Introduction

In this paper I argue that a Kleinean re-reading of Freud's concept of the `uncanny' can leave us better placed to understand the quality of feelings involved in racism and ethnic hatred. My first introduction to Das Unheimlich was through the work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno use the concept of `uncanny' and projection to explain the visceral and embodied nature of anti-Semitism; `what appears repellently alien is in fact all too familiar'. This paper is an attempt to situate Kleinian psychoanalytic theory within the context of Freud's `uncanny' with a focus on the explanation of racism and ethnic hatred. I start with a brief examination of Horkheimer and Adorno's thesis before to returning to Freud's original work to try and unpick what he actually means by Das Unheimlich. I then go on to argue that a Kleinean interpretation of Freud's concept leaves us better placed to understand the violent and eruptive nature of racial violence and ethnic hatred. I argue, that as an aesthetic, a quality of feeling, the uncanny is deeply entrenched in phantasy. Phantasy provides a vehicle for the construction of our own identity and that of others. Uncanniness is not produced by the repression of drives, but in the way in which we relate to our fellow human beings.

Blinded by Civilisation

Dialectic of Enlightenment is written with a passion, almost a rage, rarely seen in social science literature. It is a philosophical work with a depressing conclusion. The first page gives a taste of the thesis:
 

 "In the most general sense of progressive thought, the enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant" (Horkheimer and Adorno:1994:3).

The dialectic, perhaps better described as the tension, is between that of the rationalisation process and `man's' relationship to nature. Why in this enlightened world is mankind, instead of entering into a truly humane condition, sinking into new forms of barbarism? Horkheimer and Adorno draw heavily on Freud's instinct theory, weaving together powerful primitive drives and projective mechanisms of defence to explain the pathological nature of anti-Semitism. They argue that Mimesis, a powerful instinctual mechanism of defence, a form of self protection in the natural world, has become perverted in the modern world. In our natural environment we mimic in order to camouflage and blend in, quite simply this may mean freezing is we sense danger, this is, part of our biological pre-history:
 

 "When men try to become like nature they harden themselves against it. Protection as fear is a form of mimicry. The reflexes of stiffening and numbness in humans are archaic scemata of the urge to survive" (Horkheimer and Adorno:1994:180).

In a similar vein to Freud's (1969) thesis on civilization, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that civilization, the modern world, has slowly and methodically prohibited instinctual behaviour. Initially mimesis becomes organised in the `magical' phase, ceremony and rite replicate instinctual phantasy. Religious practice outlaws the instinctual, rational practice banishes the display of emotions. People are taught behavioural norms in school and the workplace, children are no longer allowed to behave as children. All `devotion and deflection' have an element of mimicry. Mimesis now takes the form in which in which society threatens nature; control equals self preservation and dominance over nature. For Horkheimer and Adorno the ego is formed in resistance to mimicry. We no longer make our `self' like nature to survive but attempt to make nature like us:
 

 "Society continues threatening nature as the lasting organised compulsion which is reproduced in individuals as rational self preservation and rebounds on nature as social dominance over it" (Horkheimer and Adorno:1994:181).

In other words, the instinctual mechanism of mimesis becomes sublimated in the practice of the rational control of the modern environment. Those `blinded by civilization' experience their own mimetic features in the actions and behaviours of others, as often embarrassing rudimentary elements; touching, feeling, smelling - `what appears repellently alien, is in fact, all too familiar' - something, unhomely, uncanny, Das Unheimlich. This perverted form of mimesis which leads to the urge to make the natural world fit our purposes develops into the urge to control and dominate others through paranoid phantasy. We project on the world experiences and qualities that are part of ourselves, as if they were part of someone or something else. Certain individuals and groups remind us of our repressed pre-history, it matters little if these groups actually have the mimetic features, these urges are unpalatable so we project them:
 

 "Impulses which the subject will not admit as his own even though they are most assuredly so, are attributed to the object - the prospective victim... In Fascism this behaviour is made political; the object of the illness is deemed true to reality; and the mad system becomes the reasonable norm in the world, and deviation from it, a neurosis" (Horkheimer and Adorno:1994:187)

The implications of this thesis are reasonably clear if we are to apply them in explanation of racism and ethnic hatred. Blending in with our environment means accepting difference, assimilating, and is a form of sociability as well as self preservation. Projection of the mimetic impulse however, confuses inner and outer worlds, others are no longer familiarised, but seen as dangerous, frightening and threatening. Even the most intimate experiences are seen as hostile. Others, serve as a direct reminder of our mimetic pre-history, of our repressed longings to return to a pre-social state of nature. Quite simply we accuse groups of behaving like animals, because we long ourselves to return to this state. The paranoic cannot help or accept his instincts, attacking others, and experiencing his aggression as that of the `other'.

