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The Mixed-Race Child Within: Psychoanalyzing Race, Trauma, Vermin, and Spider-Man

2020; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 77; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/aim.2020.0030

1085-7931

Eric Berlatsky, Sika A. Dagbovie‐Mullins,

Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology

The Mixed-Race Child Within:Psychoanalyzing Race, Trauma, Vermin, and Spider-Man Eric Berlatsky (bio) and Sika Dagbovie-Mullins (bio) Though psychoanalysis has, over the past thirteen decades or so, developed into an exceedingly complex and variegated discourse, incorporating and considering much that it initially ignored, it nevertheless has substantial roots, like so many theoretical paradigms, in whiteness and masculinity. This is perhaps most succinctly and easily seen in Sigmund Freud's statement in 1926's "The Question of Lay Analysis" in which the father of psychoanalysis notes, "We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a 'dark continent' for psychology" (p. 212). In these two sentences, Freud admits that the scaffolding of early Oedipal psychoanalysis was based almost completely on less than half of the population, due to the lack of study of women (or those with any gender other than traditionally binary male), while simultaneously revealing an unsurprising investment in colonialist and racialist thinking. By borrowing phraseology from explorer/colonialist John Stanley's description of Africa as the "dark continent," Freud links all that is "dark," mysterious, and not understood about the human psyche to Africa and its inhabitants, while tying psychoanalysis itself to colonialism, exploring and bringing understanding, or "light," to an entire continent and people stereotypically and offensively defined by ignorance and incomprehensibility. While Freud, and thus psychoanalysis at its origins, claimed to be working towards the understanding of the human psyche, making a more or less universal claim, its case studies were hardly so, with the initial basis for Freudian psychoanalysis being based very heavily on white male European subjects, as well as on implicit biases [End Page 569] about people and places of color (to say nothing of the possibility that we will explore of the psychology of racial mixing). Subsequently, of course, many theorists challenged the white male biases of early Freudian psychoanalysis. As Arlene Keizer (2010) discusses: African-American writers, psychologists, and other cultural commentators have […] highlighted the limits of psychoanalysis that derive from its presupposition of white European/European American subjects as the prototypical analysts and analysands […] and [have] also suggested what psychoanalysis might bring to the understanding of racialized subjectivities and what a […] consideration of race might bring to psychoanalysis. (p. 410) In this essay, we look to some surprising comics to illustrate the tension between more and less racially biased approaches to psychoanalysis, initially focusing on the admittedly oldfashioned Freudian Oedipal dynamics invoked by the texts we consider, before exploring how these texts also challenge and reconsider these dynamics. While the Spider-Man storyline "The Child Within" (published in The Spectacular Spider-Man #178–184 in 1991–92) evokes classical Freudian psychoanalysis, particularly through its introduction of analyst Ashley Kafka as a prominent character,1 its easy analogization to Freud's "Rat Man" case study,2 and several characters' self-conscious engagements with Oedipal ambivalence, it also elucidates the ways in which the psychological structures derived from the study of European white males take on different meanings in different contexts. In particular, the Oedipal ambivalence of a mixed-race man in America (the son of a white father and an African-American mother) is categorically different from the ambivalence(s) of the white men depicted. That is, while the storyline initially gestures to Freudian Oedipal structures rooted in white masculinity, it also usefully challenges the applicability of those structures to other contexts by drawing attention to the specifics of the psychology and history of race in America. Likewise, as we will show, it challenges classical Oedipal psychoanalysis from the point of view of the "seduction [End Page 570] theory" outlined in Freud's "Aetiology of Hysteria" (1896) and controversially elaborated upon by Jeffrey Masson. Over the course of this essay, we will first explore how these comics problematize, or even reject, Freudian Oedipal dynamics by invoking and deploying the "seduction theory." We then go on to discuss the ways in which the depiction of the mixed-race Edward Whelan/Vermin further critiques Freudian Oedipalism rooted in whiteness and masculinity by highlighting the history of racial mixing...