Whiteness Catalyzes Character Disorder and Mass Violence

ABSTRACT

Whiteness, understood in psychoanalytic terms as a complex emerging in relation to an invidious object, catalyzes character disorder and mass violence. Drawing on historical analyses of the early American colonial period and a 2014 mass shooting in Isla Vista, California, I articulate a theory of the workings of Whiteness, with an eye toward the interrelationship of psychodynamics and sociocultural, structural, and ideological forces. I conclude with a consideration of how and why psychoanalysis has failed to fully contend with Whiteness because of the discipline’s own investment in Whiteness and White aggression.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest are reported by the authors(s).

Notes

¹ I would especially recommend these last two texts to psychoanalysts eager for a model of how to make psychoanalytic ideas compelling to a popular audience.

² This reading is further substantiated by confessions in his manifesto that he secretly listened in on his younger sister having sex and was filled with a mixture of envy and disgust that any Freudian would recognize.

³ The “almost” does a lot of work here, because as Sheehi (Sheehi, 2020; Sheehi and Sheehi, 2021) has noted, the subaltern does speak (Spivak, 1988), does resist, does sustain sumud in face of overwhelming opposition. The “almost” here conveys how extraordinary it is that so many can sustain such resistance in face of such monumental efforts at their subordination and annihilation.

⁴ American history is nonetheless full of heartening exceptions, for example, the Quakers, whose resolute pacifism was inimical to slavery and white supremacy and who were consequently regarded as bizarre outsiders in the early American state (Lepore, 2018).

⁵ It might in fact be most apt to conceptualize it as what Morton (2013) had called a “hyperobject.”

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Notes on contributors

Carter J. Carter

Carter J. Carter, Ph.D., L.I.C.S.W., is an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and a lecturer in the Doctorate in Clinical Social Work program and Affiliated Faculty of the Program for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an activist, psychotherapist, (bad) farmer, union organizer, small-town newspaper recipe columnist, and pain in the neck.