosophy with psychoanalytic thinking, sociology and psycho-social studies, analysing the unconscious elements of social processes. The author makes a case for framing a questioning of prejudice, not in terms of normality versus pathology or deviance, but in what is socially unconscious. Hypocrisy and double standards are inherent in our social practices, reflecting the contradictions present in our thinking about these issues: that we both believe and do not believe in equality.

CHAPTER ONE

Subjectivity and absence: prejudice as a psychosocial theme

Lene Auestad

“How come I’ve never seen you people here before?”

“Because we are the people you do not see”

(Knight, 2002)

This chapter aims to examine prejudice as a psychosocial field of study. The term “psychosocial” refers to theoretical approaches that strive to integrate a psychological understanding of human subjectivity with attention to the impact of social situatedness.⁵ Against the background of my understanding of respect as involving an ability to see people both, and simultaneously, as subjects and as objects, I can identify with the psychosocial project of aiming to avoid psychological reductionism, which disregards social circumstances, on the one hand, and social reductionism, which disregards subjectivity as active interpretation, on the other. The chapter makes a case for framing a questioning of prejudice, not in terms of normality vs. pathology or deviance, but to look for it in what is socially unconscious. It is argued that psychoanalytic studies of prejudice as a feature of the prejudiced person’s subjectivity leave out the extent to which this phenomenon is founded on a silent social consensus. The social norm, the prejudice that “works”, is left untouched. Using Michael Balint’s theoretical reflections on trauma, I argue that assessments of whose subjective responses and evaluations count are themselves socially structured. This model, and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, is used to show how, when detachment becomes an unqualified epistemic aim, prejudices are concealed and preserved rather than addressed. The phenomenon of prejudice reveals that psychosocial studies should be concerned not only with subjectivity, but equally with what is absent from subjectivity on an individual and social level—with positions which have been rendered unreal, or meaningless. In other words, I present an argument as to why psychoanalytic thinking is of interest to social studies, with its focus on what is unconscious, and otherwise left out, and also why a critical social focus is of interest to psychoanalysis, with its focus on the impact of power relations on what can and cannot, and what need and need not, be made conscious, individually and socially.

The phenomenal qualities of prejudice

In an interview with Juliet Mitchell, in the context of speaking of creative artists as well as analysts, Enid Balint said the following: “to perceive something you have not perceived before is terribly difficult; we fight against it like mad” (1993, p. 235). “Like the physical,” Freud wrote in 1915,

the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be. We shall be glad to learn, however, that the correction of internal perception will turn out not to offer such great difficulties as the correction of external perception – that internal objects are less unknowable than the external world. (1915e, p. 171)

If this is indeed the case, we might wonder whether it is a cause for consolation or for increased worry.

The phenomenon of prejudice presents itself, one the one hand, in most brutal and violent forms, and this is the kind of manifestation that catches the eye, and then sometimes becomes an object of study. What we then have is a study of a subject who appears as more prejudiced than the average. Thus, it tends to become an investigation not into the prevailing social norms, but into an aberration. When psychoanalytic studies focus on prejudice as a feature of the prejudiced person’s subjectivity, the extent to which this phenomenon is founded on a silent social consensus remains in the dark. The prejudice that “works”, because it agrees with a social norm, is left untouched. When one tries to examine it, it tends to appear as something vague, indistinct, uncertain. Dalal (2002) opens his book on racism by pointing to the experience of trying to sort the origin of his anxiety in encountering a white Britain as internal or external, or, rather, what weight to assign to each, and it is in the nature of the problem that such final sorting remains highly difficult.

If, rather than focusing on the abnormally prejudiced individual vs. the normal society, or on a distinction between being subject to social pressure and having a motivation that is substantially one’s own, we aim to look for condensation and displacement as evidence of prejudice in social space, we will find multiple examples of groups being naturalised and homogenised in the media and in public discourse. In instances where someone attempts to nuance the picture, to introduce more complexity, and this attempt is rejected as irrelevant, it provides evidence not only of the respondent’s stiffness, rigidity of character, extrapunitiveness, and, possibly, conventionality (Adorno et al., 1950), it also reveals that a power structure is operative in which this response is regarded as acceptable, and the quality of the speaker’s subjectivity might not be the most interesting feature of the situation.

