Introjection of the Slavemaster

Join us for this fascinating Open Seminar with Chris Chamberlin

The race riots that engulfed American cities during the 1960s made it increasingly clear that the Civil Rights reforms of the preceding decade were woefully inadequate to counteract the structural injuries of racial apartheid. As bewildered policymakers began to shift the blame for racial inequality onto the supposedly pathological cultural patterns of black family life, two relatively unknown Freudian psychiatrists, William Grier and Price Cobbs, published a dazzling if controversial counterargument to the emerging liberal consensus (and to their racist peers in the psychoanalytic profession). In it, they proclaimed that racial slavery had never been abolished in the unconscious and that it was now, still, the explosive root of black discontent with American civilization. Reforms would not suffice to redress the glowing traces of slavery; but what libidinal factors, they ask, were stalling the revolution? 

In this talk, I present excerpts of a chapter-in-progress that responds to this question. Front and center is an examination of the theoretical debate about, and technical details of, the psychic mechanism that Grier and Cobbs argue is to blame for the reproduction of slavery in the unconscious, and that they claim determines the uniquely debilitating psychopathologies suffered by black subjects: the “introjection of the slavemaster.” This talk unfolds across two acts. First, I syncretize their concept of the identification with the oppressor with the theories of introjection and trauma developed in the works of Sándor Ferenczi and Jacques Lacan. Then, I demonstrate this theory about the transmission of antiblack jouissance through a close reading of one of the dozens of clinical vignettes that Grier and Cobbs describe in their work, which derive from their experience treating African American patients in private practice and community mental health clinics.

The Speaker

Christopher Chamberlin is a theorist and practitioner of psychoanalysis. He is currently the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. His work examines the history and afterlife of racial slavery from a variety of clinical, theoretical, and historical angles, with an emphasis on the work of Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, and Willy Apollon. Chamberlin is an active member of a number of psychoanalytic organizations based in Berlin, Quebec, and California, and serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.