Entre Negros, Blancos y Judios: Revisiting Claudia Tate’s “Freud and His Negro” with Puerto Rican Eyes

Abstract

In this essay the author, a Puerto Rican psychoanalytic therapist, weaves personal, clinical, and theoretical material to interpret Claudia Tate’s paper, “Freud and his ‘Negro’: Psychoanalysis as ally and enemy to African Americans,” through the eyes of the Puerto Rican experience of anti-Blackness, racial mestizaje, and colonial capitalism. Drawing on Afropessimism, the author argues that Tate’s paper points toward a fundamental rethinking of psychoanalytic theory. Using clinical examples, theory and personal narrative, the author concludes by pointing toward clinical and political possibilities for theorizing anti-Blackness, and the verticality it facilitates, as a component of psychic structure.