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Thinking with Blacks:
A Discussion of the Use of Black Human Forms by the White Mind
Daniel M« Begel,M4
Contents
Chapter I page 1
Chapter II 16
Chapter III 46
Appendix 62
Bibliography 71
i
I
The Study of Race Symbolization
The psychological study of race symbolization has focused on
"prejudice" and ,!racism0" "Prejudice" is defined by Gordon Allport
as "an avertive or hostile attitude toward a person who belongs to
a group, simply because he belongs to that group, and is therefore
presumed to have the objectionable qualities ascribed to the group"
(Allport, 1954). "Racism," a concept often used interchangeably
with prejudice and rarely defined by writers who study it, is
usually thought of as prejudice in action. Kovel says "race prej¬
udice ...is clearly a causal agent in racism" (Kovel, 1970).
Although racist action presumably depends upon a hostile
attitude associated with a belief in negative qualities, we should
remember that it is possible for a person to have an ambivalent or
even friendly attitude toward an objectionable object, or contra¬
dictory beliefs about an object of hostility. Robert Coles, for
example, sensitively reports in his long and beautiful quotations
from conversations with white Southerners the complex feelings of
tenderness and anger, superiority and self -recrimination (Coles,
1964) .
But on the whole the psychological literature on race divides
the operations of the mind according to moral criteria. Where
the question concerns whites thinking about blacks, five aspects
have been identified. First, the black is evaluated negatively.
Second, the white is evaluated positively. Third, there is a
tendency toward avoidance and/or fourth, there is a tendency to-
2
ward domination. Fifth, there is a tendency toward hate. These
are the criteria which alone or in some combination define an idea
as 11 racist." This is the sense in which we will use the term in
this paper.
Writers who are struck by the power and apparent ubiquity of
such ideas in American society have tended to assert that the black
embodies particular universal meanings for whites, Lawrence Kubie
states that race prejudice has its roots in three "nearly universal"
experiences of childhood (Kubie, 19 65), The origin of anti-black
prejudice he highlights is the child’s oscillation between secret
guilty pride in his body and a hidden aversion to it. A complex
web of feelings — guilt, fascination, fear, and loathing— is asso¬
ciated particularly with feces, "We teach the child that his body
is... a dirt factory.,, A child’s buried feelings of disgust with
himself is one of his later reactions against differences." The
thought that "the other is dirty.. .(is) a defense against a con¬
ception of a dirty self," The other race represents feces and re¬
lated symbols,
J.W. Hamilton follows Kubie in an interesting discussion of a
Midwestern university town which reacted to an open housing drive
with a cleanup drive and a crusade against homosexuals (Hamilton,
1966)0 He sees anti-black prejudice as a defense against the threat
of the Negro, who represents feces, to anal compulsivi ty » He is
slightly more rigid than Kubie about the black’s meaning to whites
and expands the list of associations. According to Hamilton, white
represents up, breast, good, milk, God, heaven, and clean, while
black represents all the opposites .
, . .
3
James Comer and Richard Sterba add to this list of meanings .
They point out that blacks can represent the principals of the
Oedipal situation, Sterba sees general anti-Negro feeling as being
based on the representation of younger siblings by the black man
(Sterba, 19^7). He associates attacking behavior with "collective
father murder" and the emergence of repressed father hatred. Comer
adds that the black man can also represent the powerless self of
the Oedipal situation, or the repressed aggressive self of that
time (Comer, 1970), West seconds this idea: "Put into (the Negro)
these (sexual) parts of yourself and you become a part of him as you
now imagine him to be.,, Thus arises the secret wish that Negro men
will actually transgress successfully against white women" (West,
1967). Pinderhughes states "The value orientation and psychology
associated with a class or caste divisions are derived from pro¬
jections of the body image" (Pinderhughes, 1969), "High-type"
groups are associated with the head, the brain, and incorporation
while "low-type" groups are associated with the genitals and anus,
with expulsion, with what should be kept out by the bottom, includ¬
ing not only forbidden objects but forbidden thoughts.
There are important limitations to this approach to race
symbolization. To begin with, a symbolic form is intrinsically
ambiguous in meaning, as the wide range cited by the above authors
suggests. The significance of an object of prejudice can vary from
person to person. Ackerman and Jahoda, in a study of twenty-seven
anti-Semitic patients, discuss the inconsistent stereotype of the
Jew (Ackerman and Jahoda, 19^8). They state "the specific selec¬
tion that an individual makes out of this wealth of contrasting
attributes can be understood only if this selection is discussed
,
4
simultaneously with the individual anti-Semite’s attitude toward
his own self." And as Coles’ study shows, the significance can
change by the moment for a single individual. That is, a prejudiced
person, like anyone else, may be ambivalent.
True, the meanings of race derive in part from universal child¬
hood experiences. But this does not distinguish race symbolization
from any other symbolization of people. Childhood may be a neces¬
sary condition for race symbolization, but as an explanation of
racism it is insufficient. For racism can emerge, disappear, and
change content long after childhood is over, Brian Bird reported
a two week episode of anti-Negro prejudice in a liberal, anxious,
phobic, Jewish female with a highly developed sense of social con¬
science (Bird, 1957) • During therapy she developed the belief
that Negro men were inferior, were envious of whites, and would
get out of control and try to elevate themselves by having sex with
white women. These beliefs were coupled with hatred and fear.
The patient was developing a positive transference at that time
and wished to "cross the gulf" between herself and her analyst.
Her prejudice was a "final defense" against the realization of
these feelings in the face of the analyst’s imagined resentment of
her. It disappeared after these feelings were analyzed.
In another case study, Terry Rogers discusses a passive, ob¬
sessive white Southerner who became an active anti-Negro racist and
subsequently dropped psychoanalysis to become a leader of a White
Citizen’s Council (Rogers, i960). Rogers sees this development as
a protection against emerging homosexual wishes, incestuous desires,
and patricidal impulses, involving the "wholesale use of the de¬
fense mechanisms of projection and identif ication with the aggres-
.
5
sor." Like Sterba, he says "in the unconscious of white people,
the Negro male represents the hated father, particularly the
father at night,"
The defense of projection is emphasized by virtually every
student of race symbolization. Pinderhughes , for example, speaks
of "projections of the body image." And Brian Bird speaks of
" incorpro jection, " He says the prejudiced individual or group
"borrows imagined and feared indignation from a "higher8 race, and
loans its own guilt (really repressed wishes) to the "lower" race."
Thus, a conflict is passed "right through" the ego. Bird"s fine
piece stresses the adaptive, ego-syntonic nature of prejudice. He
sees it as giving vent to hostility as well as keeping aggressive
thought from being acted out. Certain limitations to the notion
of " incorpro jection" are suggested, however, by the generalizations
Bird derives from this notion. For example, the statement that prej¬
udice will not occur in "successful" people and groups is contra¬
dicted by the racist beliefs of Thomas Jefferson (Jordan, 1968) and
the anti -Communism of numerous American Administrations (New York
Times . almost any year).
The concept of projection has even more severe limitations,
however, as an explanation of race prejudice or race symbolization.
When used in the narrow sense of the attribution of one"s own id
impulses to another it fails to explain a whole host of qualities
attributed to blacks, such as that blacks are musical, or natural,
or lazy. When used in the broad sense of externalization, it only
implies that external perceptions depend upon something known in¬
ternally. In other words, the psychological source of racism is
psychological .
11 . ' o ?
.
6
Rubenf eld, in an unpublished doctoral dissertation done at
Yale in 1963, attempted to prove six hypotheses based on the pro¬
jection-prejudice hypothesis, with respect to sexual conflict. He
used both the standard TAT pictures and a set of redrawings very
similar to the standard set except the figures were black. The
blacks in the redrawings were dressed the same as whites, had wavy
hair, and were not very dark. Some of the results were interesting.
For example, one standard picture elicited stories of sexual con¬
flict from a majority of white subjects, but when redrawn elicited
stories in which the male figure was seen as leaving to perform
some aggressive act, Rubenf eld concluded that this was an artifact
of the test because blacks are seen culturally as inherently re¬
bellious. It could be argued, however, that blacks have many cul¬
tural meanings, one of which is that they argue a lot about sex.
This meaning could have been selected but was not for reasons
which are obscure but worth investigating. Regardless of the in¬
terpretation of this change, it is clear that blackness had an
impact on the stories. However, none of the hypotheses based on
the projection-prejudice notion could be verified. One hypothesis
that failed, for instance, was that prejudiced people would project
more sexual ideas onto Negro figures than white figures. Another
was that in sexual arousal situations high prejudiced people would
show a greater increase in sexual imagery in response to Negro
cards than low-prejudiced people.
Experimentally, the projection-prejudice hypothesis doesn’t
bear fruit. Logically we should expect this, for to imply that
the white’s black man is needed only as a "bad man," however de¬
fined, suggests a peculiarly simple motivation operating in race
7
symbolization. There are other problems with the idea of projec¬
tion onto blacks, to which we will return shortly.
First, however, we should discuss a work by Joel Kovel:
White Racism, A Psychohistory (Kovel, 1970), This book deserves
special mention for several reasons. First, it is the only book-
length discussion in the psychological literature which deals ex¬
clusively with white symbolization of blacks. Second, it is widely
read and regarded as an important work. Third, it demonstrates
the inadequacies of the notions we have been discussing and extends
them to a degree wisely avoided by other authors,
Kovel’s idea is that race fantasies are generated in the uni¬
versal setting of childhood and applied at second hand to races in
a culture which uses them to handle its historical problems. The
culture is both an outlet for and in part a projection of these
fantasies. There is a "congruency (of the institution of racism)
with the personalities of the people within society .Instinctual
conflict, when projected onto culture, is one of the crucial deter¬
minants of historical power--in our case, of white men over black—
(which) is the single most salient thread of history."
The psychological origins of racism develop during the anal
phase when fantasies about dirt and property develop and first
separation from the mother occurs. Excrement becomes associated
with ambivalence around separation. Dirt becomes the recipient of
the child’s anger at separation; while the love of possessions be¬
comes a substitute for the love of what has been separated from him,
"Since racism involves the separateness of people, so must it be
invested with anal fantasies" (emphasis mine, D.B.), In the phallic
phase, the central themes are castration and fantasies about
-
8
genital activity with forbidden people in the setting of compe¬
tition and envy, "The resolution of the Oedipus complex condenses
all the previous stages of development .under one mental organ¬
ization, the superego », .By adjusting his superego to a set of cul¬
tural controls, a person adapts and becomes "normal.® If he is a
white American, it is likely that he will then find an outlet for
some of his infantile fantasies about dirt, property, power, and
sexuality in his culture’s racism,"
The 'hversive racist" is one for whom anal fantasies are of
primary importance, A split of infantile origins between good and
bad body (the self and what is expelled) becomes generalized.
Objects are sought to represent both, "For symbols of what is
hated,. .the developing mind looks to see what can be associated with
excrement," while property becomes the loved excrement.
The "dominative racist" has a harsher, more rigid superego
than the aversive racist. Oedipal fantasies are more significant
to him. Black symbolizes bad and white good, "The black man is
the bad father who possesses the black mammy (who is herself impure)
and has the genital power which forever excites the child’s envy.