An article in the Observer refers to a study where

Academics looked at the marks given to thousands of children at age 11. They compared their results in Sats, nationally set tests marked remotely, with the assessments made by teachers in the classroom and in internal tests…. The study concludes that black pupils perform consistently better in external exams than in teacher assessment…. Gloria Hyatt, a former secondary headteacher of black-Caribbean and Irish heritage, said the study confirmed a longstanding complaint made by ethnic minority groups…. “This is not discrimination or racism,” said Hyatt. “It is something unconscious”. (Asthana et al., 2010)

My position is that this does exemplify racism and discrimination, although it may well be the case that it is unconscious. This study does not reveal the teachers’ motivation; it only displays that whatever their motivation might be, their judgements are systematically distorted in such a way as to result in a pattern of racial discrimination. Some of the teachers might consciously adhere to racist beliefs, others might not. Let us grant, for the sake of the argument, what I regard as a probable assumption, that at least a significant portion of the teachers concerned thought of their assessments as being fair and unbiased; they simply saw a less good student, and marked his or her work accordingly, without entertaining any conscious beliefs about causal connections between skin colour or ethnicity and intellectual performance. If a large share of the teachers were indeed subjectively innocent, one might ask, “so what?” Morally and politically, the case opens up the question of what weight to assign to these actors’ conscious motivation.

Such examples lead me to conclude that psychosocial studies cannot only be about subjectivity. The phenomenon of prejudice reveals that it should also concern itself with what is absent from subjectivity, about what “we”, as any society or social unit, do and repeat (Freud, 1914g, 1939a), but do not, and cannot, think and experience. In what follows, I propose to use Balint’s model of trauma, built on Ferenczi’s writings on the subject, as a metaphor for how prejudice functions on a societal level. This model is one that enables one to think psychoanalytically in a more social way about the relationship between power, love, and responsiveness on the one hand, and subjectivity and its absence on the other.

Balint’s account of trauma

In the article “Trauma and object relationship” (1969), Balint argued that clinical experiences reveal that the structure of trauma has three phases. In the first phase, the child is dependent on the adult and is in a primarily trustful relationship (1969, p. 432). In the second phase, the adult, either once and suddenly or repeatedly, does something highly exiting, frightening, or painful. The child might be exposed to excesses of tenderness or excesses of cruelty, to severe overstimulation or rejection (1969, p. 432). The trauma is only completed in the third phase, when the child, in reaction to the second phase, attempts to obtain some understanding, recognition, and comfort and the adult behaves as if nothing had happened. The adult might be preoccupied with other matters or plagued by severe feelings of guilt, and might reproach the child with moral indignation or feel that his or her action is best redressed by a feigned ignorance. Balint’s claim is that, while an economic model focuses exclusively on the second phase, having in mind Freud’s definition, “We describe as ‘traumatic’ any excitations from the outside which are powerful enough to break through the [organism’s] protective shield” (1920g, p. 29), his own proposed three-phasic structure changes the basis for the theory of trauma from the field of one-person psychology to two-person psychology (1969, p. 432–433). In his view, the second phase is preceded by a trustful relationship and, crucially, is followed by a non-response that deprives the event of its character of reality. Bion’s concept of nameless dread can be seen to point to a similar phenomenon: “If the projection is not accepted by the mother,” he writes, the rejected feeling does not remain the same but becomes qualitatively different; it is “stripped of such meaning as it has” (1962a, p. 116). Thus it cannot be truly experienced but becomes indigestible, meaningless, that-which-cannot-be-thought. Like the bird mother that feeds the baby bird with food she had digested, Bion’s mother feeds the infant digested experience, leading to the growth of an ability to think (Auestad, 2010). In this case, there is a feeding of meaninglessness; the infant is being fed, and left with unthinkable, unpredictable, and assaulting occurrences. The situation is one where “the infant has a wilfully misunderstanding object—with which it is identified” (Bion, 1962a, p. 117). He or she becomes, incorporates, the misunderstanding object and is also, at the same time, the subject which is misunderstood and, thus, deprived of subjectivity.

