The Lunatic's Fancy and the Work of Art

It was as though I had entered a haunted wood wherein every detail of scene, each thought and incipient action, sprang together and became endowed with a surreal and sinister significance. Almost everything about me seemed bent upon contributing to my growing sense of the irrational disorder of life . . .

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Yes, sane men did misread reality. Just as he had once had fantasies, so now he was looking at men who were passionately arguing their own fantasies, trying to decide which fantasy was to be taken for reality.

Richard Wright, The Outsider

When the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic opened in Harlem in 1946, one newspaper responded with a headline, "They're Crazy Anyway." The clinic was the first of its kind; it offered counseling to poor people, mostly black, but regardless of race or ability to pay. According to Richard Wright, whose essay "Phychiatry [sic] Comes to Harlem" (1946) was specifically meant to increase the clinic's publicity and financial support, it "is the extension of the very concept of psychiatry into a new realm, the application of psychiatry to the masses, the turning of Freud upside down." In its practice the clinic rejected abstract notions of psychoanalytic neurosis to address what became understood as social and artificially induced crises: "Negroes temporarily swamped by the Jim Crow conditions of Harlem . . . the powerful personality conflicts engendered in Negroes by the constant sabotage of their democratic aspirations . . . which easily tips the emotional scales toward neurosis" (49-50). It appeared underground (literally, in the basement of a church) and without institutional recognition or financial support. ¹ According to its well-known founder and director, psychiatrist Dr. Frederic Wertham, the clinic sought to treat patients whose "mental difficulties" arose out of the "free-floating hostility" that emerged from poverty, from congested living conditions, and, most importantly, from segregation (Bendiner 23). ² Wertham, other volunteer psychiatrists, and mental hygiene professionals who donated their time, specifically attempted to address what they understood as the interior and intangible effects of racial discrimination--a problem Ralph Ellison describes as "the sickness of the social order." In an article written to support the clinic, Ellison contends that black people had become "confused" by a paradox: the reality of racist social inequality in the US and the nation's postwar reputation as champion of democracy had exposed the "psychological character" of "the Negro's perpetual alienation in the land of his birth" ("Harlem" 295, 302). The paradox had threatened the recognition of black American humanity and had implicated the integrity of democracy in the US. Thus, both Ellison and Wright applauded the emergence of the Lafargue Clinic--they helped Wertham secure the space, the clients, and the funds for its opening. ³ And, rather than offering "proof" that, in fact, black people were "crazy anyway," the clinic presented a psychological discourse to enunciate the implications and the new contours of what had been called the "Negro Problem," the "problem at the heart of every American" (4), in the words of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), as the nation began to imagine integration.

As a significant but largely forgotten underground institution, the Lafargue Clinic indeed represents the material embodiment of an emerging era--one that understood the crucial difference between "black" and "white" as moving beneath the surface and turning inward. ⁴ By midcentury, increasing national and international demands for an exemplary democracy required a reconfiguration of US racial ideology, and rather than a question of color, of visible and public difference, this new "Negro Problem" became one of psychology and feeling, forcing the terms of race and the social and ethical implications of racial distinction out of sight. Concerning psychoanalysis, Wertham believed "a psychiatrist had to understand a patient's economic and community life," and he advanced an idea that "psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are not the property of the rich." He called his approach to psychoanalysis "social psychiatry&quot...