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c h a p t e r t w o Richard Wright Reading The Promise of Social Psychiatry Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s Dark Legend: A Study in Murder (1941), a clinical account of a matricide, had a powerful e√ect on Richard Wright. More than a case study, Dark Legend o√ered a primer on psychoanalytic inquiry. When ‘‘any organized forces in mental life come into diametrical opposition,’’ Wertham wrote, ‘‘we speak of a conflict.’’ In the event that such conflicts reside primarily below consciousness , ‘‘open manifestations’’ take the form of ‘‘strange eruptions in consciousness— impulses, fears, inhibitions and unstable compromises.’’∞ Wertham did not believe that psychiatry alone could resolve crises and social contradictions. Yet a ‘‘dynamic, not dogmatic’’ psychiatry could provide the ‘‘courage to draw conclusions’’ about intractable and di≈cult conflicts.≤ ‘‘Psychiatry is the art of listening,’’ Wertham wrote in Dark Legend, and ‘‘real understanding must be based on knowledge of the person’s inner life history.’’≥ After becoming familiar with Wright’s work, Wertham concluded that Wright’s capacity to recognize and record the e√ects of race hierarchy on modern subjectivities had much in common with the life histories involving psychological abnormality that defined his training and clinical background. Wright, for whom psychiatric expertise and psychotherapy became increasingly critical subjects, concurred . Wright’s strongly held conviction that psychological inquiry could engender more incisive and informative understandings of race hierarchy is nowhere more evident than in the connections he developed and sustained with psychotherapeutic thinkers. In his estimation, psychotherapists and writers who wove psychological theory into their work were especially well equipped to demonstrate the arbitrary nature of race thinking. Beginning in the early 1940s, Wright explored institutions that modeled alternative forms of socially conscious psychotherapy. By the middle of the decade, his reading practices and activities often coalesced symbiotically with his psychoanalytic concerns. This chapter explores Wright’s readings and institutional a≈liations in terms of the merger of psychotherapeutic knowledge and antiracism he attempted to enact. 50 Psychology Comes to Harlem In 1941 Wright wrote a letter in support of parole release for an African American man named Clinton Brewer, who had been convicted for killing a woman who had refused to marry him. Wright had learned about the skills in music composition Brewer had developed during his eighteen years in prison. He seemed to be rehabilitated , capable of living in society and supporting himself through his talents. But, to Wright’s astonishment, Brewer committed murder again a few months after his release, in circumstances not altogether di√erent from his first crime. At a loss to understand the shocking turn of events, Wright contacted Wertham. Wright wanted to know what psychological abnormality had led to the second murder, for which Brewer faced the death penalty. Persuaded to provide expert testimony, Wertham cited pathological obsession as the defining feature of Brewer’s mental condition, which helped to nullify the death penalty threat, giving Brewer a sentence of life imprisonment. Wright and Wertham began a long friendship defined by shared interests in literature, the figure of the criminal, juvenile delinquency, and, not least, the antiracist potential of psychological investigation generally and psychotherapeutic resources in particular.∂ Bavarian-born, Wertham studied in London and Munich before coming to the United States. He had grown familiar with American race hierarchy while working in Baltimore at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Unlike most of his peers in clinical psychiatry, he sometimes testified in court on behalf of African Americans when his psychological expertise proved relevant. Moving to New York, Wertham widened his knowledge U.S. race hierarchy and worked with black youth while serving as director of psychiatric services at Queens General Hospital in New York. ‘‘The exploitation of the Negro in the South is a very direct and brutal one,’’ he commented. ‘‘In the North, it is very insidious—half-concealed—and in the long run really much more ruthless and deadly.’’∑ In the mid-1940s, when he began to conceive of a psychiatric clinic in Harlem, he conferred with Wright and asked for his support. Yet even before the establishment of Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic, Wright and Wertham were engaged in public dialogue. One of the most intriguing results of the friendship formed between the men was an article by Wertham titled ‘‘An Unconscious Determinant in Native Son,’’ based on a paper given at the 1944 meeting of the American Psychopathological Association. Wright had agreed to participate in an experiment in the...

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