He is also the bad child who lusts after the pure and utterly for¬
bidden white mother.,, By making the rape fantasy the cornerstone
of his culture, the white male only repeats in adulthood the cen¬
tral incest taboo of his childhood. . ,The Southern white male
simultaneously resolves both sides of the conflict by keeping the
black man submissive and by castrating him when submission fails..,
he is castrating the father.,, and also identifying with him by
castrating the son. , .Black man, white man, black woman, white woman-
each realizes some aspect of the oedipal situation; and in this
9
realization, the infantile impossibilities of the oedipal conflicts
attain their perverted resolution by being projected onto split
elements of culture." Further, "in accordance with the principle
of multiple function, and for survival of the ego (in the face of
the persistence of the original wish) , some sense of realization
is necessary. . .The solution devised by the ego..." is that it
"will find a symbolic representation, , .that corresponds with some
perception of the world,"
We have already discussed the assertion that a symbolic form
"must" be invested with particular meanings and found it wanting.
But in addition Kovel makes us wonder why projection should operate
so ubiquitously in the case of race. His answer, that projection
onto another race is necessary "for the survival of the ego,"
ignores the broad range of other defenses available to the mind.
The "why" of projection is usually answered this way, in terms of
some fundamental necessity. For example, Pinderhughes speaks of
a "drive to dichotomize" (Pinderhughes, 1971)® And Zilboorg,
another student of racism, talks of a "herd instinct" (Zilboorg,
19^7). He says that herds do not satisfy a need for togetherness, and
are by nature aggressive. This aggression leads to guilt and
anxiety which is dealt with by projection which increases fear of
being alone which stimulates an attempt at passivity which arouses
homosexual anxiety which leads to greater projection which starts
the vicious cycle all over again. "The circle of this psychological
economy is thus closed, perfect, and immutable .To defend his
illusory security, man projects his herdness . . .Here lies the very
secret of the tenacity and intensity of . „ , pre judice . " If this
psychosocial "cycle" seems unconvincing in paraphrase, a reading
■
10
of the original is unlikely to clarify. "The narcissistic, anal-
sadistic strivings to gain a sort of purely passive, intrauterine
existence in the womb of the mass, or nature, are brazenly project¬
ed into the enemy and then aspired to and approximated by the pro¬
jector who is himself the accuser."
By relying on such notions as "outlet" and "survival of the
ego" we are able to avoid many questions. If repressed universal
instinctual conflicts are what is projected, how do qualities that
are not part of the conflicts as Kovel describes them, such as
laziness or cunning, come to be projected? If what is projected is
what is unacceptable and repressed, why is it that blacks represent
"hated excrement" rather than the surely more unacceptable idea
"loved excrement?" And why is it that castration anxiety drops
entirely out of the picture Kovel draws (with the wish to castrate
the father remaining) until the black man is actually castrated,
an event far more infrequent than the prevalence of racism? Here,
it suddenly reemerges by being "realized" through an equation of
the black man with the evil child.
Another problem for this theory is posed by the existence of
positive ideas about blacks, such as the idea that "blacks are
kinder" (from an interview with a friend) . To preserve his theory,
Kovel would have to respond to this statement in one of several
ways. First, it is a realistic perception, but therefore not a
projection. Second, It is a reaction-formation against another
idea. Again, it is not a projection since there is no conscious
perception of the repressed idea in the external world. Third, it
is a projection of a quality which is unconsciously unacceptable
to the self, but acceptable in blacks. The reversal in this case
11
requires an explanation which is not suggested.
The fourth possibility is that this is a phenomenon which
Kovel recognizes but does not attempt to explain. He seems to
think there are four kinds of orientation towards blacks: the
dominative racist, the aversive racist, the "metaracist" and "those
who treat another person as he is.., without the shackles of cate¬
gories," If on the other hand Kovel admits of this fifth possibil¬
ity, a positive orientation, then it can be excluded from discussion
only by treating racism as a cultural phenomenon consisting of a
miscellaneous amalgamation of attitudes selected on the basis of a
value judgment. This precludes any psychological explanation which
goes beyond the idea that if it!s bad, it's got to be a projection.
We have seen that the unadulterated racism Kovel describes is
only one possibility among many types of white orientation toward
blacks. According to Coles, a self-respecting dominative racist
may also love the man he calls black. Compare the quotations In
Coles® book with Kovel's "Pattern: blackness is bad, what goes on
in the dark comes from the dark; therefore, make the black man re¬
present both father and son in their destructive aspects.,," and
so forth. Further, bits and pieces of Kovel's phenomenon can appear
without the other elements, while racist beliefs can change, appear
and disappear. In short, Kovel has explained a phenomenon which
in a psychological sense does not exist by a "mechanism" which,
when operative at all, itself requires an explanation.
The extension of such a theory leads to some dubious asser¬
tions, For instance, Kovel believes the white Southern female was
made "sexless, in reality," This is a curious statement in light
of the many generations of all white Southerners who were born--in
.
12
reality. Kovel considers this hypothesis "too well known to need
documentation. " And in fact, the only documentation for his theory
at all is provided by secondary sources, with an occasional bit of
distortion. For example, Kovel labels "virtually psychotic" a man
he has never seen and whom Rogers, the man’s therapist, describes
as "passive" and "obsessive."
Similarly, he uses an excellent historical work by Winthrop Jordan
(1968) primarily as a source of historical "facts," and gives the
work a one-sided reading. There is no sense in Kovel’s work that,
as Jordan states, "provincial Americans ... showed themselves pulled
by opposing tendencies--the need to explain why Negroes looked both
the same as and different from white men and the twin senses that
man both is and is not an animal." Jordan talks about the "puzzle"
of the Negro’s color, and the "human relationships, continually
driving home the common humanity of all" and "the push and pull of
an irreconcilable conflict between desire and aversion for inter¬
racial sexual union." The point is not that Kovel misconstrues
Jordan’s conclusions about the dominant outcome of these tensions,
but only that he is blind to Jordan’s sense of development and
conflict. Jordan, in studying white attitudes, allows himself to
discern both sides of tensions at many levels of consciousness.
He shows how, with the support of religious ideas, "scientific"
notions, chance, cultural symbolizat ions , and slavery itself, the
history of white attitudes grew and changed under the impact of the
needs of Americans to know who they were, and to solve problems of
mastery, control, and freedom. That the solution rested on a per¬
ception of difference and involved a measure of projection onto
enslavable and enslaved men is clear. Had it involved only this,
• ■ V.
: -
. > r ~
■ ■
13
Jordan’s contribution to the psychological and historical under¬
standing of the problem would have been trivial.
Many authors have asked themselves why ideas about race seem
so powerful and so ubiquitous. The most important contribution to
the psychological understanding of this problem has been the demon¬
stration that the content of racism may be motivated by unconscious
ideas derived from the experiences of childhood and may serve a
defensive function. But this is true as well of symptoms, sympto¬
matic acts, jokes, and fantasy life in general. The problem of
race symbolization per se has been largely ignored. Recourse to
the concept of "projection" merely raises the central question in
a different way: Why projection onto an entire race of people?
This question has been almost defined out of existence by a
moralistic decision. Theories which assume the universality of
racism but ignore the positive stereotypes are free to ignore the
process by which universal childhood experiences have different
manifestations in adult race symbolization. Theories which treat
racism as episodic focus on the manner in which the solution of
particular psychological problems employ particular defense mech¬
anisms, But since these theories also ignore positive ideas about
another race, race symbolization can be treated as if it were only
a matter of defense,
Robert Coles has hinted that what is important about the black
person to whites is not that he has a particular universal meaning,
but that he can universally mean something— in fact, anything. If
this is true and if race symbolization is as widespread and power¬
ful as so many of us believe, it may be that the various black
people of the mind share, not a common meaning, but a common
14
symbolic process of creation.
To test this idea we must have some hypothesis about what this
process might be. The purpose of this paper is to formulate such
a hypothesis on the basis of experimental data.
The data we will use was gathered in a simple way. One white
subject, an undergraduate male, was shown a set of fourteen Thematic
Apperception Test cards. These were photographs taken specifically
for this study. The fourteen consist of two sets of seven, one
with all white figures (the W set) and one with one black on each
card (the B set). In each set of seven, four of the cards show
two figures and three show a single figure. For each card in the
W set there is a card in the B set which corresponds to it in terms
of age, sex, and relative position of the figures. The difference
is in the substitution of a black figure for a white on each card
in the B set. Thus, four of the cards in the B set show a white
figure and a black figure, and three show a single black figure.
(For a description of the cards together with the stories told to
them see the Appendix.)
The subject was given a modification of the standard TAT in¬
structions. He was told:
This test is part of a medical school thesis I am doing.
Although I cannot explain the nature of the thesis to you
beforehand, you will no doubt get an idea of the general
area of the study as we go along. Please don't concern
yourself too much with this while taking the test. After
the test is over, I will be interested in discussing it with
you.
Today 1 5 11 be showing you a series of pictures and
would like you to tell an imaginative, dramatic story about
each one. Tell what has led up to the event shown in the
picture, describe what is happening at the moment, what the
characters are feeling and thinking, and then give the out¬
come. Speak your thoughts as they come to your mind.
Although it is unlikely, you may become uncomfortable
during the test, and if you wish to stop at any time, please
.
15
feel free to do so. Any questions? OK, here is your
first picture.
The fourteen cards were scrambled in the order shown in the
Appendix to conceal the pairing between the two sets of seven.
I discovered after the test that the subject was not only unaware
of the corresponding sets, but also unaware that the study dealt
with some aspect of race. Nevertheless, he said he was conscious,
at times, of the race of the figures.
The method of analysis will be discussed in the next section,
A question may be raised about the sense in which the two sets are
similar. It is true that the difference between any two correspond¬
ing cards will be greater than a mere racial difference. For ex¬
ample, card five shows a young black male sitting with a letter in
hand while number eleven shows a young white male sitting with a
telephone receiver in hand. Such differences are unimportant for
this study for several reasons. First, the age and sex of the
figures is identifiably similar. Second, the pictures are in¬
tentionally out of focus and highly ambiguous. The letter in pic¬
ture five, for example, was perceived as a book. Third, our in¬
terest is primarily in the symbolic form in which very general
types of ideas are embodied, and not in the subtleties of content.
For this reason we tape recorded the subject 9 s speech.
Let9s now examine the impact of racial forms on the thought
of one person.
.
16
II
The Impact of Black Human Forms
There are many ways to analyze a TAT protocol. At one end of
a range there is TAT analysis done in conjunction with clinical
work. Here the interest is in the particular woven texture of ideas
which unknown to the patient have fed his suffering. The TAT is
used diagnostically. At the other end lie those research studies
in which a statistically significant variation Is sought in the
frequency of particular words or phrases* pre-selected on the
assumption that their meaning will be the same for different people.
The TAT is used almost as a questionnaire .
The method we will use owes something to both these techniques.
The writers whose work was reviewed are all convinced that the
strange and racist fantasies they study owe their formation to
human passions and fears. In part I share this belief since I
have witnessed such processes in my own mind and since psychoanal¬
ysis has shown that people are motivated to distort the humanness
of others even though they sometimes know better. But since we
are wondering about a general impact of the black on the white
mind, it seems sensible to confine our investigation of the affec¬
tive significance of any story to some general properties of con¬
flict and defense.
