In a paper that was given at the conference, ‘Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: A Clinical Exploration’, Peter Nevins shares his own traumatised reaction as a black man to demonstrate the way phenomenology can serve as a psychoanalytic tool to explore questions of race. This experience-based approach, unlike most psychoanalytic methods, can become an inclusive theoretical political and clinical apparatus, in which, experiences such as intergenerational trauma, cultural difference, social power dynamics and the invisible effects of racism can be acknowledged. Anchoring the therapeutic work beyond the familiar Oedipal interpretation opens psychoanalysis to the new landscape of the social and cultural.
Challenging the very core of our psychoanalytic assumptions is also, as Nevins points out, ‘a resistance to the pathologies of paranoia and delusion’ that often accompanies traditional interpretations of black people’s narratives. Not only does it free the patient from the grip of blame and ‘unhook themselves from the messages of being wrong’, it also enables, if I may continue this line of thinking, to recognise the impact of the ‘negative hallucinations’ of psychoanalysis itself – the oppressive effect of denying the existence of an object, an other, or erasing their narrative.