Political Freud: A History

The transformation in the self-image of American Blacks between 1902, when The Souls of Black Folk appeared, and the 1960 sit-in movement, is dramatic. Early twentieth-century African American society was a ravaged continent, protoliterate and impoverished, still dominated by despots such as Booker T. Washington or white overlords, “philanthropists,” and political allies. Two generations later, Black college students shook off all tutelage and boldly extended the civil rights movement into the darkest reaches of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Most historians appreciate the role played by radical cultural and political movements such as those of the Harlem Renaissance, the Popular Front, and the anti-imperialist tendency that culminates in the idea of the Black Atlantic in bringing about this change. What is less recognized is the contribution of Freudianism.

There were many reasons for the African American interest in Freud, including the wish to understand the irrationality of racism. But one in particular stands out. Africans had been separated from their families, taken from their homelands, kinship and language groups, sold, resold, and sold again, kept in ignorance, beaten, raped, slaughtered at will, and, at best, patronized and condescended to. As they sought to overcome this horrendous legacy, African Americans needed to come to grips with their history through mourning, working through, and the constitution of collective memory. Inevitably this would be painful, at times humiliating, and would typically bring forth great rage. At key moments in this process they drew on Freudianism.

To understand how and why rests on recognizing that slavery was ultimately a patriarchal system; the slave originally was part of the master’s household, and, long after the Civil War, African Americans found themselves “in the master’s house,” especially as they sought to assimilate into American society. Black intellectuals used Freud to struggle with the problem of remembering and reconstituting a patriarchal past in which they were still immersed. To illuminate this process I draw on Hegel’s now canonical phenomenological description of how the slave attains freedom.¹

In the first stage, the slave’s consciousness is divided or “doubled” in the sense that the slave is continuously aware of “the other,” i.e., the master. In the second, the slave realizes her nature as a free person through a struggle in which she literally risks her life. In a final stage, the relations of slave and master are reversed; the master has become dependent on the slave, and the slave’s consciousness exists “for itself.” Hegel’s schema can illuminate the African American people’s internal struggle against their psychic masters, which complemented the social and political struggles that unfolded in streets, public squares, churches, and schools. At three moments African American radicals turned to psychoanalysis to forge both memory and identity: the Harlem Renaissance, the Popular Front, and postcolonialism. These correspond to the three moments in the slave’s struggle for freedom, as we will see.

What makes the encounter between African American intellectuals and psychoanalysis so salient to the theme of political Freud is that it did not occur through the development of a profession or of an isolated academic tendency, but rather through the engagement of Black intellectuals with an entire people. As a result, psychoanalysis took on a political dimension that was greater than usual. For middle class white America, psychoanalysis served as avatar, interpreter, and authority over private, intimate space. In African American society the line between public and private was more tenuous, breached by racial intimidation, economic victimization, and sexual misuse. The call-and-response tradition of African American music and of the Black church illustrates the differing character of the public/private division. When a blues or gospel or jazz singer shared his pain with an audience, it was a collective pain that was being shared. Analogously, Freud, in the African American community, was not typically the interpreter of personal life per se but had to be political as well. The porosity of the public and the private in the Black community also helps explain why that community has been central to America’s political culture. The exploration of the psychic life of Black America was not only a necessary component in building an African American community; it also helped lay bare the collective unconscious of the white middle class.

In the Souls of Black Folk W. E. B. Du Bois noted the centrality of music to African American memory. Following his lead, we will situate the African American Freud in the context of music, especially in relation to the blues. The enslaved African captives created spirituals, a sacred music that told them that they were a chosen people and that they would be liberated. The blues, which first emerged in the United States in the late nineteenth century, were a secular descendant of the spirituals, a lower- and working-class response to the African American community’s continued history of bondage, exclusion, and violated dignity. As the word suggests, the blues signified pain, but they also signified something new. Descended from collective sources such as ring shouts, work songs, protest songs, and field hollers, the blues were the first explicitly personal form in the history of African American music, an outbreak of sound closely linked to psychoanalysis: not just the emotion-wracked collective voice of an oppressed group but the personal voice of an individual longing for emancipation, including emancipation from the racial community itself.

The traumatic origins of African American society made themselves felt in the anguish of the singer; the mournful humming that so often accompanied the guitar; the prevalence of such themes as blindness, old age, and impotence; and the overall sense of impasse, passivity, and stasis. When Blind Willie Johnson moans, “My mother is dead” or when Fred MacDowell describes himself as lost, humiliated, and unmanned or when Ma Rainey laments betrayal by her man, there is no self-pity. Rather, as Ralph Ellison wrote, “The Blues [was] an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near tragic, near comic lyricism.” As a form, Ellison writes, the “Blues [was] an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”² What this means, however, is that the blues were ultimately affirmative. They affirmed the triumph of the singer over her sorrow—that is, of art over reality. Reflecting the still closely felt presence of a great wrong or harm, blues singers transcended pain through art, music, and humor but offered no path beyond it.

When Ellison described the blues as part of an effort to keep “a brutal experience alive,” he was describing the role of the blues in the construction of African American memory. Psychoanalysis contributed to this task because, more than any twentieth-century movement, it placed memory at the center of all human strivings toward freedom. By memory I mean not so much objective knowledge of the past or history but rather the subjective process of mastering the past so that it becomes part of one’s identity, a process that goes on for individuals and for groups. African Americans brought psychoanalysis into the collective processes through which they reconstructed their group memory as one of several ways of moving beyond the impasse the blues represented. Other ways included Marxism, pan-Africanism, artistic modernism, and existentialism, all of which interacted with Freudianism as well as with the blues. Still, there was specificity to the Freudian contribution. In trying to bring the violence, discord, and negativity of African American history into consciousness, African Americans experienced similar difficulties—impasses—to those encountered by individuals who undergo psychoanalysis. Attempting to translate a repressed unconscious into conscious collective memory and will formation, they encountered defenses or resistances, in part reflecting the obdurate intensity of racism and in part reflecting the shame, guilt, and anger of the African American community itself. African Americans learned, accordingly, that the road to the past could never be direct but had to proceed through the resistance, through shame, guilt, and anger. It was especially at those most touchy and difficult moments that African Americans drew upon Freudianism.³

The first stage in the movement beyond the blues, the Harlem Renaissance, began with W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea of a double consciousness. Du Bois first formulated this idea in 1902 as a consciousness divided between self-consciousness and regard for the gaze of the other. Originally an intersubjective idea—self and other—under the impact of Freudianism double consciousness took on a depth-psychological inflection, that of “the racial unconscious.” Consciousness, accordingly, turned inward, albeit at the collective level. Thus a new way of thinking about the self, as having an unconscious, began to develop in tandem with a new way of thinking about memory, that is, as the unconscious resources of a group, such as their folktales, their music, and their habitus.

The idea of a racial unconscious evolved out of a broadly shared notion of culture generated during the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century. During these revolutions romantic poets and philosophers, such as Johann Herder, counterposed the idea that each “folk,” people, nation, or “race,” had its own spirit, language, or “culture,” against the supposedly rootless cosmopolitanism of aristocratic “civilization.” By the late nineteenth century the idea of culture expressed itself in a series of philosophies and theories that defined human beings as symbol-producing animals. Works like W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1902) showed that Black Americans had maintained a culture under slavery and thus had a basis on which they could participate in American and world history. It was in this spirit that James Weldon Johnson contended in his 1922 Book of American Negro Poetry that “no people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.”⁴

Johnson notwithstanding, music provided the deepest sense of historical continuity for the African American community created under slavery. The first slaves already carried small, secreted musical instruments with them. They also remembered and preserved African (pentatonic) rhythms. The centrality of not just music, but remembered music, to African American history animates The Souls of Black Folk. Writing of the fragments of music that he placed at the start of each chapter, Du Bois recounted: “Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and mine.” They descended, he explained, from his “grandfather’s grandmother seized by an evil Dutch trader two centuries ago.” Passed down through the generations, the melody reached Du Bois in the following form:

Do bana coba, gene me, gene me!

Ben d’nuli, nuli, nuli, nuli, ben d’le.

