Postwar Psychoanalysis, African American Blues Narratives, and the Lafargue Clinic

"Crazy for This Democracy": Postwar Psychoanalysis, African American Blues Narratives, and the Lafargue Clinic Catherine A. Stewart American Quarterly, Volume 65, Number 2, June 2013, pp. 371-395 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2013.0025 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/510633 Access provided at 7 Apr 2020 21:44 GMT with no institutional affiliation Postwar Psychoanalysis, African American Blues Narratives, and the Lafargue Clinic | 371 “Crazy for This Democracy”: Postwar Psychoanalysis, African American Blues Narratives, and the Lafargue Clinic Catherine A. Stewart n 1945 Negro Digest published an essay by the renowned writer Zora Neale Hurston titled “Crazy for This Democracy.” Hurston drew upon the meta- Iphor of disease to critique the United States’ failure to deliver democracy either abroad or at home, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime rhetoric had promised. As Hurston wittily suggested, it would be more accurate to refer to the president’s “arsenal of democracy” as the “arse and all of democracy,” as the US military moved to shore up teetering imperial powers against indigenous movements fighting for decolonization.1 For Hurston, Jim Crow laws were symptomatic of the larger disease of racial discrimination, just as the bumps and blisters of smallpox (with which she compared them) were the visible signs of the disease and not the disease itself.2 Smallpox resonated for black writers like Hurston and Ralph Ellison as a particularly apt metaphor for the diseased state of American democracy: African Americans in the South were particularly susceptible, and it manifested itself both in the blood and on the epidermis, critical sites of racial taxonomies—what Frantz Fanon would term the “racial epidermal schema”—thus making visible the internal scarring left by contact with the diseased body politic.3 In Ellison’s Invisible Man, one of the asylum patients in the Golden Day is “a short pock-marked man,” a former doctor and World War II veteran, whose craziness is the result of prolonged exposure to the hypocrisy of fighting for democracy in a Jim Crowed army.4 Smallpox and racism were highly communicable diseases, and Hurston prescribed “a shot of serum that [would] kill the thing in the blood,” specifically, the immediate repeal of Jim Crow.5 Unfortunately, the United States seemed reluctant to take Hurston’s prescription, which she chalked up to a psychological case of mass delusion among white Americans. Using disease as a metaphor, Hurston illuminated how segregation was not just about the control of black bodies—politically, socially, and economi- cally—but about the psychological control of black minds. Jim Crow laws led to the “unnatural exaltation of one ego, and the equally unnatural grinding ©2013 The American Studies Association | 372American| Quarterly down of the other,” as they inculcated among whites a belief in their racial superiority and simultaneously persuaded blacks of their inferiority.6 Thus Hurston used the term crazy to signify two different states of mind: white America’s irrational refusal to acknowledge African Americans’ equality, which resulted in a different form of “crazy” for black folk subjected to Jim Crow. But Hurston’s title referred to a third meaning as well: her own passionate (and sane) desire to actually experience democracy. “I am crazy about the idea of this democracy,” Hurston proclaimed. “I am all for trying it out. I want to see how it feels. Therefore I am all for the repeal of every Jim Crow law in the nation here and now.”7 Hurston’s wordplay with the concepts of crazy and sane is emblematic of African American writers’ growing interest in psychoanalysis.8 Its popularization after World War II provided African American writers with a new paradigm for exploring the effects of white racism on the formation of black identity.9 Hurston’s entwining of black America’s mental state with the diseased state of American democracy was a trope that would also resonate in the writings of her contemporaries, Ellison and Richard Wright, whose growing interest in psychoanalysis manifested itself in their fiction and nonfiction. Both explored how the geography of American racism mapped itself onto black subjects, creating a troubled topography within the black psyche. These writers’ adaptation of psychoanalytic concepts for the project of black liberation and the realization of a democratic society developed concomitantly with the field of social psychiatry, which shifted the emphasis from the individual’s personal trauma and psychopathology to the societal and environmental forces at work on the individual.10 African American writers shared an interest in the