Object fear: The national dissociation of race and racism in the era of Obama

Abstract

This paper furthers the use of psychoanalysis as a lens for reading the contemporary political and social world and explores the ongoing reproduction of the racial unconscious in the United States. In applying a psychoanalytic lens to interpersonal violence and legal and political discourse during Obama’s presidency, we attempt to explore how internal fear of blackness prevents America and psychoanalysis from accessing non-destructive relational psychological spaces. We argue that the violent responses to racial blackness and power are not second-hand effects of racial and economic disparity, but rather intimate parts of our psychodynamics that involve an intersubjective process we term “object fear.” We discuss relational theories that help us negotiate object fear as a location for often ignored racialized group and dyadic psychodynamics, looking at specific examples of object fear, interpersonal violence and the limits of relational psychoanalysis to address these types of object relations. We end by turning to a series of recent Supreme Court decisions to look at the ways in which object fear has been triggered at this historical moment in relation to the presence of a black president and the threat to the maintenance of white supremacy in the United States.