In the next section we will define the notions of "conflict"
and "defense" more clearly. Let us state here that we are not
using the term "defense" in the traditional psychodynamic sense.
That is, for the purposes of this paper a defense is not a mech-
»
17
anism employed to reduce the signal anxiety associated with intra¬
psychic conflict. Rather we are considering "defense" to he an
intellectual operation upon intellectual ideas of "wishes," which
structure a relationship of union between objects, and upon intel¬
lectual ideas of "fears," which structure a separation of objects.
We assume that such ideas often have affective importance and are
the elements of conflict, A defensive operation is successful in¬
sofar as it fulfills a wish or mitigates a loss.
In our analysis we will look at whether the manifest story
deals more with wishes or with fears. This will not tell us much
about defense, however, A story which expresses a threatening
separation may serve to make loss tolerable. In therapy, a patient
may defend against his fear of abandonment with an "i'll leave you
before you leave me'' fantasy. Therefore, we distinguish between
surface structure and deep structure.
Surface structure is the particular system of relationships
between the figures of the manifest story. It represents one
particular arrangement of a set of underlying themes --the deep
structure. We will identify these underlying themes by a compari¬
son of the manifest themes of each pair of stories. Since we will
pay particular attention to union and separation the "relative
def ensiveness " of each member of the pair may be discerned. This
method is not, strictly speaking, an analysis of psychodynamics .
Deep structure is analagous , but not identical with unconscious
conflict, and we do not assume, therefore, that the subject actu¬
ally experiences the conflicts we will identify. In fact, there
are innumerable layers of wishes and fears. Our very general in¬
terpretations represent simply one way of conceptualizing structures
18
which are consistent with the stories.
In addition to this thematic approach we will be inspecting
the organization of the speech and the use of particular words or
phrases. Our hunch is that in order to investigate the questions
raised in the previous section we will reasonably have to ask with
what kind of construct ions we are dealing,
"Thought,” from the point of view we are taking, is an active
process and is distinguished from "thoughts" or "ideas" which are
structures. Ideas can be shaped by external patterns created inde¬
pendently of the mind’s activity (thought in accommodation). And
the mind can reorganize these external patterns and combine them
with others in structured ways (thought in assimilation). Both
processes can occur together (thought in equilibrium). These two
functional activities transform thoughts and can be performed by
any person capable of thought. As I write this paper, for example,
daydreams of distant people and unspoken words frequently dovetail
with activities conforming to the requirements which any medical
school thesis must obey. The domination of either of these poles
of activity over the other results in two relatively different pro¬
ducts, identified by their more or less "dreamlike" properties.
The notion of "dreamlike" properties refers to the manifest
properties of a symbolic product. It is an imprecise notion, and
strictly speaking it says nothing about either thought processes
or thoughts. It is suggestive, however, of the relative difference
between the results of assimilation and accommodation. This relative
difference, as intuitively obvious as that between dreams and imi¬
tation, defines a continuum on which the TAT stories lie, A more
precise discussion of the creative processes themselves will be
19
postponed until the next section, after we have examined several
stories in terms of this continuum*
In order to clarify this notion of dreamlike properties let’s
simply list some of the qualities of manifest dreams.
Dreams seem different from waking life. The dreamer pays
little heed to the contextual relations of the real world. Unreal
and strange things happen. The narrative sequence Is fragile and
subject to disruption and irrational leaps. Events may be repeated
over and over, or sustained long after they should have been com¬
pleted, It may be hard to know just what is going on in this world
of now absurd, now mundane events.
The sense of temporal context is different in dreams. In
waking life one can conceive of past, present, and future actions.
In dreams, we draw upon the past for material but exist only with¬
in present time. There is no expression of condit ionality , neces¬
sity, or wish in manifest dreams. Things just happen or they are.
The expression is all in the indicative mood. Cause and effect
cannot be expressed directly. There is no way to represent an
action which has not yet occurred, and the events of a dream se¬
quence are unimportant as soon as they cease to be immediately pre¬
sent ,
The sense of spatial context is disrupted in dreams. An ob¬
ject may appear out of its normal place. The scene of dreams can
shift from place to place with no explicit transition. Objects
can change size and shape.
Dreams do preserve some sense of space, however, since they
are visual. Present objects can be compared in terms of dimension,
shape, and color, but not in terms of intangible qualities.
• J c
Contradict ion does not exist in dreams. Opposites can ex¬
ist side by side without conflict. People in dreams may possess
rationally contradictory qualities without a sense of incompati¬
bility, Internal conflict, therefore, does not exist in dream fig¬
ures, Although the dreamer may have feelings and thoughts in his
dream, the dream figures never self-ref lect , think, or feel, though
they may speak. They simply act, or exist.
People who are accustomed to thinking systematically about
language may question the validity of drawing inferences about
thought processes on the basis of linguistic features, mainly se¬
mantics and syntactics. Our analysis, let me say at this point,
assumes a distinction between what is called linguistic "competence,
the knowledge of the rules of a language, and linguistic "perfor¬
mance," the ways in which these rules are used and violated. Since
our subject’s knowledge of English probably did not change during
the test in response to my grunts, nods, simple questions, and
silence, we can view our analysis as an investigation into his per¬
formance, This performance, the variable use of linguistic compe¬
tence, can be viewed as changing under the impact of the variable
activity of the subject’s thought.
The subject and I compared notes after the test. He was sur¬
prised to find out the experiment dealt with race, assuming that I
was interested in the "male-female type" themes which abound in
his stories. Like many theorists of race symbolization, he had
difficulty imagining that one could be interested in the forms he
used to embody particular themes, I admitted to a lingering doubt
in my own head at the time, and stated the experiment was based
upon unformulated hypotheses, or, more bluntly, a guess. Of the
, •
21
several cards of which the subject said "it struck me," one was of
"the guy and girl holding hands," Let’s start, then, with the pair
of which this story is a member.
Picture number nine: A young white woman with lowered eyes
is turned slightly away from a young white man who is looking at
her and has his hands on her shoulders.
Story number nine:-®- (long pause) The guy here has found out 1
urn that this girl doesn’t care for him as much as uh he thought, 2
possibly as much as she let him think, either consciously or un- 3
consciously, and uh he’s upset. It doesn’t, it doesn’t involve, 4
say, her sleeping with another guy or something like that. It’s 5
just that uh she just doesn’t give him as much as he wants and as 6
much as he feels he gives her. And so (he) is in a position to 7
be asked, is in a position of asking her to either— give more, 8
treat him as he wants to be treated, as he feels their, you know, 9
to in other words, to get in deeper, to uh let the relationship go 10
as far as he thinks it could go. And she is, very indecisive, be- 11
cause she she doesn’t know where she stands as far with him. She 12
doesn’t know what she wants out of it urn. She’s got other commit- 13
ments, not romantic type commitments, but she has other friends 14
that she doesn’t want to be, doesn’t want to have to stop seeing 15
because she’s going to devote everything to him, uh, and so, she 16
has to turn away. She can’t look at him knowing how much he needs 17
an answer, because she doesn’t have it yet. She needs time. So 18
she will just turn away and sort of walk off and— they’ll separate 19
uh this time, you know, before deciding anything, and have to 20
1
Additions and nonverbal behavior are contained in brackets, ( )a
Sentences are marked off intuitively.
22
come back together. It’s not going to be resolved , uh, this 21
afternoon, and so its she’s going to have to come back to him or 22
he's going to have to come back to her after a very short period 23
of time, after she’s gotten things straightened out in her own 24
head, 2 5
Picture number two: A young black woman with lowered eyes is
turned slightly away from a young white man who is looking at her.
At the bottom of the picture a part of his hand, which is holding
her wrist, is visible.
Story number two: (long pause). It looks like there's been 1
urn like the girl has had urn some sort of a tough time, got some
bad news or something, and come together with this guy, who, she 3
knows fairly well. They know each other, and they’re fairly 4
close, close enough to be touching, and she’s looking for uh, 5
someone to talk to, someone to sympathize with her. It’s not, it 6
hasn’t been a fight between them. But it might be, she can be 7
coming with, something she’s thought about their relationship, or 8
she’s coming with, uh--something that’s happened to her directly 9
that didn’t involve him at all, uh, something bad to another 10
friend, or her mother died, or she got wiped out on a test, that 11
sort of thing. They’re just sort of really nonverbally, because 12
their their relationship is beyond that really. They don’t have 13
to talk just to be together. It comforts her. And uh from here 14
they’ll go out and, not out necessarily, but they’ll go on, and 15
on a very sort of calm level uh and be together for a while uh 16
not necessarily doing anything very exciting, uh (It’s) just 17
their being together that matters to uh both of them. And so I 18
I just see them having a you know, either where they are or 19
8 1 r
23
someplace to eat or something, but just talking quietly in the 20
next couple hours and sort of resting on each other, particu- 21
larly her, you know, on the security that he’s providing after
the tough time she’s had. 23
A preliminary comment on these stories in terms of the liter¬
ature is in order. It is obvious that although both stories may
have forbidden thoughts lingering underneath, the notion of the
"projection of id impulses" is useless in understanding the changes
between the two stories. As far as the manifest story is concern¬
ed, the only characters who are In any sense "bad" are the pair in
story number nine, particularly "the girl" who is leaving the guy,
the central figure in the story. Sexuality is specifically mention¬
ed only in the story with white figures: "it doesn’t involve, say,
her sleeping with another guy or something like that." She’s got
"other commitments, not-~romant ic type commitments," Further, the
references to giving, to getting in deeper, to letting the relation¬
ship go as far as he thinks it could go, are more suggestive of
sexual themes than the "not necessarily doing anything very excit¬
ing" and the reference to "close enough to be touching" of story
two. "The girl" of story two is a victim who needs and receives
comfort. She is hardly the stupid, dirty, evil, harmful, dominated,
avoided, promiscuous, et cetera object of the "universal racism"
which so many writers have condemned. This is not to say that the
impact of race does not enter the picture, nor that such fantasies
as number two do not in some way contribute to racism. To under¬
stand this, however, we need to develop notions which are at least
capable of encompassing the manifest story without distorting it
beyond recognition.
24
The major themes of the two stories are roughly similar,, yet
they appear quite different because of a difference in their organ¬
ization, Both stories deal with one person in need of another.
Both depict a response by the other to that need. Both contain an
idea of loss, separation, or a sustained hurt. Both suggest a re¬
lationship between a woman and people or events outside of her in¬
volvement with the guy. And both suggest that there is an impact
of the outside relationship on the primary one.
The striking differences lie in the organization of these
themes. In story number two, the woman is in need and the man re¬
sponds positively. In nine the man is in need and the woman re¬
sponds negatively. In two the woman sustains the hurt in an outside
event, while in nine the man sustains the hurt in his relationship
with the girl. In two the woman’s negative relationship to the
outside brings the two together. In nine, her positive relation¬
ship to the outside contributes to keeping them apart. The two
stories can be thought of as mirror images of one another, each
preserving an opposition between inside and outside, each express¬
ing a loss of and preservation of some relationship. Thematically
they are transformations of one another or of some underlying struc¬
ture ,
The result is that story two represents primarily the fulfill¬
ment of a wish and the continuance of a relationship characterized
by friendship, closeness, and security "beyond" words. Number nine,
by contrast, represents primarily a loss, a separation, a turning
away. By removing the notion of loss from the level of the inter¬
action between the two actors in number nine, to the level of the
woman’s relationship with some other event or object in number two,
25
the subject has masterfully turned story nine inside out. Although
the loss and the need still relate to a single individual , as in
nine, the subject has been able to preserve the idea and permit
gratification of the need at the same time. In other words , fantasy
number two has the charaterist ics of a defensive fantasy, including
compromise formation, relative to story nine, which also has its
defensive aspects.
