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Reinventing the Self in the Face of Received Transgenerational Hatred in the African American Community 1
by Maurice Apprey, Ph.D.


Maurice Apprey, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychiatry and a faculty member of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia.

The French phenomenologist and social science scholar, Jean Francois Lyotard (1991) has suggested that in order to understand history we might wish to escape the impasse of necessity and total freedom, the rationality of history and the contingency of it. In other words, to the extent that history can be unique, necessary or inevitable, it can have "a meaning"; history, also has "some meaning" that may be collective (p. 131). For example, the simple typographical difference between the usage of "holocaust" and "Holocaust" connotates very different meanings. In this sense Lyotard (1991) writes:

This collective meaning is the result of the meanings projected by historical sub-jectivities at the heart of their coexistence, and which these subjectivities must recover in an act of appropriation that puts an end to the alienation or objectification of this meaning and history, constituting in itself a modification of this meaning and proclaiming a transformation of history (p. 131).

For this reason, Lyotard suggests that there is not objectivity or subjectivity on one side or the other. There is no objectivity that is heterogeneous, no subjectivity that is all-encompassing. For Lyotard (1991) then, "there is never a total understanding of history" (p. 131), because any historical understanding that is adequate is nevertheless incomplete. Agreeing with Lyotard, I would add that understanding of history that is ethical and engages history in a way that provides a new profile of knowing creates a new future. It is for this reason that Benjamin Campbell's (1998) account of Virginia's Jamestown Settlement of 1607 and its consequent transmission of destructive aggression opens up a new way of coming to grips with the ripple and devastating effects of this "colony of death." From Campbell's account we are able to see the trajectory from the colony of death, through the horror of slavery, the Civil War, a century of segregation, to economic resegregation.

The ethical position of Campbell's account says that "the astounding fact of African American life in America is not how unsuccessful-but rather how successful-the African American community has been at preventing the perpetration of these behaviors [that is, killing, torture, beating, rape, emotional abuse, etc.] by their hereditary victims" (p. 24). This statement is the decisive starting point of this essay and gives us the hope and responsibility to discover how history may be unpacked, how the vicissitudes of the colony of death have been mentalized, and subsequently, how we may repair the damage.

Some Basic Assumptions Behind Mentalization of the Impulse Towards Extinction

Tzvetan Todorov, the Hungarian-born human science scholar and director of research at the Centre National de la Research in Paris, wrote in 1993 as follows: "Human beings are at once alike and different…. The essential thing is to determine just how far the realm of identity extends and where the realm of difference begins; we must try to discover just what relations obtain between the two realms" [that is, of difference and identity] (p. 90). Three years later he became more pointed in his remarks. He said: "If we look at definitions of the human in the mainstream of European thought, we are led to a curious conclusion: the social dimension, the fact that living with others is not generally conceived as being necessary" (Todorov, 1996, p. 1; emphasis in original). He wants us to know, however, that this unspoken asocial vision is not the only one, but a dominant one.

In my own work on interracial conflicts and the need for African Americans to work towards overturning the impact of the consequences of transgenerational transfer of destructive aggression (Apprey, 1996a), I have, following Hillis Miller (1992), suggested a four-step heuristic strategy to observe and ultimately transform the received hatred. The following key rubrics will introduce us to the heuristic strategy: (i) line; (ii) character; (iii) transgenerational haunting; (iv) figure.

Under the first rubric of line we may think of a broken line, a cut, a gap, rupture, lost ancestry, and the wound of an absence in the African American lineage. What attempts, successful or otherwise, are made to suture the wound of an absence? The use of exotic first names juxtaposed to simple European last names like Jones, Williams or Smith is one example of the attempt to fill the gap. However we must be careful when we examine the strengths of such creativity intended to fill a gap. Some names unconsciously recreate the very trauma a family may be attempting to extricate themselves from. A case in point: George Roger Smith is eleven years old. He comes to a treatment center for children for the treatment of his conduct disorder. In the history taking process, a psychologist whose prior work I had supervised chooses to ask how the boy received the names George and Roger. She learns that the child's mother linked the name George to "the mischievous Chicken George" in the movie Roots and Roger to the actor who played 007 in numerous James Bond movies who "can get out of all kinds of traps." Prior to answering the question about the naming of her child, the mother had described a mischievous child whom she needed to keep indoors for fear that he would leave the house and bring back stolen shoes. When she locks the door, however, he sneaks out of the window and brings home yet one more pair of new sneakers.

