ABSTRACT
In this chapter an argument is made in favor of the usefulness of a psychoanalytic perspective in understanding and addressing racial and cultural prejudices. In addition to providing a framework for understanding the function of prejudice as a defensive operation in the intrapsychic world, psychoanalysis can help us understand how anti-racist programs and other such efforts may, at first, unwittingly perpetuate the very problems they purport to address and resolve. Insensitivity and micro-aggressions can occur in therapy interactions as much as in any human interaction but can be subject to exposure and re-evaluation in the reflective space of psychoanalytic therapy. Likewise, theoretical formulations concerning prejudice can contain prejudicial aspects, as when stereotypes are invoked in describing racial and ethnic groups under the heading of “cultural competence”. A contemporary psychoanalytic perspective can point the way forward from such seeming dead ends by showing how and why efforts to solve a problem (on both personal and social levels) necessarily first perpetuate the problem as part of a process of owning it, then working one’s way out. If change agents didn’t first own a problem, the world would be divided into two camps: those who are the problem, and those who are part of the solution. Thus, splitting would be perpetuated, undermining efforts to create a common ground from which to effect change. Freud advised that problems must be present in the here and now, via transference, in order to be subject to resolution. This process will inevitably involve the change agent, or therapist, who must be open to examining the commonality he or she has with the person whom one hopes to influence.