It should be clear that closeness and unity pervade story
number two, while number nine chronicles the-trouble-I ’ m-having-
with-my-girl . The multiple use of "they51 and "each other" replaces
the "he and she" of nine. In nine, the only "they" is used in the
phrase "they’ll separate." The only "their" stands as an adjective
with nothing to modify and the phrase of which it is a part is
dropped and replaced.
We should also note that the subject, in number two, seems very
unconcerned with the characteristics of the black image on the TAT
card. Her two most obvious properties, blackness and womanness,
are not manifestly used in this story. Although she is referred
to as "she" occasionally , none o^ the words used to describe her
are as suggestive of her biological sex as the "her sleeping with
another guy" of story nine, (Though a man, the subject has little
trouble identifying with her. In projective test terminology, she
corresponds most closely to the "hero,") Further, the context of
her life is obscure. As far as the subject is concerned the death
of her mother and a bad experience with a test are both "that sort
of thing,," Although there is a sense of her outside world, it’s
nature is opaque to the subject. Her fundamental humanness, her
need, her hurt, her looking for someone to talk to, her experience
26
of comfort and security, prevail. In a way, she is used as a form¬
less pan-human being seeking and finding refuge in closeness. Her
companion, of course, is even more devoid of particularity. He re¬
mains a simple human presence from beginning to end.
Use of the forms on the cards in this non-contextual way suggests
a more dreamlike construction of story two as opposed to number
nine. Keeping the manifest properties of dreams in mind, let’s
check on those aspects of speech which might reveal these proper¬
ties »
A greater sense of uncertainty is conveyed in story two by the
use of three expressions: "some” as in "some sort of," used nine
times; ’'really" used twice; and "you know" used twice. By con¬
trast, in story nine "some" is used once, "you know" once, and
"really" not at all.
Notions of cause and effect are expressed six times in nine,
including the "and so’s" which are followed by consequences , and
only one in story two, following an adverb in an ungrammatical way.
The conditional phrase used in two Is an expression of the subject’s
attitude toward the story, but not part of the story itself. In
nine, a conditional phrase is used once in a similar sense, and
once as part of the story (line 11). The imperative mood Is used
once in story two (line 14) , but negatively, and six times in nine
(lines 15, 1 6 , 17, 21, 22, 23). The optative mood is never used
in two, but is used four times in number nine (lines 6, 8, 13, and
15) .
There are four references to time in number nine (lines 18,
20, 22, 24), and two in two (lines 16, 21). References to future
actions are five in story two (lines 15, 15, 16, 20, 21), and five
27
in nine (lines 15, 19, 21, 22, 23), References to past action are
two in nine and ten in story two.
Contradictions of a previous idea occur three times in two
(lines 9, 14, 19, 20), and not at all in number nine. Phrases of
comparison of intangible qualities are used twice in number two
(lines 13, 14, 22), and eleven times in nine (lines 2, 2, 6, 6, 8,
9, 10, 11, 1?, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23),
A phrase suggesting reflective thought occurs once in story
two (line 8), but is quickly denied. In nine, such phrases occur
nine times (lines 2, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 20, 24). References
to people feeling in number two are all in terms of actions, events,
and consequences of actions* The girl doesn3t explicitly feel bad,
but she has had a "tough time," or got some "bad news." Explicit
references to feelings occur three times in number nine (lines 3»
7, 9 ) »
In transcribing from tape, it was necessary to arbitrarily
and intuitively mark off sentences. I chose to mark them in such
a way that each phrase has at least one noun phrase and one verb
phrase, and consider phrases the subject corrects and phrases which
disrupt grammaticalness as not being part of the sentence. One
could argue about this highly primitive method and the particulars
of grammaticalness. Nevertheless, by this method the ratio of
words of four or more letters which are part of a grammatical sen¬
tence to words which are not part of a sentence is about 3 to 1 in
story two. The ratio in story nine is about 6.5 to 1.
None of these differences are statistically significant since
the total number of items is so small* But in every case but one
they suggest a drift toward dreamlike thought in story number two.
28
(The one exception is the equal number of references to future action
in the two stories,) Number nine uses more integrated, organized,
discursive, relational, and complex speech. And just as dreams so
often flee the memory when we awake, the subject seems distant from
the unknown details of the guy and girl holding hands. He says "it
looks like, it might be, she can be, I just see them,51 The trouble
between the guy and the girl, however, has the immediacy of a real
situation. The subject is still aware of painting a picture, but
he fills the canvas with ease. Chunks of social reality are used
with assurance. The outline of the story is clear from the initial
declaration that "the guy here has found out um that this girl
doesn3t care for him as much as uh he thought," A story seems to
suggest itself to the subject. Still, he volunteers that "the one
with the guy and girl holding hands struck me," picture number two.
Perhaps we could say that the subject was close to the meaning of
a story of unknown details, while in nine he was distant from the
meaning of a story with known details.
Story number two, then, is more defensive, more expressive of
union, and more dreamlike than number nine. In addition, the black
figure is used primarily for its personal human meaning, with little
use made of its form. Let3s now examine two stories in which the
impact of race seems strikingly different, but which was similarly
flagged by the subject after the test.
Picture number three: Two young white men are looking at each
other. One has his hand on the door of a phone booth, and the other
is several feet away, facing the first. It is night.
1
Story number three: (long wait). These two guys have had a
2
disagreement um and the one is stepping into the phone booth. It's
29
3 4
a very decisive sort of a thing. And I’m not sure. I can’t tell
5 6
what it’s about. But He’s taking some action, that uh He’s calling
someone, perhaps a girl that they both know uh after disagreeing
with the other guy, almost as a proof of of his superiority or uh
his (proof) that he’s going to to it despite what the other guy
7
things, uh The other guy’s obviously very upset, and he’s un As
8
soon as the guy gets into the phone booth, they’re right now making
their uh sort of glaring at each other, in a way of saying goodbye.
9
uh The one’s going to go in the phone booth and make his call and
the other’s going to leave, after this final conf rontation.
D.B.: What does the guy who’s going into the phone booth feel?
Subject: He-regrets having to do what he’s doing because he seems
to v- value his relationship with the other guy. He’s they their
they They've been friends and something uh I’ll say a girl, has
come between them and he is sorry it has to be the way it has to
be. and uh he’s and he doesn’t He’s sort of uh upset that things
have to be a certain way, (and) that something is being forced on
him that he would rather not have. But he’s going to go through
with with with the phone call. He’s going to go through with it and
um--sacrif ice his friendship with the guy for urn the object of the
phone call.
Picture number eight: A young white man and a young black man
are looking at each other. The white stands with his hand on a
half-opened car door. The black is gesturing toward him from sev¬
eral feet away. It is night.
1
Story number eight: (pause, sits forward). Outside of a movie
2
theater, or some some such place. A white guy has come out uh ob-
3 ' 4
viously with money. He’s got rather fancy clothes on. The bla,ck
.
I
■ .. >
. !
30
guy comes up uh has come up to spare change him, and knowing he can
play on the other guy's white guilt, sort of that kind of feeling
urn knowing his advantage, and that it's it's increasingly hard for
a white guy to turn down uh a poor looking black, and so he comes
5 6
up. and The white is feeling very threatened, he's un Although
he's uh enlightened (smile) in his racial views, he recognizes that
the crime and uh that sort of thing that he reads about all the
time, and therefore he's scared that this guy uh uh is wants more
than just his spare change, that he might do him some harm, uh
7
Meanwhile, the black guy knows, pretty much knows, what goes through
the white guy's mind and uses it hoping that the guy will give him
8
some spare change and uh take off. and But rather than do this, the
9
white guy has his— security » He's got his car he can leap into and
uh I think he's got— a girl in the car already who he feels respon-
10
sible for, and It sort of doubles his fear but it also doubles his
11
courage, and he just son't He's just going to say no and get in
the car and leave, urn the black guy staying around to try urn the
next person that comes along.
This pair of stories presents an example of a racist transfor¬
mation, according to one of the criteria presented in the last sec¬
tion, In story number eight, the avoidance behavior of the white
is based on a belief about the likely Intentions of a black man.
The white reads the newspapers and knows that blacks commit crime,
and therefore he feels threatened,
V/e could hardly understand this story by reference to some
automatic mechanism of projection onto blacks or by labeling our
subject an "aversive racist," To begin with, only particular
elements of the standard collection of racist beliefs are selected.
, •
, •
31
Explicit ideas of domination, superiority, and sexual aggressive¬
ness are absent. The black may be threatening, but he is smart.
More importantly, our subject produced some nonracist stories with
black figures. Story two is one example, and may suggest that the
sex of the black figure is the significant factor for this subject.
This conclusion is invalid, however, as evidenced by story number
twelve (see Appendix). In twelve, a white man and a black man are
"friends” and "colleagues" who "know each other." The black man
"refreshes" the white who is "resting after delivering a lecture,"
and "both go on to finish the day in good spirits." But finally,
I think our subject would be embarrassed to reread story eight. He
seemed to sense its racist elements even in the telling, as his
apologetic smile in the middle of the story suggests. The story,
in fact, is unsettling as much for its bizarre conventionality as
for its racism. It’s hard to dismiss it as the probabilistic
eruption of man’s evil nature. But we can wonder how the mind uses
the image of the black in ways as disparate as stories eight and
two.
If we look into the themes of three and eight we find, once
again, a similarity. In both stories two guys are in conflict.
One guy, the central figure in each story, is leaving the other guy.
The other guy doesn’t want him to leave, at least not yet. The guy
who’s leaving is ambivalent. In number eight it Is hard to turn
down a poor looking black, while in three it is a question of friend
ship. Finally, the guy who’s leaving has a girl waiting for him.
These similarities in the fantasied relations, and the discom¬
fort of the hero in both stories permit us to view this pair as two
different ways of solving one problem: the inherent contradict ion
32
in sacrificing, or leaving a friend. In the TAT pictures, two men
are together. Soon, our subject says, they will be apart. If it's
friendship, why the sacrifice?
There are, no doubt, layers of related problems underlying this
one, but the idea of leaving a friend is one way of identifying a
deep structure of conflict which could surely be transformed into
these two manifest stories. There are two primary ways to mitigate
this sense of intentional loss. One is to make it appear as if
leaving is being dictated by some outside force: it is not inten¬
tional, The other is to turn the friend into something else: it
is not a loss. In the second part of story three (after my ques¬
tion), the first method is employed, "They’ve been friends, and
something, I’ll say a girl, has come between them.., is being forced
on him that he would rather not have," In the first part of the
story the second method is used. The hero leaves the other decisive*™
ly, while whatever friendship exists between them is not mentioned.
Their relationship is characterized by glaring conf rontation and
disagreement over superiority, independence , and a girl.
