White Privilege

Psychoanalytic Perspectives

Neil Altman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367503505
• eBook ISBN: 9781000199857
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

White Privilege: Psychoanalytic Perspectives looks at race and the significant role it plays in society and in clinical practice. Much of the effort going into racial consciousness-raising rests on the concept of unearned "white privilege". In this book, Neil Altman looks deeply into this notion, suggesting that there are hidden assumptions in the idea of white privilege that perpetuate the very same racially prejudicial notions that are purportedly being dismantled.

The book examines in depth the structure of racial categories, polarized between white and black, that are socially constructed, resting on fallacious ideas of physical or psychological differences among peoples. Altman also critically examines such related concepts as privilege, guilt, and power. It is suggested that political positions are also artificially polarized into categories of "liberal", "left" and "conservative", "right", in ways that contribute to stereotyping between people with different political leanings, foreclosing mutual respect, dialogue, and understanding. Finally, White Privilege: Psychoanalytic Perspectives explores the implications for the theory and practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, discussing these ideas in detail and depth with clinical illustrations.

Drawing on Altman's rich clinical experience and many years of engaging with racial and societal problems, this book offers a new agenda for understanding and offering analytic practice in contemporary society. It will appeal to clinicians, psychoanalytic therapists, and anyone with an interest in social problems and how they manifest in society and in therapy today.

1 Whiteness

“White” in the United States is an identity category, not the literal color of anyone’s skin. The concept of “whiteness” seeks to define the essence of this category, inextricably tied to its polar opposite twin, “blackness”. The origin of this polarity lies in the enslavement of Africans, when the black-white polarity was shorthand for the slave-master polarity. The earlier distinction between European immigrants to North American soil, and Native Americans, never gained traction in this shorthand way; “black-white”, of course, is the archetypal polarity, and, anyway, Native Americans were eventually exiled, virtually annihilated, from European immigrant consciousness as they were literally banished and virtually annihilated physically. Color distinctions among European and other non-African immigrants, briefly salient, were eventually marginalized in the face of the archetypal power of black and white (Jacobson, 1999).

Of late, in the context of U.S. populism, white identity has attained new salience in public discourse. People with white identity have commonly been thought of as forming a privileged (economically and politically) elite by virtue of having “white” skin. Not included in this stereotype was the large number of rural, blue collar, economically impoverished white-identified people in the United States, those denigrated by terms such as “red necks”, “trailer trash” (as noted by Williams, 2010), and “hillbillies” (Vance, 2016). The multiplicity and variety of white-identified people in the United States was overlooked by those who focused on the unearned privilege of white people, and the oppression of people “of color”, triggering some of the anger about being invisible that Donald Trump has been able to tap into. Here is one of the perils of focusing on race without taking account of the interaction of race and social class. There is more than one way to identify as white, just as there is more than one way to identify with any of the race-based identity categories out there.

Race-based identity categories have recently become more salient as the racial diversity of the U.S. population has increased. As those who identify as people “of color”, or who are perceived that way in one form or another, have become a majority or near majority in many parts of the U.S., those identified as white may feel that their dominant status, economically and politically, in the U.S. is endangered. This sense of danger, of course, is exacerbated by the move out of the U.S. of many of the jobs once held by the once-dominant white majority. The economic plight of many white-identified people in the U.S. is one of the major ways that Trump has found to speak to the fears, anxieties, and anger of this large, though diminishing, group of people.