The Souls of Black Folk set the stage for Freud’s entry into African American culture. Here is Du Bois’s famous passage:

To be sure, Du Bois’s immortal passage already contains powerful suggestions of interiority: “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,” along with its self-and-other “two-ness.” But the element of internal struggle was strengthened when Freudianism entered African American culture, along with the explosive growth of urban Black racial awareness, during and after World War I. The Harlem Renaissance was an expression of this explosion. Freud was important to the Black cultural milieu of the twenties just as he was to the white, middle-class “jazz age” milieu. Like white flappers and modernist radicals, African Americans deployed Freudianism to counter Victorian sexual repressiveness, expressed in the hygienic advocacy of Booker T. Washington and in the Puritanism of the Black church. Whether or not there were analysts practicing in Harlem, the new Black media were replete with such articles as “The Psychoanalysis of the Ku Klux Klan,” “The Madness of Marcus Garvey,” or “The Mirrors of Harlem: Psychoanalyzing New York’s Colored First Citizens.” Popular African American newspapers like the Messenger or the Crisis speculated about white people’s “repressed” love of blacks.⁶ In this context Du Bois’s double consciousness took on an increasingly Freudian valence, expressed in the image of a “racial unconscious.”

The idea of a racial unconscious emerged in the course of the study of African American folk culture. Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic journeys into the American South in the 1920s supply the best starting point. A student of Franz Boas and of Edward Sapir (the main figure responsible for introducing psychoanalysis into American anthropology), Hurston at first complained that there was no such thing as African American folk culture, since Southern Blacks were interested only in radio and the movies. Later she discovered a folk culture in “the arts and crafts, the beliefs and customs of our lumber camps, city evangelical storefront churches, back-alley dives, farmer’s festivals and fairs, hill frolics, carnivals, firemen’s lofts, sailor’s cabins, chain gangs, and penitentiaries.”⁷ According to Hurston, the Black South’s dialect, tales, humor, and folk mores constituted a collective, aural catalogue of the past, a past that was still insistently present and that had its own character. “The white man thinks in a written language and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics,” she wrote.

We might already consider folk culture an expression of a Black collective memory, but the Freudian influence helped bring to the fore the element of internal conflict that ran through the African American experience of memory. One indication of this lay in Hurston’s interest in dissonance and negativity. Directly referencing Ruth Benedict’s Freudian Patterns of Culture, Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression” described Black America’s unconscious grammar in such terms as lack of reverence, “angularity,” redundancy, mimicry, and “restrained ferocity in everything.”⁸ Hurston’s best-known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, traces the efforts of a Black woman to work through her own traumatic experiences by drawing upon the warm, wet tremolos and resonant vibratos of the Deep South. It was only when Hurston’s heroine turned the collective memory of her people—the racial unconscious—into something autonomous, personal, and idiosyncratically hers that she became “a speaking Black subject.”⁹

Jean Toomer, the author of Cane, also linked the idea of a racial unconscious to a disrupted, fragmented, painful past. In a 1921 review of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, he wrote: “the contents of the unconscious not only vary with individuals; they are differentiated because of race…. Jones lived through sections of an unconscious which is peculiar to the Negro. Slave ships, whipping posts, and so on…. His fear becomes a Negro’s fear, recognizably different from a similar emotion, modified by other racial experience.” The Emperor Jones, Toomer concluded, is “a section of Negro psychology presented in significant dramatic form.”¹⁰ Not just slavery but the Great Migration produced the dissonance and contradictoriness of the racial unconscious, according to Toomer. Cane used visual images and musical effects as a literary equivalent for the dislocations “wrought by moving people from soil to pavements, making them ashamed of their traditional folk culture or changing it into commercial entertainment.”¹¹

Freud’s influence on the construction of African American memory persisted long after the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) inspired by Freud’s claim that Moses was both Egyptian and Hebrew, described an invariable element of indeterminacy that went into African American identity as well as the specialness that mysterious birth provokes. Like the spirituals that the slaves sang, and like Du Bois in Souls, Hurston identified African Americans as the chosen people. Comparing the long, slow process of African American emancipation to the Hebrews’ forty years of wandering in the desert, Hurston insisted that freedom posed internal challenges at least as difficult as those posed by slavery. Freedom, Hurston’s Moses repeatedly tells his people after they have fled Egypt, is an inner state, “not a barbecue.”¹²

In African America’s first encounter with Freud, then, the idea of a divided consciousness gained depth-psychological content. Nonetheless, the encounter remained stamped with a defensive impulse. For all its richness and complexity, the aim of the Harlem Renaissance was to bring out the humanity of the African American past, the sense in which Black lives had not been negated by slavery, not been reduced to mere haulers of wood, tobacco, and cotton, to what Aristotle called zoon, mere animal existence. What Du Bois, Toomer, Hurston, and many others showed was that even under the conditions of slavery Blacks had retained their music, history, humor, folk tales, sexual practices, religion, family ties, in a word, their culture. To be sure, Du Bois, Toomer, Hurston, and others described African American consciousness as divided, conflictual, dual: “two warring ideals in one dark body.” But what this duality revealed was that African American society had a telos, that of freedom, which remained to be realized. Soul, as defined by Du Bois, was similar to the blues: it was the acceptance of an ambiguous, in-between state, an acceptance based upon the unjust, sad (blue) but ultimately comic, in the sense of triumphant, character of the Black experience. The humor and sensuality with which Hurston leavened bitterness, the irony with which Toomer portrayed Black strivings for upward mobility, the enormous spiritual resources in Du Bois’s oeuvre: these are all examples of “soul,” that is, of the spirit’s triumph over adversity. The bittersweet “blue” quality of the triumph is what gives Black literature, music, and visual art its deeply moving quality.

Yet the African American project of cultural reconstruction could not and did not rest content with the ideas of soul, culture, and a racial unconscious, even when inflected by Freudianism, as they were. Du Bois, who had moved toward communism ever since visiting the Soviet Union in 1927, intuited that psychoanalysis offered a deeper picture of human irrationality than the idea of a racial unconscious. In his 1940 autobiography Dusk of Dawn, he recalled that as a young man he had thought of the “Negro problem as a matter of systematic investigation and intelligent understanding. The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity, the cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation.” Then “there cut across this plan which I had as a scientist, a red ray which could not be ignored…a poor Negro in central Georgia, Sam Hose, had killed his landlord’s wife. I wrote out a careful and reasoned statement concerning the evident facts and started down to the Atlanta Constitution office…. I did not get there. On the way news met me: Sam Hose had been lynched, and they said that his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store…I turned back to the university, I began to turn aside from my work.” Lynching, DuBois grasped, came from deep inside the twisted white psyche. As he later concluded: “In the fight against race prejudice, we were not facing simply the rational, conscious determination of white folk to oppress us; we were facing age-long complexes stuck now largely to unconscious habit and irrational urge.” Criticizing his earlier view that “race prejudice [was] based on wide-spread ignorance,” Du Bois concluded that he had not been “sufficiently Freudian to understand how little human action is based on reason.”¹³ Du Bois’s insight, though focused on the racist and not on the race, anticipates the second moment in the African American encounter with Freudianism, the moment when the slave risks his or her life and is thereby launched toward true self-consciousness or freedom. Our discussion of this moment will center on Richard Wright.

