Anzieu-Premmereur (2015) explains that “the skin-ego is an envelope that contains thoughts and
gives to thinking activity; some limits, continuity, and a protection against the instincts. The
functions of the skin-ego are to maintain thoughts, to contain ideas and affects, to provide
a protective shield, to register traces of primary communication with the outside world, to
manage inter-sensorial correspondences, to individuate, to support sexual excitation, and to
recharge the libido. The skin-ego is the foundation of the container-contained relationship”.
- What is the skin-ego for a person of color, more specifically, with darker skin?
- What, if any, type of protection does the skin give to a person of color?
- Instead of being a means of protection, can darker skin be a means of traumatization? To
the self and to others?
During my second official year of my first attempt at training in the Panamanian Psychoanalytic
Association, I was introduced to Dr. Robert Langs and his book The technique of psychoanalytic
psychotherapy. Punctual clinical material shared in this book violated me while at the same time,
stimulated my curiosity. Here I will share two clinical vignettes illustrated by Dr. Langs in
which his goal was to “clarify further how we detect and interpret specific unconscious fantasies
related to resistances”
Vignette 1
Mr. F.E was a young depressed man with school problems and a tendency to form
destructive relationships. He had been severely traumatized by his mother’s
illness and hospitalization when he was three years old. He tended to be very
resistant and oriented to external reality in his sessions. Some of his associations
indicated a great dread of reviving the childhood trauma which had, on some
level, prompted suicidal and other terrifying fantasies.
One set of fantasies underlying his resistances was expressed in several current
dreams in which he was pursued by hoodlums or a Negro who were out to murder
him. The genetic meaning of this latter attacker, a man, was not clear from the
material, though the patient’s associations pointed to his father and to the
basis of his fears of him in sexual longings for his mother. For example,
in one dream, Mr. F.E was with his fiancé and a Negro man attempted to break
into the patient’s
house to murder him and to rape his fiancé in his mother’s bedroom. Associations
made it clear that the dream was an expression of angry sexual fantasies toward
the patient’s mother and a punishment for these impulses. These fantasies were
also one unconscious basis for his symptoms” (Langs 474-475).
Reading this clinical material on my own, during the COVID 19 pandemic and during the global
Black Lives Matter movement, was emotionally painful. During a training course, physical pain
was introduced in me as I read the material alongside my peers and my professor at the time.
This was due to the fact that, everyone in the zoom room was, as Dr. Dorothy Holmes adequately
put it during the 111th APsA meeting , “oblivious”, not only of the material that we were reading,
but of me. I was invisible. My invisibility was made clear when, after I addressed my discomfort
with the material to my former professor, his response was “I didn’t notice”. “I didn’t notice”
not only solidified my suspicion that the racial significance of the material and the world was not
existent to him, it also meant that I was not significant to him nor to the institute.
The unconscious sexual fantasies that Dr. Langs was able to interpret from Mr. F.E’s dreams are
agreeable not only by myself but by other important analysts such as Jorge Kantor (2016) who
explained that the “the sexual desires of white men from the south of the USA during the civil
rights movements were projected onto African American men when they were accused of
looking seductively at white women and before being lynched, they were castrated”.
It was easy and clear for me to see in the various appearances of Negro men whom were trying
to murder Mr. F.E and rape his fiancée, that there was also an unconscious yet conscious fear of
annihilation. The fear of annihilation can be understood by studying Melanie Klein who
developed her theory through her work with children. For Klein, “the fear of one’s own
annihilation, the paranoid form of anguish, is the earliest and most primitive form in
development because its danger situation (annihilation) is innate” (Sollod, Wilson y Monte,
2009).