I have argued elsewhere (Clarke:1999a) that although enlightening in many ways, Horkheimer and Adorno's thesis is flawed and in need of development. For example, it is not clear how the urge to control and dominate nature turns into the urge to dominate and control others. Is there really such a great condemnation of the instinctual in the modern world? There seems little doubt that the public display of emotion is something that has been seen as increasingly inappropriate (see Elias:1978), although, interestingly, the public display of grief for celebrities seems an exception to this rule. The most severe condemnation of Horkhiemer and Adorno's work, certainly for sociologists, stems from the biological nature of Freud's instinct theory. In situating explanation of racism and anti-Semitism within the context of a biologically derived theoretical framework, it seems as if they are suggesting that the racist or anti-Semite is biologically pre-disposed to a certain type of inferior behaviour; the case against the racist becomes racist.

What I feel we can take from Dialectic of Enlightenment are the psychodynamic processes of projection which may be rooted in (un)sociability, and as Alford (1989) notes, an idea or grasp of the way in which the irrational stealthily intrudes on the rational. It is at this point that I wish to return to Freud's concept of the uncanny, to start from `scratch' if you like, as a precursor to a Kleinean re-reading of the concept and discussion of its usefulness in the explanation and understanding of hatred and racism.
 

Das Unheimlich: That Class of Frightening.
 

 "Unheimlich is the name for everything that ought to have remained... secret and hidden but has come to light (Schelling) (Freud: SE:XVII:224).

In his monograph `Das Unheimlich', Freud dons his philosophical cap to investigate the subject of aesthetics, something he indicates that a psychoanalyst rarely gets a chance, or feels impelled to do. Aesthetics, Freud argues, generally concern themselves with questions of beauty, of that which is attractive, of the sublime. In other words, things, ideas and feelings of a positive nature. Freud however is not concerned with a theory of beauty, but a theory of the quality of feelings and particularly the quality of feelings that belong within the field of `what is frightening':
 

 "The subject of the `uncanny' is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening - to what arouses dread and horror" (Freud:SE:XVII:219).

Freud embarks on an investigation of the linguistic usage of the term `das unheimlich', as well as considering the experiences and situations which arouse in people a sense of uncanniness. The two courses of investigation Freud argues, lead to the same conclusion: `the uncanny is that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar'(220). Thus we have a feeling, the quality of this feeling is both familiar, old and frightening. We may not always be able to identify where this feeling comes from, this suggests that it emanates from something repressed, something in the unconscious mind, something triggered by certain symbols or events.

Freud uses the example of the Sandman from Eight Tales of Hoffman. The sandman is roughly equivalent to the `bogeyman', the fear of which keeps children in their beds at night. In a linguistic sense the writer creates something uncanny which plays on our unconscious fears and phantasies. In the same way religion has created gods and demons. These we feel we have surmounted, particularly with the spread of secularisation and the demise of religious practice. But, we still have uncanny feelings of supernatural powers that are frightening. Freud thus gives us two forms of uncanny. First, feelings that are triggered by infantile complexes, and second, the uncanny which proceeds from actual experience, from animistic beliefs that have been surmounted. Thus, for Freud:
 

 "animism, magic and sorcery, the omnipotence of thoughts, man's attitude to death, involuntary repetition and the castration complex comprise practically all the factors which turn something frightening into something uncanny" (Freud:SE:XVII:243)

Freud draws our attention to themes in uncanniness that are prominent. In literature there is often a `doubling' of characters, identical people who look alike, joined in some of telepathic union so that experiences and feelings become common. Freud also suggests that these characters represent or are marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself in some other. There is a `doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self'(234). Robert Jay Lifton (1986) has made much of this concept in explanation of actions of the Nazi doctors. Freud was less convinced:
 

 "having considered the manifest motivation of the figure of a `double', we have to admit that none of this helps us to understand the extraordinary strong feelings of something uncanny" (Freud:SE:XVII:236).

Nothing in the concept of doubling, Freud argues, can account for the urge to project outward parts of the ego as something foreign, uncanniness in the `double' stems from our archaic inheritance. Another theme is that of repetition. Freud gives an example of walking on a summers day in a small town in Italy. Despite taking different routes Freud himself back in the same location, it was on his return to the same place for the third time, via yet another route, that he experienced a sense of uncanniness. I have experienced the same kind of feeling in the Souks of North Africa, every attempt at finding a way out, results in a return to a familiar landmark, which creates a sense of helplessness, a feeling of the uncanny.