In 1925, at the age of seventeen, Wright left Mississippi for Memphis and then, two years later, moved to Chicago. Responsible for the support of his sick mother, Wright found Chicago reinforced his early experiences of intimate everyday violence. According to one biographer, “His inability to prevent his resentment from registering on his face or in his demeanor result[ed] in his dismissal from various jobs because his employers [did] not like his ‘looks.’”¹⁷ On one occasion, Wright was fired for saying “yes sir, I understand,” since that showed more self-respect than a Southern Black was meant to possess. “I could not make subservience an automatic part of my behavior. I had to feel and think out each tiny item of racial experience in the light of the race problem, and to each item I brought the whole of my life,” Wright wrote. Literature alone, he says, allowed him to stay “alive in a negatively vital way.” Above all, H. L. Mencken inspired him. As he wrote in Black Boy: “this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club.”¹⁸

In his Depression-era jobs Wright encountered what Ellison later called invisibility. As a hotel bellboy he was summoned to rooms where naked white prostitutes lolled around as if he wasn’t there. “Blacks were not considered human beings anyway,” Wright observed. “I was a non-man, something that knew vaguely that it was human but felt that it was not…I felt doubly cast out.”¹⁹ Wright also worked as an orderly in a Chicago medical research institute, an experience that underlined the significance of voice and language to the working through of trauma: “Each Saturday morning I assisted a young Jewish doctor in slitting the vocal cords of a fresh batch of dogs from the city pound…. I held each dog as the doctor injected Nembutal into its veins to make it unconscious; then I held the dog’s jaws open as a doctor inserted the scalpel and severed the vocal cords. Later, when the dogs came to, they would lift their heads to the ceiling and gape in a soundless wail. The sight became lodged in my imagination as a symbol of silent suffering.”²⁰

The Communist Party, more than anything, first gave Wright his voice. Nor was Wright unusual in this regard. Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Paul Robeson, Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, and W. E. B. Du Bois were only a few of the African American intellectuals of the time active in or around the Party.²¹ To be sure, American communism had been sparked by the huge upsurge in strikes involving Blacks, both as workers and as strikebreakers during World War I. But what attracted Wright and others to the Party was not primarily its commitment to the struggles of labor, but its contribution to the construction of African American memory. Ever since the Russian Revolution, the “labor question” had been largely subsumed into the “national question,” and for a while Wright’s favorite book was Stalin’s Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. “Of all the developments in the Soviet Union,” he later recalled,

the way scores of backward peoples had been led to unity on a national scale was what had enthralled me. I had read with awe how the Communists had sent phonetic experts into the vast regions of Russia…. I had made the first total emotional commitment of my life when I read how the phonetic experts had given these tongueless people, a language, newspapers, institutions. I had read how these forgotten folk had been encouraged to keep their old cultures, to see in their ancient customs meanings and satisfactions as deep as those contained in supposedly superior ways of living.²²

We can see the impact of Communism on African American life, as well as the way it paved the way for the second African American Freud, by considering its relation to the blues. In the world that Wright’s life encompassed, that of sharecropping in the Mississippi delta and odd jobs in Black Chicago, the blues had been ubiquitous. The reason was that they were integral in overcoming the shame culture that had pervaded slavery and persisted under Jim Crow. Shame is the feeling of personal inadequacy in a group context and is intrinsic to Hegel’s first stage in the struggle for freedom. The rejection of shame can be seen in the blues’ scatological language and pungent sexuality, their acceptance of weakness, frailty, and bad luck, of failed marriages and failed jobs, their embrace of the simple joys of eating, drinking, and sex, and their acceptance of ambivalence, which was expressed through humor: “I put my head on the lonesome railroad track, but when the train come by, I snatched it back.” Reflecting the triumph of narcissism (humor) not only over slavery but also over Jim Crow, the blues were integral to the great step taken by the black middle classes during the Harlem Renaissance: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Ma Rainey (so-called Mother of the Blues) all attained their first great success during the 1920s, while Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which demonstrates how the blues and classical music crossed paths, dates to 1924.

Still, the Russian Revolution, which inspired American leftists like Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, had the impact of redefining the blues, to make explicit their lower-class (proletarian) and, even more, their folk meaning. The blues were in fact one of the world’s leading examples of a folk art that had successfully made the transition to urban, industrial society, an achievement that lies behind the world supremacy of American popular music. The African American folk traditions, Alain Locke argued, were the American counterparts to the communal and medieval traditions of Europe and thereby invaluable for the modern world. At the same time, beginning in the twenties, blues, jazz, ragtime and the whole panoply of the musical Black past were in danger of being commercialized and losing their political implications. Wright believed this had already happened to African American literature, which, unlike the blues, was being written primarily for white audiences. A class analysis made it possible for him to explain this. In a 1937 essay Wright contrasted the “parasitic and mannered” literature of the Harlem Renaissance’s “rising Negro bourgeoisie,” which sought to obliterate its roots in the lower-class and slave experience, to the “blues, spirituals and folk tales recounted from mouth to mouth,” the Black mother to her Black daughter, the Black father to his Black son, the shared sex experiences of the streets, the “work songs sung under blazing suns.”²³ Memory required direct confrontation with authority. Unlike the blues singers, Wright charged, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance had “entered the Court of American Public Opinion dressed in the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not inferior, that he was human, and that he had a life comparable to that of other people.”²⁴

In the context that a left wing movement provided, blues singers were able to capture the anger and pain emanating from the Black community sharply and with emotional depth. An example comes from Robert Johnson’s 1937 “Hellhound Blues,” which refers to a Mississippi sheriff notorious for sending a trained horse out after fugitives. “I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving / blues falling down like hail / blues falling down like hail…and the days keep on worryin’ me / there’s hellhound on my trail / hellhound on my trail / hellhound on my trail.” Wright sought to create a literature capable of a similar emotional impact. His “Long, Black Song,” written at the height of the Popular Front, is an example. The story portrays a white traveling salesman, selling phonographs with clocks, who seduces a black woman, Sarah, by playing records of spirituals for her. When Sarah’s husband Silas learns what happened, he beats his wife, kills the salesman, and waits for the lynch party so he can kill a few more of his oppressors. In “Long, Black Song” the spirituals are no longer the resource for the race that they were in The Souls of Black Folk. Rather, they have been co-opted into a crass commercial culture that rests on racism, violence, and the transformation of the past into kitsch; like Sarah, they have been raped.

Bigger Thomas, who smothers his drunken, communist, female employer because he fears being discovered alone with her, and who blindly rapes his girlfriend during the flight that follows, supplanted the seventh son as the iconic representative of the African American struggle because he exemplified the knot of resistance and negativity at the heart of African American memory. Thomas’s situation is truly tragic: an accidental murder puts him in the first situation of his fear-ridden life in which he manages to take moral guilt and responsibility for himself.²⁵ In the aftermath of the murder, he experiences a profound “lifting of tension and calmness.” The reason was “the thought of what he had done, the awful horror of it, the daring associated” with it. “He had murdered and had created a new life for himself. It was something that was all his own, and it was the first time in his life he had anything that others could not take from him. Yes; he could sit here calmly and eat and not be concerned about what his family” or anyone else thought or did. After being convicted and sentenced to die, Bigger had further insight into his crimes. To the dismay of his lawyer, he cried out, “When a man kills it’s for something…. I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em…. It’s the truth, Mr. Max. I can say it now, ’cause I’m going to die. I know what I’m saying real good and I know how it sounds. But I’m all right. I feel all right when I look at it that way.”

After finishing Native Son, Wright wrote two autobiographical works: “How Bigger Was Born” and Black Boy (American Hunger). In one of his most powerful childhood memories, he recalled a friend, Carlotta: “One day I stood near her on the school ground; we were talking and I was happy. A strong wind blew and lifted the Black curls of her wavy hair and revealed…a long, ugly scar.” The rawness and violence of the sight never left him.²⁶ In Black Boy Wright reflected on the effects of a traumatic past on Black memory and culture: “After I had outlived the shocks of childhood, after the habit of reflection had been born in me, I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair. After I had learned other ways of life I used to brood upon the unconscious irony of those who felt that Negroes led so passional an existence! I saw that what had been taken for our emotional strength was our negative confusions, our flights, our fears, our frenzy under pressure.” Here we have an unprecedented reflection on the costs exacted by a traumatic past, searing in its pain.