Under the rubric of character (from the Greek work Kharassein, to brand) we may think of a scratch, the verbs to engrave, to make a deep impression, to carve, in short to put a hot rod in blazing fire, make a deep branding impression on the skin of a slave and in so branding him, declare the signification "I own you." Or, a Nazi soldier may pin a Star of David on the chest of a Jewish person and declare the constructed signification, "You are vermin. You must burn." Witness the reversal of agency of branding in the African American community, the extreme case being the extensively tattooed Dennis Rodman with varieties of hair color. Witness the causation of injury and death in Black-on-Black crime where the African American transgressor has lost sight of the original enemy.

Under the rubric of transgenerational haunting, we come to the transfer of destructive aggression from one generation to the next. In such a transfer we may witness a shift from suicide in one generation, murder in the next, followed by, let us say incest or physical abuse in a subsequent generation, and so on and so forth. It is as if the injured group has accepted the message that they do not deserve to live and therefore must die in one form or another. At the very least that injured group may exist in a reduced form such as living but living a most unproductive life. Here the motor of ambush toward one's death remains the same but the license plate, that is, the form of reducing oneself to nothingness, changes from one generation to the next.

Lastly the figure, of bartering or exchanging goods, that was once perverted into reducing humans into property, must be restored. In other words, the metonymy of reducing humans to goods must be overturned so that we may reactivate the metaphor of exchange and meaningful discourse. In short, African Americans must simultaneously keep a vigil on observing the many ways in which the transgressor has and may attempt to cause them injury, as well as continue to find new and exciting ways to overturn the received injury.

A crisp example of the phenomenon of transgenerational haunting can be found in Carolivia Herron's (1991) novel Forever Johnnie, a story of five generations of African Americans. There, she spells out one haunting scenario after another:
-The females shall be raped by slave-masters; the males shall be murdered by slavemasters.
-The males who are not murdered shall be sold away.
-The males who are neither murdered nor sold away shall marry the females who are not murdered or sold away.
-In marriage, enslaved males and former slaves shall have revenge over females perceived to have consented to the destruction of males.
-Women and daughters shall therefore be raped over and over again by enslaved men or former slaves.

This is a sequence of appropriative and appositional shifts and transfers where there occurs:
-The historical presentation of rape and murder in the first instance;
-Appropriation by an ethnic group of a transgressor's cruelty, to serve a secondary purpose of revenge; and
-Ossification of a structure of experience that says that victims may heap cruelty, that once originated with external transgressors, onto their own kind.
In transgenerational haunting, then, a concrete staging, a doubling, a reactivation of sedimented historical grievances, a replay and an extension occur, and it is this transformation that starts the process of losing sight of one's historical or contemporary enemy.

Now, whether or not Europeans or Euro-Americans actualize their dominant vision of finding living with others to be unnecessary, I hold that the received hatred can be overturned by African Americans. I hold further that the hospital community, outreach groups, and clinical settings of many kinds can be meaningful laboratories for patients, health professionals, policy makers and others to negotiate racism and to overturn its destructive consequences. However, regardless of who did what to whom in history, an ethical system of mutual implications must operate in ways which enable us to understand that when one group changes for the better, the whole prospers; when one person grows, he or she grows with the other; when the obligation to grow with the other is grasped as a necessary ethical position, the interests of self and other are yoked.

