Notes
1. Introduction: “When You Think of Me, Think of My Life” 1. Eschewing identity politics, Kincaid states, “I hear people say stupid things like ‘I am protecting my black identity.’ I’ve no idea what that could mean. I can’t imagine that I would invent an identity based on the color of my skin.” For Kincaid, “There are so many things that make up a person and one of them is not ‘an identity’” (Cryer). Instead, Kincaid believes that “one’s identity should proceed from an internal structure, from one’s own internal truth” (Hayden). “My husband is white, my children are half-white,” as Kincaid once remarked of her marriage to Allen Shawn (the couple is now divorced). “I can really no longer speak of race, because I no longer understand what it means. I can speak with more clarity about power. I know I come from people who were slaves. I can make judgments about the past. I can see history, but I can no longer say ‘white people’ with any conviction. They’re just a group of people behaving really abominably” (L. Jones 75). 2. See Diane Simmons 23–33; see also note 5 below. 3. Unlike recent postmodern theorists who believe that “interiority is an appearance, an effect of discourse,” contemporary relational theorists hold that “a constructed interior relational world motivates behavior” (Layton 25). In this view, the self or individual subject is “a continuously evolving negotiator between relationally constructed multiple and contradictory internal and external worlds” (Layton 26). “[B]orn into families with their own histories and ways of mediating culture,” individuals thus engage “in particular patterns of relating ,” and the internalization of these patterns, in turn, is “conditioned by the accidents of gender, race, and class and by the power differentials that structure them at a given historical moment” (Layton 26–27). Contrary to the postmodernist claim that the notion of a “core” self is essentialist, the idea of a core self offered by relational theorists does not “assume the kind of unity . . . that silences otherness” although it does “imply something internal that recognizably persists even while it may continuously and subtly alter” (Layton 25). In this view, the multiple experiences of the self over 191 Notes time exist side by side with “the continuity of a self-reflective and organizing ‘I,’ an ‘I’ that creates meaning and organizes the diverse experiences and manifold self-other configurations” (Schapiro 5). Focusing attention on the psychic processes of projection and introjection, relational theorists describe how in projection the individual puts “feelings, beliefs, or parts of [the] self” into another person or internal object while in introjection “aspects or functions of a person or object are taken into the self and come to constitute and differentiate an internal world and reshape the ego” (Chodorow, Power 15). Investigating the creation of mental life from a relational matrix, relational theorists describe how inner and outer reality “are continually reconstituted through projective and introjective fantasies, so that experiences of others are shaped or filtered through fantasies of inner objects and in turn reshape these inner objects” (Chodorow, Power 54). 4. In her insistence on the “power of feelings” and the irreducibility of the psychological, Chodorow contests the antipsychological views of contemporary cultural theorists who assert that the psychological and subjectivity are modern cultural inventions and that emotion is constituted by culture. In this view, “culture doesn’t just surround or act on a bedrock of psychobiological ‘emotions’; it defines, produces, and has us enact in our behavior what we are told and tell ourselves are emotions” (Pfister 19). Despite the “gripping reality” and intensity of experiences interpreted as emotional—such as giving birth or feeling anxiety about death—because the meaning of such experiences can differ within and across cultures, antipsychological theorists, as they rightly call into question the universality of emotional expression, also seem to deny the psychobiological reality of emotions (Pfister 21–22). Equally suspect to such theorists is the idea of a desiring and experiencing inner self, which is also a social creation in this view. “To conceptualize the ‘inner,’ not as universal, but as a social representation that comes to be experienced as natural . . . is to challenge the premise underlying the term internalization,” as Joel Pfister comments (27–28). Thus, the psychology of interiority, while it seems self-evident and natural, is constituted through cultural representations and institutions, and indeed psychoanalysis itself can be considered as “a revealing historical symptom,” giving us “a picture of...
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