Ralph Ellison’s review situated Black Boy in the context of the blues. In its refusal to offer solutions, Ellison wrote, Black Boy shared something with the blues, since the blues “provide no solution, offer no scapegoat but the self.” But, to my reading, Black Boy expressed elements of defiance and existential rage that moved beyond the blues. Perhaps for the first time, the unbelievable enormity of the crimes that had been committed against African Americans began to rise to the level of consciousness, and men and women began to bear the anguish that the realization of a traumatic past entails: the discovery that one’s life could have been different, that one’s best potential had been betrayed by the rapacity of others, that the sanctity of one’s heart had been violated by the instruments of an enemy, that one’s parents, grandparents, and ancestors had had their lives stolen from them. Even Ellison conceded that Wright “has converted the American Negro impulse toward self-annihilation and ‘going under-ground’ into a will to confront the world.”²⁷

Communism, which was a fundamentally historical conception of the world, and which therefore fostered collective memory, had played a role in this. Communism, Wright wrote, was “something more recondite than mere political strategy…. It was a life strategy using political methods as its tools…. Its essence was a voluptuous, a deep-going sensuality that took cognizance of fundamental human needs and the answers to those needs…. It was a noneconomic conception of existence.” Communism helped bring the subterranean violence of African American life into the foreground and give it a systematic and structural focus. But communism had no room for the distinct and idiosyncratic struggle of an individual subjectivity. Like so many others, Wright felt it was necessary to leave communism in order to advance the cause of freedom that communism had itself in part unleashed. Wright wrote in his preface to St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton Jr.’s Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), “We know how some of the facts look when seen under the lenses of Marxist concepts but the full weight of the Western mind has yet to bear upon this forgotten jungle of Black life. What would life on Chicago’s South Side look like when seen through the eyes of a Freud, a Joyce, a Proust, a Pavlov?” “I’m convinced” he added in his diary, “that the next great area of discovery in the Negro will be the dark, landscape of his own mind, what living in white America has done to him. Boy, what that search will reveal! There’s enough there to find to use in transforming the basis of human life on earth.”²⁸

In seeking to combine Marx with Freud (not to mention Joyce, Proust, and Pavlov) Wright pioneered an important variant of the idea, pervasive in later twentieth-century politics and social thought, that mental states, such as hysteria, “neurosis,” or anxiety, as well as antisocial proclivities, such as racism, authoritarianism, or criminality, had a historical and social basis. Wilhem Reich had pioneered this version of political Freudianism in the thirties by explaining “the mass psychology of fascism.” Karen Horney, a student of Reich’s, applied it to sexism. The Popular Front was suffused with it, under such rubrics as neo-Freudianism, “national character,” “culture and personality,” and in the widely read writings of such figures as Erich Fromm. To be sure, the confrontation with the Nazis largely decimated hereditarian and eugenic theories of Black “deviance,” leading to a deepening appreciation of sociological and cultural explanations of “individual problems” such as E. Franklin Frazier’s theory of the “weakness” of the Black family. However, harnessing psychoanalysis to the Popular Front critique of racism had its own distinctive character.

Wright’s involvement in this project began with two white, left-liberal Jewish psychiatrists: Benjamin Karpman and Frederick Wertham, as well as with the Black sociologist Horace Cayton. In April 1943 Karpman, a psychiatrist at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, DC, who taught at all-Black Howard University and considered himself “a specialist in minorities,” wrote Wright urging him to do an article for Harper’s Magazine that “might deal with such a topic as ‘The Blind Inability of the White Man to Understand the Psychology of the Negro,’ which blindness is a defense barrier put up by him, while the negro too, when dealing with white people, is also on the defensive.” Among Karpman’s “special qualifications” for pursuing a “psychogenetic study on the problems of the negro” he cited his “intimate contact with the people for the past twenty five years, which I doubt that many white people have had an opportunity to have”—a contact that Karpman “sought,” “nourished,” “cultivated” and to which he “gave all the sunshine [he] could.” In his parting words to Wright, Karpman emphasized that he “had met among [his] students Bigger Thomas long before [Wright] ever thought of writing about them.” Karpman also told Wright that he “probably would not have gone into Psychiatry were it not for my feeling that neurotics and psychotics are a greatly misunderstood minority. Similarly, the criminal has been misunderstood and abused as well. I found the same situation existing with respect to homosexuals.” Wright appealed to various foundations and mayor’s committees for funds to publish Karpman’s case studies of Black criminals, studies that Karpman hoped would prove the “scientific parallel to Native Son.”²⁹

In addition, Wright formed a relationship with Frederick Wertham, née Wertheimer, a refugee from Germany, director of the Mental Hygiene Clinic at Bellevue and author of a psychoanalytic study of matricide, Dark Legend.³⁰ As in the case of Bigger Thomas, a “violent destructive act seemed to have been a rallying point for the constructive forces of [the hero’s] personality.” In Germany Wertham had observed the misuse of psychiatry by Kraepelin and others to stigmatize leftists and Jews. Wertham treated Wright, partly to help him avoid service in World War II as well as assisting him in an ill-fated intervention in the New Jersey prison system. In June 1944 Wertham presented “An Unconscious Determinant in Native Son” at the annual meeting of the American Psychopathological Association. According to Wertham, the project was unique since “no psychoanalytic study of a literary creation based on analytic study of its author [had] ever been undertaken.”

Horace Cayton, coauthor with St. Clair Drake of Black Metropolis, was another figure who sought to wed Freud to leftist sociology. Cayton’s honesty about how racism affected him personally endeared him to Wright. Considering fear to be the fundamental emotion guiding Negro personality and behavior, Wright wrote, “I like Horace because he’s scared and admits it, as I do.” According to Wright, “None of us want to believe that fear—a fear that lies so deep within us that we are unaware of it—is the most dominate [sic] emotion of the Negro in America. But what if we are afraid and know it and know what caused it, could we not contain it and convert it into useful knowledge? But we are afraid and we do not want to tell ourselves that we are afraid; it wounds if we do; so we hug it, thinking that we have killed it. But it still lives, creeping out in a disguise that is called Negro laughter.” Wright called upon his fellow Negroes to face the fear of exploring the psychological and emotional effects of racist oppression. He called this process “The Conquest of Ourselves.”

The friendship between Wright and Cayton was marked by an intense interest in the theoretical insights of psychoanalysis for the Negro. “About the whole problem of psychoanalysis,” Cayton wrote to Wright, “I would like to talk to you at length. Especially would I like to discuss the question of what constitutes the rock bottom of the Negro’s existence & personality structure—his earlier psychological conditioning in the family or his reaction to his subjugation. My notion is that they are curiously blended—one reinforcing the other to produce the most devastating results. However, I would have to talk to you about this at length. It is not in the literature and we could make a real contribution if we could express it.” In “A Psychological Approach to Race Relations” Cayton also theorized white Americans’ “guilt-hate-fear complex”: “The white man suffers then from an oppressor’s psychosis—the fear that there will be retribution from those he has humiliated and tortured.”³¹

Cayton underwent a long analysis with Dr. Helen V. McLean, a disabled woman and a prominent advocate for the inclusion of psychoanalysis in discussions of American race relations. Through McLean, Cayton arranged for Wright to give a lecture at the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis on the utility of psychoanalysis for understanding fear and hate in the American Negro. Speaking of his own analysis, Cayton wrote that beginning with the idea that race was a “convenient catchall,” a rationalization for personal inadequacy, a “means of preventing deeper probing,” he had concluded that race “ran to the core of [his] personality” and “formed the central focus for [his] insecurity.” “I must have drunk it in with my mother’s milk,” he added.³²

Psychoanalysis also provided Cayton and Wright with the language and concepts to explore the impact of racism on African Americans’ sexuality and family life. The dominant—white, middle-class—ideal of the family was rooted in the “cult of true womanhood.” White racism was integral to this cult. Blacks were degraded and associated with the profane, while white women were placed on a pedestal. In Freudian terms this cast the white man as a protector of virginity, while the Black man was hypersexualized and therefore in need of being castrated. Wright felt that Black men internalized this racism, by castrating themselves before they could suffer at the hands of others. In 1943 Wright, traveling with Cayton in the South on a Jim Crow train, insisted that they eat in the dining car. The white steward sat them last, in the least desirable table, pulling a curtain around them so no one could see them. Their waiter, however, was Black. After they ate, Wright queried Cayton about the waiter: “Did you notice that waiter when he talked to the steward?…Poor Black devil, his voice went up two octaves and his testicles must have jumped two inches into his stomach…. He does that to emasculate himself, to make himself more feminine, less masculine, more acceptable to a white man.”³³

Wright’s wish to redeem Black masculinity cannot be reduced to sexism. Rather, it has to be situated in the context of bisexuality in the Freudian sense of the term, which ascribes heterosexual and homosexual currents to both sexes. In Wright’s short story “Man of All Work” (1957), the hero, Carl, had been a cook in the army, but he is now busy taking care of a newborn and a sick wife, and the only work available is as a domestic. To feed his family, Carl dresses as a woman and gets a maid’s job. Not only is Carl invisible as a Black man but also as a woman, as we learn when the man of the house tries to rape him. The story’s high point comes when the wife of his employer forces Carl to give her a bath, thus compelling him to look upon a naked white woman. At its end, Carl’s whole family—a newborn, a six year old, and a sick wife—are crying, and Carl joins in: “Aw, Christ, if you all cry like that, you make me cry,” and then comes a wail from the blues, “Oooouuwa.” As in the case of Tyree, the Southern Black father figure in Wright’s last novel The Long Dream, the Black father may only appear castrated; we need always appreciate the feminine or maternal elements in his character, which are motivated by love of family and not solely by fear of white intimidation.

