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4 “A genuine cooperation” Richard Wright’s and Ralph Ellison’s Psychoanalytic Conversations On January 6, 1953, three months after the publication of Black Skin, White Masks, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon wrote what could best be considered a fan letter to Richard Wright.1 In it, Fanon informs Wright that he has read Native Son, Black Boy, and Twelve Million Black Voices but would like to read more of Wright’s texts to complete a study of “la portèe humaine,” or the psychological impact, of Wright’s oeuvre. By 1953, Wright was well established as a literary giant and critic and Fanon was but an emerging analyst. Yet Fanon tells Wright that their interest in black and white relations, globally, is mutual. Fanon acknowledges that while his name must be unknown to Wright (“Mon nom doit vous être inconnu”), he is equally concerned with the “systematic misconceptions” between blacks and whites (“où je me proposais montrer les méconnaissances systématiques des Blancs et des Noirs”), which also serve as the central focus of his recent and only text. The letter from Fanon to Wright reveals the influence of Wright’s articulations of African American experience on Fanon’s own thinking about colonized subjectivities. In addition, Fanon’s letter allows for a reshaping of the dominant circumscription of Wright as an “urban realist” or “naturalist” and points to the psychical import of his work to analysts themselves. But more generally, the letter signals an important shift in the way black writers after the period of the Harlem Renaissance began to think about psychoanalysis as more than a theoretical space merely to be appropriated for literary use or as political ends to a discourse in which they could actively participate and potentially reshape. Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison are perhaps the best exemplars of the evolution of the relationship between African American literary and psychoanalytic communities from the Harlem Renaissance to the World War II era. What we begin to witness in the middle of the twentieth century, and what Fanon’s letter to Wright suggests, is an emerging and unprecedented dialogue, a symbiosis, between black writers and practicing analysts. The result of such an interaction is that, for the first time, black writers and psychoanalysts were able to meld their mutual interests to extend the boundaries of literary analysis and psychoanalytic therapy, creating opportunities to materially change the lives of African Americans through psychoanalytic processes. The 1940s and 1950s witnessed the rise of social psychiatry, which meant that analysts and their patients were no longer isolated within the realm of the privileged few. Within this historical moment, psychoanalytic psychiatry increasingly linked the nature of one’s social environment to his or her psychological state, and as a result the discourse of psychoanalysis diverged into two separate entities: the more “traditional” analysts who continued to privilege the role of the family in the shaping of individual subjectivities , and those analysts who deviated from Freudian-inspired paradigms to investigate the impact of society on the subject. The result, as Dan Blazer notes, was that social psychiatry became a form of “social activism,” in that it served as a “movement to change society (and to study society) to lessen emotional suffering” (69). In this way, postwar psychoanalysis was imagined as an “emancipatory therapy” that could effectively articulate and respond to the psychological crisis of African American experience.2 It was during this same period that Ellison and Wright became active and integral parts of the discursive formation of American psychoanalysis. However, it is also significant to note that Ellison and Wright diverged greatly from the then popular and accepted idea that psychoanalysis could effectively “cure” psychological problems that emerged as the result of social conditions. Their belief was that flaws in U.S. democracy ran so deep that until the United States became a free and equal state, African Americans would suffer from socially induced neurosis. While mainstream America began to regard psychoanalysis as a way to resolve problems facing both the individual and society, Wright and Ellison were less convinced that it might have such curative affects on African Americans who were the unfortunate victims of an uneven U.S. democracy. Still, they believed that psychoanalysis was the most effective methodology available to interpret and explain the prevalence of mental illness and social deviance within black communities. They maintained enough faith in the science to offer their energies and resources to establish, with analyst and friend Dr. Frederic Wertham, Harlem’s first...

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