Introduction

In recent years there has been a marked increase in discussion about race, racism, and racialized subjectivity in psychoanalytic literature.¹ One area of "race relations"² which requires more attention, however, and a different kind of attention from that which it usually receives, is the area of interracial intimacy. In this article, I raise some questions about psychoanalytic responses to interracial sexual intimacy and interracial subjectivity. I argue that historical psychoanalytic responses to interracial desire, intimacy, and subjectivity were shaped by denial and repression of race, and by (unconscious) fears of miscegenation.³ In addition, I argue that psychoanalytic writers, past or present, who overtly or implicitly pathologize interracial desire deny full subjectivity to those in interracial relationships and of interracial parentage, inadvertently perpetuate forms of racial segregation, and mandate endogamy as the proper choice of "healthy" individuals. When informed by the insights of hybridity/critical mixed race studies and contemporary psychoanalytic frameworks embedded in notions of relationality and intersubjectivity,⁴ however, psychoanalytic perspectives can provide important insight into the intersubjective complexities, subtleties, and specificities of interracial desire and intimacy.

The article begins with some background information and discussion on general historical attitudes toward miscegenation, and the relatively recent emergence of hybridity/mixed race studies. I then show how "anti-miscegenism" permeates psychoanalysis, first by looking at the historical picture and the implications of covert racist and colonialist formulations for interracial couples and individuals, and then by examining some contemporary psychoanalytic writing on white desire for black bodies. In order to illustrate and elaborate some key issues, I utilize extracts from my research interviews with women and men who are or have been in intimate interracial relationships.

The interviews I draw on for this article are part of a wider psycho-social research project on transculturation in intimate African and non-African relationships, involving a series of conversations with 20 African and non-African women and men over a period of 2 years. There were several dominant themes in the narratives of my interlocutors, one of which was the responses of family, friends, and observers to their "mixed race" marriages, relationships, and children. I decided in the early stages of the research that I would try to let the data direct theoretical exploration, and this article is one outcome of this process (see also Stopford, 2004, 2006a, 2006b).

Background: "historical and contemporary neuroses" about interracial marriage

Miscegenation – the mixing of races – has been a social and sexual phenomenon throughout the history of the world. In my view its importance and significance as a social catalyst has not been sufficiently recognized. (Henriques, 1975, p xi)

Discussion about interracial marriage/relationship, whether scholarly or popular, has until fairly recently been mired (usually implicitly) in racist and colonialist fantasies of distinct races with intrinsic qualities. As Brah and Coombes write: [T]he historical and contemporary neuroses about intercultural union, which circulate especially (although not exclusively) where the peoples involved display visible signs of difference such as skin colour, are inevitably grounded in the impossible assumption of originary unity and racial purity. (2000, p 4)

Most analyses of interracial relationships and families over the past 50 years have perpetuated this underlying assumption.

Psychological literature about interracial relationships in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, often focused on the pathological motives of individuals who formed such relationships. While nearly all commentators acknowledged that interracial relationships had existed throughout the ages, they were commonly explained as being driven by personal pathologies of various kinds, including "acting out" of personal problems, repudiation of one's "own" social group, rebellion against parental authority, neurotic self-hate, self degradation, and exoticization of the Other (Porterfield, 1978). Analysis of the social, economic and political conditions and forces that enforced racial segregation and policed racial and sexual boundaries in the interests of protecting white/male power was rare. In the United States, most of the focus was on black–white relationships, and black and white commentators in the United States were sometimes equally as suspicious and hostile. In 1965, for example, a black psychiatrist stated that "deep-seated psychological sicknesses of various sorts underlie the vast majority of marriages between white persons and Negroes... . The participants make use of the unique opportunity that socially opposed or forbidden interracial sex offers for acting out their personal problems" (Osmundsen, 1965, p 73).

Even Frantz Fanon seemed to see only the pathological symptoms and expressions of racism in his analysis of interracial relationships. His discussion about the motivations and fantasies associated with black/white sexual relationships (1967) was radical in one way, in that it addressed unconscious process, but at the same time it neglected the sociopolitical genesis of these phenomena. When Fanon was himself married to a white French woman with whom one can only assume he enjoyed a multidimensional complex relationship, it is curious that he wrote only in general(izing) and essentializing ways about black/white sexual relationships.