Both methods are employed in eight. The hero is not only
forced to leave but forced to "leap," And the motivating agent is
no longer obscure: it is the friend of the last part of story
three, who has now become a threatening black man. The self-willed
loss becomes an achieved escape. The reward, in three "I’ll say a
girl" or "the object of the phone call," has become security, a
car, and the responsibility of a girl.
Like story number two, this transf ormat ion is defensive. The
manifest story, however, emphasizes the avoidance of a loss rather
than realization of a union. At the same time, the separateness of
33
the two men is almost organic* No words are spoken. One is rich,
one is poor. One is named "black guy," one is named "white guy."
Neither knows the other’s intentions. Suspicion prevails. They are
strangers. There is none of the mutuality, the glaring at each
other, the disagreement, the saying goodbye, the valued friendship
that we see between the guys at the phone booth,
A glance at the use of language in this pair of stories leaves
the impression of a less dreamlike, more vigorously textured, in¬
terracial fantasy. We may check this impression by tabulating
speech elements of the same categories which differentiate two and
nine. Thirteen categories have been defined. Larger totals in the
first three of these suggest more dreamlike assimilatory thought.
Larger totals in the remaining ten categories suggest more accommo¬
dative thought. The categories are as follows:
1. Phrases suggesting a conditional attitude of the subject toward
his story,
2. References to past action.
3. Ideas which contradict previous ideas,
4. Cause and effect constructions ,
5. Phrases expressing conditional relationships within the story.
6. Verb phrases expressing necessity,
7. Verb phrases expressing a wish.
8. References to time.
9. References to future action,
10. Comparisons of intangible qualities,
11. References to reflective thought,
12. References to feelings,
13 o The ratio of words of four or more letters which are part of a
,
34
sentence to words which are not part of a sentence*
The scores for stories three and eight are shown in table I,
Table I
category story 3 story 8
1 9 5
2 4 2
3 0 0
4 0 4
5 (2 1 )
6 (5 0 )
7 12
8 2 3
9 6 7
10 2 6
11 3 6
12 4 5
13 8 9
Ten of the categories suggest that story eight is less dream¬
like than three* Two categories {five and six) suggest that eight
is more dreamlike. And one (category three) is equivocal.
These results do not prove that eight is more imitation-like
than three. The number of items in each is too small to establish
significance. And as far as we know, no one has developed a precise
method for determining degrees of assimilation in thought on the
basis of speech alone. In fact, assimilation and accommodation
can only be identified by their symbolic products alone in the ex¬
treme cases of dreams and imitation. The subject telling a TAT
story fluctuates from moment to moment between these poles of thought
and the symbolic product is an intermediate form.
But our interest is only in the exploration of a phenomenon,
not in proof. Vie are faced with two stories which we would like to
place on a continuum defined by formal properties. One way to de¬
cide their relative positions is by comparison with the defined
position of dreams. Such a comparison suggests that, on the whole.
35
story three is relatively more dreamlike than story eight. Another
way is to examine the stories one at a time, following more care¬
fully the progress of the subject’s organization of ideas as they
are developed in speech, while paying closer attention to his ex¬
perience of his own productions. That is, we may attempt a more
direct inspection of his thought. Let us apply this method, begin¬
ning with story three.
The first sentence of three is a compound sentence, relating
a past situation to a present action. It is unclear whether the
"stepping into the phone booth" is a consequence of the disagree¬
ment, or of the disagreement now being over. We expect further de¬
velopment of this relationship in the story, but the subject for
the moment seems primarily concerned with the act of stepping into
the phone booth. He says "it’s a very decisive sort of a thing,"
reflecting a certainty about the act which we would expect from the
declarative and grammatical construction of the first sentence. He
seems preoccupied with a general quality of the action and of the
relationship with the other guy, both of which are known to him,
and he has difficulty building up context. Not only is there a
difficulty with context, but "I’m not sure. I can’t tell what it’s
about" suggests that the subject experiences the figures In the
picture as having a life of their own, with the facts being una¬
vailable to him. He will have to make something up.
The subject tries by saying "he’s taking some action that--,"
but the "some" already indicates uncertainty and the attempt is
aborted. It is followed by recourse to the obvious, "he’s calling
someone," using clues from the picture and placing the act in the
present tense, although even at the end of the story "he" has not
36
yet called. There is the tentative suggestion that he is calling
"perhaps a girl they both know," followed by another reference to
the as yet unelaborated context, "after disagreeing, " of the call.
The phrase beginning "almost as a proof of—" is syntactically
ambiguous. Was "his" disagreeing with the "other guy" a proof of
his superiority? Or is his calling someone a proof of his independ¬
ence? Are they fighting over the girl at the other end of the line?
None of these ideas are clear, despite the attempt to relate the
actions of "the one" to his intentions, and to the disagreement.
The attempt to make use of a secondary process, conceptual word
"proof" has an ambiguous result. The context, sequence, and con¬
tent of the disagreement and the act of stepping into the phone
booth are subordinated to the meaning the act has for "the guy."
The other guy, we learn, is very upset, a fact "obvious" to
the subject by looking at the picture. But while this meaning has
an unquestioned reality, the attempt to develop it further, "and
he!s uh," fails, since there is nothing in the picture to offer a
way. The subject appears bound by the notion of conflict and by
the image of the card itself. An attempt to move temporally beyond
the immediate picture and its meaning, "as soon as the guy gets in¬
to the phone booth," is again interrupted, and the subject finds
himself back in the present, elaborating quality and meaning:
"they3 re right now sort of glaring at each other, in a way of say¬
ing goodbye." The resultant sentence looks slightly ungrammatical.
The outcome statement of part I is a well-formed reference to
future action. It is basically a summary statement, however, add¬
ing a small piece of off-hand new information, "the other3 s going
to leave," and includes a last effort to clarify what just occurred
37
by strengthening its meaning: "this final confrontation."
The first part of three , then, is repetitive and makes use
largely of simple sentences, the longer ones being syntactically
ambiguous or slightly ill-formed* It is motionless in time, and
context remains undeveloped though not distorted. Very little in¬
formation not found in the picture is added, except the meaning of
the scene, which the subject sees as embodied in the picture. The
act of stepping into the phone booth is proof of a point of view,
glaring is an expression of saying goodbye, and a look is a sign of
being upset. There is a sense of distance from detail and certain¬
ty about the few known items, particularly the importance of the
action to both figures. This sense of reality binds the subject to
the few essential meanings the picture has for him. Thus, while
context remains minimal, there is a complexity of meaning— superi-
ty, independence , disagreement, saying goodbye— which define a con¬
flict. This sense of reality and conflict, in an otherwise barren
story, steers the subject away from the dreamlike assimilation of
story two.
My question to the subject reflects the fact that at the time
I thought it important to have a fuller knowledge of the subject.
This wasn’t helped, I think, by the administration of the test in
the room where medical students are assigned for learning psycho¬
therapy. With so much left out of this story, I responded as a
puzzled student with an imprecise research interest might: I asked
a question about feelings.
The subject introduced the ideas of regret, friendship, and an
outside sacrificial force. The speech is correspondingly halting:
"and uh he’s and he doesn’t he’s sort of."
Previously he focused
t
38
on the meaning of the one’s actions in relation to the other. Now,
he is attempting to get close enough to the story to identify the
one’s feelings, while remaining far enough to observe and express
them. This change of stance is difficult and requires a change in
ideas, expressed in a stammering way.
The speech of both parts I and II of this story is different
from that of story eight. Let us examine story eight and pay par¬
ticular attention to the use of the black figure. As we do so we
should keep in mind that a reliance upon social reality is more
indicative of imitative thought than is any set of indices one might
devise .
The first sentence of eight is ungrammatical as it stands, and
"some, some such place" suggests a conditional relationship of the
subject to his story. However, the "movie theater" is more concrete
than most elements of story three, and the subject now seems to be
distant from a situation of known details.
"A white guy has come out, obviously with money. He’s got
rather fancy clothes on." The reference to white guy and black guy
is consistent throughout the story. The subject is conscious of
forms, images, and social groups. The past tense is used in this
first sentence, and correct and consistent verb tenses are used
throughout. The "obviously" is explained by reference to the pic-
ture, unlike the "obviously" in story three, which we only guessed
was derived from the card. There is both an awareness of the details
of the picture and a self-conscious sense of logic.
"The black guy. c. and so he comes up" is a rather long, slight¬
ly ungrammatical construction. The subject is attending to images
and social groups. He is also self-conscious about his speech and.
39
attuned to temporal context: "comes up uh, has come up." The
grammar could have been improved by replacing "knowing" in each
case with "he knows," Also, if the "knowing" phrases were intended
to explain some further action or thought of the black guy, the
repetition of "he comes up" in the tense rejected at the beginning
of the sentence suggests this is difficult.
"To spare change him" is a noun phrase used as a verb phrase.
Two things should be noted. First, its use and the assumption
that I will understand depends upon a rather conventional sense of
social reality, beyond the more dictionary meaning of words. The
phrase is slang for panhandling. Secondly, although it ostensibly
refers to the intention of the black, the phrase derives as much
frcm the sought after possession of the white. The black’s inten¬
tions are seen largely from the white guy’s point of view in this
story.
In the next phrases, it appears that the black guy’s thoughts
are seen from this point of view as well. Ostensibly "knowing he
can play on the other guy’s white guilt, sort of that kind of feel¬
ing,,," is what the black is thinking. However, the sentence
actually tells us more about a stereotype of the white guy. We
learn of his "white guilt," which socializes him more than if the
subject had said "the white guy’s guilt," The phrase "increasing¬
ly hard" reflects an almost historical consciousness .
Such is the basis on which the black guy knows that he can
play on the guilt. There is no consideration of what might be
required of the black himself in order to approach the white. This
is a stereotype not only of the black but also of the nature of the
interaction. In addition, "feeling" is a manifestly inappropriate
. ■ *
,
40
word to describe the black’s experience, which is in the realm of
"knowing," and is more appropriate to "white guilt," The advantage
cited, furthermore, is in terms of the white’s difficult position,
but it is intended as information about the black guy’s thoughts.
Indeed, "a poor looking black" can only refer to the perception of
the white. This black guy apparently has no thoughts of his own.
As far as we know, he doesn *t need the money, he has no feelings,
he has no life of his own, and no uncertainties about his act. He
is just there, knowing exact!}/- what the white guy thinks.
Next we hear that "the white is feeling very threatened," not
that he feels guilty or generous. The meaning of the approach for
the white as a person is different from the meaning for him as a
member of a group. The subject knows what the black is up to since
the story is based upon what he considers to be a socially repeated
phenomenon. However, as soon as one gets to the feelings involved,
it is the white guy who misperceives the black and interprets the
approach as a threat: "he might do him some harm," The reason
for this, we learn, is that the white guy reads about crime all the
time and "that sort of thing," Although he’s "enlightened" in his
racial views, the implication Is that blacks commit crime in the
streets. His reaction is determined on the basis of newspaper re¬
ports and blackness, despite the unlikelihood {I think) of getting
ripped off coming out of a movie theater. The smile near the be¬
ginning of the sentence is ambiguous. It could be interpreted
either as a knowing comment on the unlikelihood of whites having
" enlightened" racial views, the way one might react to a statement
"I’m not prejudiced, but . . . " or as an apology for making such a
statement
.
