Migration and Intercultural Psychoanalysis

Unconscious Forces and Clinical Issues

Kristin White, Ina Klingenberg, Kristin White, Ina Klingenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367342388
• eBook ISBN: 9781000245325
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How does migration affect us in the deeper layers of our minds, where forces are at work that affect our mental and physical health, our experiences in the world and our behaviour?

This edited volume brings together contributions on the social, historical and personal aspects of migration from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Clinical perspective is combined with a wider view that makes use of psychoanalytic concepts and experience to understand problematic issues around migration today. Later chapters take the historical background into account: the history of psychoanalysis itself is a history of migration, beginning with Freud's experiences of migration, in particular his escape from Vienna to London at the end of his life, to answer questions regarding migration, refugees, living in a 'multicultural society' and living in a 'foreign culture'.

Taking on the challenge of looking at the multi-layered, often subtle, yet powerful emotional and unconscious layers of meaning around migration, this book brings together practice and theory and will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and those with an interest in the working of the mind in an intercultural context.

Part I

Migration and defensive organisations

Part I of this book looks at specific themes, difficulties and pitfalls that analysts might experience in their work with people from different cultures and countries around the world.

John Steiner has written about ‘psychic retreats' in which the internal reality of painful and frightening feelings and phantasies is avoided, often by ‘turning a blind eye’ to the truth, just as King Oedipus turned a blind eye when he gouged his eyes out, unable to face the unbearable truth that he had murdered his father and married his mother:

Mechanisms such as ‘turning a blind eye’ which keep facts conveniently out of sight and allow someone to know and not to know simultaneously can be highly pathological and lead to distortions and misrepresentations of the truth … Oedipus adopts a state of mind which can be thought of as a psychic retreat from reality and a defence against anxiety and guilt.

(Steiner, 1993, p. 129)

The globalisation of our economy and our first-hand knowledge of social and political developments around the globe bring with it not only new horizons but also a new dimension of responsibility. As in the myth of Oedipus, many of us would like to gouge our eyes out and pretend not to see or take responsibility for the terrible plight of many of our fellow human beings who are trying to find safe havens in comparatively wealthy western societies. The political tendency to retreat into our small worlds, by closing the borders of our nations and trying to build up an illusion of privileged self-sufficiency in our economies and our food supplies, represents a socio-political version of a psychic retreat. When we recognise not only our dependency on the world as a whole and our responsibility towards the underprivileged, but also the role that hatred, envy, revenge and a drive towards superiority have played in the injustices of the world of which we are all a part, then our privileged position crumbles and we are left with a feeling of helplessness and humility in which as psychoanalysts we can merely do our best within our limited scope of effectiveness. Defences mounted against such feelings of helplessness and humility can lead to an attitude of intolerance of racial difference.

Both in the political sphere and on a personal level, the fear of loss and feelings of guilt and responsibility in the depressive position are in this way enacted instead of being worked through.

Reference

Steiner, J. (1993). Psychic Retreats. London: Routledge.

Chapter 1

Ethnic purity, otherness and anxiety: the model of internal racism¹

M. Fakhry Davids

Introduction

Europe today has become increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. Borders between many of its nation states have come down, and inward migration from previously colonised developing world countries has added to a pleasing sense of diversity that, on the whole, continues to enrich the continent. Despite a degree of tension beneath the surface, it has by-and-large been possible to create a multi-cultural accommodation in which the values of tolerance and mutual respect prevail, often allowing individuals and communities to overcome states of enmity and hostility that, elsewhere, succeed in driving their ethnic, religious or cultural groupings apart. In Europe, however, people of many different shades and backgrounds have found a way to live reasonably comfortably side-by-side. If we consider the history of Europe in the 20th century, where the drive to set Jews and other minority groups apart from a supposedly truly native European essence – such as the model of Aryan purity – produced such devastating consequences, it does indeed appear that Europe has moved on. This can be seen, with some justification, as a major achievement.

Today, however, this accommodation is coming under strain from two sources. Firstly, there is the on-going threat of extremist violence, with groups such as al-Qaeda and Daesh determined to bring their on-going conflict with Western powers to the streets of Europe. The orchestrated attacks in Madrid on 11 March 2004, in London on 7 July 2005, in Paris on 13 November 2015, and in Brussels on 22 March 2016, are instances of this threat erupting into violent and deadly assaults on European citizens going about their day-to-day affairs. Such incidents set in motion psychic processes that tend to drive a wedge between Europeans of indigenous extraction and their Muslim and/or Arab compatriots.

A second source of tension stems from the unabated flow into Europe of refugees – fleeing war, instability, persecution, or poverty in their own African or Middle Eastern countries – desperate to make a new, safer and more secure home here. Germany, for example, faces the prospect of absorbing one million refugees from this influx in 2015 alone.² The pressure of integrating such very large numbers of new arrivals touches on primitive anxieties – for instance, will there be sufficient resources to go around? – that are readily articulated, especially by far-right groups, in racialised terms. The influx of refugees, particularly ones whose otherness is so visible, then comes to be seen as a threat to the very identity of western Europe as we know it. Is there a connection between this wish for a Europe, free of the ‘other’ in its picture of itself, and the Europe of yesteryear taken over by the pursuit of ethnic purity with such devastating consequences?

These are powerful social currents that draw all of us in, as citizens, bringing into the open, where they exist, racist mindsets that otherwise remain hidden. Even those with liberal attitudes can find their tolerance put to the test, and this may contribute to polarised thinking and political correctness, an atmosphere in which creative thought becomes more difficult. I have suggested that the model of internal racism can shed light on the psychological dimension of what is involved in these situations (Davids, 2002, 2006). In essence, I propose that there is a defensive system in the human mind, structured around the lines of racial/ethnic/cultural difference, which can be deployed in order to shield us from the profound anxiety generated in this situation. Stifling political correctness is one outcome of its deployment.

In addition to this broader perspective, internal racism is also directly relevant to psychoanalysts who may be called upon to treat patients from backgrounds distant from our own. Many refugees today come from a very different world, where they will have had deeply traumatic experiences, followed by an extremely stressful and perilous journey to Europe. These experiences need to be assimilated, and many may require professional help to do so and make an adjustment to their new homes. How well are psychoanalysts equipped to do this work? I want to suggest that an understanding of internal racism can assist us in preparing ourselves, internally, to do so.

The psychoanalytic study of racism

Racism is clearly a complex phenomenon. Sometimes it can be present with such devastating power that it sweeps away all sense and reason, almost effortlessly. Yet, at other times it can take the form of innocuous prejudice against an arbitrary out-group that can produce embarrassment, shame and guilt which, when faced, can genuinely move things forward.

It falls, of course, to psychoanalysis to give an account of how racism operates in the mind. This is more difficult than it seems. The psychoanalytic method proceeds best through clinical investigation, which one could do, for example, by revealing the inner workings of racism in a known racist. However, mostly even blatantly racist individuals deny their racism: something other than racism is held responsible for beliefs and actions seen as racist by others. Moreover, when racists do seek help it is for difficulties other than their (disavowed) racism, and pursuing a full investigation into the nature of the racism in that patient's mind may pose an ethical dilemma in these cases: the analyst is in danger of prioritising his or her own research or theoretical interests above the patient's clinical concerns.

Cross-race analyses in general offer another way forward, and some have indeed been reported. An early classic was Wulf Sachs' Black Hamlet, in which Sachs, a Vienna-trained psychoanalyst working in Johannesburg, South Africa in the 1930s, tried to investigate psychodynamics in the mind of a black migrant worker (Sachs, 1937). It was not a conventional analysis – there was no therapeutic contract, meetings did not take place in a consulting room, etc. – and this was further complicated by the fact that Sachs clearly wanted to get something from the analysis in the way that an ordinary clinician would not. In fact, both introductions to the new edition of Black Hamlet, although sensitive to the fact that today's intellectual climate is very different from the one in which the study was undertaken, nonetheless draw attention to what would now be seen as implicitly racist attitudes that permeate it (Rose, 1996, Dubow, 1996). For instance, we can now recognise a hidden aim on the part of a white liberal working in a structurally racist society: to show that, beneath the skin, black and white were the same. Such hidden agendas restrict its scope for shedding light on manifestations of racism present in the rich and complex black–white transference that developed. For all its limitations, however, a contemporary re-reading of this work underscores two enduring points regarding the difficulty that psychoanalysis as a discipline has in engaging with the reality of racism. The first is that racism is an extremely slippery phenomenon that is hard to pin down in the consulting room. Donald Moss (2001) has suggested that racism is one of a class of phenomena for which it is very difficult to take personal responsibility – it is we who hate in racism, not I – and that this contributes to its slipperiness. A second enduring point is that an unconscious wish on the part of our profession to prove that human beings are, beneath the skin, made of the ‘same stuff’ (Thomas, 1992) may be implicated in our difficulty in engaging analytically with the reality of racism.

When psychoanalysts report on racist mechanisms at work in the minds of individual patients they tend to show how an individual patient uses a racial category, which helps to understand that patient's mind more fully (e.g. Schachter and Butts, 1968). However, extrapolating from this to a more general level, to the nature of racist mechanisms themselves, is problematic. Critics point out that psychoanalysts invariably seem to conclude that racism is a problem only because of underlying issues presumed to reside deeper within the psyche: racism is not the real issue. This, it is argued, is an a priori and hence untestable assumption; furthermore, this reductive turn is seen as defensive as it protects us from having to face the awkwardness of racialised encounters in the consulting room. This failure, in turn, partials out the very phenomena that should be the focus of any inquiry into racism, and so we remain unable to shed light on them. At worst, the resulting psychoanalytic discourse on racism becomes an unwitting instrument of the latter's perpetuation (Dalal, 2002).

The problem of reductionism to a psychological essence is serious and some of our colleagues, critical of the mainstream, think that as a discipline we just do not engage sufficiently with these issues. Instead, we are seen as smug and self-satisfied, which, it is argued, reflects a deeper bias within the psychoanalytic movement. Psychoanalysts, on the whole white, Western and privileged, are seen as best at analysing people like themselves (Perez Foster, 1996) since ‘psychoanalytic assumptions on the nature of … psychological functioning are more loaded with Western cultural meanings than we commonly recognise’ (Roland, 1996, p. 71). Patients who, in their outside lives, are the objects of racism find this very distressing. They feel that their actual experience as members of groups systematically discriminated against is denied; instead, they are perceived as someone else – beneath the skin really Western, middle class and white (Kareem, 1988). From this critical base, some progressive clinicians have moved away from traditional psychoanalysis and gone on to develop alternative models of therapeutic practice seen as more sensitive to the context of these ‘other’ groups (Kareem, 1992; Perez Foster, Moskowitz, and Javier, 1996; Roland, 1996).

I myself have taken a different approach that has led me to the formulation of a model of internal racism (Davids, 2011), which I shall outline briefly. I begin by asking, what are the elements of a racist object relationship that require psychological explanation? I examine a recognised racist interaction in the outside world to identify these elements, and turn to the consulting room to deepen the inquiry into them. I describe what I experienced, in my countertransference, as a racist attack launched on me in a session and, from knowledge of the patient gained over the course of a long analysis, I show how that attack stemmed from internal racism mechanisms mobilised in the patient's mind. I go on to suggest that these mechanisms belong to the normal mind – not his unique psychopathology – and give meaning to the aspects of racist interchanges identified earlier, as they occur both in the world and in the consulting room. I then discuss the relevance of this understanding to our changing world today.

Racism in the world

In the real world racism has a concrete existence, and always involves a perpetrator and victim – the racist subject and the object of his/her racism. How to designate them, however, is already difficult and thorny. To speak of the racist subject and the object of racism would be most correct, but academic and clumsy; to speak of perpetrator and victim calls forth undesirable associations – victimhood, for instance, carries negative and disempowering connotations.

One way forward is to begin with an obvious incarnation of racism, such as that on the part of the indigenous, white, empowered group against non-white, disadvantaged, immigrant groups and their descendants – white–black racism. Such an approach would be difficult to justify in a purely academic paper, where one would be expected to begin with a more precise definition of the term racism. However, in a psychoanalytic inquiry this is a good enough starting point from which to explore whether a deepening of our understanding of racism is possible. The terms ‘black’ and ‘white’ themselves are nevertheless probl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Migration and defensive organisations
• PART II Languages, symbols and internal space
• PART III Past generations, past worlds and the struggles of the patient in the present
• Select bibliography
• Index