In 1945 Wright joined Wertham in opening a low-cost therapy center, the Lafargue Clinic, in Harlem, named for Paul Lafargue, an Afro-Cuban French-born socialist who was also Karl Marx’s son-in-law. The clinic, a pioneering experiment in “mass therapy,” charged twenty-five cents an hour and did not pay psychiatrists. Ralph Ellison called it the “most successful attempt in the nation to provide psychotherapy for the underprivileged” and “one of the few institutions dedicated to recognizing the total implication of Negro life in the United States.” General Omar Bradley, director of the Veterans Administration, recommended it to all veterans, regardless of race. Wright wrote several articles popularizing the clinic, including “Psychiatry Comes to Harlem,” in which he spoke of the “artificially made psychological problems” of Blacks.³⁴ According to Wright, “the powerful personality conflicts engendered in Negroes by the consistent sabotage of their democratic aspirations in housing, jobs, education, and social mobility creates an environment of anxiety and tension which easily tips the normal emotional scales toward neurosis.” Embodying a “social psychoanalytic approach professing that change within the social environment can and will affect the black psyche,” Wright referred to it as “the extension of the very concept of psychiatry into a new realm, the application of psychiatry to the masses, the turning of Freud upside down.” The clinic’s location in the basement of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church led Wright to imagine it as an “underground” institution.

Ralph Ellison was also closely involved with the clinic. Born in Oklahoma City, Ellison moved to New York in 1937, where he found work as a clerk for the psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan. Sullivan, like Karen Horney and Erich Fromm, was a “neo-Freudian,” i.e., someone who followed Wilhelm Reich in insisting that psychoanalysis needed to be situated in the context of social and cultural conditions and, therefore, ultimately in the context of memory and history.³⁵ Like Wright, Ellison explained the Black psyche in terms of the Great Migration of Blacks to Northern cities. Perceived psychological disorders among African Americans, Ellison wrote, mask deeper intellectual energies that are repressed due to Southern oppression. The Black Southerner who possesses insight into the illogical nature of his inferior position appears to be a hysteric. When he moves north, “his family disintegrates, his church splinters, his folk wisdom is discarded in the mistaken notion that it in no way applies to urban living,” but he also experiences a “quick rise in intellect,” a spurt in energy that takes the form of nervous tension, anxiety. In September 1944 Ellison wrote Wright: “I did hear the rumour that you were neurotic again; first it was Bigger and now you. ‘If you can’t control a nigger, call him crazy,’ you know the technique.”

In “Harlem Is Nowhere” (1948) Ellison expressed his hopes that the Lafargue Clinic could give shape to the overall project of African American emancipation. The Harlem streetscape, he wrote, resembled the devastated inner world of many African Americans: “a ruin—many of its ordinary aspects (its crimes, its casual violence, its crumbling buildings with littered area-ways, ill-smelling halls and vermin-invaded rooms) are indistinguishable from the distorted images that appear in dreams, and which, like muggers haunting a lonely hall, quiver in the waking mind with hidden and threatening significance.” Harlem’s citizens inhabit a social, geographic, and psychological no-man’s-land where they “feel alienated and their whole lives have become a search for answers to the questions, Who am I, What am I, Why am I, and Where? Significantly, in Harlem the reply to the greeting ‘How are you?’ is often, ‘Oh man, I’m nowhere’—a phrase so revealing an attitude so common that is has been reduced to a gesture, a seemingly trivial word.” According to Ellison, “the phrase ‘I’m nowhere’ expresses the feeling borne in upon many Negroes that they have no stable, recognized place in society. One’s identity drifts in a capricious reality in which even the most commonly held assumptions are questionable. One ‘is’ literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto maze, a ‘displaced person’ of American democracy.” In contrast to the devastation Ellison found in Harlem’s streets, he claimed the clinic’s “importance transcends even its great value as a center for psychotherapy; it represents an underground extension of democracy.”

The Lafargue Clinic had a long reach. Conducting individual interviews, mosaic tests, and group observation, psychiatrists at the clinic found that segregation resulted in Black children having feelings of inferiority, insecurity, and alienation and bred sentiments of racism and prejudice among white children. After the study, Wertham concluded that segregation was “a massive public health problem,” creating “in the mind of the child an unsolvable conflict.”³⁶ Joined with the research of Drs. Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark, the study was later instrumental for the NAACP attorneys who relied heavily on psychological evidence in Brown v. the Board of Education. In a more long-term sense, the experience of the clinic, linked as it was to the Supreme Court integration decision, provides an indelible moment situating Freudianism in African American memory as it exists today.

The Popular Front, then, provided the context for the second great political Freud in African American history. While the New Negro of the 1920s still contained elements of proving oneself, the Popular Front insistence on the integrity, and even moral superiority, of lower-class culture encouraged a new sense of equality not as something bestowed but as always already present. This changed the emphasis of African American memory, from the cultural achievements of the past to the devastation that slavery and racism had wrought. A shift in the class basis of the freedom struggle was the key to this change. The inclusion of the lower classes and of folk culture not only grounded African American identity more widely than before; it also deepened it. This deepening, which reflected a kind of popular sociological and political Freudianism, can be seen in terms of sex and aggression. On the one hand, the African American struggle for a fully sexual life and for a family life in the context of racism was validated; on the other hand, the centrality of aggression, conflict, and even violence in African American history was admitted into consciousness. Unlike the Freud of the Harlem Renaissance, then, who was always aware of his “twoness,” the Freud of the Popular Front helped inspire a life-and-death struggle against the dominant culture. Indeed, so important was psychoanalysis to left-wing African American culture of the forties that the later Popular Front should be thought of as Marxo-Freudian and not merely Marxist.

As we have already seen, the blues helps clarify the context in which the project of African American memory germinated. In particular, attention to the blues demonstrates the way in which Popular Front collectivism, almost in spite of itself, was generating a new and potentially radical focus on individual subjectivity, and not just on group consciousness. Blues historians often say there is no such thing as the blues, only Ma Rainey blues, Blind Lemon blues, Willie Johnson blues.³⁷ During the Popular Front, the new and increasingly refined focus on the individual voice, along with the single harmonica, banjo, or guitar, expressed the incomparable qualities of the idiosyncratic individual, as did the sliding between scales (pentatonic and heptatonic), the slurring, vocal leaps, and falsettos, the syncopation, which accented the weak or offbeat notes, the dark introversions of the minor keys, and the improvised, informal, spontaneous performance, impossible to reproduce for a mass public. A new consciousness, centered on jazz, abstract expressionism, and existentialism, along with psychoanalysis, was in the process of being born, and Wright pursued it by moving to Paris in 1946, where the third African American and now Afro-Caribbean Freud was also germinating.

In Black Jacobins (1938) C. L. R. James struggled to understand how Toussaint L’Ouverture, perhaps the greatest liberator of the Age of Revolution, had lost the support of his people. “Knowing the race question for the political and social question that it was,” James wrote, “he tried to deal with it in a purely political and social way.” Toussaint’s failure to appreciate the passions of the ex-slaves “was a grave error,” James continued, a “failure of enlightenment, not of darkness.”³⁸ Behind James’s wrestling with Toussaint lay the self-inflicted tragedy of the Russian Revolution. A leading figure in the Fourth (Trotskyist) International, James believed the revolution had disintegrated into Stalinism because the Bolsheviks lost touch with the subjective experiences of the Soviet peoples.

