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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 10.3366/pah.2022.0434
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Abstract
HATE UP TO MY COUCH: PSYCHOANALYSIS, COMMUNITY, POVERTY AND THE ROLE OF HATRED Patricia Gherovici, Philadelphia, USA Is psychoanalysis as a clinical practice and as a theoretical discourse capable of addressing burning issues of today’s society such as race, power, and privilege? Is psychoanalysis only for the well-to-do? Is psychoanalysis normative, sexist, and patriarchal? As early as 1918, two months before the Armistice, aware of the destruction brought about by World War I and the huge problems created for the underprivileged, Sigmund Freud gave a moving lecture at the Fifth International Psychoanalytic Congress in Budapest. The often-quoted short address, ‘Lines of Advance in Psycho-analytic Therapy,’ initially focused on technical issues of treatment method. However, it dramatically changed its tone toward the end when Freud speculated about the future of psychoanalysis. Then he announced that ‘at some time or other the conscience of society will awake’ (Freud, 1919[1918], p. 167). The new awareness would entail: that the poor man should have just as much right to assistance for his mind as he now has to the life-saving help offered by surgery; and that the neuroses threaten public health no less than tuberculosis and can be left as little as the latter to the impotent care of individual members of the community. When this happens, institutions or out-patient clinics will be started, to which analytically trained physicians will be appointed, so that men who would otherwise give way to drink, women who have nearly succumbed under their burden of privations, children for whom there is no choice but between running wild or neurosis, may be made capable, by analysis, of resistance and of efficient work. (1919[1918], p. 167) By appealing to the conscience of society, Freud made an apparently obvious remark, although this was quite revolutionary at the time: the poor have as much PATRICIA GHEROVICI is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. Her books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press, 2003; Gradiva Award and the Boyer Prize) and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2017). She is the editor (with Chris Christian) of Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious (Gradiva Award and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize; Routledge, 2019). Psychoanalysis and History 24.3 (2022): 269–290 DOI: 10.3366/pah.2022.0434 © Patricia Gherovici. The online version of this article is published as Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the original work is cited. www.euppublishing.com/pah 270 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2022) 24(3) right as the rich to benefit from psychoanalysis. In his passionate plea, Freud thus proposed a ‘psychotherapy for the people’ whose structure and composition would follow the model of ‘strict and untendentious psycho-analysis’ (p. 168). This progressive vision for psychoanalysis was at the same time a call for social reform. Both highlight the role of psychoanalysts as agents of transformation at an individual as well as a social level. This would be materialized in the interwar decades by the creation of an inclusive network of more than a dozen clinics in seven countries aimed at making psychoanalysis available to all. The second generation of psychoanalysts who were active in the free clinics included several women analysts in leadership positions, including Helene Deutsch, Anna Freud, Karen Horney, Edith Banfield Jackson, and Melanie Klein. Interwar psycho- analysis was not only alert to injustice in society, it was also an international movement (Danto, 2005). Has the situation changed since then? In fact, one might say that it has regressed since a century ago. Poor populations have once again become excluded from the psychoanalytic process whether privately or institutionally. While there is extensive literature linking income inequality to health disparities, a survey by Manasi Kumar (2012) that reviewed 70 years of psychoanalytic English-language scholarship available on the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publications online database (from 1933 to 2003) revealed that very little has been written about poverty in psychoanalysis. In the limited bibliography, one recurrent feature quite widespread in North America is the claim that lower-income people make ‘poor candidates’ for psychoanalysis (Bluestone & Vela, 1982, p. 272). This would not just be due to financial reasons but because they would be psychically deprived; poverty appears throughout not as an economic factor but as an emotional and cognitive deficit that renders these groups un-analyzable. Why would so many psychoanalysts think that poverty happens in a separate domain, far removed from their concerns? Whenever I talk about my experience of conducting psychoanalytic cures with poor Puerto Ricans and other Latinos, I trigger surprise, doubt, and disbelief. In a kind of knee-jerk reaction, the idea of working psychoanalytically with minority people of color is regularly dismissed. As I have said elsewhere, it is as if poor people could not afford to have an unconscious (Christian et al., 2016). This article is based on my experience working as a psychoanalyst in Philadelphia’s barrio in the 1990s, which led me to meditate on the psychology of racism, segregation, and other forms of intolerance of difference in view of the recent social movements triggered by the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African American man, choked to death by the police. After the COVID-19 pandemic and the growing awareness of violent discrimination, structural racism, and the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, it seems that no analyst can be immune to the cultural context in which we work. I believe that the simple fact that psychoanalysis is not available to the poor constitutes a form of racism, which is not limited to the fact that these populations are mostly black or brown. I will argue that psychoanalysis, thanks to its power of actualizing otherness, can reveal its PATRICIA GHEROVICI 271 emancipatory potential with populations marginalized by race, class, gender, or sexuality. I will then turn to the recent concept of Afropessimism as developed by Frank Wilderson III (2020) in connection with racism. For Wilderson, the curse of slavery has not been lifted. This structural exclusion would place racialized subjects in a social death, a deathliness that saturates Black life (Patterson, 2018). In an attempt to traverse the racist fantasy, I will conclude with a discussion of Toni Morrison’s (2017) meditation on the invention of otherness, rethought from a Lacanian angle. Discrimination, Exclusion, Isolation Who are those people that are excluded and seem outside the reach of psychoanalysis? Why are they considered not sophisticated enough, under- developed, only reachable as the objects of charitable activities? Isn’t this the result of a patronizing attitude that infantilizes them? My experience with clinical work in Philadelphia’s barrio has proved, on the contrary, that psychoanalysis can be effectively conducted in settings not considered ‘traditional’ for psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is not only possible but much needed in the so-called Hispanic ghetto. This is what we have shown in a collection I coedited with Chris Christian, Psychoanalysis in the Barrios (Gherovici & Christian, 2019). The collection was inspired by a documentary called Psychoanalysis in el barrio made by Basia Winograd (Christian et al., 2016) to demonstrate that psychoanalysis can be successfully conducted in so-called ‘outsider’ zones, in racialized sociopolitical islands defined by language borders that are invisible to the outside observer but experienced as impassable by their inhabitants. The documentary and our collection gather numerous testimonies from both practitioners and patients about the relevance of psychoanalysis. For instance, people interviewed in the barrio streets spoke spontaneously about the benefits of talking about their dreams and explained in simple words the basic advantages of the talking cure. These marginalized locations that we call ‘barrios’ are spatially separate and socially distant from mainstream America. They are, moreover, harsh social environments dogged by crime, the result of parallel economies based on the drug trade. There is as well an increased presence of fundamentalist religions, of family fragmentation linked with extreme poverty and systemic violence. Obviously, this type of residential segregation has negative socioeconomic consequences for minority groups. Often these communities experience their disadvantaged spatial locations as a hindrance to overcome. Why try to insert psychoanalysis in such a controversial location? The etymology of the word barrio itself is predicated on a form of segregation: barrio is an Arabism deriving from the classical Arabic word barrī meaning ‘wild’ via the Andalusian Arabic bárri (‘exterior’), thus denoting an ‘outside.’ While it is incontestable that unequal urban development and unjust wealth distribution create these excluded urban spaces, we purposely placed psychoanalysis in the barrios to challenge the idea of an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ of the reach of the unconscious. 272 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2022) 24(3) For quite a long time (Gherovici, 1995–6, 1996a, 1996b, 1997a, 1997b, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2013), under the heading of ‘Freud in the barrio,’ I have been arguing for a more socially responsible practice of psychoanalysis, one that does not forget that the origins of our profession were quite radical, as we have seen it documented in Danto’s work. We can add that Freud’s support of the treatment of the poor and the working classes has been erased not just from collective memory but more importantly from psychoanalytic history. Freud’s initiative, however, found an equivalent in New York City in 1945, when psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, novelist Richard Wright, and journalist Earl Brown opened a psychoanalytically influenced clinic in the basement of Harlem’s St. Philip’s Episcopal Church. It was called the Lafargue Clinic as a homage to a Latino figure, the Afro-Cuban physician and philosopher Paul Lafargue, a mixed-race Cuban, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, and the author of the notorious essay ‘The Right to Be Lazy’ (1883). The Lafargue Clinic advocated for a socially conscious and uncompromising practice of psychoanalysis to undo the negative effects of segregation (García, 2012, pp. 49–74, 105–35; Mendes, 2015, pp. 35–7, 40–4). The founders trusted psychoanalysis to rethink ‘race,’ leading to an antiracist clinical approach capable of overcoming segregation (García, 2012). With uncompromising psychoanalysis as ‘an essential frame and method’ (Mendes, 2015, p. 103), the Lafargue Clinic challenged in practice the racism of psychiatric services that failed to take into account the psychic consequences of oppression in the assessment and treatment of poor African Americans. Unhappily, in 1959, despite having a long waiting list, the Harlem clinic closed. Its clinicians relocated. Given the McCarthyist political climate of the time, and the openly leftist orientation of the Lafargue founders, most clinicians abandoned their progressive position sooner or later. Compared with the presence of such socially responsible and progressive experiments in the 1920s–1950s, one observes that for decades now the discussion of class and gender inequality, racism, and ethnic discrimination in psychoanalysis has all but disappeared. It is as if these ideologically charged issues are not a concern for the type of psychoanalysis that is practiced in the United States. Eli Zaretsky (2005) has noted the substantive difference between European psychoanalysis and the form that developed in the United States, where it quickly ‘became a method of cure and self-improvement’ (p. 67). It took a more marketable shape, drenched ‘in the optimistic and pragmatic spirit that has in many ways transformed it,’ as Philip Cushman (1996, p. 148) observes. Psychoanalysis then became a method available only to those who could afford it. Historically, American psychoanalysis has disregarded the political implications of the practice, developing as a narrow and very lucrative medical subspecialty (Hale, 1995; Turkle, 1992), completely divorced from politics and seemingly impermeable to the pressures of history. The depoliticization of psychoanalysis in this country has been amply documented by historians such as Nathan Hale (1995) and Russell Jacoby (1983). As opposed to the political conformity of PATRICIA GHEROVICI 273 American psychoanalysis, in the rest of the Americas psychoanalysis had a very different development. It was considered eminently political. In Latin America, psychoanalysis developed as a transformative praxis often associated with progressive politics. For instance, in the 1950s in Argentina, Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a Swiss-born psychoanalyst and founding member of the Asociación Argentina de Psicoanálisis (Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, APA), opened psychoanalytic clinics in a shanty town location (Legrás, 2006). My contention is that it is worth disputing common assumptions about psychoanalysis, because it is too often presented as a treatment only practiced with middle- and upper-middle-class patients. With this supposition, psychoanalysis itself has been ghettoized, a victim of its own segregation. Important aspects of the human experience – such as race, social inequality, and gender identity (all these constructed categories of difference) – have been historically neglected in psychoanalytic theory. They constitute a ‘repressed’ which haunts it symptomatically. In 1918, Freud speculated that the future of psychoanalysis depended on becoming an inclusive practice. In 1926, in ‘The Question of Lay Analysis,’ Freud proposed that not doctors but ‘lay’ people were better suited to become psychoanalysts. His choice of word insisted on inclusivity since ‘lay’ derives from the Late Latin laicus, from Greek laikos, ‘of the people.’ Nevertheless, there is a tension inherent in psychoanalysis, between a universalism that often hides colonialist and imperialist realities, and a marginalized position of otherness that nevertheless strives to address all subjects. This tension reappears in the work of two thinkers of racism who have seen the importance of psychoanalysis: Frantz Fanon (2009), who used Jacques Lacan against Octave Mannoni to posit Black people as an absolute Other, both excluded and sexualized; and Frank Wilderson (2020), who also engaged Lacan’s work, in particular the topology of the real, in his radical theoretical memoir Afropessimism. The devastating situation of exclusion begs the question: how does someone become a racialized other? This is the question that Toni Morrison posed in a thought-provoking series of lectures given at Harvard University on race, fear, borders, mass movement of peoples, and desire for belonging, published in The Origin of Others (2017). Morrison’s nuanced meditation is not about racial difference but hatred, because she believes that there is only one race – we are all humans. ‘Race is the classification of a species, and we are the human race, period’ (2017, p. 15). Differences between people might be constructed tangentially on genes and biological taxonomy but are mostly about projective fantasy. Morrison discusses the fetishization of skin color in our era of mass migration, pondering why human beings invent and reinforce categories of otherness that are dehumanizing. In her analysis of racism, Morrison’s originality is to turn the tables, showing that racism not only objectifies its victims, who are stripped of their humanity, but also dehumanizes the racists themselves, who ‘would be nothing without it’ (Morrison, 2016, p. 143). 