Psychoanalysts Hating White People

Just in case you thought that Dr. Aruna Khilanani’s intemperate rant about white people was an outlier, a spasm of neurosis from the sober halls of American psychiatry, now we have another piece of pure idiocy, from a New York psychoanalyst, published in a venerable mainstream mainline psycho journal, called The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. (via Maggie's Farm)

We are not talking about some fringe group. The APA is the most reputable and respectable psychoanalytic journal. This means that the field of psychoanalysis is over and done with. 

So, here we have the summary from what is called a “research article” by one Donald Moss. Whoever chose to call this screed research should be looking for another job.

In was published six weeks ago:

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.

If it had not been in such a distinguished journal we would have thought that it was simply an exercise in bad writing and worse thinking. 

Whiteness is malignant and parasitic-- a cancer can certainly be malignant, but we do better not to mix up too many metaphors. Psycho theorists ought not to compare mental afflictions to cancer, unless they have a chemotherapy treatment at hand. One suspects that calling psychological conditions cancers makes them feel that they did not waste their time getting medical degrees.

Somehow whiteness produces appetites that are voracious, insatiable or perverse. Hmmm. Whatever does this mean? In truth, it means precisely nothing; it is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Which appetites is Moss referring to-- are white people especially prone to commit crimes? Are they especially prone to drug addiction or alcohol abuse? Are they most likely to be afflicted with obesity and other forms of intemperance. In truth, one might say that white people are far less likely to commit crimes and to abuse drugs and alcohol.

One imagines that Moss is thinking of bigotry, though even there, do we really believe that white people are especially bigoted, more bigoted than everyone else on the planet. Note that the word "bigotry" does not appear in the plot summary.

Also, note the idiotic phrase-- infiltrated appetites. Say what? It means precisely nothing.

Now Moss continues to say that reparations are the cure. Did he need years of psycho training to arrive at a solution that is highly unoriginal? 

Does he know that the war against toxic whiteness has been led by hate preachers like Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan? One suspects that he does not. Why does the APA publish trash thought that merely wants to make white people feel guilty for everything?

And what is served by making whiteness, a racial characteristic shared by different peoples, into a malignant, incurable disease? In truth, it is nothing more than an idiot metaphor, but idiot metaphors sometimes have consequences. Has this nitwit imagined that he is laying the groundwork for prejudice against white people, for attacks on white people, for crimes against white people? Hasn’t the Black Lives Matter movement, with its call for reparations and its work blaming white people for everything that has ever gone wrong for black people, incited more than its fair share of crimes against white people, against white police, against white businesses?

If, instead of whiteness, Moss had substituted Jewishness, he would have presented a modern version of standard Nazi anti-Semitism. How often were Jews accused of having an unquenchable thirst for the blood of Christian children? Moss has exposed an extreme form of bigoted thinking, in what used to be a reputable journal.