While Fanon and others focused on the pathology of interracial relationships, there were others in this same period who worked against the grain and refused to ignore the social and political conditions which determine the status and psychosocial dynamics of mixed race relationships and families (see, e.g., Stuart and Abt, 1973; Henriques, 1975; Porterfield, 1978). This work sometimes incorporated radical psychological perspectives. For example, a white psychiatrist writing about counselling mixed race couples in the South of the US had this to say about the "typical" white marriage counsellor of that time and place: The typical counselor is conventional, oriented toward "social truths", cautiously conformist, and eager to "help" people fit into societal norms... . This kind of counselor converts all differences into deficiencies. Consequently, difference itself is never praised, and the world – uniracial and unidimensional – is pasted up in the paper-thin image of...the counselor. (Adams, 1973, p 69)

The tendency of observers to pathologize interracial marriages and families persisted throughout the late 20th century. In her 1993 work on the social construction of whiteness, Ruth Frankenberg (1993) noted that discourse on interracial relationships was invariably against such relationships, and that there was at that time "no popular discourse specifically for them" (p 71, original emphasis). And in 2000, Joanne Nagel wrote: Although the black/white ethno sexual frontier is a somewhat less deadly zone today than it was a century ago, and despite increasing rates of black/white intermarriage, the color line is still a dangerous and controversial intersection, with vocal critics of miscegenation speaking out from both sides... . (p 122)

With regard to contemporary "neuroses", where opposition to interracial relationships was once predicated on notions of white purity and superiority and was blatantly racist, "anti-miscegenism" is now equally likely to be associated with black and anti-racist discourse. In her book "Black Looks" (1992), bell hooks, for example, has eloquently problematized white desire for blacks. In a chapter of the book entitled "Eating the Other," hooks repeatedly issues a warning that the desire of white people for intimate contact with the black Other is more often than not yet another manifestation of white domination and appropriation. While she does acknowledge that when there is mutual choice and negotiation there is the possibility of subject to subject contact between black and white, "which signals the absence of domination" (hooks, 1992, p 28), hooks' emphasis is very strongly on the dangers (for black people) of interracial sexual intimacy.

As brief interview extracts will show presently, in recent years the focus has moved in some locations and contexts from a preoccupation with the mixed race couple to the "problems" faced by their children. In the United Kingdom, for example, while there has been a "longstanding negative orientation to relationships between black and white people and the children from such unions, the nature of that negative orientation has shifted...from eugenic concerns with 'miscegenation' to liberal concerns with the welfare of the children born from such unions" (Phoenix and Owen, 1996, p 77).

Confronting anti-miscegenism: contemporary mixed-race/hybridity discourse

Despite ongoing resistance to interracial relationships from both ends of the political spectrum, in recent years there has been a sea change with regard to both public and academic commentary on interracial marriages and interracial subjectivity. Not only has there been a dramatic increase in literature related to intermarriage and interraciality (especially in the United States), there has also been a marked change in approach to research and analysis. In the United States, a new cross-disciplinary field of interest has developed, generally known as "mixed race studies" (see, e.g., Root, 1992, 1996; Zack, 1993, 1995; Moran, 2001), and (sometimes), in the United Kingdom, as "hybridity studies" (see, e.g., Alibhai-Brown and Montague, 1992; Tizard and Phoenix, 1993; Phoenix and Owen, 1996; Windance Twine, 1999). Rather than pathologize or problematize mixed race relationships, families, and individuals, theorists and researchers now focus on the social, political, and economic conditions shaping normative attitudes toward marriage, desire, family, and identity, and question the way racial categories and boundaries are constructed and policed.

This shift is due partly to seminal theoretical work on hybridity, ambiguity, and complexity by scholars associated with postcolonial and cultural studies, especially Homi Bhabha (1994, 1995, 1996) and Stuart Hall (1990, 1992, 1993). In Bhabha's theorization of "a Third space" of enunciation, he proposes that when we understand that "all cultural statements and systems are constructed in (the) contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation", then it is possible to see why "hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or 'purity' of cultures are untenable" (1994, p 37). The implications of Bhabha's exposition of "a Third space" are obviously immense for people who have felt denigrated and devalued for their ambiguous and mixed cultural and racial affiliations and locations. In a similar vein, Stuart Hall proposes that "identities are never unified, and in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed" (1996, p 4).

The shift in orientation is also partly due to the growing frustration of people in mixed race marriages and families, and those of inter- and multi-racial parentage, at being categorized in racist or essentialist ways. As Carol Camper writes, "...Mixed race people must speak. Identity, loyalty and belonging are issues which reside at the very heart of our existence and it is up to us to define who we are..." (1994, p xv). A new genre of literature on interraciality and hybridity has emerged, with varying degrees of theoretical and experiential content, largely written by people who have crossed the "color line" through marriage (e.g., Reddy, 1994; Lazarre, 1996), or who are the children of mixed race parents (e.g., Zack, 1993, 1995; Camper, 1994).

