Psychoanalysis and anti-racism in mid-20th-century America: An alternative angle of vision

Abstract

The conventional historiography of psychoanalysis in America offers few opportunities for the elaboration of anti-racist themes, and instead American ‘ego psychology’ has often been regarded as the most acute exemplar of ‘racist’ psychoanalysis. In this article, consistent with the historiographical turn Burnham first identified under the heading of ‘the New Freud Studies’, I distinguish between histories of psychoanalytic practitioners and histories of psychoanalytic ideas in order to open out an alternative angle of vision on the historiography. For psychoanalytic ideas were in fact omnipresent within American culture at mid-century, and they played a fundamental role in the psychological reworking of race that unfolded in the work of social scientists, literary artists, and cultural critics in the 1940s and early Cold War years, culminating in the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954, a major landmark in the civil rights narrative. By pursuing the implications of psychoanalysis in anti-racist struggles at mid-century, and with particular attention to Richard Wright and his autobiographical novel Black Boy, I move towards unearthing an alternative historical account of the intersection between psychoanalysis and race, which offers new ways for psychoanalysis and the history of the human sciences to think about this period.

Psychiatric epidemiology and the Chicago School of Sociology

“…In turn, both native-born and foreign-born white Chicagoans had higher rates of mental illness if they lived in Black communities. These findings, along with those of psychiatric statistician Benjamin Malzberg (1936) , helped to undermine some of the racist assumptions regarding mental illness that were predominant during this period ( Doyle, 2016 ; Fielder, 2022 ; Hoberman, 2012 ; Rose, 2009 ; Stewart, 2013 ). They also strengthened the idea that the degree to which an individual was either integrated into or isolated from their community was a key factor in mental health outcomes.…”