- But why was this so clear to me? Maybe it is because I have a “black skin-ego” just like
the “Negro” man. - But why does a “Negro” man provoke such fear in this white person? Maybe it is because
this fear is part of a “white skin ego” - Should institutes even use this material from training? Maybe they can however, with the
understanding that there is more to what meets the eye
Vignette 2
“Mrs. F.K. was a severely depressed white woman who was infuriated by her
daughter’s engagement to a Negro. When the wedding date was set, the patient
came to her session in a rage against therapy: it had not helped and nothing had
changed, she was getting worse and she wanted shock therapy or medication. The
therapist listened silently. After raging for a while, Mrs. F.K. went on to describe
the setting of the wedding date and then stated that she had been angry with one
of her other children, a son. She had had a fantasy that he was killed in a car
accident. The therapist then intervened: he told Mrs. F.K. that she was in a
murderous rage against her daughter because of her marriage plans and that this
rage was partly displaced onto her son and partly turned against herself, in a
talion-like fashion, leading to her wish for punishment to shock treatment – a
move also calculated to evoke revengeful guilt in her daughter. Further, her fury
at the therapist was based in large part on her unspoken fantasy the therapist was
going to prevent her daughter’s marriage; this had not turn out to be the case
(Langs 489-490).
Despite Dr. Langs take on the manifestation of Mrs. F.K’s infuriation, I dare to challenge
the latent motives behind it by sharing the following
- I wonder if Mrs. F.K’s anger towards the therapist had to do with the fact that the
therapist was not able to help her work through her racism. - Maybe Mrs. F.K displaced her wish of the killing of the therapist because of his
inability to understand the racism that was plaguing her mind and that was
potentially damaging her relationship with her daughter. - Maybe the anger that Mrs. F.K was displaying was in fact a disguise of her fear of
the challenges that this marriage could bring to herself, to the family but most
importantly to her daughter and even to her future grandchildren. - Maybe Mrs. F.K’s daughter was “acting out” against her mother’s racism by
marrying a Negro man. - Maybe Mrs. F.K was embarrassed, ashamed and humiliated not only by the
relationship but also by her emergence out of her “psychic retreat” (Steiner,
2020). - Maybe the treatment was in fact not helping her resolve her conflict with racism.
- Maybe the therapist’s own racism was blinded and did not enabled him to help
Mrs. F.K address her own.
Dr. Robert Langs is a well-known contributor to our field. He has made significant
contributions not only to the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic fields but also to the
field of psychiatry making noteworthy developments on transference and the analysis of
dreams. Despite these accomplishments, as it is accustomed to occurring in the study of
psychoanalysis, it is important to take into consideration Dr. Langs background.
Dr. Langs is/was a white man that was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York and by default, he
was born and raised during a time that was filled with racial turbulence in the United States of
America. During his upbringing and until he was approximately 37 years old, he lived in a
nation where racial segregation, which in my opinion is the social splitting of races, was the law
of the land and it existed in all areas. It still does.
Because of the overall culture in which Dr. Langs was raised in or around, it is extremely
possible that he may have been forced to become a racist or at the very least, he introjected racist
ideologies. My ideas are supported by the thoughts of Kantor (2016) when he writes that
“Parents and older members of the family pass their prejudices, values, and negative appraisals
to the younger generations in the course of socialization, and eventually the child’s beliefs
will be determined by those of his parents. From a psychoanalytic point of view, both the
superego and the ego ideal are constructed through primary identifications with these significant
representations”. Because of this, unfortunately yet understandably, it is possible that Dr. Langs
was unable to see his patient’s racism let alone his own thus making it almost impossible for him
to interpret it in his patients and to discuss it in his book, The technique of psychoanalytic
psychotherapy.
In the work that was elaborated by Kantor (2016), he cited Bruce (2007) when he “draws
attention to the fact that in clinical practice we tend to ignore associations, experiences or
circumstances related to racism”. He thinks that this omission allows us to observe the
infiltration of a covert racist ideology in the psychoanalyst’s mind. If we think about the vignettes
that we reviewed at the beginning shared by Dr. Langs, we can see that maybe there was an
omission of the social and cultural material in analyzing it, then in interpreting it, but definitely
in writing it.
I draw part of my hypothesis of the difficulties faced by Dr. Langs, other analysts and training
analysts from Dr. Earl Hopper’s research and development of the concept of social unconscious
in which he describes it as follows;
“The concept of the social unconscious refers to the existence and constraints of
social, cultural, and communicational arrangements of which people are unaware,
in so far as these arrangements are not perceived (not “known”), and if perceived,
not acknowledged (denied), and if acknowledged, not taken as problematic
(“given”), and if taken as problematic, not considered with an optimal degree of
detachment and objectivity” (Hopper 1996).
