Melanie Klein and the Black Mammy: An Exploration of the Influence of the Mammy Stereotype on Klein’s Maternal and Its Contribution to the “Whiteness” of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to show the influence of the black mammy stereotype on Melanie Klein’s theorization of the maternal object. It takes as its starting point the underrepresentation of black analysts and their negative experiences within psychoanalysis and links this to the wider cultural phenomenon of “whiteness,” defined as the denial of racialized experience. It then explores a symbol of this whiteness, the colonial stereotype of the black mammy, and demonstrates that she was a well-known figure in the interwar Britain in which Klein developed her ideas. It suggests that the colonial dynamics between the mammy and white people are repeated in Klein’s formulation of the maternal object and infant, and argues that we can see evidence of this in Klein’s analysis of Dick and in her theorization of the maternal object as split and as a combined parent figure. It then shows that a “negress” is central to the article used by Klein in her formulation of reparation, but that Klein transformed this article, replete with questions of racial identity, into a theory of “universal” psychic processes by reading the “negress” as mammy. It argues that the mammy may well have been a potent figure for Klein both professionally and personally due to the modernist trend of using “blackness” to break from tradition and due to a precedent of the mammy facilitating Jewish assimilation into whiteness. The Kleinian theory of the maternal object, inflected with the racial dynamics embodied by the mammy, can therefore be seen as contributing to psychoanalysis’ silence on race, perpetuating the invisibility of whiteness to white subjects and legitimating (psychic) violence toward the black other.