Racism and the Unconscious as Understood by Psychoanalysis and Critical Psychology

Abstract

Originally appeared as "Rassismus und das Unbewubetate in psychoanalytischem und kritisch-psychologischem Verstandnis" in Forum Kritische Psychologie, 1995, 35, 4-41. In this chapter, Holzkamp follows up on the question of the extent to which the idea that racist behaviour is a result of undesirable individual development is influenced by psychoanalytical thought. To answer this, he draws on distinct explanatory models of racist behaviour in psychoanalysis, showing that even those psychoanalytical approaches which explicitly distance themselves from "therapeutic" explanations of racist behaviour as the delayed after-effects of early childhood trauma, and which underscore its societal dimensions, ultimately remain trapped in individualist thinking. He regards the common individual-society juxtaposition as one reason for this-or, more precisely, the lack of a scientific framework for adequately conceptualizing the societal mediatedness of individual behaviour, namely the concrete forms by which societal conditions affect individual actions. To advance here, Holzkamp refers to Foucault's concept of "state racism" and his analyses of majority-minority discourses as a particular strategy of lateralizing suppression, namely a means of involving people in their own disempowerment by mutually surveilling and controlling each other. Hence, a main subject science task would be to analyse the different levels and forms by which this participation in one's own disempowerment takes place. Moreover, conceptualizing human subjectivity as the possibility of consciously creating one's own life conditions, instead of only submitting to them, makes a reinterpretation of the Freudian concept of the unconscious both possible and necessary. In such a perspective, the unconscious is less constituted by the repression of offensive "instinctual desires" than by isolating oneself from any insights into the asocial and self-harming implications of all attempts at coming to terms with restrictive conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)