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Postscript In the 1949 film, Home of the Brave, a young black soldier, Pvt. Peter Moss (James Edwards) suffers from shell shock that leaves him paralyzed and plagued with short-term memory loss. The film, directed by Mark Robson and based on the play by Arthur Laurents, centers around Moss’s interactions with an army analyst who attempts to discover the root cause of the soldier’s psychological break. The analyst finds that during a special mission, Moss fights with his white best friend, Finch, and in a fit of anger calls Moss a “yellow-belly nigger.” Shortly after the incident, Finch is shot and killed, and Moss discovers that he can no longer walk. In the course of his therapy sessions, Moss reveals to his analyst that, for a moment, he was “glad” that Finch was killed in retribution for calling him a “nigger.” However, the doctor convinces Moss that neither race nor racism has anything to do with his feelings of guilt; instead, Moss was simply glad that he was not the victim of the fatal bullet. The analyst notes that Moss has experienced a feeling common to many men who have witnessed the death of a fellow soldier. Instructive in this scene is the therapist’s (and the film’s) insistence that the racist attacks Moss has endured throughout the course of his life have led him to become hypersensitive to any encounters with whites, even when they are not hostile, and it is this racial sensitivity that Moss must somehow learn to overcome. The film’s final triumph emerges when Moss realizes that he is different (yes!) but also that everybody is different, and because of this, there is no reason for him to move through the world with a “chip on his shoulder.” Moss is able to reach this epiphany only after being chastised by a white soldier, Mingo (Frank Lovejoy), who lost an arm during their mis- 156 . postscript sion. Mingo berates Moss for crying—literally—after another soldier directs a racial epithet toward him. Mingo identifies his new disability as something that now makes him “different” too, though ironically, no different from Moss. Not only does Moss emerge as a victim of his own self-perceived and selfconstructed “tragedy,” but he can be “cured” of his racial sensitivity only by succumbing to a rhetoric of universalism that the model of psychoanalysis (and Hollywood) readily provides. A comprehensive analysis of this film’s problematic glossing of the vicious and ubiquitous racial violence enacted upon black soldiers in World War II, not to mention its depiction of black men more generally (Moss is a former high school basketball star and he makes some mean fried chicken), as well as its representation of (white) psychoanalytic authority over the weak black body (paralysis) and mind (amnesia), would warrant another full chapter. However, I use Home of the Brave as an example here to point to one of the many reasons why cultural critics have been reticent (rightfully so) to consider psychoanalysis a particularly useful or compelling methodology to examine the black subject. In its totalizing, the film makes it impossible to address racial identity and the subsequent problems it conjures. Despite the film’s heroic conclusion, with Moss and Mingo figuratively walking into the sunset, the universality of the film is ultimately destructive in that it forecloses the possibility for psychoanalytic and racial discourses to coexist. Hence, critical suspicion of the pitfalls associated with psychoanalytic inquiry is not without cause. I embarked upon this project in the hope of complicating this formula. I was curious as to whether psychoanalysis and race were truly fundamentally and diametrically opposed: when psychoanalysis encounters the subject of race, does it work only to subjugate or liberate? In the process of writing this book, I had hoped that the final product would reveal an emergent interconnectedness between black intellectual and psychoanalytic communities that would lend this project a triumphant narrative arc. Instead, the carefully plotted trajectory I attempted to project onto Freud Upside Down collapsed into a fragmented compilation of black literary and print interventions framed within, outside, and against mainstream psychoanalytic discourses. The interactions that I examine in this book resisted this oversimplified plot, and revealed a far more complex set of negotiations. What I have attempted to demonstrate in constructing this relatively eclectic collusion is that throughout the course of the twentieth century, black subjects persistently engaged with psychoanalytic thought that has been integral to the working out and working...

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