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 |
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