To clarify Freud's position thus far. The uncanny belongs to a set of feeling that can classed as frightening, the frightening element emanates from a feeling that has been repressed. The recurrence of this feeling causes uncanniness. It matters little if what is uncanny was originally frightening. The uncanny is neither new or alien, but something old and familiar which has become repressed in the mind. Hence, if we return to Horkhiemer and Adorno's explanation of anti-Semitism, those blinded by civilization experience there own archaic and repressed feelings in others. Certain individuals and groups remind us uncannily of our repressed pre-history. We project our phantasy into others, attacking and experiencing our own aggression as that of the other. I feel that Freud's original philosophical piece has been overly biologised by subsequent interpretations, most notably those of the Frankfurt School. As Robert Young (2000) has recently, and succinctly noted when differentiating between Freudian and Kleinean models of human nature:
 

 "One is a world of animals as scientific objects reacting to stimuli, the other is a world of subjects haunted by demons" (Young:2000)

I feel that Freud's original paper is written in the spirit of the latter rather than former. In the next section of this paper I want to suggest that the concept of uncanny can be better read in terms of the Kleinian notion of paranoid schizoid position, of splitting, and of projective identification. These mechanisms, I argue, can give us a better understanding of the ubiquitous and visceral nature of racism and ethnic hatred.
 

Phanatasy, Splitting and Projective Identification: The Containment of the Uncanny

 "Infantile feelings and phantasies leave, as it were, their imprints on the mind, imprints that do not fade away but get stored up, remain active, and exert a continuous and powerful influence on the emotional and intellectual life of the individual" (Klein:1975:290)

The word fantasy is usually associated with something imagined or unreal, for example, a far fetched and unattainable idea. If we fantasise we imagine pleasant but unlikely events or outcomes. If something or someone is fantastic then `wonder' springs to mind. Fantasy is therefore about something imagined, unreal and pleasant. Phantasy, for Klein, however, is a concrete representation of the mechanisms of defence (Segal:1992:30). Phantasy is a `hard fact'(Guntrip:1968:223). Phantasy is about things good and bad, real and imagined, and the influence of phantasy on everyday life, interaction, art and science `cannot be overrated' (Klein:1997:251). Klein's view of the `inner' world, is that of a world constructed in phantasy, that is, unconscious phantasy. As both Isaacs (1952) and Ogden (1986) note, phantasy for Klein is psychic or psychological representation of the instincts, the `infants attempt to transform somatic events into a mental form' (Ogden:1986:11). Instincts are always attached to an object or, are object seeking, and therefore the experience of instinct in phantasy relates to an appropriate object; the desire to eat would have a corresponding phantasy of something edible.

The infant from birth has to both cope with and interpret reality. Reality influences, and is influenced by unconscious phantasy. In this sense the concept of instinct is set within a relational rather than biological context. Phantasy is not an escape from reality, but can produce reality, in that, `phantasies can determine what kind of causal sequence is attributed to events' (Segal:1964:3). Phantasy is therefore constructed from the material of internal and external reality and modified by feelings, and emotions, and then projected at objects both real and imaginary. In other words, phantasy is an integral part of perception, it enables us to interpret and understand the world. Julia Segal illustrates:
 

 "In these phantasies, people and parts of people live and die inside and outside the self; move around; give rise to enormous gratification and equally enormous fear, jealousy, or envy... In this way phantasies strongly influence expectations and interpretations of real events in the world" (Segal:1992:31)

The implication of this is, that phantasy not only provides a vehicle for the construction of our own identity, but also, through projection, the construction of Others. In other words, our perception of others is affected by our own emotional state, bad objects are expelled in a process of projective identification, in which we not only attribute our own affective state, our sense of uncanny, onto others, but make others feel the way we do. Segal (1992) elucidates:
 

 "The defence of identification with an aggressor might involve a phantasy of actually taking the aggressor inside the self in an attempt to control them, then feeling controlled by them and needing to get rid of other, threatened and vulnerable parts of the self into something else (the new victim)" (Segal:1992:31).

This is why Klein thought object relations to be so critical in that, phantasy involves doing something to some other, an object which has become split off or separated from the self and placed in some other, in this way phantasy is no longer mere imagination, but a concrete influence on reality. If we now make reference to Jean-Paul Sartre's (1976) work, Anti-Semite and Jew, we can see how phantasy is made reality through projective identification. Sartre argues that it is not the Jewish character that creates or induces anti-Semitism, it is the anti-Semite who creates the imago of Jew. Indeed for Sartre, if the Jew did not exist, then the anti-Semite would invent him. The Jew becomes a phobogenic object constructed in phantasy, a container to contain what is dangerous and frightening, the object uncanny split off from the anti-Semite:
 

 "It is not unusual for people to elect to live a life of passion rather than reason. But ordinarily they love the objects of passion: Women, glory, power, money. Since the anti-Semite has chosen to hate, we are forced to conclude that it is the state of passion that he loves" (Sartre:1976:18).

 "Phantasies - becoming more elaborate and referring to a wider range of objects and situations - continue throughout development and accompany all activities; they never stop playing a great part in all mental life" (Klein:1997:251).