Inherent in the common response of the racist, anti-Semite, misogynist, or homophobe, “My statement was not intended to be hurtful. You must be hypersensitive. You misunderstand me”, is a similar structure to the one seen in Balint’s account of trauma. It contains the claim that the speaker’s intention should be seen as real or valid, whereas the feeling and interpretation of the recipient should not. As in his description of the trauma’s third phase, the reality of the occurrence is denied. Moral indignation may enter in, as in the accusation of hypersensitivity, where the blame is allocated to the recipient. The speaker is reaffirming his or her own subjectivity and nullifying that of the other. To allude to Bion, the reaction of the recipient is deprived of its name; the position from which it could be articulated is not significant—it is not a meaningful experience. Finally, the recipient is invited, or forced, to identify with the speaker. This is the position, it is assumed, from which it makes sense to speak, thus, in so far as one is making sense, one is connecting with this position. Since the speaker’s version presents itself as being in line with “common sense” whereas the recipient appears as “radical”, a third party would be inclined to support the former, which appears as intuitively meaningful, while the second is on the edge of the universe of meaning. Thus, we have a situation where the supposedly neutral third party, in responding, to refer back to Balint, by “non-participating passive objectivity” (1969, p. 434), repeats the third phase of misunderstanding, of depriving the event of its reality. It has become non-existent.

The unconscious and experience

In describing the nature of the unconscious, Freud’s characterisations are mostly negative. We are sometimes aware of absences, lacks, holes in consciousness, and psychoanalysis provides a method for making inferences about how these gaps may be filled; “We infer a number of processes which are in themselves ‘unknowable’ and interpolate them in those that are conscious to us” (Freud, 1940a, p. 197). The description is counterfactual—“something occurred of which we are totally unable to form a conception, but which, if it had entered our consciousness” (1940a, p. 197) could have been rendered in a particular way. He later emphasised that almost everything we know about the id is of a negative character compared to the ego (1933a, p. 73). The unconscious is alien, something one does not identify with, as if it were someone else (1915e, p. 169). To the extent that it can be said to appear, is it in the form of absences, slips, errors, or as something sudden, devastating and overwhelming, seemingly attacking from behind, abruptly and unexpectedly?

Gadamer writes, “That experience refers chiefly to painful and disagreeable experiences does not mean that we are being especially pessimistic, but can be seen directly from its nature … Every experience worthy of the name thwarts an expectation” (2004, p. 350). It is an essentially negative process, wherein something is found not to be what we supposed it to be--it refutes false generalisations (2004, p. 347). Thus, it changes both the object and the perceiver, providing, rather than any particular insight, an insight into the limitations of humanity (2004, p. 351). It results not in a feeling of knowing everything better than anyone else, but in being radically undogmatic, in openness to having, and learning from, new experiences (2004, p. 350). Recall the contrasting account, from The Dialectic of Enlightenment, of anti-Semitism as a closed system of projection:

The inner depth of the subject consists in nothing other than the delicacy and wealth of the external world of perceptions. If the links are broken, the ego calcifies. If it proceeds positivistically: merely recording given facts without giving anything in return, it shrinks to a point; and if it idealistically creates the world from its own groundless basis, it plays itself out in dull repetition. (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1997, p. 189).

This is a description on an individual level, but how do we identify society as a closed system of projection? Where Freud spoke of collective neurosis with regard to group formations and patterns of culturally embedded beliefs (1912–1913, 1921c), the British tradition has spoken of psychotic functioning in relation to a social defence system (Jaques, 1953, 1955; Menzies Lyth, 1990), and Davids recently stated that to account for the fact that “racism occurs universally, not just in very disturbed individuals … we need to introduce the paradoxical idea of a normal pathological organization” (2009, pp. 178–179). But then the issue of the point of view from which this is assessed becomes problematic. In many psychoanalytically informed social analyses, it appears as if the idea of the ideally analysed analyst, as an embodiment of perfect neutrality, is not a theoretical fiction, but the reality.

More recent psychoanalytic theory, with its emphasis on counter-transference and interpersonal processes of projection and introjection, is in line with some of Gadamer’s epistemic points. A situation, writes Gadamer, is “a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision” (2004, p. 301), emphasising how one’s aim is not to disregard one’s own hermeneutical situation, but relate to it in order to understand at all (p. 321). It is a lack that he is not more frequently referred to by psychoanalysts, who alternate between descriptions of “reality” as socially situated and references to “understanding it as it really is” (Klein, 1975c[1935], p. 271), “the demands of reality”, “the objective situation” (Menzies Lyth, 1990, p. 452), where “reality” is conceived of as independent of any social context. In these and similar formulations, detachment appears to have become an unqualified epistemic aim—this position, I have argued, is misguided.

