Hate Up to My Couch: Psychoanalysis, Community, Poverty and the Role of Hatred

Abstract

This article is based on the author's experience working as a psychoanalyst in Philadelphia's barrio in the 1990s, which led her to meditate on the psychology of racism, segregation, and other forms of intolerance of difference and otherness. The author argues that no analyst can be immune to the cultural context in which they work and that the simple fact that psychoanalysis is not available to the poor constitutes a form of racism. It further argues that psychoanalysis, thanks to its power of actualizing otherness in the context of analytic treatment, can reveal its emancipatory potential with populations marginalized by race, class, gender, or sexuality. In the second part, the article turns to the recent concept of Afro-pessimism as developed by Frank Wilderson III (2020) in connection with racism. For Wilderson, the curse of slavery has not been lifted, placing racialized subjects in a social death, a deathliness that saturates Black life. In an attempt to traverse this racist fantasy, the article concludes with a discussion of Toni Morrison's meditation on the invention of otherness, rethought from a Lacanian angle.