Black skin, white clinic?

Psychoanalysis, racism and its impasses in listening to the racialized subject

Abstract

Classical psychoanalysis, developed from a Eurocentric and white bourgeois perspective, presents a fundamental problem by ignoring or denying race as a constitutive dimension of the unconscious, thus invisibilizing the psychic suffering generated by structural racism and coloniality. This article aims to demonstrate the urgent need for a racialized and situated psychoanalysis, in opposition to a deracialized practice, that recognizes race, history, and social context as fundamental elements in the formation of the unconscious and subjectivity, especially in Brazil, where the myth of racial democracy persists. To achieve this, the study employs a critical analysis of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts, engaging with the contributions of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Neusa Santos Souza, among other intellectuals who articulate race, psychoanalysis, and coloniality. The results reveal how the white gaze, racial alienation, the process of becoming black, and cultural neurosis profoundly structure the psychic experience of Black individuals, demonstrating that traditional analytical neutrality can, paradoxically, perpetuate racist structures. It is concluded that psychoanalysis must confront its colonial limits, “to decenter whiteness” from its theories, and adopt a situated and implicated listening that recognizes necropolitics as an intrinsic dimension of psychic suffering, thereby assuming its ethical responsibility.