The racial landscape of the United States is organized by polarized and artificial color categories that act as code. The deceptively simple polarized categories obscure an underlying and much more complex reality, making the entire meaning system seem a matter of simple common sense. Coded color categories bond together, psychically, people who otherwise might have little in common in terms of family history, national and cultural history, and origin or economic status. Racial categories are nonetheless consequential for existing solely on the psychic level of self image and group identification. Racial categories are internally multiple, not one-dimensional (it matters if one is white with an Italian background vs. white from a Jewish background, black from the rural U.S. south vs. black from the Caribbean). They intersect and interact with social class, cultural, gender, sexual, and other categories. Racial categories organize where one stands in relation to the cross-currents of anger, anxiety, and guilt with which U.S. society is riven, and which strongly feed into U.S. politics. U.S. residents who state that undocumented immigrants from Mexico should go back where they came from, ignore the fact that, if you go back less than 200 years, some Mexican immigrants came from places that now have names like California and Texas. Once people are organized into polarized categories like “illegal” vs. “legal” or “immigrant” vs. “citizen”, the entire edifice of meaning is graspable at a glance as self-evident. Then, the boundaries between inner and outer, between the United States and the non-United States must be unambiguous and clear, and, of course, a concrete or electrified wall is needed.

The underlying realities of human similarity and difference are of a high enough order of complexity to be amenable to modeling only by chaos theory (Gleick, 1987); the interaction among categories in a political context has nonlinear and dynamic systemic qualities. Relatively enduring patterns of organization emerge, like eddies in a stream. These are called “attractors”, meaning that the elements of the system are attracted to, or pulled into, an organizational pattern like water pulled into a whirlpool, or air pulled into a hurricane, or space drawn into a black hole. Polarized concepts like racialized categories of black and white can, likewise, suck human elements, people, into a relatively stable pattern that is self-reinforcing, until a disruption, like the current wave of populism, emerges and the elements reorganize; the “white” category suddenly morphs, from the elite and powerful, to Donald Trump’s base.

Escape at Dannemora

Toni Morrison (1993) put the development of whiteness in the United States into the context of Europeans who immigrated to North America seeking freedom: freedom to practice their own religion, freedom to be socially mobile, to escape the bonds of social class and caste in the Old World. Constraints are inherent in life itself. The constraints the Europeans were used to may have been absent, but there was still land to be cleared, Native Americans to negotiate or fight with, families to feed, and so on. Furthermore, human beings tend to be terrified of freedom and the choices and responsibility entailed. Erich Fromm (1941)captured this terror in his book Escape from Freedom, in which he tried to come to terms with the appeal of dictators to masses of people in the wake of World War II and fascism. Morrison contends that faced with their own terror of freedom, and the new constraints on freedom in the New World, the Euro-Americans found in the enslavement of Africans a way to feel free by contrast.

Morrison’s discussion of freedom calls to mind the distinction made by Isaiah Berlin (1969) between what he called “positive liberty” and “negative liberty”. In his language, “negative liberty” means the absence of constraints. “Positive liberty” he defined as the freedom to do what you want, which is clearly a matter of interpretation. Morrison refers to negative liberty when she speaks of Euro-Americans feeling free by contrast with enslaved Africans. Negative liberty is what the European settlers sought when they came to North America expecting to be delivered from the constraints of religious oppression and the caste/class set-ups of Europe. Positive liberty is what the Europeans did not necessarily find in North America, for which they tried to substitute negative liberty. If positive liberty is the promise of whiteness, negative liberty is the consolation prize that obscures the reality of unfreedom. Negative liberty bears an impossible burden as the would-be substitute for positive liberty; slavery and other forms of oppression come to seem indispensable for this purpose.

In the Showtime film, Escape at Dannemora (Stiller, 2018), two inmates, David Sweat and Richard Matt facing life terms for murder concoct a scheme to escape, to find freedom, assisted by a female guard who helps them smuggle in tools to cut through bars, etc. Watching extended scenes of the inmates painstakingly sawing through iron bars, and thinking about what kind of life could possibly have been awaiting them as escapees, I wondered what kind of freedom they envisioned if they succeeded.¹

As it happened in real life, the inmates indeed escaped the prison and were on the run in the wilds of the Adirondack mountains for two months until they were found by State Police, who killed one of them and took the other back to prison where solitary confinement awaited him. The guard who had assisted them was convicted and imprisoned for her role in assisting the escape.

What did freedom mean to these people? What was so compelling in their idea of freedom that they would devote so much time and energy to its pursuit, despite the obvious constraints that awaited them if they had completely succeeded?