There are of course many complexities and debates within the general field of mixed race/hybridity studies, as the title of a book published in the United Kingdom, "Hybridity and its Discontents" (Brah and Coombes, 2000), beautifully encapsulates. For example, for some postcolonial theorists the contemporary use of the concept of "hybridity" has not broken completely with racialized formulations of the past, since it evokes associations with botanical discourse on inter-species breeding and the racist rhetoric of Victorian England that regarded black and white people as belonging to different species (see Young, 1995). Likewise, there is the paradox of postmodern, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theorists of multiple and mixed (that is, non-essentialist) subjectivities employing terms such as "interraciality" and "mixed race", which carry with them the same implications of inter breeding between distinctly different groups.⁵

However, despite the complexities and contestations surrounding terms such as hybridity and interraciality, for people who do not have the luxury (or fantasy) of a clearly defined racial identity, celebrations of hybridity and interraciality are a vast improvement on the racist rhetoric traditionally attached to miscegenation. Perhaps what is most important about the genre of work associated with hybridity and mixed race studies is that it "...foregrounds complicated entanglement rather than identity, togetherness-in-difference rather than virtual apartheid" (Ien Ang, 2001, p 3), and challenges the all too frequent assumption underlying discussion on race and racialized subjectivity (including most psychoanalytic discourse) that "both bodies and households are monoracialized" (Wright et al., 2003, p 458).

Psychoanalysis, "mixed race" relationships and interraciality: brief overview

While psychoanalytic concepts have been employed in general psychological analyses of mixed race marriages, there has been little discussion of interracial relationships in psychoanalytic literature per se. However, the attitudes of the few psychoanalysts who have discussed their patients' interracial marriages have generally reflected the trends noted in the section above on contemporary and historical neuroses about interracial/cultural marriage. That is, historically, mixed race relationships and people of mixed racial parentage have generally been either explicitly or implicitly pathologized in psychoanalytic literature. For example, in a review of previous psychoanalytic discussion on mixed marriages, Lehrman noted in his 1967 article in Psychoanalytic Quarterly that Karl Abraham viewed exogamous marriage as an exaggerated phobia of incest (Abraham, 1955, cited in Lehrman, p 67), while Ferenczi (1923) viewed mixed marriage as a misalliance based largely on the pull of sexual instincts. Similarly, Little (1942) regarded marriages between black and white men and women as being determined by the fact that they were symbols of lust for each other. In fact, the twin themes of incest phobia and eroticization of the racialized "other" as the overriding determinants of interracial relationships pervade psychoanalytic discussion to the present day, as I will explore presently.

In Lehrman's discussion about his own patients, he acknowledged that not all mixed marriages are psychologically suspect (p 68). However, as Lehrman's analysis was predicated on the flawed underlying assumption that exogamous marriages are inherently more suspect than endogamous couplings, his conclusions were inevitably similar to previous pathologizing formulations: [T]he psychopathological factors which have been found to overdetermine mixed marriages are: 1, unresolved Oedipus complex and incest-taboo problems (exaggerated phobia of incest); 2, debasement in the sphere of love (special types of choice of object made by men, misalliance, "family romance" in reverse); 3, hostility as a result of disappointment of unconscious incestuous love impulses, often accompanied by masochism; 4, exaggerated narcissism, including the phallic significance of the marriage bond; 5, exhibitionism; 6, the conviction that one is an exception; 7, counterphobic and fetishistic attitudes and choices which defend against castration anxiety. (p 79)

Psychoanalytic clinical discussion on mixed race marriages of the type described above seem to have ceased about the same time as general anti-miscegenist discourse began to ease in the West (i.e., in the latter part of the last century), and there has been little subsequent discussion specifically devoted to interraciality. As stated at the beginning of this article, the relatively recent increase in discussion about race and racialized subjectivity in psychoanalytic literature has largely concentrated on monoracialized subjectivities, and the infrequent comments on interraciality tend to unquestioningly reproduce the kind of anti-racist anti-miscegenism stance discussed earlier. Perhaps this is due to the fact that unlike some other psychological disciplines (e.g., family therapy, narrative therapy), the insights and clinical implications of critical mixed race/hybridity studies seem to have made little impact on psychoanalytic clinical theory and practice.

Historical questions

Historically, there is an important question as to why psychoanalysis has failed to theorize how sexual desire is shaped within embodied cultural and racial contexts as well as within the symbolic order. One of the most appealing aspects of psychoanalysis is its insistence that human sexuality is not fixed at birth, but rather that we become sexed through a complex process of identifications and negotiations within a network of relationships, initially with our parents, and within the symbolic order. However, as Walton says, in its theorizing of sexuation, or the production of gender, psychoanalysis "has devoted none of its epistemological project to the tracing of how racialization of subjects is bound up in their sexualization" (2001, p 105), and has thus neglected a critical dimension of the production of subjectivity. Through her analysis of early feminist psychoanalytic writing, Walton shows how psychoanalytic theorizing of the production of gender has gone hand in hand with the repression of the production of race. Like some contemporary relational feminist psychoanalytic writers (e.g., Dimen, 2002; Layton, 2002a), Walton challenges the traditional feminist psychoanalytic idea that subjects acquire gender identities in isolation from, or prior to, racial identities, and raises significant questions about the basis of contemporary feminist, queer and cultural theory discussions on subjectivity (including fantasy and desire) which derive from white-centred psychoanalysis.

