ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that thwarting the other links the racist scene to the psychoanalytic notion of the “primal scene”, in which complex psychic issues are being worked out. Like fantasies of the primal scene, racist scenes also involve an intermingling of benign and malignant elements that contain racial and racist fantasies respectively, oscillating between a sense of curiosity and concern that accommodates the ethnic other and descent into a spiral of hatred and revenge. Whether the primal scene is actually witnessed or fantasised, the nature of what is being psychically worked out at both pre-Oedipal and oedipal levels of mental organisation form different referents for the primal scene. In contrast to Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein conceptualised the malignancy of the primal scene in part-object terms, as a frightening amalgam in the child’s mind in which the sexual organs of the parents are intertwined in violence, representing the most primitive version of the primal scene.
