Cultural transition, negation and the Social Unconscious¹

Abstract

Blackwell: Cultural transition, negation and Social Unconscious 305 Not just politics I have been asked to talk, 'not just about politics'. This is an interesting request, because I never talk just about politics. I believe the personal is political. In the same way that Foulkes talked about the individual being permeated by the social, I believe the political gets inside us and shapes our thoughts, our feelings, our perceptions, our language and our actions, both individually and collectively and I always talk about this. But often the only bit of what I have said that gets remembered is the quote from Marx, or some other comments that can be safely bracketed off as 'political', so they can then be regarded as 'not personal' and nothing to do with the internal world. So I want to suggest that if anyone leaves here, thinking I have only talked about politics, you will have missed half the talk. Problems and solutions This session is set up in a particular way. The topic for the day asks 'How can our groups offer Therapeutic Work with displaced people who have been forced to leave their home, their country and their social contexts, often suffering many different traumas at any one time?' In other words, how do we do therapeutic work with refugees? And note, 'Therapeutic Work' has capital letters. So, it is implicit in this invitation that I should first outline the problems that refugees have, and then explain how group analysis can provide solutions. This is a common psychotherapeutic approach. Someone else has a problem and we have the solution: Diagnosis and treatment. In the triangle of persecutor-victim-rescuer we fall neatly into the rescuer role. We are the good guys! Well, those of you who know me at all well will not be surprised that I am not going to go down that road. Back in the 1960s, there was a slogan: 'If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem!' Then it was subverted by an American community activist called Ed Berman, who said, 'Unless you're part of the problem, you cannot be part of the solution!' So I am going to talk, not only about how group analysts can be part of the solution but how we are very much part of the problem. This is a more psychoanalytic approach because it begins with the analysis of the would-be analyst. It is also a more group analytic approach. We often say that group analysis is analysis of the group, by the group, including the conductor. I would like to change that to 'analysis of the group, by the group, starting with the conductor'.

The impenetrable wall of whiteness. A response to Guilaine Kinouani

“…It simply required a number of black people to think and act like white people. This, as I have argued before in this journal, (Blackwell, 2018) is the typical way in which members of marginalized groups are invited into group analytic culture. ‘You are very welcome to join us provided you behave like “one of us” and indeed become “one of us”.…”

“…There is no overt hostility here; just condescension, infantilization and negation. It is precisely this negation that was a focus of my S H Foulkes lecture on colonialism and of the paper I wrote for the Berlin Symposium in 2017 (Blackwell, 2003 and 2018). I also reported one of Ben Judah’s correspondents in his survey of life in London listing the hierarchy of migrants and ‘others’.…”

Silencing, power and racial trauma in groups

“…Until only very recently, it was well known that any black trainee psychotherapist in London who tried to discuss her/his experience of everyday racism in her/his training analysis could expect to have it interpreted as a displacement of some other problem. Analysts seemed completely unable to conceptualize the possibility that racism might be part of ‘reality’ with which they were unacquainted, or indeed part of the social unconscious of the psychoanalytic community in which they participated (Blackwell, 2018: 306).…”

“…In the quote above, Blackwell (2018) speaks of the common pathologization of those who speak of their experience of racism and the individualistic decontextualization of their social trauma, illustrating a potential split between group analytic scholarship and its everyday practice. Although the author uses the past tense—and I would like to share his optimism—my personal and professional experience lead me to believe that the pathologizing of targets of racism is far from a thing of the past; that it continues, in fact, to take multiple forms so that when a black person speaks of their racialized experiences in groups, even today, they continue to risk:…”

Black Power–White Halos. A response to Guilaine Kinouani’s ‘Silencing, power and racial trauma in groups’

“…A primary feature of the system we are dealing with here is negation, which I have elaborated previously (2003 and 2018). That is negation of the ‘other’.…”