274 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2022) 24(3) Following the lead of Toni Morrison, I propose a traversal of the racist fantasy that acknowledges the Other while giving room for the other. This traversal would grant a more equitable access to psychoanalysis. To accomplish this, I will engage in a detour in what I may call a metapsychology of racism and other expressions of hatred such as exclusion because of class, gender, or sexuality. While the derogatory term ‘Jewish science’ has been used to describe psychoanalysis, for Freud, as Betty Fuks has shown in Freud and the Invention of Jewishness (2008), Judaism was important to his affective and intellectual education. Fuks takes distance from religion or even the idea that psychoanalysis is a form of secular Judaism and proposes the notion of ‘Jewishness’ to express Freud’s unique relation to Judaism: an invention that sustained him in his ‘splendid isolation’ and provided a foundation for the understanding of psychoanalysis as an experience of both subjective exile and nomination. In fact, Fuks follows Freud’s own statements, closely reads his writings, and concludes that the diaspora, exile, and errantry that mark the history of the Jewish people reappear in the Freudian discovery. Indeed, not only is psychoanalysis an experience of exile, displacement, and relocation, but the psychoanalyst is structurally positioned as an ‘other’,a ‘stranger.’ This is a complex proposition because the figure of the ‘stranger,’ as Julia Kristeva (1991) observes in Stranger to Ourselves, elicits strong emotions that are not necessarily pleasant ones: ‘Experiencing hatred’: that is the way the foreigner often expresses his life but the double meaning of the phrase escapes him. Constantly feeling the hatred of others, knowing no other environment than that hatred. […] hatred provides the foreigner with consistency. […] Hatred makes him real, authentic so to speak, solid or simply existing. […] Living with the other, with the foreigner, confronts us with the possibility or not of being an other. It is not simply – humanistically – a matter of being able to accept the other, but of being in his place, and this means to imagine and make oneself other for oneself. […]Or should one recognize that one becomes a foreigner in another country because one is already a foreigner from within? (1991, pp. 13–14) We can find many instances of this ‘other within,’ be it Freud’s description of the unconscious as the ‘other scene’ (in German: anderer Schauplatz), an expression taken from G.T. Fechner and mentioned in The Interpretation of Dreams (1905); we find it in the Freudian notion of the drive, or any time we have a slip of the tongue and hear the productions of our own unconscious as a foreign language. Being a foreigner marked by self-hatred – understood here as making oneself other to oneself – corresponds to being oneself the ‘you’ of ‘you people.’ Freud’s work is illuminating in this respect. He provides us a double model to understand the individual psychic causes of social and cultural phenomena as well as the psychic effects that social and cultural formations can have on individuals. Our People Freud explores hatred by addressing what is considered its opposite and tackles the notion of love revisiting the biblical injunction from the PATRICIA GHEROVICI 275 Old Testament: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The phrase is part of a unit of two verses that instruct the Israelites not to hate one another, nor to take revenge or bear a grudge against one another, but to love one another. ‘You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself’ (Leviticus 19:18). The commandment of universal love was later associated with a fundamental requirement of Christianity. We may remember that Freud (1930) remained skeptical facing a commandment to love ‘your people’; he deemed it simply impossible to follow. In an often visited and quite remarkable passage in Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), Freud asks us to forget everything we know about the injunction to love one’s neighbor in order to address it anew. How can we love ‘you people’ as we love ‘our people’? Freud uses this provocation to move away from the biblical injunction to love all the others and instead discuss a general human disposition to aggression and mutual hostility. While discussing the source of hostile feelings, Freud engages politics directly and expresses skepticism about the communist program, arguing that it is built on the assumption that humans are ‘wholly good’ and ‘well-disposed’ to their neighbor, but corrupted by private property, and that a redistribution of wealth and resources would finally end hostility among people. He questions the supposed equality between men, holding that it is a mere abstraction, and notes with pessimism that ‘[a]nyone who has tasted the miseries of poverty […] should be safe from the suspicion of having no understanding or good will towards endeavors to fight against the inequality of wealth,’ but ‘if an attempt is made to base this fight upon an abstract demand, in the name of justice, for equality for all men, there is a very obvious objection to be made – that nature, by endowing individuals with extremely unequal physical attributes and mental capacities, has introduced injustices against which there is no remedy’ (Freud, 1930, p. 113, n.1). There may not be justice in nature, but humans are far removed from the natural world and because the unavailability of psychoanalysis among economically challenged populations is predicated on exclusionary, essentialist principles of ‘natural’ differences that are nothing but social constructions, we need to further explore the complex logic underpinning hatred. According to Freud, humans ‘are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness’ (Freud, 1930, p. 111). In the end, Freud has interposed the commandment to love with the Latin dictum Homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man. Already in ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915), Freud states that ‘[h]ate, as a relation to objects, is older than love’ (1915, p. 139). For the infant, hatred is the most primary manner in which the external world is perceived: ‘At the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects, and what is hated, are identical’ (1915, p. 136). In the beginning, there was undifferentiated hate: the child needs to be taken care of, is powerless and overwhelmed with pressing needs that have to be 276 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2022) 24(3) satisfied by an external agency. Babies experience their needs as pain – the internal needs (hunger, cold) as well as the external world of objects (the food that is not yet there to satisfy the hunger, the caretaker who takes too long to respond and may be at loss about how to help) are not differentiated: internal needs and external objects both cause unpleasure and hatred. Freud is here following Wilhelm Stekel who defined hatred as the ground of all psychic events, claiming that a new conception of life must rely on hatred as both the primal element and the basis of altruistic feelings (Stekel, 1911, p. 536). However, Freud shows that hate is not exclusively destructive toward the object; rather, hate introduces a first differentiating boundary between inside and outside that ensures the permanence of that boundary and is its constituting principle. He argues that love ‘is originally narcissistic, then passes over on to objects […] as sources of pleasure.’ He then points out that ‘[a]s the first […] we recognize the phase of incorporating or devouring – a type of love which is consistent with abolishing the object’s separate existence and which may therefore be described as ambivalent’ (Freud, 1915, p. 138). Let us return to Freud’s genetic scheme. The oral stage involves incorporating and devouring the object; in the pregenital, anal-sadistic stage, ‘the striving toward the object appears in the form of an urge for mastery, in which injury or annihilation of the object is a matter of indifference. Love in this form and at this preliminary stage is hardly to be distinguished from hate in its attitude towards the object’ (1915, p. 139). This lack of distinction between love and hate in early life calls up one of Jacques Lacan’s punning neologisms that results from joining seeming opposites – hainamoration or hate-love (Lacan, 1998, p. 90). Freud here clearly moves away from the claim that hatred originates from love and thus from sexual drives. Instead, hate comes into being alongside the constitution of the ego. It expresses the ego’s self-preservation instincts, the will to power and the urge for mastery. Basic Ethics of the Other? In our contemporary world, the encounter with the other often presents an opportunity for exclusion – or rather, an indulging in expressions of hatred. We are witnessing an increase in world inequality, militarization, and terror alongside with racist, nationalistic, and fascistic forces determined to exclude and kill. Nevertheless, at the origins of subjectivity, the encounter with another person, with ‘the prehistoric, unforgettable other person whom no one coming after can equal,’ is useful and beneficial not just for practical reasons but for its moral significance (Freud, 1895, p. 331). In the 1895 ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology,’ following this speculation about the origins of subjectivity, Freud considered the fellow human as simultaneously ‘subject’s first satisfying object and further his first hostile object, as well as his sole helping power’ (1895, p. 331). It is in relation to this loved/hated first fellow human that the human being learns to judge and remember. PATRICIA GHEROVICI 277 Freud concludes that humans learn to think in the encounter with fellow human beings. The baby is in a state of need, fully dependent on an ‘other’ for its survival. The baby experiences need as painful: being at the mercy of the caretaker, babies are unable to fend for themselves and are fully dependent on an outside world that will supply nourishment and comfort. Freud identifies that this ‘initial helplessness [Hilflosigkeit] of human beings is the primal source of all moral motives’ (Freud, 1895, p. 411). Such an early recognition of helplessness surely sends us in the direction of a basic ethics of the other. The other should be tolerated and not just loved or hated. The babies’ awareness of their own extreme vulnerability and dependence on the caretaker, combined with the appeasing function of helping is primordial – then hate and love can follow. The Analyst’sHate Just as there is a tension between different narratives of human – and political – origins, born into love, hate, or indifference, so there are similar tensions framing the clinical stance of the analyst. While transference has often been theorized on the axis of love, Donald Winnicott talks about the analyst’s need to be able ‘to hate the patient objectively’ (1949, p. 70). Winnicott cuts to the chase and describes ambivalence simply as ‘hate in the counter-transference’ (1949). Winnicott makes a convincing argument for the expression of hate in a knowing manner. Only if we accept our hate as psychoanalysts, within the privacy of our office, can we start tackling the hate underpinning our resistances, our prejudice even our unconscious racism as well as the weight of unanalyzed structural White privilege. Furthermore, we may need to admit that hating hurts so good. This brings me to how psychoanalysis may help traverse the racist fantasy. Morrison writes that: the necessity of the rendering the slave a foreign species appears as a desperate attempt to confirm one’s own self as normal. The urgency of distinguishing between those who belong to the human race and those who are decidedly non-human is so powerful […] The danger of sympathizing with a stranger is the possibility of becoming a stranger. (Morrison, 2017, p. 29) The construction of the stranger has its benefits, it grants psychic profits. This profit is theorized by Lacan with the notion of jouissance, a concept that accounts for the unconscious profit granted by a symptom (he refers to jouissance as an indistinguishable mixture of pain and pleasure, as in ‘it hurts so good’). Let us take a clinical example: Ramona, a woman from the Dominican Republic who was receiving weekly therapy in our Bloque de Oro (Golden Block) clinic, the inner-city mental health center located on North 5th Street in the heart of Philadelphia’s barrio (Figure 1). This case not only shows that psychoanalytic work can be successfully done in such a setting, it also demonstrates the relevance of psychoanalysis to effectively address the causes underlying symptoms of hate such as segregation, racism, and sexism. Early on in the treatment, Ramona once came to therapy flustered and upset: she complained that ‘dirty Blacks’ had moved 278 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2022) 24(3) Figure 1. A moment of el barrio in Philadelphia. Image taken by Basia Winograd, director of the documentary film ‘Psychoanalysis in El Barrio’ (2018). to her block. Even though she had dark brown skin, she did not identify as Black because she spoke Spanish. Assuming herself to be a part of the amorphous Hispanic crowd, she identified with hegemonic racialized discourse that used language to construct racial difference. Unaware that she was supporting a racist discourse that also segregated her, she herself became a victim of such disparaging remarks. As we know, ‘Hispanic’ refers to a language and not a skin color. What is the race of Hispanics? Even the US Census Bureau admits that Hispanics ‘may be of any race.’ Many of my barrio patients identify themselves as belonging to ‘the Puerto Rican race’ or to ‘La Raza’ rather than as Hispanic or Latino. Even if we may call them, more politically correctly, ‘Latinx,’ those subjects and their experiences of oppression, like other populations belonging to so-called minorities, will continue to be negated and viewed as part of a crowd, a single undifferentiated body. Hispanics or Latinx are presented by mainstream discursive practices as a host of frozen images in which any trace of individuality, class, culture, and gender difference is erased. This oppression is perpetuated in the notion of ‘race’ that has shaped Latinx identities. Of the People Because racism was Ramona’s symptom, I had to deal with it without immediately combating it or even attempting to reduce it. Ramona offered the ‘royal path’ PATRICIA GHEROVICI 279 to overcome her stereotyping, prejudice, and bias. The hatred she needed to define herself could only be released when her new neighbors started appearing in her dreams. Like Freud, Lacan takes the dream as a metaphor of desire; that is, he holds that dreams are a compromise formation, a substitute satisfaction for an unconscious desire. Like her symptom of racism, Ramona’s dreams were granting her a form of displaced satisfaction. Putting her dreams to work and reading them like a text, as a cryptic message she was sending to herself, Ramona became aware of her unconscious investment in the neighbors that she hated as much as she hated herself. A simple word association to a dream (she was at a party at the despised neighbor’s house) proved revelatory. She first thought about the saying ‘mi casa es su casa’ (my house is your house) or ‘what’s mine is yours.’ Surprised that the disliked neighbors were in her dream and had welcomed her to their home, she exclaimed ‘¡Ay, bendito!’ (Oh blessed!), an expression equivalent to ‘Sweet Jesus!’ in some Latin American countries. The homophony of ‘Ay’ was, she told me later in her associations, an echo of the pronunciation of Haiti in Spanish (ay-tee). Another racialized other that she did not like had appeared, and it was one that exposed the prejudice, the selective interpretation of history, and the nationalism of the Dominican Republic, which were expressed in systemic xenophobia against darker-skin Haitians. Indeed, in the Dominican Republic, Ramona’s birth country, Haitians are not just second-class citizens, they are considered the ‘eternal enemies of the Dominican people.’ There, ‘students are, quite literally, educated to hate’ Haitians, which is called antihaitianismo (Hall, 2017). In the past, Haitians have been the victims of several mass slaughters. Because of her skin color, on several occasions Ramona herself had been discriminated against because she was suspected of being Haitian. Under threat of being deported, she had had to prove her Dominican citizenship to the authorities. So she never left her house (casa) without her cédula (an identification document detailing ethnicity, race, and immigration status). Ramona also acknowledged that she secretly felt like an impostor. Fundamentally, she believed that all true Dominicans had lighter skin; in fact, she suspected that she was of Haitian descent. As a child, she would hear an occasional joke mocking her father, which brought up questions about his paternity – her parents and grandparents on both sides had lighter skin than Ramona. This biological quirk, the pigment of an unknown darker-skin ancestor, made it difficult for her to grow up in a society based on race and prejudice. Her work in the treatment centered on what Freud has called the narcissism of minor differences – namely, the human proclivity for aggression intertwined with the desire for distinct identity. When Freud used the expression ‘narcissism of minor differences’, he wanted to highlight that it is precisely the most minimal differences that generate clashes between people who are otherwise quite alike; this is the root of a perception of strangeness leading to hostility between them, once again affirming the fascinating power of the stranger in the construction of identity. I am referring here to the narcissism of minor differences because, 280 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2022) 24(3) besides historical socioeconomic conditions, I believe that rich and poor people are pretty much the same and that the tinier the factual differences are, the larger they loom in the imagination, transforming the insignificant into the fundamental. Let us note that before he mentioned the notion of minor differences in Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), Freud referred to such differences 12 years earlier in ‘The Taboo of Virginity’ in relation to sexual difference (Freud, 1918, p. 199). Freud adopted the concept from anthropologist Ernest Crawley (1902) and argued that the narcissism of minor differences appears as a symptomatic construction, a defense against castration that also impedes the acknowledgment of sexual difference. When Freud returned to how minor differences successfully overcome feelings of fellowship, he addressed the affect underpinning discrimination, be it by race, class or gender. Without using ‘minor differences’,in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) Freud referred to the narcissism underpinning the hostility elicited by the ‘other’: In the undisguised antipathies and aversions which people feel towards strangers with whom they have to do we may recognize the expression of self-love – of narcissism. This self-love works for the preservation of the individual, and behaves as though the occurrence of any divergence from his own particular lines of development involved a criticism of them and a demand for their alteration. We do not know why such sensitiveness should have been directed to just these details of differentiation. (Freud, 1921, p. 102) Let us ask, why do we, like Ramona, love to hate those who resemble us the most? By constructing ‘details of differentiation,’ that is, minor differences as major differences based on race, class, nationality, or gender, we demonize, scapegoat, and use the convenient ‘other’ that we keep at arms’ length. There is a benefit: the existence of the ‘other’ makes a group or a society cohere. Freud writes: The evidence of psycho-analysis shows that almost every intimate emotional relation between two people which lasts for some time – marriage, friendship, the relations between parents and children – contains a sediment of feelings of aversion and hostility, which only escapes perception as a result of repression. This is less disguised in the common wrangles between business partners or in the grumbles of a subordinate at his superior. The same thing happens when men come together in larger units. Every time two families become connected by a marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighboring towns each is the other’s most jealous rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt. Closely related races keep one another at arm’s length; the South German cannot endure the North German, the Englishman casts every kind of aspersion upon the Scot, the Spaniard despises the Portuguese. We are no longer astonished that greater differences should lead to an almost insuperable repugnance, such as the Gallic people feel for the German, the Aryan for the Semite, and the white races for the colored. (Freud, 1921, p. 101) PATRICIA GHEROVICI 281 Freud shows us that the ‘glue’ that keeps together the members of a group is the erasure of difference: crowds crave conformity – they need a leader or master to love and to be loved by without any concern for truth. Whenever we find mass phenomena, we encounter segregation. Segregation is not a secondary consequence but a crowd’s formation. Segregation is what constitutes the crowd. Segregation is the disavowal of difference. All group formations erase difference since their constitution is based on a principle of identity, an identity constructed in alienation, in identification with an other. Any attempt at stressing differences, no matter how minimal, can be experienced by the crowd as an attack threatening its very existence. The members of the crowd love each other while they hate the outsider, the stranger, the other, who is not ‘like us.’ The narcissism of minor differences plays a central role in the creation of the ‘us.’ The differences may be ‘minor’ but are clearly intolerable because the ‘other’ represents a blind spot in the mirror image. The power of racism stems out of the primordial fascination each of us experiences facing human counterparts, the captivation by a mesmerizing image of the other in the mirror. This fascination for the other paradoxically erases it as such, since one identifies with the other’s mirror image while making the other, as such, disappear. As Philippe Julien explains: With his invention of the mirror stage, Lacan had exposed the very source of racism […]. Indeed the power of racism is rooted in the primordial fascination of each of us with his or her counterpart, in the captivating vision of the Gestalt of the other’s body in the mirror. A specific sort of beauty, silhouette, and muscle tone; the power of the body moving or at rest; the color of the skin, eyes, and hair – all this defines a phenotypic physiognomy productive of kinship along genotypic lines. On the other hand, this vision excludes the stranger, the one with whom I cannot identify lest he break my mirror. (Julien, 1994, p. 28) This blind spot in the mirror is also the place that conceals subjective division. We deny the sameness of the ‘other’, so as to imagine a complete other, denying our own castration, which harkens back to Freud’s first introduction of ‘minor differences’ in connection with sexual difference. As we see with Ramona, racism is not simply intolerance of differences but intolerance of excessive sameness. If the characteristics that define this ‘other’ get blurred, those who identified themselves as not ‘like them’ feel their identity threatened. That is to say, the negation of the other is correlative of the self’s affirmation. To see one’s neighbor reflect and mirror oneself too much threatens a person’s unique sense of self. As Pierre Bourdieu (1984) proposes in Distinction, social identity is constructed on the differences created by the things closest to oneself; these similarities represent the greatest threat as differences are exacerbated to create an illusion of superiority. Implicit in Bourdieu’s text is the idea that the external is tasked with defining the internal. In Ramona’s hatred of her new Philadelphia neighbors, she was replicating the racism of which she herself 282 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2022) 24(3) had been a victim, while trying to assert an identity that denied the fact that this view was built on similarity disguised as difference. In the end, Ramona became aware of this repetition; she understood that the hatred projected onto the neighbors was the hatred she had been subjected to. She unconsciously expressed it with the phrase ‘what’s mine is yours.’ I could not help but think about the saying that appeared in her dream, ‘Mi casa es su casa,’ and wonder whether Ramona could extend her hospitality to neighbors that she saw as beneath her. For the People To continue thinking through the problem of the other, that is, the excluded one we love to hate, be it our neighbor or the preferred candidate for psychoanalytic treatment, let us further discuss Ramona’s dislike of her neighbors who she saw as ‘other’ or ‘not-me.’ She hated them because she saw them as having access to a form of enjoyment from which she was excluded. In order to understand the hatred expressed in racism, we need to introduce a new notion – jouissance. This will help us understand the psychic economy set in motion. An unconscious profitis always at play whenever we encounter racism. Let us explore it. Ramona complained that her new neighbors were loud, they were always sitting outside on the steps as if they owned the sidewalk, they were unfriendly, they had too many people over, they played loud music, they barbecued on the sidewalk. In other words, she thought that they had access to some strange jouissance from which she needed to take distance: ‘They’– the neighbors – were not like ‘us.’ Not only did her neighbors seem to enjoy themselves in some alien and unfamiliar manner, but in doing so, they also spoiled Ramona’s fun, because she could no longer enjoy the block where she lived as she did before. Here is how I intervened. First, I identified the fundamental problem at work: Ramona created a racist fantasy in which the enjoyment of the ‘other’ was inversely proportional to her own. This situation was becoming increasingly intolerable and Ramona believed that the presence of the new neighbors would force her to move somewhere else. Interestingly, Ramona told me that when she moved to her house a few years earlier, she was surprised that she liked her block so much; in some curious manner, there was a disturbing intensity in the pleasure associated with living where she lived, north of Roosevelt Boulevard, an avenue that functions as an invisible boundary and marker of upwards social mobility in the barrio. All was great for Ramona, until ‘these people,’‘esos prietos’ (those Blacks) moved to her block. If it looked as if she claimed that they did not belong there, in fact it was Ramona who felt she did not belong. A few years earlier, when she made 1. For a similar account, inspired by Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of racism as theft of jouissance, see Gherovici (2016) and Gherovici (2021). PATRICIA GHEROVICI 283 it to the other side of Roosevelt Boulevard, Ramona was concerned about not fitting into what she thought was a better-off area; she projected that same feeling of not belonging onto the new neighbors. The despised neighbors became a manifestation of her old fears, of her own experience of being an outsider. Above all, she hated the neighbors because they looked at ease, comfortable and happy in their new surroundings, enjoying themselves ‘too much.’ This disruptive excess, was in fact her own because, like them, she had moved from a less desirable area to this better section of the barrio and liked it a lot. Her own access to pleasure became regulated from the outside by the hated neighbors, an ‘other,’ who enjoyed in excess and as a result made her enjoy less. Ramona’s racist projection was a fantasy that allowed her to regulate her own jouissance by reinstating balance in a situation that was experienced as overwhelming. Fantasy, according to psychoanalysis, is a construction with a void at its center. Ramona’s racist fantasy was a screen with nothing behind it, and it was only a matter of time before she would arrive at the root of her true problem. And facing this kernel of nothing, Ramona deflected her anxiety by blaming the neighbors for forcing her to consider moving and thus having to leave a block that was so desirable, so wonderful, so sunny, so full of nice people, just perfect. Insofar as Ramona was able to fantasize that the neighbors were stealing her enjoyment, that the block was perfect until the new neighbors arrived, she could construct the block as an ideal (lost) space. The neighborhood could then be imagined as the most beautiful one, a place from which she is excluded by the others she excludes. ‘If the prietos would not be there,’ she pondered, ‘the block would be great again.’‘If only the neighbors would have moved elsewhere in the barrio, I could finally enjoy myself.’ This inner dialogue is quite stereotypical in all forms of racism. If we could only get rid of the ‘other’ (the immigrants who take our jobs, the Jews, the Blacks, gays, atheists, and so on) everything would be perfect. The logic of exclusion requires a problematic ‘other,’ an embodiment of imperfection. Ramona identified this necessary ‘other’ in the Black neighbors; she needed them to maintain the fantasy of a perfect situation of an ideal block, a perfectly harmonious neighborhood where all neighbors like each other, a fantasy that was predicated on her own exclusion from it, projected onto the neighbors. With this fantasy intact, Ramona avoided the personal upheaval that jouissance entailed for her. Humor allowed me to introduce change for Ramona. The space that laughter opened for her allowed her to separate from her own racist prejudices. For Ramona, to accept the neighbors, to tolerate them and not move, was to simultaneously accept a measure of dissatisfaction without her racist fantasy acting as a placeholder for an impossible ideal. In Ramona’s racist fantasy, the ‘other’ excludes her from her enjoyment. ‘If not for the new neighbors, this block would be great.’ I wanted Ramona to recognize that the excess she projected onto the ‘other’ concealed the truth of her own failed enjoyment. It was only when she 284 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2022) 24(3) accepted this inconvenient and limiting dynamic that she could achieve some agency. Through treatment, a yielding of jouissance took place and she finally achieved a modicum of freedom from this symptom. In this case, I managed to make her laugh. The distance created by laughter was sufficient to uncover the fragile construction supporting her racism. A silly joke that elicited her laughter during a session lifted the racist paranoid mechanism, pointing to the fact that her hate would hide and reveal at the same time the minor differences that are exacerbated into major hurdles to create a sense of identity. It also reminded her that when you laugh you can see your own rigidities and introduce subjective flexibility. In the process of making a joke rather than searching for meaning, Ramona was in fact making meaning. Rather than exacerbating minor differences, she was eventually able to sympathize with the strangers who moved to her block – the neighbors that she had previously racialized and dehumanized – and overcome the fear she had of becoming a stranger herself, a dark-skin foreigner, a Haitian who could in turn be racialized and dehumanized. Ramona knew that she was often seen as ‘different’; she had always felt different, and she needed to see this difference acknowledged. Her skin color had been used by others as a basis for racial discrimination. Ramona would be terrified of encounters with the police, and felt vulnerable to physical violence or harassment for being Black. Even if my work with Ramona began when she consulted me and placed me in a position of doctor-like expertise to help cure her ailments, the dynamics of the analysis itself would eventually push her further in her desire for knowledge. In this process, sooner or later the analyst moves away from their role as knowledge keeper, and a new desire will emerge, a desire for difference. By adopting a psychoanalytic stance in my work in a barrio clinic, I offered Ramona a place where she was not an object but a subject; it gave her the space for transformation, a space with emancipatory potential, a space that not only ‘tolerates’ difference but desires it. We see how Ramona’s hatred for the new neighbors expressed and concealed her own unease at having moved up the social ladder. This calls up aporophobia, the neologism created by the Spanish philosopher Adela Cortina to convey the ‘rejection of the poor’ triggered by the fear of becoming poor. It encompasses a wide range of social interactions between the poor and the non-poor that includes aversion, antipathy, contempt, disgust, disregard, fear, and hate (Cortina, 2017). Speaking the Unspeakable In the previous section I explored how psychoanalysis can avoid – and help clients to avoid – exclusionary practices. This last section articulates the hope that we can start thinking psychoanalytically about symptoms of hate like racism, discrimi- nation, and exclusion, particularly when they threaten the psychoanalytic frame PATRICIA