Walton's concern is with the unacknowledged yet foundational role of race in the formation and development of psychoanalytic theory. My specific interest is in the way psychoanalytic denial and repression of race shapes psychoanalytic theories of sexual desire, and affects (often unconscious) responses to interracial subjectivity. The normative subject of psychoanalysis sexually desires someone of the opposite gender, and, although it may rarely be said in so many words, the same race. In the absence of discussion about desire between those designated as racially different (i.e., discussion which does not automatically assume that white desire for black, or vice versa, is pathological), normative ideas about endogamy –ideas that are embedded in symbolic and material structures of white superiority and black inferiority – prevail. In other words, when there is no deconstruction of the way psychoanalysis is white-centred, the white subject who desires the black subject can only be viewed as racist, hysterical, neurotic, alienated or narcissistic, depending on the particular psychoanalytic frame, since black is always already othered, and inferior.

Without addressing the white supremacist social structures within which psychoanalysis was formed, and the implications of the racially segregated lives of many western psychoanalysts (both in Freud's time and in the contemporary context), psychoanalysis can not challenge or change entrenched hierarchical structures of power, where some identities and relationships are privileged, and some are devalued. As Nissim-Sabat comments in her review article of Walton's book, "in all its cultural manifestations, psychoanalysis unquestioningly embodied white privilege and superiority. Consequently psychoanalysis...has contributed to sustaining the oppression of Africana people in Europe and in the United States by constituting them as the inferior other, as black, that is, as raced" (2002, p 49). When black is inferior, black–white sexual relationships are inferior to white–white, and the children of mixed unions are also devalued. Their origin is what decides their fate. We may compare them with individuals of mixed race who taken all round, resemble white men, but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other, and on that account are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges of white people. (Freud, 1915, p 191)

While it was presumably not Freud's intention to denigrate "individuals of mixed race", in this quotation from "the Unconscious" (1915) he unambiguously equates "coloured descent" with instinctual impulses, thereby embedding psychoanalytic discourse on interraciality firmly within colonialist and racist hierarchical formulations of civilization. In Brickman's words: The scaffolding of the evolutionary anthropology that Freud used was a color-coded typology of hierarchically arranged races, in which cultural development was presumed to be the result of the evolution of biological structures within the human race, an evolution reflected in increased brain size and a progressive lightening of the skin. (2003, p 72)

These unacknowledged racialized and colonialist foundations of psychoanalysis constitute a "basic fault" in psychoanalysis, to borrow Balint's term.

The "racial subtext" in the psychoanalytic development model: some implications

Much has changed since the early days of psychoanalysis in Europe and the US. Nonetheless, Walton's comment that a "racial subtext informs the psychoanalytic development model, in which...one must be fully 'white' (or perhaps fully one's 'race', however that might be locally constructed) in order to fully become a subject..." (2001, p 5), is still pertinent, particularly her bracketed comment regarding the obligation to be "fully one's 'race,'" as the occasional alternative to being "fully white". In the absence of any theorization of complex, multiply shaped subjectivities that includes understandings of how subjects become racialized but does not essentialize racial identity, there is a danger that contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers who are sensitive to colonialist/racist issues may fall back on essentialist black or anti-racist discourse that predicates full constitution of subjectivity on being "fully" black. This yet again makes mixed race subjectivity inauthentic and lacking.

This is an important issue for psychoanalytic clinicians and theorists to grapple with, as the children of people who cross "the colour line", especially in black/white relationships, often encounter subtle and overt resistance to their interracial subjectivity from a variety of sources. In the US, for example, black discourse frequently ignores, denies, derides or downplays interraciality. The desire of the children of black/white parents to have both/all aspects of their cultural and ethnic heritage acknowledged is viewed simply as the desire for whiteness, and therefore a rejection of blackness. Within dichotomized race and identity frames, interracial subjectivity is inauthentic. Increasingly, scholars and activists of diverse racial affiliations are challenging this stance and resisting derogatory stereotypical representations of interracial people as defective and tragic mulattos. This particular stereotype is so entrenched that in many social and geographical locations black/white couples are frequently admonished about the potential suffering of any offspring they may have.

Some, like my research participants Esther and John, frequently feel guilty and anxious about the well being of their mixed race children. Esther: My daughter said, Mum, where do I belong? In Australia, they give me heaps, they call me black, in Ghana, they call me white, now so where do I belong? And she goes out with these friends and the boys, and in fact one of her friends said take "Mary" out, she's gorgeous, but she's black is what the boy said. Now this kid, she's beautiful, only she doesn't think so ... and you know how much guilt I have for that? That's why I'm saying to you if I had my life again I would be against mixed marriages. And John: I used to worry a lot about the kids, a huge amount around the mixed race identity thing.

As Pabst says, "the trope of the tragic mulatto places on the mixed-race subject [and, I would add, on their parents], rather than on society, the responsibility for any disconnectedness, displacement, alienation, and lack of belonging he or she might experience in a social context that widely subscribes to deleterious dualisms" (2003, p 196). The construction of mixed parentage and mixed race subjectivity as intrinsically problematic and damaging (for the children) is symptomatic of the assumption that there are "clearly differentiated 'races' who are, in essence, necessarily polarized" (Phoenix and Owen, 1996, p 72).