 "If the racist's deep fear is of disorder - disorder within as well as without... racist violence under these circumstances can be seen as an outpouring of the racist's own disorder, directed at the boundary of the other to prevent being directed at the self" (Frosh:1989:237)

If we return to Freud once more, Das Unhiemlich is a paper about aesthetics, about the quality of feelings and particularly that which is frightening. I have argued that the uncanny as an object is produced in phantasy and projected into some other. In terms of racism this object is created by both our fear and ignorance of difference. This I feel is crucial in explanation of how we come to hate some other. What is repellently alien, is in fact a manifestation of our own phantasy. It is not that we see a projection of our repressed drives, feelings that we find unpalatable. What we see in `racial' others is a reflection of our own phantasy. In this way what is familiar turns to frightening and produces feelings of hatred. It is in the depressive rather than the paranoid schizoid position where familiarity turns to hate. Klein (1997) identifies the depressive position as an integration of experience; the tendency to split and project lessens and the perception of persons containing both good and bad develops. Klein both notes, and cautions that these processes of integration and synthesis cause the `conflict between love and hatred to come out in full force' (Klein:1997:72). Care for others develops, as does guilt, in realisation that the attacked other contains good. The individual hates the hating self and tries to repair, to make good the damage that has been done:
 

 "At this stage, the drive to make reparation to the injured object comes into full play... When the infant feels that his destructive impulses and phantasies are directed against the complete person of his loved object, guilt arises in full strength" (Klein:1997:74)

 "The white man has woven me out of a thousand details... I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave ships..." (Fanon:1968:112).

Situating Klein in the Freudian Uncanny: Some Conclusions

In this paper, I have argued that a Kleinian re-reading of Freud's notion of the uncanny can leave us better placed to understand the quality of feelings involved in racism and ethnic hatred. I have not been as dismissive of the work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno as some critics have. This is partly because I feel their thesis represents an excellent introduction to psychoanalytic thought within sociological and philosophical enquiry, and partly because their use of the concept of projection provides a firm foundation from which to start a more detailed analysis of the psychodynamics of racism.

In previous papers I have indicated what I believe to be the importance of projective identification in the way in which we make others feel inferior and in some sense create their identity through our projections. This has led me to question why we feel the need to do this to others. By returning to Freud's original work on the aesthetic qualities of feelings, and particularly bad or negative feelings I have argued that Freud's philosophical work has been overly biologised by subsequent interpretations. In Das Unheimlich the accent is on the quality of feeling, on the aesthetic, and as Freud notes, the uncanny proceeds from actual experience. The uncanny then, belongs to a set of experiences that can be classed as frightening and frightening element emanates from something familiar that we see in others that has been repressed in the self. The uncanny, I have argued, is deeply entrenched in phantasy.

Phantasy, not only provides a vehicle for the construction of our own identity, but also through projection or more specifically projective identification, the construction of Others. Not only do we attribute our own affective state, our sense of uncanny, to others, but we also make others feel the way we do. Using by example Sartre's work, I have suggested that the racist constructs a phobogenic object to hold his or her phantasies. Feelings of uncanniness produce the uncanny object. Phantasy in a Kleinian sense is therefore a relational rather than biological source of Das Unheimlich. These feeling are not produced by the repression of instincts and drives, but by the way we construct ourselves in relation to others through phantasy. Thus, I have argued that racism and ethnic hatred emanate from a complex interaction between self and other, in which phantasy becomes the reality of containing uncanniness in a racial category.

The racial or ethnic other is created by both our fear and ignorance of difference. What appears repellently alien is the manifestation, a reflection of phantasy in some other. In this way, that which is familiar turns to frightening and produces feelings of hate. I have tentatively argued that it is in the depressive rather than the paranoid schizoid position that this is more likely to happen. As this phantasy is recognised in some other, the racist hates the hating self and tries to make reparation. The depressive anxiety associated with this position becomes to much and love turns to hate. The re-introjection of this object phanatasy acutely reinforces the fear of internal and external persecution. In other words, an excess of anxiety in the depressive position marks a return to paranoid schizoid defences. It is in this way that I argue that ignorance, anxiety and fear lead to racism, hatred and suffering. The racial `other' is constructed in phantasy through ignorance, projected into others through fear, recognised in others as familiar, and experienced by us as uncanny.

Note

This paper was original published as Clarke, S. (2002) From Aesthetics to Object Relations: Situating Klein in the Freudian Uncanny. Free Associations. 8 (4) No 48. pp. 547-560.  Karnac Books and is Copyrighted. It is reproduced with the kind permission of Robert Young.

Dr Simon Clarke
Centre for Psycho-Social Studies
Faculty of Economics and Social Science
University of the West of England
Frenchay
Bristol BS16 1QY

e-mail: simon.clarke@uwe.ac.uk
 

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