At one point in the film Matt turns to Sweat as they sawed through iron bars in the bowels of the prison inquiring about how long he had been in the prison. After Sweat informs him that he had been in Dannemora for 12 years, Matt comments that this must be the first time in 12 years that no one knew where he was. One definition of freedom, then, rests on the absence of surveillance and control. For Matt and Sweat, positive liberty meant the freedom to saw through iron bars for months and years, the freedom to work toward the goal of negative liberty, i.e. for freedom from imprisonment, the ability to escape surveillance and control.

As a meditation on freedom, on the nature of positive and negative liberty, Escape at Dannemora invites contemplation of how a sense of freedom is constructed—negative liberty by contrast with people who are relatively more constrained than oneself, positive liberty by whatever action gives one a feeling of meaningfulness through agency. The existence of prison, or slavery as Morrison points out, facilitates a sense of negative freedom, while nearly any activity defined as agentic creates a sense of positive liberty.

White guilt and reparation

In the Kleinian theoretical schema, depressive position guilt is resolved by efforts at reparation. When one feels one has damaged a loved person, that damage, in most cases, cannot be undone. Guiltiness, discussed above, consists in magical efforts to undo damage and a sense of guilt, e.g. by a hasty apology that amounts to lip service. Reparation acknowledges damage that cannot be undone. Reparation is different from repair; repair directly seeks to fix the problem resulting from destructive action. Repair may be a subset of reparation in a situation amenable to repair. Reparation may include any action that resets the balance of love and constructive impulses against hate and destructiveness. A sense of destructiveness arises when a sense of badness (hate, destructiveness) threatens to overwhelm goodness (love, constructiveness). In the Kleinian view of human being, love and destructiveness are both inevitable parts of any relationship and any person’s sense of self. It is not possible to be rid of destructive feelings and actions, but it is possible to have a balance between them, and reparation is the regulatory mechanism.

Action taken in a spirit of reparation, or in an effort at reparation, may have a reparative effect on the other person, and/or it may serve primarily or solely to regulate the person’s sense of self. These may coincide, but not necessarily. I may feel better about myself when I undertake a reparative action in relation to you, but you may still feel as damaged as ever.

The situation is vastly more complicated when damage is not done personally, but by members of a group with which one identifies consciously or unconsciously, or by one’s ancestors. This is the situation with respect to people who identify as white, in relation to those who are seen as black, and thus damaged by slavery and ongoing discrimination. The question of reparation comes up in relation to monetary reparation paid to the descendants of Africans who were forcibly brought to North America in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and in relation to affirmative action programs in hiring for employment and in college admissions.

In these cases, individual people who identify as white sometimes object that affirmative action programs for African-Americans discriminate against them. The claim may be that they are being made to suffer for sins they did not commit, that they did not enslave anyone and that, in fact, they are not even prejudiced against blacks. Here, the distinction between guilt and responsibility becomes salient, i.e. the fact that one is not personally guilty does not rule out a feeling of responsibility for alleviating the suffering of others. One may feel responsible for others because of a feeling of kinship with them, or a feeling of community, or a sense that one’s own welfare is enhanced by the overall welfare of the community, or because the actions of one’s ancestors set in motion forms of systemic prejudice that persist today. In a competitive and individualistic culture, of course, there may be zero-sum calculations in which the advancement of others is assumed to lead to a loss for oneself. This is a matter of emphasis, however. If you and I are applying for the same job, and you get the job because of affirmative action favoring your racial or ethnic group, I am indeed disfavored and will suffer due to your advancement, or the reparation offered to you. The fact that life in our shared community, overall, is enhanced by the fellow feeling thus cultivated is not perceived to help me if I am unemployed, despite the demonstrated benefits to all from living in an egalitarian society (Picket and Wilkinson 2009).