Conceptual Strategy: Linking Basic Assumptions to Tactical Community Action

Here, we must make a motivational shift from conceptualizing our grasp of the nuances of history, to a sense of history and we must do so in ways that link history to the potential for change in our communities. Here concepts like introjection with the aggressor (Ferenczi, 1924) or identification with the aggressor (Anna Freud, 1946) are, in my view, incomplete although they are correct in their rightful places in psychoanalytic practice. In working with aggrieved communities and pooled communal memories that continue to have destructive impact on the present, a description of shared communal injury must include: a) the fact of historical injury; b) the potential for transformation of that history; and c) a constant reminder that each person, family, or ethnic group must know the motivation behind the historical injury caused by the transgressor.

I want to suggest that the fact of history has an urgency; it cries out for recognition and meaning. The will to transform the injury of history is a necessary volitional process with slippages because breaking away from bondage requires mourning and a related process of self-invention. The historical motivation behind the transgressors' will to hurt, injure, kill, colonize or extinguish the Other en masse is appropriated as an errand. In another context of describing the phenomenon of transgenerational haunting and its relation to such clinical entities as core gender identity disorder, anorexia nervosa and schizophrenia, I (Apprey 1996b) have drawn attention to a haunting statement by the mother of a transsexual who was once treated by Robert Stoller (1968). In the mother's words: "I had died and was already dead but my mother was so busy sending me to the store on errands that she did not notice I was dead." A good metaphor to capture this essence of transgenerational haunting is Auden's phrase "Ships diverge on urgent, voluntary errands." I have yet to find an appropriate clinical term that captures the urgency of compelling historical fact, the will to transform the received hatred, and the responsibility that an errand is continuing to be carried out in one form or another. The errand is an abiding one threatening to take root or reluctantly yield to transformation. Invariably! In health or in sickness! The peremptory urges behind repetition are formidable adversaries.

If this motivational shift from history to transformation is not grasped in its tripartite inclusive form, several consequences may befall us. If we emphasize only the urgency of remembering history, subjects, patients, ethnic groups only get more angry. There is, as it were, a repeat of the experience of history in affective form. If we only emphasize the will to change and bypass history, subjects, clients, ethnic groups experience a sense of woundedness once again. They hear the voice of the transgressor saying that their history of devastation does not matter. However, by considering the wounds of the living, as it were, together with the will and responsibility to transform the received injury, one gets to transform the toxic errand of extinction, humiliation, massacre, a legacy of ashes, and so on, into a positive errand.

Praxis

What do injured communities put into the wound? How may they suture the rupture, the wound of an absence? Appropriating the language of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1983), I would say that the behaviors utilized by injured ethnic groups to fill the gap, to suture the wound, may be described as: a) syncretic, b) amovable, and c) symbolic.

In syncretic behavior, the structure of experience is concrete and is embedded very tightly into the conditions of materiality. Tell an ape that this is a chair to sit on; the ape will most likely use the chair as a chair. Here, the structure of experience is very tightly immersed in the concrete conditions of materiality so that the signification chair as chair is the only expected one.

In contrast to the syncretic, the structure of experience in symbolic behavior suggests that the behavior can be lifted from the conditions of concrete materiality and described independently so that a symbol is both a thing and other than itself. So if you tell me that a chair is for me to sit on it, I might add other and multiple functions. I can sit on it. In addition, I can hang my coat on the back rest. If I were in a glass building and there were fire, I could pick up that same chair, smash a window and get out of the room.

With regard to amovable behavior there are degrees of differentiation accompanied by an emergent phantasy life where a phantom of a gloating cynical parent may occupy one's inner world. Here change is not sustained. Change is frowned upon, or enacted with tremendous difficulty. For the once colonized or enslaved African-Americans, the internal assassin looks at his or her progress with contempt.

Why these three categories? The syncretic tells us about incest, murder, direct boundary violations and other concretely staged acts of grievance or expressions of human desire. For example, an African American father says of his daughter: "I saved her life, I can sleep with her." One may ask what saving a young woman's life has to do with sexual molestation? Such a syncretic juxtaposition of two unrelated issues can fill the wound of an absence. Here, the immaturity of the adult is reflected in and is concretized in the immaturity of the child when the adult believes the lie that saving a life has something to do with sexually causing a girl, a daughter, or a woman injury which can devastate her for years.