A deepening awareness of subjectivity, and indeed of freedom, also lies behind the third incarnation of Freud in African American history: the anticolonial Freud or—the term I will eventually suggest—the Freud of the Black Atlantic. Even more than his two great predecessors—the Freud of the Harlem Renaissance and the Freud of the Popular Front—the anticolonial Freud was a transnational figure, issuing from a diverse community of left-wing African, African American, and Caribbean insurgents and intellectuals, formed in Paris after the Second World War, and including Richard Wright, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, and C. L. R. James, as well as French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Memmi, and Octave Mannoni. Also important were pan-Africanist intellectuals in London, notably George Pad-more, South Africans like Peter Abrahams, and exponents of Négritude like Amilcar Cabral and Leopold Senghor. Deeply influenced by existentialism, these thinkers externalized the psychoanalytic idea of an unconscious, turning it into an account of projection, projective identification, and intersubjective conflicts and defenses. Diverse though they were, the long-term result of their labors was one of the great paradigms of the postwar world: the antagonistic self/other relations of domination exemplified by the anti-Semite and the Jew (Sartre), colonizer/colonized (Fanon, Memmi, Mannoni), sexism (Beauvoir), knowing subject/object of knowledge (Foucault), racism (Stuart Hall), and orientalism (Edward Said).

The anticolonial Freud emerged against the background of a powerful leftist social and historical concept, that of imperialism. In 1935 the Italian invasion of Ethiopia encouraged African Americans to think of U.S. racism as one building block in a worldwide system of racialized colonialism. In 1936 the Spanish Civil War brought the fascist boot down in Spain’s North African colonies. World War II was waged mostly by two self-proclaimed anticolonial powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, against expansionist empires: Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan. As the war was ending, President Roosevelt sought to dismantle the French and British empires. As a result, many African Americans expected that the postwar era would also lead to the end of Jim Crow. When the leaders of India’s independence movement refused to fight the Nazis without the promise of independence, when African and Caribbean national liberation movements exploded, or when the British suspended Nigerian press freedoms, these were huge stories in the African American community, closely linked to expectations of an end to the American racial divide. Equally powerful, if less conscious among African Americans, was the awareness of a contemporaneous expression of racial hatred, the murder of six million European Jews.

Meanwhile, the most promising challenge to cold war consumerism did not come from an already largely discredited communism, nor from psychoanalysis, but rather from artistic radicalism, including music such as the blues, jazz, and bebop and—the seedbed of the third African American Freud—from existentialism. A theory of human freedom, choice, and contingency, existentialism had emerged against the background of France’s defeat, resistance, and collaboration. Sartre called existentialism an “individualism of the Left,” reflecting the way in which leftist thought had shifted, albeit subtly, from the Popular Front’s preoccupation with equality to the postwar preoccupation with freedom. Existentialism drew on the French conception of the subject or cogito, which had originated with Montaigne, Pascal, and Descartes, a conception that was weak or absent in Anglo-American philosophical thought. With this legacy in mind, Sartre criticized Freudianism because it seemed to analyze consciousness from the outside, as if it were an objective “thing,” and not from within. Still, Sartre’s reading of Freud was ambiguous, hovering between outright rejection and phenomenological restatement. What Freudianism brought to existentialism, as it had brought it to the Harlem Renaissance and to the Popular Front, was a sense of the weight of the past, which is to say depth psychology. Frantz Fanon, our main example of this third moment in the relations of Freudianism and African American memory, saw this, and so he sought to synthesize the existentialist subject and the Freudian unconscious in his historically framed conception of a “racial complex.”

The original psychoanalytic element in Fanon’s thought was the idea that the unconscious could serve as a revolutionary force. This idea drew on Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and ignored the later complexities in Freud’s theory of memory, such as Freud’s elaboration of a theory of psychic structure. In fact, Fanon derived his original idea of the unconscious less from his analytical training than from surrealism, artistic radicalism, the blues and jazz, and from his Négritude background. Though influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude rested on the conviction that the achievement of genuine subjectivity on the part of an oppressed race had to pass through the recognition of degradation, an insight we have already seen in Wright. In his great 1939 poem Retour d’un pays natal, Césaire describes the Caribbean sun as venereal and diseased and portrays Martinique as “scrofulous,” still echoing with the groans of despair in the hulls of the slave ships. Recalling monstrous sodomies, prostitutions, hypocrisies, petty cowardice, and “wheezing enthusiasms,” the poet describes the Martinicans as a race of “worthless dishwashers” who have “never invented anything.” In his final line, repeated by Fanon, Césaire describes the Afro-Caribbean past as “the great black hole” (le grand trou noir) into which the poet expects to drown (noyer).

Surrealism, which Césaire called “a weapon that exploded the French language,” rested on the idea that unconscious traces of the past, which could take the form of physical sites, even of urban neighborhoods, but also of subaltern behaviors and practices, had revolutionary potential. In 1941 André Breton, interned in Martinique by the Vichy government, discovered Césaire’s poem and praised it for revitalizing surrealism after Stalinism had dealt it a near-mortal blow. Surrealism, Breton wrote, “is allied with people of color…because it has sided with them against all forms of imperialism and white brigandage…. Both envision the abolition of the hegemony of the conscious and the everyday.” Césaire, in turn, termed surrealism “a process of disalienation,” able to awaken the tortured Baudelairean albatross of the colonized self, sick from “fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement,” yet capable of poetic sublimity. Fanon quoted Césaire’s words at the start of Black Skin, White Masks (1952), his first book, and described his own project too as “disalienation.”³⁹ Surrealism, though, was similar to the blues in that it provided access to unconscious or primary process thinking, but had no means of turning primary process material into speech acts, social theory, and political action, in other words into memory in the sense of a subjective, structured, collective account of the past.

Sartre’s thought, though not explicitly concerned with memory, provided Fanon with a model of agonistic struggle. Most important was Sartre’s 1946 essay Anti-Semite and Jew, a response not just to French anti-Semitism but also to Nazism and to the camps. In Sartre’s searing account of the intersubjective character of anti-Semitism, which Fanon applied to racism, “We experience our inapprehensible being-for-others in the form of a possession. I am possessed by the Other; the Other’s look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it.”⁴⁰ Freud’s work suggested that the origins of this experience of being taken possession of by the other lay in infancy, but also in the lingering effects of traumatic experiences of prehistory. Fanon grasped this point, but substituted the history of slavery and colonialism for Freud’s prehistory. For Fanon, as for Freud, then, both individual and collective memory included earlier strata, byways, tunnels, and burrows that had not disappeared in the course of time, even though new structures had been built so that the earlier ones were no longer available to consciousness. Both Fanon and Freud saw themselves as historically minded archaeologists unearthing the remains of these early strata, which were the remains not so much of primitive civilizations as of primitive catastrophes—catastrophes that remained “at one and the same moment actively vital and…incapable of resolution.”⁴¹ For Fanon, though, these catastrophes were the French invasion, capture, and brutal sexual and economic violation of the Caribbean islands. Unearthing these early catastrophes, Fanon believed, was the key to transforming what Wright had called negative confusions, flights, and frenzy into the ordered authority of a mastered past. Because Freudianism provided a sense of how this could be achieved, Fanon insisted, in Black Skin, White Masks, that “only a psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem can lay bare the anomalies of affect that are responsible for the structure of the [racial] complex.”

The changing character of psychoanalysis during the thirties and forties also facilitated Fanon’s reconstruction of racial memory. The experience of the war, and the shocking discovery of the concentration camps along with that of new nations discovering their own origins in the midst of imperial holocausts and the capture of slaves, seemed to have more in common with a primal murder than with the social contract promoted by postwar modernization theorists. Writing in the wake of World War II, Fanon registered the traumatic impact of the Holocaust when he described the colonial world as “one vast concentration camp.”⁴² Equally poignant was the Freudian-inflected resonance between the patriarchal slave owner and the modern dictator. Psychoanalysis had much to say about the ways in which individual minds can be subjugated, reduced to villeinage and servility, not just through economic deprivation or foreign conquest, but also from within, as had occurred in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, as well as among colonials and, as some claimed, in middle-class white America itself. Finally, a subgroup among psychiatrists were identifying with inmates, patients, and other subordinated groups, anticipating the antipsychiatry movements of the sixties associated with such figures as R. D. Laing and David Cooper. Fanon was one of these. After qualifying as a psychiatrist in 1951, he worked at Saint-Alban Hospital in Southern France, a famed center of the resistance, under the Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles, a leading advocate of “socio-analysis,” which enlisted patients and staff in a struggle against institutional psychiatry, again highlighting the role that power struggles played in the excavation of the unconscious.