Two psychoanalytically orientated theorists who take a different stance are worth mentioning here: Dalal has emphasised how both therapist and patient are implicated in the reality of social oppression, and, importantly, has criticised purely internalist readings of clinical material on the ground that they reproduce what he terms “the double bind of the experience and the denial of racism” (2002, pp. 220–221), stating,

So, how might a black patient hear an interpretation from the white therapist, in this instance, the experience of social oppression, as a reflection of his or her inner dynamic? The black patient is quite likely to view such an interpretation with suspicion, in effect hearing the therapist saying “you have a chip on your shoulder, and what you experience as the racist edifice does not exist”. (Dalal, 2002, p. 220)

Bass, questioning the situatedness of the institution of American psychoanalysis, compared his analysis with a young black man, Mr A, and a second-generation Holocaust survivor, Ms B, stating that

despite the similar presentations, and despite the fact that both were in full-scale analysis, with Ms. B. I was acutely aware of the interface of psychodynamics and historical process, while with Mr. A. I was not, although in retrospect I believe I should have been. (Bass, 2003, p. 34)

His reflections reveal an awareness of the impact of sensitivity to historical detail; both its presence in the former case and his retrospective questioning of its absence in the latter speak to the author’s credit.

Gadamer emphasises how illuminating the situation that forms the precondition for our understanding is an always unfinished project (2004, p. 301). Thus, there is a limit to the extent to which the presuppositions that guide one’s enquiry can be spelt out, not only, if we think psychoanalytically, because something has not yet been posed as a problem, but because the enquirer forms part of a system that actively prevents such questioning from taking place, holds it back or keeps it out, and refutes such examination. These conditions are not only preconscious, not-yet-conscious, but socially repressed or split off. Now, if we think in terms of Balint’s three-phasic model, this state of affairs completes a series of violence, but one that is silently performed and not thought of as such. The answer to how we would recognise that we form a part of a socially instituted and upheld “closed cycle of projection” is that generally we do not, and it is only in exceptional circumstances that parts of these processes are illuminated.

Enforced splitting

In a passage in “Notes and fragments”, Ferenczi writes, “Possibly, complicated mechanisms (living beings) can only be preserved as units by the pressure of their environment. At an unfavourable change in their environment the mechanism falls to pieces” (1994a, p. 220). He later describes how, if beaten down by an overwhelming force that cannot be warded off, one “seems to resort to the subterfuge of turning round the idea of being devoured in [the following] way: with a colossal effort [one] swallows the whole hostile power or person” (1994a, p. 228), with resulting dismemberment. Klein, citing the former passage, refers to the ego’s “falling to pieces or splitting itself” (1975e, p. 5), to splitting both as a reaction and as an active process originating in phantasy. Although her formulation that the ego is incapable of splitting the object without also splitting itself (1975e, p. 6) reveals some of the concept’s potential significance for social analysis, its applicability is limited by the fact the fact that her emphasis is always on splitting as actively initiated by the subject. In Menzies Lyth’s (1990) study of nurses in a hospital, this direction of thinking is reversed. Her reliance is on Kleinian concepts, but it can be said to be Kleinian concepts turned round in the sense that her central claim occurs in the phrase “forced introjection of the social defence system” (1960, p. 459). The solitary nurse, rather than being the author of a phantasised scenario, is forced to “swallow” the system of defences already present before she arrived at the scene. It wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Subjectivity and absence: prejudice as a psychosocial theme
• CHAPTER TWO Primary process logic and prejudice
• CHAPTER THREE Contagion, conflict, and ambivalence: prejudice as transfer of shame and guilt
• CHAPTER FOUR Injurious speech and frames of mind
• CHAPTER FIVE Basic trust and alienation, or “we have nothing to reproach ourselves with”
• CHAPTER SIX Adaptation, containment, experience: Adorno, psychoanalytic developments, and the potential for social critique
• CHAPTER SEVEN Perspectivism and plurality: Arendt’s contribution to thinking about respect and prejudice
• CHAPTER EIGHT Responsibility and the unconscious: sketches for a psychoanalytically informed ethics
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX