The case of the accidental racist

Psychoanalyst M. Fakhry Davids presents a case study to illustrate how he slowly comes to see the outlines of what he calls a internal racist organization in his patient's ego structure: Mr. A is a 30 year-old, white Englishman who seeks treatment after a "breakdown" from which he is unable to recover. Several sessions go by during which the patient seems emotionally disconnected. One day, without warning, Mr. A. explodes with rage after Davids offers a "routine interpretation". Because of the ferocious and sudden nature of the attack, Davids hypothesizes that his interpretation had penetrated and threatened a vital defensive organization. In subsequent sessions, Mr. A. makes several remarks alluding to Davids’s foreign accent, immigrant status, and Middle Eastern-appearing features. He wonders aloud if Davids, a foreigner, could be an effective analyst for an English patient and expressed doubts about Davids’s capacity to “take” his hostile outbursts. As more associations to Davids’s foreignness emerge, Davids revisits the initial outburst and concludes it was indeed a racial attack and that its vehemence suggested that what Davids’s had thrown into disarray was the weakening (possibly due to Mr. A. having entered analysis) defensive organization that was struggling to hold him together.

As Davids learns more about Mr. A., he discovers the extent to which his patient dreads becoming dependent on another person. In order to ward off feelings of dependency that he is sure to develop toward his analyst, Mr. A. had mobilized a defensive organization that projected his disavowed feelings of dependence into Davids. In Mr. A’s mind, it was his ethnicity that made Davids vulnerable and enabled Mr. A to continue to see his own feelings as located elsewhere. Because the entire structure of this organization was constructed upon the premise of Davids’s vulnerability as an immigrant, Davids concludes that this defensive organization is a racist organization. Mr. A., who was not otherwise racist, desperately needed a place to deposit the feelings of vulnerability that his analysis stirred up, and therefore his unconscious opportunistically used race as the keystone of his defensive organization:

Through projection I was transformed, in his perception, from an individual who happened to have a brown skin (and a strange accent), to a foreigner trying to find acceptance in a hostile (xenophobic) Britain. His problem … was therefore relocated in me.

During the early stages of his analysis, the arrangement worked well: Davids spent most of the hour asking Mr. A. questions, which would have been consistent with his Mr. A’s image of him as an immigrant asking for help. By making an interpretation, however, Davids stepped out of his racially circumscribed role, thus giving the lie to Mr. A’s entire defensive organization. By voiding this unspoken “agreement,” Davids unintentionally robbed Mr. A. of a fundamental feeling of security. Davids characterizes this system of defense as “mafia-like”:

….the protection offered comes at the price of absolute loyalty. This means that all transactions must be seen as taking place within the parameters of the organization: it must appear in control. This means that everyone must keep to their proper place (and be seen to be doing so), and they must not occupy an unsanctioned place.

This requirement that everyone “keep their proper place” evokes images of the other kind of organization, namely, the kind that is made up of people who are paralyzed by a group unconscious defensive organization making sure that no one steps out of line. In the U.S., nowhere is this stranglehold more evident – or paralyizing – than in discussions about race.

posted by Lisa  # 2:24 AM | Perma Link
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In M. Fakhry Davids's psychoanalytic theory, racism becomes "inscribed in the mind" through the interaction of ingredients that are already present in the inner world. "Some objects," he writes,"are to be found in every internal world and can thus be thought of as part of the structure of the mind. Self, mother, father and superego fall into this category, and it is to this list that I think the racial other belongs." What Davids terms an "internal racist organization" comes about when a racial other is the foundation on which an elaborate system of defenses known as a "defensive organization," is constructed. An internal racist organization may be present even when the racial aspect is not overtly expressed, as he describes in the central case study of his book.

W. Hoffer first used the term "defensive organization" to counter what he saw as a common mischaracterization of Freud's defense mechanisms as mere "sudden creations, spontaneous random reactions of the ego, escape mechanisms, or defensive manoeuvres." Hoffer instead saw them as more complex and permanent, "patterns of a prescribed, automatic and compulsive character, comparable to the well-organized nervous reflexes." A defensive organization, then, is a wide-ranging, elaborate structure "which is itself part of the total ego organization" and controls a wide range of seemingly unconnected functions both conscious and unconscious.

In other words, a defensive organization is not so much a tool that the ego uses but is instead a keystone on which a major ego structure is built, which efficiently "filters out" that which is feared too painful to bear. Some defensive organizations shield out so much reality that they become harmful (as in Sunset Boulevard, for example). More common and seemingly benign are those defensive organizations that people use in order to "get by" and which may serve them well until an unforeseen crisis or a psychotherapeutic intervention threatens the entire house of cards.