While in my initial institute, I set out to understand the barriers that were being created
around the topic of racism within this same institute. It proved to be an extremely hurtful
and traumatic journey for me as it resulted in my expulsion, a dishonorable discharge
from my home psychoanalytic community. The immense lost left me broken, fragmented,
humiliated, guilty, confused. I felt violated, raped, robbed, used, abused and then thrown
away by my Psychoanalytic family. I became a victim of what I recently began to
understand as Institutional Incest.
“Our psychic structures are filled with defenses to counteract and to resist the pains that are
associated with, in this case, racism” (Butcher 2020) making it that much more difficult to
explore the ugly truth. The thought of examining racism, within oneself produces guilt as well as
what Steiner (2020) considers embarrassment, shame and humiliation. In his book Seeing and
Being Seen: Emerging from a Psychic Retreat, Steiner speaks about the ability to “discuss the
importance of the experiences of embarrassment, shame, and humiliation that confront the
individual who begins to relinquish a narcissistic organization and to emerge from a psychic
retreat”. Steiner examined this phenomenon by looking at it in the analyst-analysand
relationship, that is, when an analyst or candidate is working with a patient as well as within the
patient. For the purposes of this paper, I felt the importance of exploring the phenomenon when
it occurs within the analyst or training analyst, and especially supervising analyst whom, when
not aware of it, passes it on to future analysts thus continuing the vicious cycle.
Psychoanalyst Heinrich Racker introduced the concept of counter-resistance describing its
function stating that they “…are usually the expression of the analyst’s identification with
the analysand’s resistances, even when they are related at the same time to the analyst’s
own conflicts” (Racker 1966). He explains that a counter-resistance is “a co-resistance, a
participation by the analyst in a resistance of the analysand”, which come from feelings of
guilt, anguish, anxiety and/or annihilation just to name a few (Racker 1966). This definition
is important to understand as it provides illumination to what Racker calls “the “objective”
root of counter-resistance”. As important as the objective factor of this occurrence is, it is
also important to understand that “there is also a subjective factor in all counter-resistance,
since those identifications with the analysand and their elaboration also depends on the
structure of the analyst” (Racker 1966).
Counter-resistance stems from the identification with the patient’s material. As Racker
(1966) states, it is “intensified by the analyst’s own feelings” and it is an analytical element
that prevents, like others, the emotional healing of the patients, ourselves and of our
communities. As a consequence, counter-resistance feeds into the primary resistance and
produces stagnation, which stimulates the compulsion to repeat and causes overall
energetic depletion for all involved. According to Racker (1966), counter-resistance
persists, “only while the interpretation had been incomplete” (Racker 1966).
Besides understanding that analyst and candidates are humans and that we all make
mistakes, I tend to think that some of the reasons why interpretations are incomplete is
because of lack of training and lack of understanding of one’s own conflicts. That is to say
that, although interpreting is not easy, it is something that can and should be worked on to
ensure the improvement of the patient, an act that can be done first with “one-with-one
training” (Garrido, 2020) either in personal analysis, self-analysis, supervision and in our
continuous, never-ending learning process.
As analysts and analysts in training, we already know, although more or less, how patients’
conflicts manifest themselves transferentially and how, through the countertransference
that we feel in analytic encounters with patients, we can understand the environment of
these conflicts and even ourselves. Despite this, after analyzing the role of racism at
different psychic levels, in various analytical spaces and for a several years now, I think
that what we are still struggling with doing is facing and managing cultural, structural,
social and familial challenges that are also transgenerational, narcissistic and unethical;
within and outside of ourselves due to the psychic threats that this process creates.
Especially when dealing with racism.
I believe that societal experiences are important factors in a patient’s overall development thus to
the treatment and I share Dr. Hopper’s idea when he states that “an analyst who is unaware of the
constraints of social facts and forces will be insensitive to their unconscious recreation within
therapeutic situations, and unable to provide space for patients to imagine how their identities
have been formed at particular social and political junctures” (1996).