Contemporary psychoanalytic discourse: mandating endogamy

For those of us interested in "interraciality", there are other problems with contemporary psychoanalytic discourse on race relations besides the dangers of falling back on essentialist black or anti-racist discourse on identity. This pertains to my earlier comment regarding what appears to be the persistence of underlying (and probably unconscious) assumptions that exogamy is suspect, and that mixed race relationships are driven primarily by racialized sexual fantasies. While several contemporary psychoanalytic writers have explored white racism toward black people in depth and offered useful insights, their theorization of white/black relationships seems to allow little or no possibility for intimacy or desire which is not entirely driven by white racist/racialized fantasies, disowned desire, well meaning (but deluded) liberalism and so on. Perhaps due to situational factors, including possibly their own racially segregated lives, the potential for ethical and loving sexual connections between black and white people (and other ethnic and racial combinations) who meet initially as co-workers, neighbours or students seems unimaginable to many contemporary psychoanalytic writers.

My research participant "Gina" (an Anglo Celtic woman) alluded to this tendency in psychoanalytic writings when she commented that psychoanalytic discourse "seems to offer little room for the rich kinds of relations between people of different cultures". Her rejection of psychoanalysis and adoption of another theoretical frame "has been one of the influences on (her) decisions to enter cross-cultural relationships". It is of course true, as bell hooks says, that "simply by expressing their desire for 'intimate' contact with black people, white people do not eradicate the politics of racial domination as they are made manifest in personal interaction" (1992, p 28). White/black relationships are interpellated into white supremacist symbolic and material structures that are so entrenched that even with the best intentions and motivations, including deep love for their partner, white people entering into sexual relationships with black partners are very unlikely to be free of racialized sexual fantasies and/or tendencies to want to uphold white superiority and power. However, as Gina recognizes, such dynamics are an inevitable and unavoidable part of the interracial and cultural contact zone. They come with the territory, and must be faced and worked through. Living together goes a long way toward dissolving racialized fantasies, and it creates the potential for the "other" to become a subject in his/her own right, someone both similar and different to varying degrees at different moments, and in different locations.

In order to elaborate some of the problems of contemporary psychoanalytic commentary on race relations which seem "to offer little room for the rich kinds of relationships between people of different cultures", I will briefly discuss a recent article by Isaac Balbus entitled "The psychodynamics of racial reparations" (2004). In an important article on the need for white reparations to African Americans, Balbus includes a section on white demonization/devaluation of black bodies. Using classical oedipal theory, he argues that in breaking the racial taboo through having real or fantasized dangerous sexual liaisons with their "dark mother substitutes" (p 174), white men unconsciously break the oedipal taboo. Similarly, a girl's submission fantasies (related to the culture's repudiation of the mother's agency, according to Benjamin (1998) and Dinnerstein (1976)), cannot be satisfied in a "safe" monogamous relationship with "a man who has chosen her as a mother instead of a whore" (p 175). She also is drawn to the (fantasized) pleasures of a more obviously "dangerous" man; that is, a black man. As Balbus puts it, "'the good father' becomes the boy she wants to bring home to meet daddy and the man she will eventually marry, the 'bad father' becomes her 'back door man'". In the racialization of this sexual split, the "back door man" becomes the black man and the boy next door becomes the white man" (p 175). Mutual idealization between white girl and white boy results in her lust being directed toward her "black-door man"; thus, by having sex with a black man, "the white woman succeeds in sleeping with her father" (p 175).

With all due respect for the author, in my view this section of his article is an example of some of the problems with employing psychoanalytic theory as a meta-narrative with universal explanations for human behaviour; or, to use Jessica Benjamin's words, an example of the "detachment from lived feeling promoted by the abstract focus on psychosexual symbols" (Benjamin, 2000, p 292). If this particular Oedipal formulation of white desire were described as one possible story for some people in some locations at certain historical times (or as a metaphor), it would perhaps be less problematic. As it is, Balbus's classical Kleinian formulation begs a number of questions. For example, why assume that the Oedipal stage is the crucial clue? And why assume that successful negotiation of the Oedipal complex as a developmental milestone necessarily manifests as particular object choices – that is, monoracial? As Jody Messler Davies says, one can take seriously the concept of the Oedipus complex, "while at the same time disentangling it from any linear assumptions regarding sexual orientation or object choice" (2003, p 1). Without the disentangling that Messler Davies attempts, psychoanalytic discourse on the Oedipal complex tends to reflect and perpetuate the social order, prescribing heterosexuality and endogamy as normative. The normative subject of psychoanalysis desires someone of the opposite sex and the same race.

