“Psychoanalysis is the tool best suited to
uncover, plainly discuss and understand these issues, as psychoanalysis has
always rightly enjoyed a bad reputation, the hallmark of honesty which never
curries favor with its audience, and shuns all attempts to modify a pungent
truth with our pretty lie: good taste.” Richard Norman.
I fully agree with the
need for psychoanalysis to assist in healing and searching for alternative ways
of self-awareness and perception.
But I also propose
that classical psychoanalysis will always fall short of the need to uncoil ‘the
"under-soul" of our human height and sickness’, therefore a new
psychoanalytical point of view is direly required.
The overwhelming
despondency among the black male population has seen a number of suicides escalate
as a consequence of popular discontent arising from the effects of capitalism
on the working-class and unemployed majority.
Over and above our ill
sentiments towards taking one’s own life, there has been an overt trend that
has left many with that sole option.
The demands of a
changing world, evolving gender dynamics and the influence of monetary stature
are but a few of the pressures assailing black communities.
It is often sad when
the people who take are found in ‘relationships or married’, but coming against
walls which apparently were faced in solitude.
Trauma has been a
condition least associated with black people perhaps because of their purported
animalistic strength of emotion, but close observation into the contemporary
situation will disclose the nexus upon which black humanity has been cast.
Society has
inaugurated a masochistic degradation of all healthy potential among black folk
through a proliferation of ideals subaltern to their social concern.
There can never exit a
collectivised human cooperative conglomeration among black folk when certain existing
unconscious structures which are endemic to modern personality are still
untouched.
Socio-cultural
specific assumptions can become entangled in interpretations of what is a man’s
responsibility to his community and familial structures.
Major decisions about
who goes into the frontline of battles, occupational positions and family
structures are always allocated males in society.
Capitalist morality however,
has always provided examples detailing the exact way its structures are
created, and how it influences, for the worse, our ethics and our intellect as
black people.
Capitalism has left
black folk castrated through servitude and meagre benefits of flagellation in
stables of dehumanizing labour, have never honoured the amount the sweat bled.
Capitalist economic
strangle hold continue to displaces black people as it only functions as
warfare against the black population, a war on our family systems and means of
sustaining inter-personal relationships.
The failing family and
the poverty, unemployment and hopelessness that engender it cannot be prevented
under capitalism.
This plagues the black
mind incessantly, from those who have been integrated into the debilitating and
nefarious wage machine to those who haven’t had the fortune.
Complexes and fears
thereof inform these moments of introspection about my fear the act of
castration perhaps through integration into the workforce and the emasculation
my lack thereof will bring by the hand my partner.
We lament, with screeching
wounded cries held within our breast, echoing through ruined godly souls, this
redesigned construction of personality bereft with castration complexes.
What formed our
masochistic cooperation in the surgery that dehumanised us?
What is a viable alternative
to the ‘civilized life’, to which we are all entrained?
How do we re-establish
the social and economic conditions for a new era of relations between the
sexes, liberated from the pressures and constraints of archaic capitalism?
Capitalism has entered
into its deepest crisis since the Great Depression, perhaps even greater, and a
continual sinking into the barbarism of poverty, unemployment, and other
effects of austerity are all we can expect under this system
In order to maintain
competitiveness with the so-called developed countries, and to overcome the
effects of capitalist overproduction, layoffs and savage wage reductions continue
to mar our economy.
And given capitalism’s long history of
institutionalized racism conditioned by economic imperatives, where does the
situation leave the black community?
BUSINESS WEEK once
admitted that "trends in labour markets have played a big role. Technology
and global competition have displaced many low-wage workers and driven down the
incomes of other less-skilled workers, with young black men hit harder than any
other group." Further, "The rise in women's relative wages [from 73
percent in 1980 to 98 percent in 1990 for the wages of black women relative to
those of black men and from 53 percent to 80 percent for those of white women relative
to those of white men - an indisputably positive development - nonetheless is
having some negative effects," BUSINESS WEEK wrote. "...One reason
for getting married is undermined - financial support."
Written by: Khahliso Matela