In this situation, the ghost of a slave-master turned rapist, the host of a slave who is raped, tortured or killed, the present day African-American who, as guest houses ancestral figures who are in constant destructive conversation and internal war, are tightly fitted together. In the words of Parveen Adams (1996), a British psychoanalytic scholar on sexual differences, "inside and outside rely on a certain coincidence rather than an opposition" (p. 148). For her the terms inside and outside are radically implied in each other, are linked but separate, and have a "preordained isomorphism" (p. 149) that yields extreme rigidity and inflexibility. While a "healthy" individual recognizes boundaries between inside and outside, thought and action, and has open interior spaces where thoughts and ideas can be played with in a flexible and adaptible manner, interior and exterior are consciousness syntonic for the subject who is tied to a syncretic way of behaving. This subject's interior space is filled with shadows, ghosts, and silhouettes where past and present, inside and outside are ill-defined. I hold that the ghost, the host, and the guest are now one agent who is today urgently striving to repeat historical injury, choosing an inappropriate object to attack during the repetition, and haphazardly repeating the errand toward extinction or haphazardly recreating a wayward child.

In the case of amovable behavior, there is a new signification where there are partial shifts with particular meanings. For example, a woman whose conduct disordered child I successfully treated said to me: "You treated my child and I thank you. I am not your patient. I will see a psychiatrist for medication for my Tourrette's syndrome." Six months later, I heard over the radio that she had been dismissed by her college for harassing her students. Now, instead of us dealing with and treating the consequences of incest by her father, the whole community was dealing with who causes whom injury, what constitutes harassment and what happens when a tenured college professor is on trial.

Here the slavemaster has been internalized as an internal saboteur, an internal assassin; one who kills off the subject's will to recovery and constantly and cynically gloats at that subject's failures. Here any potential success alternates with self-destructive activity. The phantom of an assassin reigns in this domain. Witness the effort of patients who wish to recover in treatment but miss sessions whenever progress is implied or mentioned in relation to their current behavior. The phantom demands that extinction in one form or another be avidly pursued. That phantom is merciless in demanding a destruction that is already mandated. What is left to be done is for the subject to choose his or her form of self-destruction.

In contrast, symbolic behaviors have given the internal assassin a decent burial, knowing that the phantom is part of the self and cognizant that the ghost may return if one is not vigilant or resilient. Adams might suggest here that the internal object of the assassin may be "emptied out." To the notion of "emptied out" I would prefer the notion that the agency of the internal assassin is deferred, suspended or detoxified without any suggestion that the emptying out is final.

These three behavioral practices of syncretic, amovable and symbolic categories are phenomenological. They are a starting point and are not meant to be exhaustive or frozen into fixed compartments. After all, there is no behavior that never descends below the symbolic level and no behavior that never rises above the syncretic level.

In terms of representative forms of community intervention, let us now abandon temporarily the three phenomenological categories of syncretic, amovable and symbolic, which can be helpful with individual interventions, in order to consider three types of community interventions: (i) psychopolitical dialogues between community factions in order to reduce tensions or to solve a particular problem; (ii) secondary prevention to treat ailments in the community; and (iii) primary prevention.

First, I want to draw attention to groups within ethnic groups that only want to remember the grievances of the ethnic group. They tend to be two dimensional. They only want to remember. When they act, they typically break the law and end up directly ambushing themselves towards their own demise. Gangs of a particularly virulent kind belong to this category. Some political activists belong to this group when they are two dimensional in focus. They act as the archivists of the sins perpetrated upon them as an ethnic group.

To the extent that these groups act as the archivists of the hurts perpetrated on their ethnic group I do not wish to dismiss them. Rather, when they are not breaking the law, I envisage dialogue between these groups and representatives of the community. I have elsewhere described this process in the context of my work in conflict resolution with Estonia and its Russian population (Apprey, 1996c, 1997).