The prohibition against miscegenation embedded in normative psychoanalytic discourse on successful negotiation of the Oedipal complex was evident in the narrative of one of my white male interlocutors. At one point in the interview, John, who is a retired mental health professional, explained his marriage to his Ghanaian (ex) wife in psychoanalytic terms: John: I mean I suspect there were Oedipal dimensions there. I mean I think it was a convenient way of avoiding Oedipus stuff around my mother...I think Esther resolved a lot of that Oedipus stuff because of that otherness.
Annie: Resolved them?
John: Well bypassed them and dealt with them in a surface way.

When I questioned John in my feedback letter about his apparently contradictory language (first "resolved", and then "bypassed"), he explained (on the phone) that what he really meant was that it was only after the marriage with Esther broke down that he could see that he had unresolved Oedipal issues with his mother, which he took to mean that he had married a black woman unconsciously to avoid "Oedipal stuff". That these feelings and thoughts might well have surfaced after the breakdown of a marriage to any woman, especially in mid life, and that he had in the interview already alluded to the fact that his attraction to Esther was strongly related to his aversion to/rebellion against the English class system, seemed not to occur to John. With his medical background, John drew on the discourse available to him to explain his choice of a black wife – that is, he made use of the "linear assumptions" of endogamy (and heterosexuality of course) embedded in traditional psychoanalytic Oedipal discourse. His narrative may look as though it confirms the kind of classical psychoanalytic formulation posited by Balbus, but in my view what it does is recycle a psychoanalytic formula in a way which diminishes the feelings, motivations and needs of both his ex-wife and himself (and the lived realities of his de-segregated multicultural/racial work environment), and flattens a complex multidimensional relational field into one overriding unconscious drive.

Endogamy as an incest equivalent

The (implicit) prohibition against miscegenation in normative psychoanalytic formulations serves to uphold and sustain the practice of endogamy. Ironically, as Adams wrote in the early 1970s, endogamy operates "in the final analysis as an incest equivalent... . The function of endogamy, after all is said and done, is to create an equilibrium, as nondynamic as possible, wherein a man, being dissuaded from marrying his biological sister, is urged to marry the cultural cognate of precisely his sister" (1973, p 66, emphases in original). While psychoanalytic formulations such as Balbus's, which concentrate on white desire for black as an expression of racism, are intended to serve the interests of anti-racism, the paradoxical effect of their implicit mandating of endogamous monoracial relationship as a superior form of object choice is inadvertently to perpetuate institutions and ideologies which endorse and reward racial segregation and preserve white privilege, "purity" and power.

When Balbus writes that white women with black lovers are always jealous of the "more sexually seductive black female competitor" (p 175), one wonders how many white women who are or have been in interracial sexual relationships he actually knows. Several of my white female respondents have strong relationships with black women, including one who is a good friend to the Ghanaian woman who replaced her as wife. From a relational or intersubjective perspective, it is rarely useful to speak in such a universalizing way about black and white men and women. As I will discuss at the conclusion of this article, attending to historicity, specificity, location, and relational contexts often yields a much more complex and nuanced picture of interracial desire and intimacy. While abstract psychoanalytic theory can be useful in thinking in general terms about racism and race relations (that is, when used in a metaphoric and/or speculative way as one of a number of possible stories), it is no substitute for careful attention to the intricacies of the intersubjective field, including of course the way one's own subjectivity as analyst/researcher shapes the analysis.

Challenging segregation

In effect, endogamy is a form of racial segregation. While it is the symbolic dimension of the intersubjective field that is of primary interest to many psychoanalytic theorists rather than the material, embodied dimensions of individual, couple and family lives, the backdrop of segregated, monoracialized locations is critical in this discussion. The anti-miscegenism associated with anti-racist discourse, including contemporary psychoanalytic discussion, seems often to be predicated on an assumption that black people are always "othered" for white people in destructive and demeaning ways. There is either an unwillingness or an inability to see that white othering of black people is both the cause, and the result, of racially segregated communities and cities. For white men and women who grow up in racially and ethnically diverse families and communities, or who in adult life choose to cross "the colour line" and develop lifelong friendships and relationships with black people, and/or become biological or adoptive parents of black and brown children, black is not necessarily, or consistently, other. The problematizing of interracial desire is inextricably entwined with racial segregation – when people of different racial or ethnic backgrounds from one's own do not share our living spaces, they remain immutably othered.

But for those who do not live segregated lives, and do not (either consciously or unconsciously) regard people of different ethnic or cultural backgrounds from themselves as inherently unsuitable as lovers or partners, there is the potential for interracial relationships to form when paths cross through work, study or social life. Gina, who attended a multi-racial progressive school, and who in adulthood has had several relationships with African men (among many relationships), commented: Gina:...I've had friends say, oh, this is your second relationship in a row with an African, and I say, well would you be saying something like that if it were my second relationship in a row with an Australian, then you wouldn't be saying that.
Annie: How do you read that?
Gina: I think it's a racial thing. One person actually said to me that she thought it was racist, and I said well, no I don't agree, this is my social network, these are the available single men that I'm meeting.