,
41
The contrast is striking between the whitens fear of harm,
based on newspaper reports, and the black’s actions, based on know¬
ledge of the white. The white guy sees himself as a person with
feelings and responds to an imaged act with socialized meaning. The
black sees himself through white eyes, as an imaged actor with
socialized meanings , and acts on this basis.
Sentence six is complex and well-f ormed. The ’’although"
suggests knowledge of the relationship between ideas separated in
the sentence. We learn a considerable amount about the life con¬
text of the white guy. There is a cause and effect construction,
"and therefore," and a relationship expressed between current feel¬
ings and past activities. There is a recognition of conflicting
thoughts, enlightenment versus knowledge of crime, and conditional
and optative constructions are part of the story.
The next sentence is equally well-formed and contextual. How¬
ever, the black guy now knows that the white is feeling threatened
rather than guilty or generous. This is a remarkable man with
mercurial knowledge of the white’s feelings on which he "plays,"
no matter what they are, in the hope of getting spare change. The
white guy knows nothing about the black, while the black’s knowledge
dovetails the white’s feelings exactly. The black is consistent as
a form, engaged in an act, and his meaning is a reflection of the
meaning he has for the white. The subject is slightly aware of
this, saying "pretty much knows," but he is not aware enough to
construct a different story.
The last few lines deal primarily with the white’s departure.
The speech is slightly more halting and slightly less complex than
the preceding sentences. The subject is mildly uncertain about one
42
element not pictured, "a girl,11 of whom the subject says "I think"
rather than "I'll say," again reflecting, as in the first sentence,
a distance from a story with known details. Sentence ten, "it sort
of doubles his fear but it also doubles his courage" was spoken
rapidly without fearful affect. It is a conventional expression,
corresponding in speech to the subject's use of social context— the
girl and the car— in thought. What is social now has the meaning
of security. What is external supports at every turn the feelings
and actions of the white guy.
Like the black woman in need, the black man participates in a
defensive transformation. But the formal aspect of this transforma¬
tion is of a very different type. It is an imitation-like shift to
a contextually conventional and linguistically well-organized con¬
struction. The black figure is largely a personless social form.
By contrast, the transf ormation from story nine to story two is a
dreamlike transf ormation: The black figure is a meaningful but
formless human being. It appears that a racial difference may assist
to dominance either of two extremes: dreamlike imagination or
im i t at i on- 1 i k e c on v en t i onal i t y ,
This impression is supported by an exmaination of the remain¬
ing five pairs of stories. Each story was scored separately in
each of the thirteen categories we are using. Then the categories
were taken one at a time and the stories were scored in succession.
Each category required one trip through the entire protocol. The
43
results from the two methods were compared, and a final reading of
the protocol reconciled the discrepancies. Table II shows the re¬
sults of the scoring. The scores in each column have been correct¬
ed for the difference in the number of ivords between the members of
each pair of stories. If x=the number of words in the shorter story
and y=the number of words in its corresponding longer story, the
raw scores for the shorter story have been multiplied by the factor
y/x, except, of course, in category thirteen.
Table II
Cat ,
2B
9W
8B
3W
10B
1W
12B
4W
53
11W
13B
6W 7B
14W
1
18
5
5
9*9
3.2
13
8
4.4
21
10.2
5
14.6 (2,1
2)
2
10
2
2
4.4
2.1
5
4
3*3
10
7.3
0
6.2 4.2
5
3
3
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
0
0
2,1 0
1
4
1
6
4
0
6 , 4
3
1
2,3
0
8.7
4
2,1 5.3
5
5
0
1
(1
2 . 3 ) ( 2 , 1
3)
0
1,1
0
4,4
(0
1) (o
1)
6
1
6
(0
5.7)
0
0
0
0
0
1 .5
1
0 ( 1. 1
2)
7
0
4
2
1.1
4.2
0
0
1.1
0
1.5
1
0 (0
3)
8
2
4
3
2,2
4,2
2
0
1.1
4
5 » 8
5
2.1 5.3
4
9
5
5
7
6, 8
(7.4
9)
(4
3.3)
2
13.1
8
4.2 10,6
8
10
2
11
6
2.3
10,6
3
1
4.4
(6
l.5)(3
3.1) 6.4
6
11
1
9
6
3.3
6 .4
4
1
2,3
4
5.8
(1
6.2) 5.3
4
12
0
3
5
4.4
(3.2
4)
(3
0)
0
4,4
4
3.1 4.2
4
13
3
6. 5
9
8
20
5.5
2.5
9
(10
8)
14
9 9
4
D
I
I
D
I
D
D
I
D
I
I
D I
D
Since we are dealing with relative differences, every dream¬
like transf ormation with black forms implies an imitation-like
transf ormation with white forms. Similarly, every imitation-like
transf ormation with black forms implies a dreamlike transf ormation
with white forms. Thus, for each pair of stories we label one "I"
for imitation-like and one "D" for dreamlike. The choice is deter¬
mined by the frequency of shifts one direction or the other
throughout the thirteen categories. Scores which contradict the
overall trend for any pair are bracketed in table II. In no pair
does the number of contradictory shifts exceed four. The pair two
44
and nine is the most clear-cut, with only one equivocal shift.
The pair seven and fourteen presents the least decree of transforma¬
tion, with four contradictory categories and no equivocal ones.
We are interested in whether black forms assist transf ormat ions
toward opposite extremes of a continuum. If we were merely to
compare the most extreme stories of both poles, with and without
black forms, we could not determine whether the effects observed
were a consequence of race or not, since we would be comparing
stories told to figures of different age and sex. Neither could
we simply average the scores from the B cards and compare these with
the averages for the W cards. Extremes would cancel each other out
by this method. We may, however, compare the group of dreamlike
transf ormations with B cards and the group of dreamlike transforma¬
tions with W cards by averaging the scores for each category with¬
in the group. Table III shows these results and the similar ones
for imitation-like stories.
m
-L
able
III
cat ,
D
I
B
W
B
W
1
15.7
9.8
3.8
6,5
2
6
5.2
2,1
4.1
3
1.3
,8
0
0
4
.7
2,5
(4,9
5.6)
5
0
1.8
( .8
2.2)
6
.3
1.9
( .5
2.5)
7
0
1,0
(1.8
2,2)
8
2
2 , 6
4.4
3.6
9
3.7
7
8.2
7.1
10
3
3.7
6.5
5 . 6
11
2
4,4
(4,7
5.7)
12
1
3.9
4.1
2.7
13
5.1
6.6
1 3
7,6
For every category within the D group the B stories are more
dreamlike than the W stories. And for the majority of categories with¬
in the I group, the B stories are more imitation-like than the W stories.
4-5
We see, however, that there are five categories in the I
columns of table III which contradict the overall trend,, Part of
the difficulty here is in the selection of the indices of imitation,
A construction which is "less dreamlike" is not necessarily "more
imitation-like," since there is the third possibility that a con¬
struction may reflect "conceptual thought" as defined in the next
section. And as we stated on page 38, a reliance upon social
reality is the surest indicator of imitation.
Nevertheless, our main interest is in the relative potential of
black and white forms to assist constructional divergence. We may
compare, then, the changes from D to I within the set of B stories,
to the corresponding changes within the set of V/ stories, as shown
in table IV,
J
cat
1
D
15.7
CQ
00
M »
CO
Table IV
£>B
11.9 9.8
A W
I
6 . 5
W
3.3
A B
> A
W
2
6
2,1
3.9
5,2
4.1
lol
A B
> A
W
3
1.3
0
1.3
,8
0
08
A B
> A
W
4
,7
4.9
4,2
2.5
5 . 6
3,1
A B
> A
w
5
0
.8
,8
1,8
2.2
.4
A B
> A
w
6
. 3
.5
, 2
1.9
2.5
06
( A B
4 A
w)
7
0
1.8
1,8
1.0
2.2
1.2
A B
>A
w
8
2
4,4
2.4
2 . 6
3,6
1,0
A B
> A
w
9
3.7
8,2
4.5
7
7.1
.1
AB
> A
w
10
3
6,5
3*5
3»7
5 » 6
1.9
A B
>A
w
11
2
4,7
2.7
4.4
5.7
1.3
A B
> A
w
12
1
4,1
3.1
(3*9
2.7)
-1,2
AB
> A
w
13
5,1
13
7.9
6,6
7.6
1
6 B
> A
w
There
are no
categories
within the
B set
which
contradict
the
general trend from D to I, There is one such contradict ion within
the more balanced W set. More importantly, in every category but one
the degree of change in the B set exceeds the degree of change in the
W set. It appears that black forms assist the loss of equilibrium
in thought, as we will now discuss.
46
III
The Creation of Racial Opposites
In the last section we observed that fantasy life is transform¬
ed under the impact of race, A visual racial property of a photo¬
graphic image enables thought to reach divergent extremes. The
transf ormations are defensive in content and beyond self-awareness.
To understand such facts we need an account of symbolic process
which conceptualizes an interplay of external forms with patterned
ideas and a relationship between alternative modes of construction..
Jean Piaget, in his study of cognitive growth, has developed such
an account.
Central to Piaget’s theory is the notion that mental activity
in interaction with the world of objects is both structured and
structuring. From the moment of birth, individual patterns of
activity— called "schema" --may be evoked, reinforced, and elaborated
by the forms of the external world. That is, a child may actively
"accommodate" schema to these forms. Alternatively a child may modi¬
fy, or structure, external forms according to his own activity.
That is, a child may "assimilate" external forms to a schema. Fi¬
nally, a child may both modify and adjust to external forms simul¬
taneously. In this case assimilation and accommodation— -the two
functional techniques for the transf ormat ion of structures— are
said to be in "equilibrium," This is the state characteristic of
adaptive intelligence , An example from Piaget’s Play, Dreams, and
Imitation in Childhood illustrates these processes at the level of
sensory-motor activity.
,
47
As we have just reminded our readers, intelligence
tends towards permanent equilibrium between assimilation and
accommodation. For instance, in order to draw an objective
towards him by means of a stick, the child must assimilate
both stick and objective to the schema of prehension and that
of movement through contact, and he must also accommodate
these schemas to the objects, their length, distance, etc.,
in accordance with the causal order hand-stick-objective...
Imitation (the primacy of accommodation over assimilation)
will reproduce the motion made by the stick in reaching the
objective, the movement of the hand thus being determined
by those of the stick and the objective (which is by defini¬
tion accommodation) , without the hand actually affecting the
objects (which would be assimilation). There is, however,
a third possibility, that of assimilation per se . Let us
assume, for instance, that the stick does not reach its ob¬
jective and that the child consoles himself by hitting some¬
thing else, or that he suddenly becomes interested in moving
the stick for its own sake, or that when he has no stick he
takes a piece of paper and applies the schema of the stick
to it for fun... In such cases there is a kind of free assimi¬
lation, without accommodation to... the significance of ob¬
jects. 1
We should note in this passage that in addition to the assim¬
ilation of external objects to the schemas of prehension and move¬
ment, these two schemas are themselves coordinated with one another.