social causes of mental health disturbances with experts in this growing field; however, they drew upon the concept of the damaged black psyche as symptomatic of a more systemic problem of the body politic, a body riven with the disease of white racism.11 Thus African American appropriations of psychoanalytic discourse were particularly apropos for their dual project of liberating the individual and curing the social order.12 Black writers, while engaged in unmaking a black “racialized” identity, were also working to redefine white identity by pathologizing whiteness and white norms. Their focus was white unreason as the cause of a diseased democracy and black unreason as a symptom; thus, these writers reconfigured and subverted postwar psychiatry’s emphasis on black pathology by pinpointing its source in the damaged white psyche. Both Ellison and Wright were instrumental in helping the prominent psychiatrist Fredric Wertham establish the Lafargue Clinic, the first community outpatient “mental hygiene” clinic in Harlem and a unique experiment in bringing the therapeutic benefits of psychoanalysis to an underserved minority Postwar Psychoanalysis, African American Blues Narratives, and the Lafargue Clinic | 373 population. The “mental hygiene” movement focused on the application of psychiatric knowledge to social issues in the interest of prevention and public health.13 The Lafargue Clinic’s records, which include staff’s notations of clients’ oral narratives, provide a unique window into patients’ experiences with the clinic’s revolutionary method of empathetic listening and simultaneous transcription; this technique helped preserve more of the clients’ perspective, much of it recorded in their own words, than other case history records.14 As these unique patient narratives attest, the forces of racial discrimination increased some African Americans’ vulnerability to episodes of mental health disturbances.15 Like Hurston’s symptomatology, the diagnostic and therapeutic methods of the Lafargue Clinic worked to shift clinical focus from the medi- cal establishment’s “Negro problem” to the pathology of whiteness and the problems that stemmed from racial discrimination.16 Just as Hurston’s essay plays with three meanings of crazy—whites’ racial prejudice, blacks’ temporary loss of sanity owing to contact with white unreason, and her own unbridled (but rational) enthusiasm for the realization of democracy—crazy similarly emerges in the Lafargue Clinic’s records in three different usages. There, crazy serves as a way to critique a diseased body politic, as a potentially real and tragic consequence of black encounters with discrimination, and as black reason reconfigured ascrazy by whites’ misread- ings of black responses to racial discrimination, responses that were either sincere or strategically performed as a form of resistance against the structures of white oppression. W. E. B. Du Bois was the first to draw upon the discipline of psychology to articulate the state of mind, “double-consciousness,” induced by the failure of American democracy to recognize black Americans as equal citizens.17 The linkages between governmentality, race, and psychological states engendered by encounters with racialized power structures would later be explored by the French Algerian psychiatrist Fanon, who examined how the psychopathology of colonialist regimes often resulted in madness among indigenous popula- tions.18 Black intellectuals demonstrated the highly infectious nature of an irrational and tyrannical system of oppression; it may be white craziness that establishes the system in the first place, but to survive within its confines, blacks must also become inmates in the asylum.19 As Fanon observed, “For a man whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason.”20 This formulation appears seven years earlier in Ellison’s notes for Invisible Man and the conundrum faced by his narrator: “He is a man born into a tragic, irrational situation who attempts to respond to it as though it were completely logical.”21 | 374American| Quarterly Du Bois, Wright, and Ellison are the most oft-cited examples of African American writers’ engagement with psychoanalysis, but Wright’s and Ellison’s investment went beyond the literary realm to the clinical world of social psychiatry. The intellectual collaboration between Wright and Wertham has been well documented by literary scholars such as Claudia Tate and David Marriott. However, their primary interest is Wright’s literary use of psychoanalytic discourse and excludes close consideration of the Lafargue Clinic’s actual methods and operations.22 Badia Ahad astutely positions both Wright’s and Ellison’s investment in Lafargue as a commitment to “the democratization

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