Other white female participants who had had more than one relationship with African men said that they had also been accused of racism. Needless to say, it was the fact that these women had sexual relationships with African men which indicated their "racism" (as opposed to how they treated their partners verbally, economically, emotionally, and so forth), and whether they were overtly accused of racism, or the object of teasing and innuendo about their sexual habits, all the white women I interviewed felt anxious and/or defensive at different times. "Josephine", an Anglo woman whose gay colleagues teased her about being a "size queen", had this to say: Josephine: I was saying about preconceptions that people have. Well, one of the things I really resent is the big dick stuff, that when people knew I was going out with an African you know, talking about larger sized condoms and stuff like that...I feel defensive about it. I mean when I first met "M" (Josephine's second African boyfriend) I felt, oh my God, this just proves it you know, people are just going to you know, and I felt really bad about it and felt I had to justify it and I felt really defensive of it and I know if I met another African man I'd just go through the same thing all over again.

The pressure to stay within one's "own" racial grouping is still so strong that it is acceptable to question the motives of participants in interracial relationships, but not to question why people are never attracted to anyone outside their "own" ethnic community. The assumption that it is preferable to find partners within the same race or ethnicity is still embedded very deeply in the every day discourse and practice of most cultural and racial groups, leaving the onus on those who choose exogamous relationships to "justify" their choices. In fact, while it is often very challenging to live with cultural and racial difference, avoidance of intimacy with other races and cultures, whether driven by feelings of superiority, fear, anger, anxiety or guilt, perpetuates many problematic social and psychological phenomena, including segregation, rigid identifications with categories of race, ethnicity or nation, hatred, fear and objectification of difference, and hoarding and accumulation of material resources within racially/ethnically defined groups.

Asking different psychoanalytic questions

As Rachel Moran writes in the quotation at the beginning of this article, "the time is long overdue to recognize the singular importance of interracial relationships" (2001, p 16). And the time is also long overdue to ask very different psychoanalytic questions; not why do people of "different" cultures and races form intimate relationships, but rather, how do they/we negotiate and respond to racism, power differences, complexity, racialized fantasies, cultural difference, and so forth. Rather than persistently to problematize interracial relationship, it is time to ask questions about the fantasies, assumptions, fears, and phobias that stifle and repress interracial sexual intimacy. Instead of focusing on individuals who cross race and cultural lines to form intimate relationships, the time is long overdue to shift the focus to the social, political, and economic conditions that militate against plurality, multiplicity, and "mixed-upness". And rather than continuing down the well worn track of constituting blackness and whiteness as two distinctly different and antagonistic forms of identity, it is high time that we approach relationships between those designated as "black" and "white" (and all others) from the premise that humans are fundamentally relational, desirous and interdependent, no matter how prone we may be to exploiting, mistreating, and misunderstanding each other.

There is an urgency to this project, for the scrutiny, prurience, and judgments experienced by those involved in interracial relationships add significant stress to the many pressures on interracial and cross-cultural relationships and families. My research respondents (black and white) reported many incidents of suspicious and judgmental responses from family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers that potentially undermined their relationships with their partners and with their children, not to mention their own self-esteem and self-confidence. In a racialized and racist world, mixed race couples and families are still anomalous, and rather than the objectifying and pathologizing scrutiny of the universalizing psychoanalytic gaze, what is required is an exploratory, empathic and insightful approach which seeks to understand the intricacies and specificities of individual and relational lives within the wider contexts of history, politics and culture.

The majority of my research respondents do not seem to fit the stereotype of someone who is preoccupied with sexual fantasies of their racialized "other", but as I have discussed in some detail elsewhere (Stopford, 2004), even when a white woman's story appears to be a straightforward example of racist/racialized white fantasies about black bodies along the lines discussed by Balbus and other psychoanalytic theorists, sensitive enquiry shaped by relational psychoanalytic perspectives can yield a much more nuanced picture. In the case of "Jane", who professed in her interview to being sexually attracted only to black men, careful questioning revealed that her preoccupation with black men started when Lionel Ritchie's music provided comfort in the aftermath of the traumatic loss of her mother, who died when she was 13, leaving her bereft, lonely, isolated and overburdened with responsibilities for her siblings. As I wrote: [R]ather than providing Stephen Frosh's important question "How is it that 'all' black people can represent so powerfully the other in the white subject's struggle for identity?" (2002, p 55) with a general story about white racism, Jane's narrative offers us a very poignant, personal answer. As a lonely, isolated, grieving thirteen year old burdened prematurely with the responsibilities of an adult woman, Lionel Ritchie's music, with all its/his associations with the suffering and marginalization of black people in America, offered her some solace and perhaps the promise of sexual fulfillment one day with "other" men – not the local white boys who she felt alienated from, and rejected by.
In her lonely and painful world, she could imagine that she and Lionel Ritchie shared something. As the "black sheep" in her family, she fantasized that black men were like her, and she was like them (it seems she may have felt like a "slave" in her family) and that she might be desirable to them. She identified with Lionel Ritchie, not with the white musicians in Cold Chisel (an Australian band), nor with her father who expected her to take up the mantle of mother to her siblings. The imagery of cold chisel/metal is particularly powerful in the context of the loss of her mother (leaving her alone in a cold isolated world), and in contrast to the sensual warmth of Lionel Ritchie's songs. That identification with Ritchie has been a powerful driving force in the shaping both of her attachment needs and her sexual desire. (Stopford, 2004, p 26)