That is, they are mutually assimilated. Similarly, if the child’s
activity is to be intelligent and tend toward equilibrium, the accom¬
modations to the stick and objective must be coordinated by an
assimilatory process. As intelligent as such activity is, however,
it does not deserve to be called 11 representative activity," since
it operates only upon objects within immediate perception. Never¬
theless, the techniques illustrated are responsible for the gradual
unfolding of more complex cognitive processes out of the matrix of
sensory-motor activity. Cognitive growth, from this point of viex-tf,
1
•Jean Piaget, Play. Dreams, and ' Imitation in Childhood, translated
by G. Gattegno and F.M. Hodgson, W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.,
New York, 1962, Brackets( ) are mine, D.B.
48
is conceived as the continuous elaboration of prior structures, De
velopment is not merely the successive emergence of de novo abili¬
ties, And it is not the consequence of neurological development
alone or of mysterious transfers from social life alone.
With these few simple ideas in hand, Piaget explores an enor¬
mously complex and subtle cognitive landscape. For the purposes
of this paper it is only necessary to discuss two aspects of cogni¬
tive development: the emergence of representation and the charac¬
teristics of the child1 s egocentric thought.
Representative activity begins when the child becomes able to
evoke an absent object or model. At a particular stage, a child be
comes capable of "deferred imitation," based on " interiorized
accommodation." That is, he becomes able to imitate an external
model, say a parent clapping his hands, for the first time after
the model has disappeared from sight. Coordination of the schemas
for extension of the fingers and arm movement, and accommodation
of these to the hand clapping has occurred internally, in the form
of suggestions of action, rather than actual action. This accom¬
modated schema is a virtual combination of movements. It is a
"draft," "summary," or "negative" of the model. It is also a
potential image, since the model can now be evoked, either as image
or in later action, by utilizing the accommodated schema in some
way.
Such accommodated schemas constitute a system of "signifiers"
for the child®s thought. By virtue of their dif f erentiation from
and persistence beyond actual performance, they acquire a certain
mobility. They are the basis of the image and deferred imitation.
Furthermore, they may be combined and coordinated with other past
49
and present signifiers, and therby acquire symbolic meaning. The
schemas of coordination-really , assimilation-provide the signifiers
with meaning, and are defined as the "signified." By the differen¬
tiation of signifier from signified, the child’s world expands in
space and time. This is the symbolic function.
Consider a child attempting to dance. A record is playing as
the child watches an older sister doing a step, which he attempts
to imitate by jumping up and down. A number of assimilations and
accommodations are in progress. The child is accommodating audi¬
tory schemas to the sound, and visual and motor schemas to the move¬
ments of the model. These accommodated schemas are signifiers.
They must be mutually assimilated, however, to be united in meaning,
that is, to form the child’s sensory-motor notion of the dance.
This assimilatory activity constitutes the signified.
Now, if the older sister stops dancing and the child stops also,
and we assume that the child is unable to continue in the absence
of the model, we cannot attribute representative activity to the
child. The child appears able to accommodate to the model and assim¬
ilate the model to his schemas of movement only when the model is
actually present. In other words, the signif iers-~the schemas of
accommodation to the sound and sight— and the signif ied— the schemas
of assimilation of these to the child’s activity are not sufficiently
differentiated. There is no permanent image of the object apart
from the perception of the model.
Now, suppose that the child was only watching the older sister
dance, and when she sits down, the child begins to jump up and down
to the music. Such an action exhibits representative activity.
This activity consists of a twofold system of accommodations and
50
assimilations, past and present, in a relationship with one another .
The first system was described above and is now assumed to have pro¬
ceeded interiorly, and persist in the form of an integrated system
of potential images. The second system consists of the child's
assimilation and accommodation of the present ob jects-~the music
and the child's body-- to certain schemas of movement.
These two systems are related to one another in thought. The
present objects (the music and the child's body) are related to the
past objects (the sister and the music) by means of assimilation of
the music and body to the previously accommodated schema. This
assimilation of present to past endows the present objects with
meaning as dance. The signified schema is the assimilatory inter¬
mediary between the two sets of signifiers. It should be clear that
this arrangement would be impossible if the system of signifiers
and signified were not somewhat mobile and independent of each other.
Assimilation of the present objects to the schema of dance, and
accommodation of this schema to the present objects could not happen
if accommodation to the model were simultaneously required, since
the model is now absent.
When the representative activity of the prelogical child (call¬
ed egocentric representation) is characterized by the primacy of
assimilation over accommodation, the activity is manifest as symbolic
play; or, in more extreme assimilatory activity, as dreams. If our
dancing child now sits at the dinner table and bounces a glass up
and down, saying "sister-dance," he subordinates his interest in the
objective properties of the glass to his interest in the absent
model. He is playing. He is distorting the qualities of the glass
and the table to evoke the model of the sister dancing. In contrast
51
to the situation described above, the model of the sister dancing
is not evoked by an imitative reproduction of it but by means of a
weakly similar intermediate object to which the qualities of the
signified model are attributed. This is symbolic play. It depends
upon the union of imaged signifiers (accommodated schemas) which
evoke the absent model, with a system of meanings by which these
are related to present objects, also used as signifiers. These pre¬
sent signifiers and the accommodated schema to which they are assim¬
ilated together form the symbol.
The symbolization of dreams, and of egocentric "preconceptual"
thought in general, involve what are called "motivated symbols."
Signifiers are a substitute for what is signified. Assimilation of
present objects to the schemas of past models depends upon some
imagined resemblance, since at this level representation requires
the assistance of images. What distinguishes this imaged symboli¬
zation from conceptual signification is not the relative dominance
of assimilation or accommodation, which are merely two techniques
available to thought on all levels. Rather, egocentric and concep¬
tual thought are dist inguished by the nature of the relationship be¬
tween assimilating and accommodat ing structures.
Let us return to the child9 s schema of dance, A child who can
recognize other members of his family as dancing by virtue of the
similarity of their movements to those of the older sister, has form¬
ed a preconcept of "dance," The stability of the class of "dancing
objects" depends upon the image of the sister dancing, which is a
"privileged signifier" for the signified preconcept. This precon¬
ceptual structure accommodates and assimilates those objects with
rather specific perceptual qualities, perhaps a certain sound, or
52
a repeating movement. Without some resemblance to a particular
aspect of the model, another type of rhythmical movement to music
may not be assimilated to the schema "dance,'1 The sister doing a
different step may not be dancing.
True generality is, theref ore, not achieved by the preconceptual
structure. Similarly, true individuality of the elements of the
class "dancing objects" is not achieved, since a dance is appreciated
as such only insofar as it is similar to the privileged signifier.
Insofar as it is different, It is not a dance,
A conceptual structure, on the other hand, would accommodate
these different forms of dance equivalently and reversibly, with the
assistance of verbal signs. Each object would be involved in dance
only by virtue, say of the rhythmical coordination of body with
music. Comparison of one type of dance with another would not be
necessary to identify both as dances. The existence of a general
concept of dance would serve to preserve the uniqueness and integ¬
rity of, say, the "Penguin" alone or in comparison with the "Fox
Trot," It would also serve to define certain activities as "dance"
or "not-dance, " regardless of the participation of the subject.
Prior to the development of such concepts the child9 s thought
remains centered on his own point of view. Accommodation is primarily
of new models which are both interesting to the child and identical
or analagous to his own schema of assimilation. By virtue of being
centered on the child 5 s point of view, thought at this level always
involves the real or imagined participation of the child. It is
image-bound. When a volume of water is poured from one container
into a container of a different shape, the preconceptual child will
assert that the amount of water has changed. Lacking an adequate
53
conservational structure, he is unable to accommodate to both images
simultaneously. He is unable to preserve different points of view
and transcend his stance of the moment. For this reason equilibrium
is unstable. The child continually swings back and forth between
imitative accommodation and assimilatory play, alternately taking
the point of view of social reality and personal reality. Intelli¬
gent adaptation is a transient way station lying between these
oscillations of the mind. Equilibrium acquires stability only with
increasing degrees of accommodation to reality, and therefore only
with the development of increasingly mobile assimilatory structures.
In other words, stable equilibrium becomes possible as thought be¬
comes socialized.
From this notion of symbolic process, we can see that the
dreamlike and imitation-like swings of racial fantasy constitute a
"symbolic regression" to a, more egocentric state of mind than is
seen in the nonracial fantasy. Our subject thinks less intelligent¬
ly with racially mixed forms than with all white forms. To under¬
stand why this can happen, we must examine the projective test situa¬
tion in terms of Piaget’s theory, and reconsider the process of de¬
fensive fantasy.
The projective test situation demands the suspension of intelli¬
gence in favor of pretense. The subject must think about photographic
figures as if they are real. Since the figures are motionless
images with intrinsically ambiguous meanings (different subjects
tell different stories), accommodation to them contributes almost
nothing to the story line. They are largely assimilated to previous
signifiers which, in turn, have been assimilated to even earlier
ones, and so on. Nevertheless, the assimilation of the figures to
54
human signifiers suggests a minimal accommodation to the properties
of the figures on the card. Our subject did not tell stories about
animals, plants, or rocks. His stories were built on past assimila¬
tions and accommodations of people, for which the present forms are
"motivated" symbols by virtue of imagined similarity to them. The
subject can then regard his story as being at least plausible in
terms of his knowledge about people.
The stories cannot, however, become too plausible, and the
subject must preserve a degree of pretense. On the one hand, he
must avoid the experience of merely recounting memories of past
events. On the other, he must avoid reducing his stories to simple
descriptions of the cards. This requires the maintenance of a dual
sense of difference. Initially, the difference is between the fig¬
ures on the cards and the people who he knows . As thought proceeds,
it becomes the difference between the assembled signifiers of his
story and both of the initially distinct sets. This enables the
subject to tell a story which is both real and make-believe. His
extreme distortions become tolerable, and egocentric thought, cen¬
tered on the subject* s point of view, is free to proceed.
In this situation the subject creates stories lying between
two extremes, corresponding to two alternative modes of construction
and reflecting the relative dominance of assimilation or accommoda¬
tion.
When assimilation is dominant, a dreamlike story is created.
Bits and pieces of past experience are gathered together with dis¬
regard for context. The properties of the signifiers are subordi¬
nated to the meaning (the signified) the subject has in mind. In
story number two, for instance, what is important is the girl's ex-
55
perience of a "tough time," The signifiers for the "tough time"
run the gamut from an impossible test and a friend5 s problems to
the death of her mother.
Despite the resultant incongruities , belief is preserved by the
sense of important meaning and closeness to the subject 5 s personal
reality. The subject runs the risk, however, of the meaning becoming
identical with the objects of the signified schema, the "privileged"
signifiers. In story two the vague reference to "something she’s
thought about their relationship" is followed by a hasty retreat.
Such an idea can be explicitly stated in story nine, and tolehated
there since the basis of belief depends less upon the importance of
meaning in that story. What rescues him in story two Is an assim-
ilatory spree, which reestablishes the uniqueness of his story and
sustains artificiality. The confirmation of pretense relies upon
the difference between the signified objects and the forms on the
cards. This difference is used by the subject to unlock assimila¬
tion, and restore the difference between the characters of his story
and the signified objects. The difference acquires meaning. Hence,
in this type of story the cards can be used for their meaning value
only if the subject remains anchored in his latent awareness of
their formal properties.
