Mapping the “Unconscious”: Racism and the Oedipal Family

Abstract

This paper argues that modern constructions of "race" are inherent in specifically modern constructions of heterosexuality and that both of them inform the normative familial quadrad: Mother, Father, Son, and the Repressed (Bestial). These mythic familial categories constitute the basis of the "oedipal" family and are instrumentally interconnected. Here the oedipal triad of Mother-Son-Father is ideationally encoded as white, the repressed bestial being "colored"-typically "black." I argue racism's immanence to oedipal familial constructions by spatially reworking Fredric Jameson's notion of the political unconscious. In so doing, I develop ways for thinking through how the psyche can be understood as a structured and libidinized spatial effect , a repository of colonial violences of body and place, unspoken and hence repressed ("unconscious"). I propose the term racist-oedipalization (after Deleuze and Guattari's oedipalization) to connote the processual ways in which racist thinking and practices are integral to white oedipal family structures and norms. In so doing, I explore how racist-oedipal configurations have worked variably, in the interests of contemporary and past colonialisms, to great embodied geographical effect. The paper begins by theoretically linking blackness to incestuousness and colonization to productions of the psychical "unconscious." The core of the paper threads the theory through particular racialized geographies in the U.S. These include, on the one hand, southern plantation slave and post-Reconstruction settings, and, on the other hand, urban segregationary practices impelled by the University of Chicago, culminating in their racialized plans for urban renewal in the 1950s. Key Words: family, racist-oedipal hysteria, slavery, unconscious, urban renewal, white supremacy. his paper draws upon the work of Hayden White (1972) and others to argue that the psyche, within which the psychoanalytic "unconscious" reposes, emerged as an embodied spatial effect unevenly across place and time in tandem with European colonialisms across the world. Unlike White, however, this paper concentrates on how the psyche was shaped through colonial sociospatial violence, desire, and repression. The psyche was, in this sense, an interiorized repository within which the violent acts and desires of colonization were secreted or made legitimately secret and unspeakable. The "truth" of colonial devastations was spatially displaced or repressed in two ways. First, the memories and actions associated with colonial violences were incorporated into the body-space of the "psyche," an "unconscious" domain outside language. Accordingly, the sequestering and torture of colonized bodies and the burning down of cities and towns was simply asserted, with the particularities of the violence as violence in various sociospatial ways being ignored, suppressed, or elided. Second, certain "unconscious" colonial violences were sexualized, the colonized used "unconsciously" and collectively as a libidinous foil against which the whi...

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“…When it comes to bringing out the intrinsic but very rarely discussed spatialities of psychoanalytic theory, and in the process contributing to a critical geography of the modern unconscious and of desire, especially as they play out across the differences between men and women, Nast has long been a source of inspiration for countless geographers (see especially Pile and Nast 1998). She is one of the earliest in the discipline not only to read Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1983), but read them as radical friends, not enemies, of psychoanalysis (see Nast 2000). For this panel Nast asked respondents to return to a question sometimes asked aggressively to reinforce disciplinary borders and heritage, but here functioning, as it does in her own richly empirical research, as an affirmation of the theoretical and ethical richness of spatial ways of thinking: How is this geography?…”

Emotions as practice: Anna Freud's child psychoanalysis and thinking–doing children's emotional geographies

“…She has received no mention in the increasing work on psychoanalysis and geography (see Callard 2003, Kingsbury 2003, Thomas 2010; except for a minor note in Holt's recent outline of an agenda for geography of infants (Holt forthcoming), not even a passing reference to Freud exists in the literature on geography and childhood. This is despite the widespread interest of geographers in Freud's father to whom her work closely relates (Pile 1996, 2010a, Wilton 1998, Nast 2000, Parr et al 2005, Hook 2005 There are a few possible explanations for this. First, Freud's work is still too often perceived as a hard and fast apologetics of Sigmund Freud without taking into consideration the expansion, but also (often subtle and implicit) critique that she brought forward against her father's work.…”

Monumental space and the uncanny

“…Indeed, it becomes difficult, on this basis, to account for the particularity of the individual's imaginative engagement with space, for the affectivity of this relationship. Such relations of affect, 'belongingness' and identification -such 'triangulations' of space, power and subjectivity -may of course be importantly unconscious in nature, a case made by both Nast (2000) and, compellingly, Pile (1993. At this juncture one is compelled to ask: surely we must involve the unconscious in explaining the inter-relationship of power, space and identity, particularly so is these three are mediated by the force of ideology, a force, which, as we know, is typically less than rational in its functioning?…”