Interracial intimacy and interracial subjectivity are complex zones, worthy of discussion that is more nuanced than the racist/anti-racist and essentialist identity discourse commonly employed. In my view psychoanalytic theorists and clinicians have much to offer when and if we work within a frame which privileges the primacy of relationality, and thereby allows exploration of both intrapsychic and intersubjective phenomena, including the all important question of the actual embodied environment (suburb, community and so forth) and whether or not racial segregation and endogamy are assumed to be normative.

Conclusion

My intention in this article has been to raise questions about conventional psychoanalytic responses to interracial relationships, and to offer alternative perspectives. I have argued that the majority of historical and contemporary psychoanalytic theorizations of interracial relationships and subjectivity are shaped by denial and repression of race, fears of miscegenation, and normative assumptions about the superiority and desirability of endogamy. Instead of relying solely on the rather abstract perspectives on psyche and sexuality provided by traditional psychoanalytic frameworks, I have suggested that psychoanalytic theorists and clinicians can benefit from the insights of hybridity and critical mixed race theorists, and from contemporary relational psychoanalytic perspectives which pay attention to the specificities and complex threads of the relational/intersubjective matrix.

I have argued that while analysis of power inequalities and racialized fantasies in black/white relationships is of course of continuing importance, we ought not automatically question the motives of people who enter into interracial relationships. The time is long overdue to question the motives, phobias, fantasies, and fears of those who oppose interraciality, and to examine the kinds of social and theoretical practices that deny the primacy of relationality and (inadvertently or deliberately) perpetuate racial segregation. The persistent pathologizing of interracial relationships, whether driven by white fantasies of purity and superiority, anti-racist activism, essentialist ideas about identity, or psychoanalytic formulations of derailed Oedipal process, is damaging to those who are members of "mixed race" relationships and families, and to those of interracial parentage.

Notes

¹ See, for example, Leary, 1997, 2000; Altman, 2000; Dalal, 2002; Dimen, 2002; Straker, 2004; Suchet, 2004; Holmes, 2006; Layton, 2006.

² The concept of "race" may have no intrinsic meaning outside of a race-conscious society, but within racialized systems phenotype and skin colour retain particular meanings. Thus, my use of the term "race" is similar to that of race theorists such as Cornel West (1993), who adopt a mode of viewing racial difference which neither treats race as factual, fixed or categorical, nor denies the specific experiences of those whose appearance marks them as potential targets for abuse and discrimination.

³ According to Wright et al., 2003, p 65, the term "miscegenation" was coined in the US in the 1860s from the Latin miscere – to mix – and genus – race, and was used as a political tool in the 1864 presidential election campaign, soon finding its way into the popular lexicon.

⁴ While some contemporary philosophers make important distinctions between the primacy of relationality and intersubjectivity (see, e.g., Butler, 2004; Oliver, 2004), in post-Hegelian psychoanalytic discussion on relationality and intersubjectivity there appears to be little, if any, distinction between the two. According to James Fosshage; "Intersubjective and relational fields are equivalent concepts, both capturing the embeddedness of the individual within an intersubjective or relational field" (2003, p 411).

⁵ It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the nature/culture debate surrounding the concept of race, but suffice it to say that I find Lacanian theorist Charles Shepherdson's (1998) argument that we need new conceptual tools that neither assume race as a biological category to be an empirical fact, nor reduce the body to discursive effect or symbolic function, very persuasive. My own thinking about the usefulness or otherwise of retaining any notion of "race" is also shaped partly by anthropologist Gillian Cowlishaw's work with indigenous Australians and their ways of understanding and talking about race. Cowlishaw writes: "...contrary to popular perception, racial identities are highly valued, not just by white supremacists but also by the racially subordinated. The progressive attempt to rid ourselves of racial categorization has been a marked failure, as was the 1970s feminist strategy to undermine sexual categories by denying the significance of the sexual binarism because it seemed always to entail one term being subservient to the other" (2004, p 11). While Cowlishaw suggests that it is "subservience", or inequality, that is the problem, rather than categorization in itself, Shepherdson asks whether rather than theorizing race as biologically determined or socially constructed, or a balanced mixture of the two, it might be better to say that race is neither, just as sexual difference cannot be reduced to either sex or gender. Perhaps new language is needed, but perhaps, too, we are always faced with the limits of language, and the terms hybridity and interraciality are "good enough".

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About the author

Annie Stopford is a psychotherapist in private practice in Sydney, Australia. She is an adjunct fellow at the Gender, Culture and Health Research Unit, University of Western Sydney.