GHEROVICI 285 itself. Our practice is affected by the current sociopolitical context. Psychoanalysis is not outside of history. We need, for instance, to start addressing the seemingly unutterable Whiteness of psychoanalysis. There is an emerging theorization on transgender psychoanalysis, but this work has rarely engaged with race or Whiteness in psychoanalysis; the occasional exception is the discussion of race when either analysand or analyst happens not to be White. As Dionne Powell observes, with regard to the discussion of race, there is a ‘collective silence’ in psychoanalysis; this tendency intensifies the Whiteness of the profession: ‘Within psychoanalysis the absence of diversity, of otherness, in those we treat, train, and teach is notable’ and race ‘is mentioned only when the patient is not white’ (Powell, 2018, p. 1024). Daniel Butler invites us to address structural racism in psychoanalysis by examining the very setting of psychoanalysis: The White imaginary deposits its phantom world (i.e., the violence of slavery and settler colonialism) into the setting, and this deposit is further entrenched by projecting racist phantasies onto Black bodies. Deeply rooted, this deposit is still never total; phantoms haunt social and psychic space, dwelling in complex psychic and national topographies, and revealing how histories of structural racism are materially and corporeally lived in the present. (Butler, 2019, p. 148) In the United States in particular, we are expected to declare some sort of identity in order to exist in society, and this identity is an assemblage of race, class, and gender. At the same time, while structural racism overdetermines psychoanalysis, identitarian claims that buttress notions of self and social representations often collide with subjective experience. This can be explained by way of the psychoanalytic premise that the subject emerges when identity fails. Here psychoanalytic theory acts as a corrective to identitarian claims. Psychoanalysis contends that the impossibility of the representation of sexuality in the unconscious implicitly challenges the fixity of identitarian claims. It is in this sense that gender transition can raise the issue of raced embodiment and necessarily interpellates the neglected intersection of gender, class, and race by considering the status of implicit normative whiteness. In Donald Moss’s (2003) study of the social-, political-, and psycho-dynamics of structured forms of hatred, he argues that hatred is a way to make an identitarian claim: we are not like them. If the biblical commandment discussed earlier appeals to a certain primal narcissism, if the commandment to love one’s neighbor as one loves oneself proves impossible, as Freud claims, we may also have to question the nature of self-love. But do we love ourselves? If I hate the other because I cannot tolerate differences, then hate erases difference, and makes us equal. If your tendency is to hate your neighbor, perhaps you hate your neighbor exactly as you hate yourself. When the being of the other is eclipsed, we remain at the level of the body, and when subjects are reduced to bodies, racism emerges. As the thinkers of the Afro-pessimism movement have argued, racial hate excludes all forms of 286 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2022) 24(3) difference; it dehumanizes the fellow human and transforms the racialized being into an undead sentient entity that lacks ontological existence. But let us recall that racism not only dehumanizes the racialized other but also dehumanizes the racist, who needs the excluded other to exist, as Toni Morrison has shown. The rise of racism has to do with what Lacan calls ‘a jouissance going off track’ (Lacan, 1990, p. 32), we impose our models of enjoyment on others that are constructed as ‘underdeveloped’ (1990) to create a distance we maintain at all costs; the ‘other’ is constructed as the foreigner, the underdeveloped, the one who steals our jobs, the one who takes over our space, the one who spoils our enjoyment. If the analyst’s desire is not a pure desire but a desire to obtain absolute difference, as Lacan argues, then a first step toward hating ‘better’ is to acknowledge that the hatred we experience for the ‘other,’ the neighbor, the stranger, the foreigner, the colonial subaltern, the slave, is related to the possibility of our becoming an other (Lacan, 1981, p. 276). Furthermore, if we have an other within, the hatred for the other, for ‘you people,’ is our own. Lacan predicted the return of a dismal past, expressed in an increase in the symptoms of hatred such as racism and segregation. Is this caused by the decline of the paternal imago Lacan (1938[1984]) mentioned in his article on the family? Is this hatred an expression of a search seeking to find the all-powerful father of the primal horde, a tyrant, an all enjoying figure, someone who is placed above the law? While this mythical exceptional figure stands for someone who is above the law, it can at the same time impose a limit. Or is hate so disruptive that it causes a break in the social contract? The racists have always been around but now feel authorized to act out their murderous wishes. If repression falters, then the sacrifice of enjoyment is renounced. We know about the suicidal aggression of narcissism: quoting Molière’s The Misanthrope, Lacan describes the narcissistic aspect of hate that invades the character Alceste at the moment when he goes into a rage while listening to Orontes’ sonnet, because he recognizes in him his own situation, but painted not just with excessive exactness but in a distorted caricature; he realizes that the idiot of his rival is his mirror image. The words of fury that he then utters clearly show that he seeks to attack himself. Winnicott and Freud agree – hate is at the origin of thought; without hatred there is no separation and without separation there is no construction of the body and the psyche. Lacan characterized our age as a civilization of hatred (Lacan, 1991, p. 277). What would this ‘civilization’ of hatred consist of? I would like to define our practice as instead predicated upon an unconditional welcome – or in other words, full hospitality. However, as Jacques Derrida pointed out, the etymology of hospitality sends us back to the ‘host’ who accepts all the ‘guests’ that can be invited, but also contains a ‘hostis,’ a Latin term meaning ‘enemy’ (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 1997). How does this new awareness affect our ideal of neutrality? Is it enough to be aware of our unconscious racism and prejudice like heterosexism or gender normativity? PATRICIA GHEROVICI 287 How can we help psychoanalysis develop and thrive in our currently conflicted situation? We can help, I would argue, by not bracketing off some hatred – after all, as the Latin motto goes, qui bene amat bene castigat (who loves well punishes a lot). Or to love well is to hate well. To reckon with psychoanalysis is to reckon with the unconscious dimension of our experience; if hate is unavoidable, at least we have to hate responsibly. Hatred is primary and inescapable; to hate in a civilized way, in a responsible way, one would have to hate without enjoying it too much. The completion of an analytic cure does not rely solely on the decoding of symptoms; psychoanalysis implies transforming the psychic economy of jouissance. A psychoanalyst who takes into account unconscious enjoyment can intervene clinically. This type of intervention is never outside history. Race, for example, we know is a fantasy, but it can nevertheless organize the racialized subject’s relation to being – as demonstrated in quite disparate manners by Frank Wilderson (2020) and Sheldon George (2016). Race, like other impossible forms of construction of difference, serves to organize jouissance both for the racist and the racialized subject, and they need to be analyzed. We know that racialized communities experience ongoing, disproportionate levels of poverty. In the barrio, ‘race’ was often invoked to mean ‘poor.’ My study of a single diagnosis, the Puerto Rican syndrome, allowed me to see how a culturally sanctioned response to stress (ataque de nervios) becomes a way of pathologizing the poor or cultural other in a psychiatrically sanctioned expression of racism (Gherovici, 1996b, 1996c, 2003, 2021; Gherovici & Christian, 2019). The future of psychoanalysis depends on returning to its early political roots – already present in the free clinics. Although this radical social conscious- ness has been lost in translation, particularly in the United States, I suggest that we might productively and creatively refine and reinvent psychoanalysis for the future by going back to the spirit of 1918, the happy times when psychoanalysis was seen not for ‘you people’ but for all the people, because a psychoanalysis that is not inclusive, that is not of the people and for the people, does not deserve to be called psychoanalysis. References Bluestone, H. & Vela, R.M. (1982) Transcultural aspects in the psychotherapy of the Puerto Rican poor in New York City. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 10: 269–83. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. by Richard Nice. London: Routledge. Butler, D. (2019) Racialized bodies and the violence of the setting. Studies in Gender and Sexuality 20(3): 146–58. Christian, C., Reichbart, R., Moskowitz, M., Morillo, R. & Winograd, B. 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London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1918) The taboo of virginity (Contributions to the Psychology of Love III). SE 11, pp. 191–208. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1919[1918]) Lines of advance in psycho-analytic therapy. SE 17, pp. 157–68. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1921) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. SE? 18, pp. 65–144. Freud, S. (1930) Civilisation and its Discontents. SE 21, pp. 57–146. London: Hogarth Press. Fuks, B. (2008) Freud and the Invention of Jewishness. New York: Agincourt Press. García, J. (2012) Psychology Comes to Harlem: Rethinking the Race Question in Twentieth Century America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. George, S. (2016) Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Gherovici, P. (1995–6) The ghetto sublime hysterics. Bien Dire? 2(3): 5–21. Gherovici, P. (1996a) Recuerdos del futuro: histeria raza y el ghetto hispano. In Fundación del campo lacaniano (ed.), 1895–1995, Estudios sobre la histeria, cien años después, vol. 1. Ediciones Kline. Gherovici, P. (1996b) The Puerto Rican syndrome. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 2: 182–6. Gherovici, P. (1996c) Sigmund dans le Barrio. Scansions? 6/7: 7. Gherovici, P. (1997a) Blocking the Hispanic unconscious: Subjectivity and subjection. Clinical Studies: International Journal for Psychoanalysis 2(2): 23–37. Gherovici, P. (1997b) The Hispanic La Raza: Psychoanalysis and losing (the) race. Clinical Studies: International Journal for Psychoanalysis 3(1): 55–71. Gherovici, P (1998) Le ghetto contre-attaque: la production hysterique dans le barrio portoricain aux Etats-Unis. La clinique lacanienne. Revue internationale 3: 135–50. Gherovici, P. (2001) Between meaning and madness: The altered states of Hispanics in the U.S. In A. Molino and C. Ware (eds), Where Id Was: Challenging Normalization in Psychoanalysis. London & New York: Continuum. Gherovici, P. (2003) The Puerto Rican Syndrome. New York: Other Press. Gherovici, P. (2004) Un Freud francés con acento español. Imago Agenda? 86: 22–24. Gherovici, P. (2013) Let’s beat up the poor. CR: The New Centennial Review? 13(3): 1–28. Gherovici, P. (2016) Laughing about nothing: Democritus and Lacan. In P. Gherovici & M. Steinkoler (eds), Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gherovici, P. (2021) The lost souls of the barrio: Lacanian psychoanalysis in the ghetto. In D. Hook & S. George (eds), Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory. London: Routledge. Gherovici, P & Christian, C. (2019) Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class and the Unconscious. New York: Routledge. Hale, N. (1995) The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jacoby, R. (1983) The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians. New York: Basic Books. PATRICIA GHEROVICI 289 Hall, S. (2017) Antihaitianismo: Systemic xenophobia and racism in the Dominican Republic. The Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Available at: https://www.coha.org/ antihaitianismo-systemic-xenophobia-and-racism-in-the-dominican-republic/ [accessed June 3, 2021]. Julien, P. (1994) Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud: The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. Trans. by Devra Simiu. New York: New York University Press. Kristeva, J. (1991) Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press. Kumar,M. (2012) The poverty in psychoanalysis: ‘Poverty’ of psychoanalysis? Psychology and Developing Societies? 24(1): 1–34. Lacan, J. (1938[1984]) Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu [Family complexes in the formation of the individual]. Paris: Navarin. Lacan, J. (1981) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York: W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1990) Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. New York: W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1991) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique. New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1998) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore. On Feminine Sexuality and the Limits of Love and Knowledge. New York: W. W. Norton. Lafargue, P. (1883) Le droit à la paresse. Paris: Henry Oriol. Legrás, H. (2016) Psychoanalysis in Latin America. In S. Ray, H. Schwartz, J.L. Villacañas Berlanga, A. Moreiras & A. Shemak (eds), The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Mendes, G. (2015) Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Morrison, T. (2016) God Help the Child. New York: Vintage International. Morrison, T. (2017) The Origin of Others: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Moss, D. (ed.) (2003) Hating in the First Person Plural: Psychoanalytic Essays on Racism, Homophobia, Misogyny, and Terror. New York: Other Press. Patterson, O. (2018) Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Powell, D.R. (2018) Race, African Americans, and psychoanalysis: Collective silence in the therapeutic situation. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 66(6): 1021–49. Stekel, W. (1911) Die Sprache des Traumes. Eine Darstellung der Symbolik und Deutung des Traumes in ihren Beziehungen zur kranken und gesunden Seele [The language of dreams. An exposition on symbolism and interpretation of dreams in relation to mental health and illness]. Munich & Vienna: Bergmann. Turkle, S. (1992) Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and the French Revolution. London: Free Association Books. Wilderson, F. (2020) Afropessimism. London: W.W. Norton. Winnicott, D.W. (1949) Hate in the counter-transference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 30: 69–74. Zaretsky, E. (2005) The Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis. New York: Vintage. ABSTRACT This article is based on the author’s experience working as a psychoanalyst in Philadelphia’s barrio in the 1990s, which led her to meditate on the psychology of racism, segregation, and other forms of intolerance of difference and otherness. The author argues that no analyst can be immune to the cultural context in which they work and that the simple fact that psychoanalysis is not available to the poor constitutes a form of racism. It further argues that psychoanalysis, thanks to its power of actualizing otherness in the context of analytic 290 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2022) 24(3) treatment, can reveal its emancipatory potential with populations marginalized by race, class, gender, or sexuality. In the second part, the article turns to the recent concept of Afro- pessimism as developed by Frank Wilderson III (2020) in connection with racism. For Wilderson, the curse of slavery has not been lifted, placing racialized subjects in a social death, a deathliness that saturates Black life. In an attempt to traverse this racist fantasy, the article concludes with a discussion of Toni Morrison’s meditation on the invention of otherness, rethought from a Lacanian angle. Keywords: racism, otherness, foreigner, neighbor, barrio, laughter, difference
Journal
Psychoanalysis and History – Edinburgh University Press
Published: Dec 1, 2022