I also agree with Kantor thoughts that “as psychoanalysts, our inescapable task is to include in
our technical model the conscious and unconscious, transferential and countertransference
expressions of this dimension in the course of the analysis that we carry out. As well as
contribute to the investigation of the psychic processes of identification and transmission of
racism in our culture” (Kantor, 2016).
Psychoanalysis has come a long way without delving much into racism as such, but we have
reached a significant moment and the issue of racism can no longer be ignored, denied, or
silenced. There are many psychoanalytic institutes, that have pledged to understand the
dynamics of racism, like mine in New Orleans, while others, have continued to stray away from
its exploration despite the research that has been conducted to understand its magnitude and the
beauties and the beasts that comes along with it. Racism brings symptoms with origins that can
be traced back to the beginning of everyone’s time and subsequently, it can be worked through
using the techniques that are constantly being developed by our theory. So, what’s the problem?
With the tremendous assistance from scholars such as Dr. Holmes, Dr. Powell, Dr. Hart, Dr.
Stout and many others, who have not only dedicated their psychoanalytic careers to addressing
the issues of Racism in its multiple facets but whom have also worked arduously on and in the
Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis to investigate all aspects of
systemic racism in American psychoanalysis. The results of this investigation were released in an
official report a little over a month ago but after the crumbling of a psychoanalytic regime which
in and of itself, set minds ablaze. Not only are the results astonishing but the recommendations
are even more enticing as they are exactly what is needed. This report is digitally sprawled out in
black and white and we can even change the colors, to fit the needs, not only in American
psychoanalysis but in Global psychoanalysis.
So, the question is really not, to explore or not to explore…racism. The question really is, what
are we waiting for?
Bibliography
Anzieu-Premmereur, C. (2015). The Skin-Ego: Dyadic Sensuality, Trauma in Infancy, and Adult
Narcissistic Issues. Psychoanalytic Review, 102(5):659-681.
Böhm, Tomas (2015) “On xenophobic and anti-Semitic prejudices”, in Hostile and Malignant
Prejudice. Psychoanalytic Approaches, Cap. VII. Ed. Cyril Levitt. Karnac, London.
Breuer, J. and Freud, S. (1983) “On the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena:
Preliminary communication”, in Freud, S and Breuer. (1985d) Studies on Hysteria, The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol 2, London:
Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Bruce, Jorge (2007). Nos habíamos choleado tanto. Psicoanálisis y racismo. Fondo editorial
Univ. San Martin de Porres, Lima
Butcher, I. (2020, October 16) Be Thoughtful and Act: Confronting Racism Inside and Outside
of Our Minds Reflections of the IPI Weekend Conference [Blog Post]. Retrieved from
Reflections of the IPI Weekend Conference by Dra. Iraira Butcher
Freud, A. (1937). The Ego and the mechanisms of defense, London: Hogarth Press and Institute
of Psycho-Analysis.
Hopper, E. (2018). Notes on the concept of the social unconscious in group analysis. Group,
42(2) 99-118.
Hopper, E. (1996). The social unconscious in clinical work. Group, 20(1)
Kantor, J. (septiembre de 2016). El supery piel: Psicoanálisis y racismo. Ponencia presentada en
el Congreso Fepal, Cartagena.
Langs, R. (1981). Interpretations. In The technique of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, (Vol 1., pp
474-475, 489-490). First Rowman & Littlefield Publisher.
Racker, H. (1966). Estudios sobre técnica psicoanalítica. Estudio IX. Contraresistencia e
interpretación pp 314-322.Editorial Paidos, Mexico.
Sollod, R., Wilson, J & Monte. C. (2009). Teorías de la Personalidad Debajode una Máscara (8°
ed.) Mexico, DF. McGraw-Hill/interamericana.
Steiner, J. (2020, June 14). La verguenza en la situación clínica. Presentación en el miercoles
científico de la Asociación Psicoanalitica de Panama (APAP).