The transformation of psychoanalysis into a theory of the mother/ infant relationship during the 1930s also contributed to the project of memory by encouraging the rethinking of the relevance of Freudianism to non-Western settings where many believed the Oedipus complex was absent. In its place the preoedipal mother appeared, often represented by the natal group. Marie Cécile and Edmund Ortigues’s Oedipe Africain, published in 1962 but reflecting several decades of work, held that in Senegal “guilt does not appear as such…but rather under the form of an anxiety at being abandoned by the group, of a loss of object.”⁴³ The Ortigues’s work suggested that the relationship to the mother underlay such anticolonial preoccupations as origins, roots, and beginnings, as suggested by the term motherland. Such themes fused in Fanon’s inspired 1952 leap, Black Skin, White Masks, which relied on La névrose d’abandon, the 1950 work of a Swiss psychoanalyst, Germaine Guex, to illuminate the catastrophic effects of the earliest traumata, the racialization of one’s earliest attachments, the drive for a homeland or identity, and the role of the natal group in “healing” the deformations wrought by colonialism. The heart of the abandonment syndrome described by Guex was the feeling that one had never been truly wanted as a child. According to Fanon, the resulting sense of disappointment, betrayal, and devaluation of self perfectly described the colonial for whom France was a beloved mother who had shown no interest in her accursed progeny.

Fanon’s sense of the colonial power as a negligent and often cruel mother lies behind the pathos of his entire contribution to African American and Afro-Caribbean memory. Echoing Horace Cayton, who described racism as lacing his “mother’s milk,” Fanon described the Black colonial’s longing to be white, or to possess whiteness, as “lactification,” a wish to be finally, adequately nursed by the warm white liquid. Later, in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), he likened the French colonial power that tells the Algerians that they will never be able to govern themselves to an intrusive, malevolent mother who pretends to help by “protecting” her perverse offspring from giving free rein to its instincts. “The colonial mother,” Fanon wrote ironically, “is protecting the child from itself, from its ego, its physiology, its biology, and its ontological misfortune.” The result is the double bind reported by a patient: “All it took for me was to come of age and go and serve my adopted motherland in the country of my ancestors to make me wonder whether I hadn’t been betrayed by everything around me, white folk refusing to accept me as one of their own and black folk virtually repudiating me.” In Fanon’s summary, “Others have betrayed and thwarted him and yet it is only from these others that he expects any improvement in his lot.”

Fanon’s evocation of the mother in explaining the colonial experience of abandonment and neglect drew on the preoedipal moment in Freudianism, but Fanon also drew on Freud’s oedipalization of Hegel’s portrait of the master/slave relationship to evoke the threat of “castration” omnipresent in the colonial order. The theme of castration was not only important because it pervades sexuality but also because it shows how colonialism entailed an internal submission to the looming, threatening French father. Yet just as the oedipal rests on the preoedipal, so the colonial subject’s fear of castration rested on the prior experience of being abandoned and unloved. The white child’s awful “‘Dirty nigger!’ or simply, ‘Look a Negro,’” seals the Black man into a “crushing object-hood” in part because it reverberated with an earlier wound.⁴⁴ Speaking autobiographically of the Antillean who goes to France for study, Fanon evoked the weight of an unmastered past: “I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema…. I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects…. I took myself far off from my own presence…. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?…I am over-determined from without…I am fixed.”⁴⁵

Fanon’s recollection echoes Toomer’s account of the racial unconscious, Sartre’s account of the gaze, but also Freud’s account of primal catastrophe. For Fanon, however, Freud’s account also evoked the importance of race to sex, which is fundamental to the postcolonial Freud. As in Freud’s description of the girl’s discovery of sexual difference, so with Fanon’s description of the colonial’s discovery of race, a sudden shocking—often but not always visual—experience creates a new life-world pervaded by a hierarchical dichotomy: black/white as well as man/woman.⁴⁶ In Freud the discovery of sexual difference follows different paths in boys and in girls; so, with Fanon, race has different meanings for whites and for Blacks. The white discovery of race is analogous to the boy’s discovery of sexual difference: race is not a sudden discovery but is rather an insidious process that disturbs and distorts the white person’s humanity. By contrast, the Black’s discovery of race is a shock—“Look a Negro”—analogous to the girl’s discovery of sexual difference, resulting in permanent (i.e., ontological) anxiety. The horrors of the colonial order translate into psychic devastation. In Albert Memmi’s summary of Fanon’s thought, “the war waged by the White against the Black also brings about a war of the Black against himself, a war that is perhaps even more destructive, for it is waged unremittingly from within.”⁴⁷ The results of this insight are some of the most moving passages in Fanon, passages that resonate with the sea change in African American memory that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s. For example: “Shame. Shame and self-contempt. Nausea. When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle.”⁴⁸

By drawing on Freudianism then, Fanon, like Wright, placed both race and sexuality at the center of the colonial past. For Fanon, there was no sexual relationship in the colonial world that was not disfigured by race. On the one hand, the Black male’s thwarted struggle for masculinity and self-respect led him to demand that black women deliver a “love that will strengthen [the black man] by endorsing [his] assumption of manhood.” As Françoise Vergès has written, Black women sometimes served as “a degraded mirror for the Black man” in Fanon’s work. “The recovery of…wounded masculinity is done at the expense of women’s own desires.”⁴⁹ Analogously, the black man who desires the white woman thinks: “I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness.” “When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.” Since Fanon saw colonial memory as pervaded by racialized sexuality, his blind spot toward sexism is striking, especially since Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex had been published in 1949, three years before Black Skin, White Masks, and based on the same Sartrean model of asymmetric domination. It would not be until the publication of Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism in 1974 that the Freudian model Fanon wielded so deftly against racial oppression would be applied to sexual domination.⁵⁰

Fanon’s understanding of the pervasiveness of shame and guilt in the master/slave relationship went so far beyond Wright’s that we are perhaps justified in describing it as a new—third—stage in the construction of memory. Most important, the third Freud broadened the scope of African American memory from slavery to colonialism, from the United States to the Americas as a whole, and from “the West” to Asia and Africa, transforming historical thought by placing the struggles against slavery and colonialism at the center of modern radicalism, not displacing but rather explaining the labor struggles that consumed the Popular Front. Still, this third stage does not conform to Hegel’s optimistic dialectic. For Fanon, there is no transcendence or reconciliation, as there was for Hegel. For one thing, the racial complex has inflicted each individual with “narcissistic scars,” claims and reproaches that interfere with the possibilities of love. According to Fanon, “authentic love”—i.e., object love in the psychoanalytic sense, the achievement of the oedipal stage—“will remain unattainable [until] one has purged oneself of that feeling of inferiority.” For example, a Black woman laments, “I should have liked to be married, but to a white man. But a woman of color is never altogether respectable in a white man’s eyes. Even when he loves her.” Fanon also speaks of “the fear, the timorousness, the humility of the black man in his relations with the white woman, or in any case with a woman whiter than he.”