This latter category, is what Davids sensed was at work in one of his patients, Mr. A, who came to see him at age 30 after a "breakdown" from which he had been unable to recover.
posted by Lisa  # 7:10 PM | Perma Link
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In the previous post I discussed M. Fakhry Davids's psychoanalytic theory of "internal racism," which he believes to be caused by projective identifications that make racial others the target. Davids considers this a "universal" phenomenon, affecting even individuals who were not raised with racist values and who harbor no conscious racist attitudes. What evidence does Davids provide to support this, and what does he believe is the cause? What about people who are themselves "racial others"? Are they afflicted in the same way? How does internal racism manifest in members of out groups? And what are the implications of this theory? If racism is universal, does this absolve people of their racism? As a psychoanalyst, does Davids believe that racism can be treated, and if so, by what means?

Racism aside, what about virtue? Can virtue be taught or developed through practice, or is it innate, and if not, does it come about by some other means?
posted by Lisa  # 8:22 PM | Perma Link
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M. Fakhry Davids is a London-based psychoanalyst who maintains that negative feelings toward members of a different race are actually feelings of revulsion against disavowed aspects of the self that are so unbearable that they have been displaced or "projected" onto others and thereby hidden from conscious awareness. Davids designates the recipients of these projections "racial others," a term that he acknowledges to be "arbitrary and inacccurate since social stereotyping is not confined to race alone," but which he prefers to use rather than invent a new term. He thus uses the term "racism" to encompass religious, class, and other strains of social stereotyping because it "evokes a plethora of meanings" that he considers necessary to remain in the foreground throughout his analysis.

Because racial others are so frequently the targets of such projections, Davids suggests that this unconscious social stereotyping may be a universal strategy that begins at a specific developmental stage in order to cope with internal conflicts of a specific type. Davids holds that this unconscious stereotyping is a special case of a defensive strategy known in psychoanalytic theory as "projective identification."

Projective identification is a concept first put forth by child psychoanalyst and theorist Melanie Klein (1882-1960). Klein believed in the primacy of early breastfeeding experience as an influence on personality development due to the intensity of the feelings evoked in the infant, from security and wholeness following an uninterrupted feed to panic and rage when the infant's desire to nurse is unsatisfied. According to Klein, in the beginning the infant does not have a mental representation of the mother as a whole being but instead conceives of her in terms of her constituent parts, with the most salient part being the breast. Klein believed that the infant retaliates against the mother for withholding the breast with both physical attacks, such as biting and "'vampire-like' sucking" and imaginary attacks, including the desire "to fill her body with the bad substances and parts of the self which are split off and projected into her." Klein held that one of the earliest developmental tasks for the infant is to "split" this internal representation of the mother in two: a "good," gratifying one and a "bad," withholding one. By "severing love from hate" the infant can keep the now-idealized "good" maternal object away from the attacks on the now-excessively hated "bad" maternal object.


Next: Why race?
posted by Lisa  # 8:00 PM | Perma Link
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What is racism? Is it part of human nature, or something that must be taught?

We who live in the United States or any other country with a history of colonialism have never known a time when racism did not permeate our culture. In the U.S., we can trace the roots of racism back only a few generations to the time when Europeans devised the scheme of traveling to West Africa, abducting people and taking them to a remote country to be sold to landowners who were free to use them however they wished. While we can identify the specific historical conditions that gave rise to the racialized society in which we now live, it is not as easy to explain why we as a species developed racism in the first place and why we find it so difficult to let it go.



London-based psychoanalyst M. Fakhry Davids sees at the root of racism a power dynamic that makes it seductive to both perpetrator and victim. According to his theory of "internal racism," the force that sustains racism is the very shame and guilt those who perpetrate it feel about their own racist impulses. To understand how revulsion towards racism actually keeps it alive requires a familiarity with a psychoanalytic concept known as projective identification.

Next: Projective identification

posted by Lisa  # 4:35 PM | Perma Link
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Song of Solstice CD release show on Tuesday, December 27 at the Birchmere in Alexandria, VA. Pictured onstage are Jennifer Cutting (keys and squeezebox), Steve Winick (Father Christmas), Zan McLeod (bouzouki, mandolin and electric guitar), John Guillory (recorders), Tim Carey (highland pipes), Bobby Spates (electric violin), Rico Petruccelli (bass), Robbie Magruder (drums) and Sue Richards (Celtic harp). Also on the bill were the Washington Revels Singers and the Foggy Bottom Morris Men.

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