Race and unconscious: a psychoanalytic approach to internal racism

Journal title INTERAZIONI
Author/s Simonetta Diena
Publishing Year 2021 Issue 2021/1
Language Italian Pages 18 P. 69-86 File size 213 KB
DOI 10.3280/INT2021-001006
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We live increasingly, within political and social cultures whose language oppose racism and antisemitism and discrimination. At the same time racism continues to exist and its effects continue to reverberate in subtle or more obvious ways. This paper acknowledges the social, political, historical reality which are beyond the ques-tion of racism and anti-semitism. However, it acknowledges too that the question of racism goes far from just the external reality and cannot be approached as an area of applied psychoa-nalysis. Internal racism is an universal feature of the human mind, and from an external world perspective moves inward the inner realm of the psychic organization. The racist internal ele-ments runs outside and parallel to ordinary conscious discourse. We are dealing at a preverbal level, that almost never succeed in becoming verbal. In the consciousness we are never dealing with what appear obvious, that is equality, but we rather switch to the acting out, subtlety dis-criminating the self and the other who is different from the self, the not-self. So, unconscious-ly, we reach, and we convey the inequality.

Keywords: Anti-semitism, internal racism, negative narcissism, purity, destructiveness.

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Simonetta Diena, Razza e inconscio: un approccio psicoanalitico al razzismo interno in "INTERAZIONI" 1/2021, pp 69-86, DOI: 10.3280/INT2021-001006