The inability of colonial subjects to experience genuine object love reflects the intense weight of an unmastered past. Speaking of a Black character in a novel by René Maran, Fanon wrote, “Jean Veneuse would like to be a man like the rest, but he knows that this position is a false one. He is a beggar. He looks for appeasement, for permission in the white man’s eyes. For to him there is”—Fanon here both echoes and deepens Du Bois—“‘the Other.’”⁵¹ “The Negro wants to be like the master,” Fanon continued. “Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave. In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object [i.e., toward labor and ultimately toward revolution]. Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object.” “In the man of color there is a constant effort to run away from his own individuality, to annihilate his own presence,” Fanon added, in obvious pain. Writing of the power of the past to intrude upon the present, Fanon recalled, “out of the blackest part of my soul across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white.”⁵² As James Baldwin, who know both Fanon and Wright in Paris, wrote, “Perhaps…we have no idea what history is, or are in flight from the demon we have summoned. Perhaps history is not to be found in our mirrors, but in our repudiations; perhaps the other is ourselves.”⁵³

Unmasterable though the past is, Fanon’s generation was successful in weaving existentialism, cosmopolitanism, and the postcolonial perspective into a deepening account of African American memory. In 1953, the year after finishing Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon wrote to Wright that he was “working on a study bearing on the human breadth (portée) of your works.”⁵⁴ Although the work was never completed, the two men were in dialogue throughout the fifties. In 1942 Wright had propounded a generalized symbol for African American identity, “the Outsider,” based on the experiences of guilt, stigmatization, and exclusion ubiquitous to the construction of nations and races. The outsider was a figure for homo sacer, the banned but unmourned victim in ancient Rome. Jews in Germany, like runaway slaves or victims of lynching in the United States, were regularly hunted down and slaughtered—slaughtered but not sacrificed, because they had not attained the free status that characterized the human. Yet in the modern world there was also a possibility of transcendence since the Outsider lives “in one life, many lifetimes,” and, though “born in the Western world, is not quite of it.”⁵⁵

Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground,” the story of a Black man falsely accused of murder, living in an underground sewer, observing reality from “below,” is a brilliant example of the Outsider. The Outsider is persecuted and excluded, but this works in part because of the effects of a primal catastrophe. Thus, although the police have framed Wright’s hero, he accuses himself, “always trying to remember a gigantic shock that had left a haunting impression upon one’s body which one could not forget or shake off, but which had been forgotten by the conscious mind.” Even so, the struggle for memory gives the Outsider what Du Bois called the second sight of the seventh son. “Negroes, as they enter our culture,” Wright’s character explains, “are going to inherit the problems we have, but with a difference. They are outsiders and they are going to know that they have these problems. They are going to be self-conscious; they are going to be gifted with a double vision, for, being Negroes, they are going to be both inside and outside of our culture at the same time…. They will become psychological men, like the Jews.”⁵⁶

Wright’s conception of a double vision builds on Du Bois’s awareness of being a minority in a white-dominated land, but the image has become both more global and more psychological. Not just otherness but internal conflict, repression, and absence have become the problem that lies behind memory. This can be seen in Wright’s 1955 description of the elites of Asia and Africa at the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned States as

men without language…. It is psychological language that I speak of. For these men there is a “hole” in history, a storm in their hearts that they cannot describe, a stretch of centuries whose content has been interpreted only by white Westerners: the seizure of his country, its subjugation, the introduction of military rule, another language, another religion—all of these events existed without his interpretation of them…. The elite has no vocabulary of history. What has happened to him is something about which he has yet to speak.

Both Wright and Fanon agreed that Négritude was only a stopgap measure in the recovery of African American memory. Speaking in Paris at the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956, with those in the audience including Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, James Baldwin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Fanon, Wright confessed, “I have the feeling, uneasy, almost bordering upon dread, that there was a fateful historic complement between a militant, white Christian Europe and an ancestral cult religion in Africa.” Whereas Sartre had complained that the new black elites had to communicate through the language of the colonialists, Wright welcomed the fact that the condemnations of the West he heard at Bandung “were uttered in the languages of the cultures that the delegates were denouncing!…By this means English was coming to contain a new extension of feeling, of moral knowledge.”⁵⁸

In Fanon’s work the painful search for a homeland gives a lyrical quality to the writing, breaking it into a series of short, anguished cries. Wright, by contrast, refused to use the term African American, embracing instead the diaspora identity that goes back to Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain and that Paul Gilroy later linked to the Black Atlantic.⁵⁹ In a 1954 work Wright described Pagan Spain as a border region, somewhat akin to Afro-America, neither wholly of the West and yet not non-Western either. Influenced by Amilcar Castro’s The Structure of Spanish History, which stressed the hybrid, “impure,” multicultural—pagan, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, African, Moorish, converso, morisco, marrano—strands of Spanish memory, Wright invented the term white Negroes (later associated with Norman Mailer) to describe the Spaniards.⁶⁰ Nor was Wright unaware that Spain had been the center of the slave trade. In Pagan Spain he likened the ritualized violence of the bullfight to a lynching: “That starting Black hair, that madly slashing tail, that bunched and flexed mountain of neck and shoulder muscles, that almost hog-like distension of the wet and inflated and dripping nostrils, that defiant and careless lack of control of the anal passage, that continuous throbbing of the thin, trembling flanks, that open-mouthed panting that was so rapid that it resembled a prolonged shivering.”⁶¹

Wright contacted dysentery in Africa in 1957 and died in 1960 at the age of fifty-two. Fanon died of leukemia in a CIA hospital in 1961 at the age of thirty-six. Du Bois died in Africa at the age of ninety-five, one day before the 1963 March on Washington. As these three great pioneers perished, the activist movements of the 1960s were born.

One expression of the new mood was the attempt to historicize the blues, a watershed moment in the achievement of African American memory. In 1960 Paul Oliver, a British architect who had never visited the United States, published the first history of the blues, Blues Fell This Morning. As Wright lay dying, he wrote a forward to the book in which he praised the idea that an outsider should have written the history of the blues, but challenged the “passivity, almost masochistic in quality, and seemingly allied to sex in origin, that appears as part of the meaning of the blues. Could this emotional stance,” he asked, “have been derived from a protracted inability to act, of a fear of acting?”⁶² Fanon, too, saw the need to move beyond the blues. In The Wretched of the Earth he argued that during the anticolonial liberation struggle the colonialists “become the defenders of the native style.” As an example, he rejected what he called the “despairing, broken down nostalgia of an old Negro,” trapped between whiskey and racial hatred in favor of the new intellectual jazz of bebop infused, as it was, with contempt for mainstream “square” culture.⁶³ In 1963 Amira Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) published Blues People, still the best account of the place of the blues in African American memory. The next year, in The Dutchman, Baraka’s buttoned-down, uptight “Negro” finally explodes, claiming that “Ofays” say “I love Bessie Smith and don’t even understand that Bessie Smith is saying, ‘Kiss my ass, kiss my black, unruly ass.’” We can take Baraka’s dialogue as an interpretation of the surreal and unconscious content always latent in the blues.

Because the whole project of recovering African American memory was in so many ways launched by Du Bois, it is striking that in 1954, when his 1896 doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade was reprinted, Du Bois wrote an “Apologia”: “The work of Freud and his companions and their epoch making contribution to science was not generally known when I was writing this book, and consequently I did not realize the psychological reasons behind the trends of human action which the African slave trade involved. Trained in the New England ethic of life as a series of conscious moral judgments, I was continually thrown back on what men ‘ought’ to have done.”⁶⁴ In repudiating freestanding, abstract moral condemnation and exploring the “psychological reasons” behind the slave trade, Du Bois was insisting on that the concrete history of slavery needed to be infused with the Freudian sensitivity to the unconscious. In other words, he was advocating political Freudianism. In any event, no apologia was needed.

In his great “I have a dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, Martin Luther King turned from memory to history, thanking the conveners in his first sentence and then turning to the Emancipation Proclamation, promulgated “Five score years ago.” The sixties witnessed a dramatic revolution in the writing of American history, from a white Southerner-centered account that viewed the Civil War as a “tragic era” to the slavery- and abolition-centered account that prevails today.⁶⁵ History records few historiographical revolutions more complete and more morally significant than that accomplished in the 1960s and 1970s, through the introduction of African American history into American historiography. But the record also shows that alongside the objective history wrested from the records by innumerable working historians stood the monumental subjective struggle to rescue African American memory initiated by blues singers and pushed forward not only by writers and artists but by political Freudians like Wright and Fanon. That this project never ended is suggested by Toni Morrison’s description of her project in Beloved as excavating “something that the characters don’t want to remember, I don’t want to remember, black people don’t want to remember, white people won’t want to remember.”⁶⁶