Here, I shall briefly allude to a less inflammatory context than work with gangs in which, let us say, an urban police department and a group of African-American ministers or other civic leaders may attempt a dialogue in order to promote reconciliation or to discover healthier means of co-existence. I shall limit myself to two parties in conflict in this methodology.

Some basic assumptions guide this methodology:
Corollary 1: In the field of conflict resolution, any conception of the Other as fixed or absolute dangerously lends itself to the readiness to dehumanize the Other.
Corollary 2: The facile notion that "we are one blood" is not a helpful solution because it poses a threat to a much needed sense of self stability and differentiation.
Corollary 3: Of even greater threat to participant groups in conflict is any notion of the self as changing or relative, because a precipitous readiness to change poses a threat to a group's identity.

Self as agency is therefore an approximation, the Other as absolute a misnomer, but when Self and Other engage in a process of resolution of a conflict, a new opportunity opens up, fostering a measured exchange of representations of Self and Other. When the process is well modulated by the facilitators, four waystations typically emerge: (i) polarization where each side needs to define itself while demonizing the Other; (ii) differentiation within each side, while recognizing the multiplicity of positions in each separate group; (iii) the crossing of mental borders where each side engages the Other in a metaphor driven and meaningful dialogue, replacing old concrete passions with a new order of designations to which all parties can relate, typically a new order of designation propelled by an ethic of responsibility for each side; (iv) ethical statements become grounded when participant groups join forces to create concrete and mutually beneficial projects.

Secondly, community projects that try to tackle the problems of drug addiction and teenage pregnancy are paradigmatic forms of intervention that deal with not-so-sudden death, indirect forms of destroying families and communities. There are also very helpful official community interventions such as community policing and other forms of constructive collaboration between citizens and the Law. These belong to the area of secondary prevention. Here harm has already been done. We want to treat and or prevent further injury.

Thirdly, in the area of primary prevention where no obvious harm has as yet been done, I want to draw attention to those community interventions that continue to renew individuals, families, and communities. Such interventions are multidimensional in purpose. For example, Saturday academies for youth in African American communities teach students precepts for living, cognitive skills, leadership skills, and so on and so forth. The emphasis here is on increasing the capacity to renew oneself by having greater options in any given situation as well as having the resilience to bounce back after mental or physical injury.

Notes

1. This article is based on a paper presented at a conference entitled "The Hidden Legacy of Jamestown," University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, March 20, 1998. The program was sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy as part of its Preparing for 2007 initiative. Through this Initiative, the Foundation seeks to broaden the observance of Virginia's 400th anniversary in 2007; to encourage individuals and organizations throughout Virginia to become involved in the observance; to support related scholarship and public programming; and to promote discussion of the most important issues that confront Virginians as the Commonwealth prepares to enter its fifth century. The views and opinions expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of The University of Virginia or the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

References

Adams, P. (1996). The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences. London and New York: Routledge.

Apprey, M. (1996a). Broken Lines, public memory, absent memory: Jewish and African Americans coming to terms with Racism. Mind and Human Interaction, 7: 139-149.

Apprey, M. (1996b). Phenomenology of Transgenerational Haunting: Subjects in Apposition, Subjects on Urgent/Voluntary Errands. Ann Arbor, MI: U.M.I. Research Collections.

Apprey, M. (1996c). Heuristic steps for negotiating ethnonational conflicts: Vignettes from Estonia. New Literary History, 27: 199-212.

Apprey, M. (1997). Alterity as process in the resolution of ethnonational conflicts: The case of Estonia. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 2(2): 121-128.

Apprey, M. (1997). Ethnonational Conflict Resolution Between Estonia and its Russians: A System of Mutual Implications. Ann Arbor, MI: U.M.I. Research Collections.

Auden, W.H. "On this island" from Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. Reprinted from Faber and Faber, Ltd.

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