Projective identification, dehumanization, and self-alienation

Indifference to the suffering of others is a manifestation of dehumanization, since identification with others leads to emotional pain in resonance with their suffering. There are degrees of dehumanization. At one extreme are forms of sadism and sociopathy in which there is not only indifference to suffering but pleasure in the pain of others. (Such pleasure may in fact flow from identification with the other, activating passionate destructiveness, toward a part of the self. There may also be an unconscious effort to test the survivability (Bader, 1996) of the other, a part of the emotional constellation called object usage by Winnicott (1969), but there is not space here to go into this topic in detail.) At the milder extreme is indifference to the suffering of people one does not know personally, from victims of war or famine on other continents, to homeless people on the street where one lives. None of us is capable of emotional resonance with all people, even with all the people with whom one is personally connected. The world is too full of suffering and pain for that, and any one of us would be quickly overwhelmed if we did not have some way of filtering out some of our responsiveness. In the present context, I am not referring to this ordinary form of emotional limitation.

Rather, I am referring to a form of dehumanization that derives from an extreme and pervasive form of disidentification, a component of what Kleinian psychoanalysts call projective identification. Projective identification is a process in which unwanted or undesirable psychic qualities are expelled, in fantasy, and located in other people. Intrinsic to this form of disidentification is the construction of an “other” or “others”, a person or group of people from whom one can disidentify. Fault lines have to be established between people—boundaries between people who are recognized as like me and those who are not like me. The psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) succinctly distinguished between people’s aspects of the self that are regarded as “good me”, as “bad me”, and as “not me”. “Not me” is the part of me that is regarded as not me. Processes of identification and disidentification map out the boundaries between me, or like me, and not me, or not like me, in the interpersonal world. Projective identification occurs when the boundaries between me and not me, between inner and outer, are fudged or blurred in order to externalize the interior “not me” so as to reinforce an internal disavowal. The greater the need to rid oneself of some psychic element or elements, the greater must be the psychic distance that must be established between self and other(s) (Alvarez, 1991). Distance, in this sense, can be defined by the intimacy of the contact one has with the recipient of one’s projection, e.g. the recipient can be a spouse, a child, or a partner, so that contact with the unwanted psychic element frequently occurs and on an intense emotional basis. Disidentification in such relationships is often accompanied by vitriolic, personal, rejection and frequent, futile, efforts, seemingly to get the other person to change, while, ironically, reinforcing the very qualities one is, ostensibly, rejecting. The psychoanalytically inclined clinician will see in such cases an unconscious investment in reinforcing the noxious behavior of the other person so that one can continually reject him or her. A common example would be the pursuer-distancer dynamic in a marriage, often noted by family therapists (Haley, 1963) whereby one partner seeks emotional closeness while the other feels engulfed and seeks to ward off the emotionality of the other. The distancing of one reinforces the pursuit of the other, while the pursuit of one reinforces the distancing of the other. The desire for closeness of the ostensible distancer and the desire for distance and autonomy of the ostensible pursuer (a polarity which may have formed the basis for their initial attraction to each other), are each disavowed, induced in the other, and then rejected. Opposites attract, then repel.

Distance can be established when the recipients of projections are people whom one does not know personally, or people who are different from oneself in some obvious way, e.g. of a different gender or race. Or distance can be established to the point of rendering the other inhuman, as when a child is seen as possessed by the devil, the devil incarnate. Distance can be established by viewing others as “primitive” (Brickman, 2003), i.e. as almost non-human animals. Distance can be established by indifference, as when people pass by homeless people without noticing the extreme suffering on their doorsteps, or at their feet. The kind of dehumanization with which we are concerned in the context of this discussion is based on a need for extreme distance from the recipient of one’s projections. Those people are not only different, they are not even people. When...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Whiteness
• 2 Privilege
• 3 Guilt
• 4 Power
• 5 The perils of political liberalism
• 6 The perils of political conservatism
• 7 How does all this play out in the consulting room?
• 8 What does psychoanalysis have to do with it?
• 9 Toward a more perfect union
• CODA
• References
• Index