This
book is about gender and culture (American culture), it is about psychoanalysis
and literature (American literature). Its main concern is dealing with basic
(implicate or explicit) representations of the human identity. It is about being
male or female. Also it is about being white or being black. 

Narrative
organization of human experience æ we could call it textuality, or even
literature æ is seen as something parallel to (more primitive, prelinguistic)
visual organization. Gwen Berger believes that there is a social construction
of basic gender and racial categories. She also believes that there is great
need for psychoanalytic deconstruction of these social constructs.

In
her own words: "Like much American literature on race, psychoanalytic
discourses compress the complex and invisible processes of subject formation
into visual crisis. From this commonality between African American and psychoanalytic
discourses æ both describe visual traumas that trigger identity formation æ I
establish a framework of reciprocal analysis. In this book, I juxtapose
American literature and theory on race with psychoanalytic theory to explore
how race and gender intersect in subject formation. Intending to privilege
neither discourse, I do not simply use psychoanalytic theory to read African
American literature. Rather, I examine how literature on race disrupts
psychoanalysis’s conventional models of gender identification, forcing a
reconsideration and reconfiguration of many foundational psychoanalytic texts.
By considering the politics of race in psychoanalytic development, I am to
address psychoanalysis’s historic inattention to race; to extend psychoanalysis
beyond the scope of its modernist, European origins; and to ground analysis of
subjectivity in a material and social context. In turn, psychoanalysis provides
a critical vocabulary for theorizing racialization, as it intersects with sex
and gender, for both black and white Americans".

As
one might guess, this book is about mediation. Thinking about categories such
as race, gender and politics implies the realm of mediation. The life of any
human being (American or not, male or female, black or white) is necessary
mediated. Being human implies being self-conscious. Being self-conscious (or
being unconscious) could not be reduced to something like commonly human
natural substratum. These categories could not bee seen as something essential
(or natural). They are effects of rather complicated and multilevel social
(interpersonal) interchange.

Gven
Bergner is right. There is really a need for something that could be named postcolonial
psychoanalysis. Classical psychoanalysis is (we must admit) heavily burden by
its own metaphysical and colonial presuppositions. This conjunction of race and
psychoanalysis might discomfit some, given psychoanalysis’s record on race and
cultural difference. A modernist discourse of subjectivity, classic
psychoanalysis ignored race as a constitutive factor of identity, perpetuated
colonialist ideologies of the savage primitive, and touted as universal its
paradigms, which were, in fact, drawn from European culture. Early
psychoanalysis not only declined to address racial difference as a constitutive
factor of subjectivity but also veiled its own implicit racialist assumptions.
For one of psychoanalysis’s key insights æ the gender is constructed æ depends
on the category of the essential an unchanging primitive for
articulation. In Freud’s works, notably Totem and Taboo, the primitive
exists in a timeless, unevolved state associated with infancy, femininity,
homosexuality and neurosis. With the primitive forever marking this starting
point of human evolution, Freud can trace the psychological development of
white, European, male subject. Comparing colonialism’s figure of the Dark
Continent  of Africa to the impenetrable mysteries of feminine
subjectivity, Freud constructs a mesonymic chain… which links
infantile sexuality, female sexuality, and racial otherness. Although the image
of the black primitive pervaded the white imagination of Europe and America the start of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis din not recognize its force in
the white unconscious. As Jean Walton demonstrates, even key early female
psychoanalysts, such as Joan Riviere, Melanie Klein, and Marie Bonaparte, who
strived to advance theories of feminine subjectivity, treated their own and
their analysands’ fantasies of racial difference as something irrelevant. It is
not, then, that race is absent from early psychoanalysis, but rather that it is
put to stealthy use without being considered a legitimate subject of analysis.

Our
symbolic compels individuals to assume raced subject positions as white or
nonwhite æ through racial difference has been figured most forcefully in
American law and custom as a black/white binary opposition. In positing a
(racial) symbolic organized in relation to the privileged signifier whiteness,
Gwen Bergner  is following Seshardi-Crooks conclusion that whiteness operates
as mater signifier (without signified) that establishes a structure of
relations, a signifying chain that, through a process of inclusions and
exclusions, constitutes a pattern for organizing human difference. Second, just
as the incest taboo determines the phallus as signifier of lack, so also does
the miscegenation taboo inflect the terms through which symbolic lack is
signified. Like the phallus, whiteness signifies desire; the absence of whiteness
signifies subjective lack. Consequently, whiteness too, covers the lack
of being with a fantasy of sufficiency and wholeness. Third, the racial
symbolic also operates through the Laws of Language and Kinship; the
miscegenation taboo determines the subject’s relation to paternal Law and the
Name-of-the-Father. Fourth, the symbolic order of racial difference and its
attendant fantasy of white sufficiency are reflected in America’s ideology of white supremacy, which operates through state apparatus or
discourses of Law, science, custom, and violence that legislate and maintain
racial groupings.   

In
Gwen Bergner’s discourse it is easy to recognize many (implicit or explicit)
references and influences. I will just mention Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan and
all that lacanian and post-lacanian tradition of (critical)
reading. Her text is coherent, convincing and relevant. It could be
informative, but also it could be seen as more than just informative.

© 2006 Petar Jevremovic

Petar Jevremovic: Clinical
psychologist and practicing psychotherapist, author of two books (Psychoanalysis
and Ontology, Lacan and Psychoanalysis), translator of Aristotle and
Maximus the Confessor, editor of the Serbian editions of selected works of
Heintz Kohut, Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein, author of various texts that are
concerned with psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature and theology. He lives in
Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

Categories: Psychoanalysis