At the other extreme is the imitation-like story created under
the dominance of accomodation. The context of preexistent signifiers
is preserved and well organized in accordance with social reality.
Here it is not so much a question of selecting scattered details to
fit a signified schema, but of selecting a schema of signification
which may be embodied in social context. Such a story is believable
because it relies so heavily on previous accommodations to social
56
reality.
At the same time, such reliance on accommodation continually
threatens belief, since the difference between the TAT forms and
the characters of his story is ever apparent . In story nine, for
instance, the subject is always explaining himself. The white guy
has money because "he9s got rather fancy clothes on." He fears
harm because of "crime and that sort of thing that he reads about
all the time." The assertion of "enlightened racial views" requires
an apology. Accommodation continually highlights the subject 9 s
awareness of his own creative acts, and, therefore, the personal
source of his meanings , His explanations resocialize his thought
by capitalizing on context and minimizing the difference between
the cards and previously accommodated social reality. Hence, in
this type of story the subject can use the pictures for their value
as social forms, only by maintaining a latent awareness of the
similarity between the photographic images and real people.
When assimilation is dominant, pretense threatens to be over¬
whelmed by belief. But when accommodation reigns, belief threatens
to be overwhelmed by pretense. Both problems are solved by the use
of formal context. Both solutions make use of human similarity and
perceptual difference.
The creation of one or the other types of stories is a reflec¬
tion of the concerns of the subject. To understand the nature of
the alternative, we must redefine notions of conflict and- defense
in terms of symbolic process.
Conflicting ideas can be defined as those which lead to incom¬
patible ends. Our subject, like everyone else, can imagine himself
in relation to others. He has had this ability since the beginnings
r X ;
.
5?
of representative activity, and it emerged gradually from the
sensory-motor object relations of infancy. Over the years of child¬
hood, structured notions of gratifying relations to objects gradu¬
ally unfold. These are "wishes." In addition, there is the struc¬
tured elaboration, under the impact of interpersonal life, of various
notions of loss. These are "fears." Contradiction and difficulty
arise out of the assimilation of these effectively important schemas
with one another.
The two simplest cases involve the assimilation of two conflict¬
ing wishes and the assimilation of a wish and a fear. In the first
case, the imagined fulfillment of one wish creates a self-object
situation which is different from the objective of the other wish.
Similarly, in the second case assimilation of the object to either
schema precludes assimilation to the other. In both cases, the
conflict is only experienced when the objective properties of the
object situation are taken into account. The conflict, then reduces
to that between personal reality and perceived social actuality,
between the assimilation of objects and the accommodations such ob¬
jects demand. Loss only becomes a possibility when social reality
is taken into account. When it is not important, as in dreams,
wishes are fulfilled.
Psychoanalysis has studied the persistence of these conflicts
throughout life. It has discovered that effectively significant
structures of assimilation are forever nourished by instinctual
drive, "the body9s demand on the mind for work," yet forever de¬
prived (at the preconceptual level) of true equilibrium with social
forms. Furthermore, with each experience of conflict, new layers
of structured signifiers are created, always built upon the founda-
58
tions of previous structures. These fantasies serve a defensive
function. From our point of view, they resolve or mediate the
discontinuity between personal and social reality. Their creation
requires symbolic thought.
As always, there are two techniques available to the mind for
the achievement of its defensive goal, and we may differentiate be¬
tween defensive accommodation and defensive assimilation. Defensive
accommodation entails the modification of all or part of an assim-
ilatory schema (the imagined self-object-relationship) according to
the pattern of an external relationship. By this technique, a
separation becomes a distinction. An oversimplified example might
be the late oedipal child 9 s accommodation to the social situation
of his family. The child modifies his behavior primarily on the
model of one adult figure, under the impact of separation from
another. In general,, defensive accommodation replaces a difficult
separation by a tolerable difference as the person becomes a partic¬
ipant in social structure.
This technique requires the subordination of distorting person¬
alized meanings to rigid and conventional socialized meanings. For
it to be achieved at all, however, the accommodated signifiers must
be both similar to the signified objects, and yet different enough
and general enough to mask the personalized meanings which would
reawaken old conflict. It must be possible to detach meanings based
on imaged properties from meanings based on secret schemas of assim¬
ilation, This is achieved by conscious utilization of formal dif¬
ferences, with an unconscious use of similarity. It amounts to a
psychic cleavage of form and meaning. Schemas are accommodated to
substitute objects and not to the original signifiers of conflict.
59
In defensive assimilation, these relationships are reversed.
The properties and context of forms are disrupted in favor of assim¬
ilation to affectively important meanings . Social reality is sub¬
ordinated to personal reality. Conventionally appropriate meanings
are ignored in deference to the important Individualized meanings ,
Objects are united with one another. They are used for their
potential meaning, on the basis of imagined similarity to signified
objects. At the same time, minimal accommodation to their objective
properties preserves the underlying sense of difference from the
objects of the assimilatory schema. Imagined ends, therefore, are
no longer incompatible, since the schemas are applied to substitute
objects. For instance, a child can take liberties with his dolls
that he could hardly imagine taking with his family. But when the
distinction between dolls and family breaks down, play is Interrupt¬
ed, Again, in defensive assimilation the form is detached from its
socialized meanings , which remain in the background, holding form
constant. Defensive assimilation gives signif ication to ideas of
union, and it mediates personal and social reality.
In the pairs of stories discussed in the previous section, there
is a movement toward one or the other of the defensive extremes.
The transf ormation from story nine to story two is essentially a
defensive assimilation. It establishes a union, it disrupts con¬
text, and it utilizes the black figure primarily as a formless per¬
son, The transformation from story three to story eight Is a de¬
fensive accommodation. It preserves context, it utilizes the black
figure primarily as a personless form, and it mitigates loss by
restructuring separation. The imaged notion of a racial dichotomy
has the peculiar potential to aid defense in either of its goals.
60
Whether the problems concerns a wish or a fear, black forms make
the solution easier.
The cost is the violation of the black person’s humanity. He
becomes either the Human Being who is not black,, or the black animate
form who is not human. One transf ormation leads to fantasies of
blacks as loving, genuine, beautiful, and God-like; the other to
fantasies of blacks as animals, attackers, filth, and property. If
interracial encounters seem so often to be unreasonably tense or
unreasonably relaxed, at the preconceptual level they quite liter¬
ally disrupt equilibrium. For defensive purposes, whites find blacks
good to think with.
This derives from the common requirements of defensive assim¬
ilation and defensive accommodation, and the ability of racial forms
to fulfill these requirements maximally. In both, techniques of de¬
fense, personal and social reality must be signified. Since the
black person is first of all a person, he may substitute for objects
of any assimilatory schema of persons. He is a mobile symbolic
vehicle. By virtue of a single Imaged property, however, the black
person as a signifier is always potentially different from signified
objects .
It will be remembered that defensive assimilation requires a
minimal degree of accommodation to formal difference for the pre¬
servation (in the TAT) of pretense. In a pinch, the subject can
accommodate to a single visual property (blackness) and the sense
of difference can easily be reinstated. The constancy of the ex¬
ternal formal difference allows the maximal assimilation to that
form to personal structures without reawakening conflict.
Defensive accommodation, on the other hand, requires a minimal
61
degree of assimilation, on the basis of similarity, to preserve
belief. The accommodated difference can never become pure image,
since it would then lose its general socialized meaning upon which
belief depends. It must become a difference in groups of people.
That is, the properties of the image-bound group must be assimilated
to at least one human signified, which is accommodated to all mem¬
bers of the group. This is defensive accommodation at its ma.ximum.
It results in the notion that all blacks are different from whites
in a particular respect.
Defensive assimilation, carried to its maximum, results in the
notion that a black can be like a white in all respects but one.
Together these two notions—that there is a single difference which
is def ined--amount to a preconcept of racial opposition. By pre¬
serving this preconcept the mind can swing in either direction with¬
out experiencing itself as regressing symbolically and without ex¬
periencing intolerable conflict between personal and social reality.
We may formulate a hypothesis. When the mind assimilates a
perceptual group difference to structures of conflict, the conflict
will be reduced and thought will be both less intelligent and more
centered. Assimilation to a structure of union is defensive assim¬
ilation, Assimilation to a structure of separation is defensive
accommodation. From a perceptual group difference the notion of
racial opposition will emerge.
62
Appendix
Pictures and Stories
Picture one: An old white man is sitting at a desk. He is
holding a pipe and his tie is loosened.
Story one: He’s a professor because uh, you can tell from his
office. It’s not a very uh classy sort of an office. He’s not a
businessman at all. He’s at ease, just uh sort of late in the day
after work. He’s settling back and taking in what went on during
the day. uh I guess , you know, some sort of reflection before taking
off for home. He’s apparently not had a very unusual day. He’s
not overjoyed or distraught at anything, uh He’s calm and ready to
ready to end the day. Ready to go,
D.B.: What kind of things is he reflecting on?
S: I think probably more about how he’s done. How in his class or
uh in his class, you know, whether he was effective rather than
worrying about a particular student or, I think a problem of that
nature. It’s sort of an evaluation of his own performance during
the day rather than uh someone else’s problem, uh A problem a stu¬
dent may be having or a colleague. . .It 3 s just a little bit of judg¬
ment at the end of the day, as to how actually he did, how his
particular courses are getting along, if he’s where he should be,
if uh he’s, if the students are are getting what he things they
should be getting. If not, you know, what in him is the cause of
it and what will he be able to do to to remedy it, rather than you
know their problem. His own sort of. Did I answer that?
D0B0: Yes, and the outcome?
S: (smiles) The outcome will be a sigh, putting on his coat,
63
straightening out the. desk. You know., I mean just leaving the office
sort of action and heading home.
Story and Picture two: See page 22,
Story and Picture three: See page 28.
Picture number four: a young white man is lying face down on
the grass with his eyes closed. An old white man in a suit is
crouched slightly toward him, several feet away.
Story number four: (finger tapping) This man, the old. man,
has urn come up from far away and can’t see very well (laughs). He’s
uh sort of nearsighted and he being sort of always conscious of
crime and and this sort of thing that weren’t so rampant in the good
old days (when) they didn’t think things he’s unaccustomed to, he
he’s wants to make sure that this guy, who’s asleep, is actually
asleep and ok rather than urn hurt in any way, or uh rather than
overdosed. So he’s approaching the guy and but carefully, so that
if the guy’s asleep he’s not going to disturb him, and He’ll realize,
when he gets close enough to see him, you know, perceiving the guy’s
breathing, or whatever he he’s looking for as a sign of life. Then,
he’ll sort of quietly walk on away.
D.B, : And the guy on the ground?
S: uh, He’s just asleep. In the park.
Picture five: A young black man is sitting in a chair with a
cigarette in one hand and an opened letter and envelope dangling
from the other. There is a desk, a wastebasket, some books, and a
poster.
Story five: This guy’s in a familiar setting. He’s in, he’s
been in, say, his college room and he studied, uh and Just right
now he’s after studying for a while. He’s come across something
'
I
• V.
64
that is worth thinking about, is worth doing more than just learn¬
ing, you know. It set him off on a tangent and he’s just sort of,
at the moment pondering whatever he’s just run across in his book
and uh, will fairly soon go on with the studying. So, it ’ s nothing
very , again, nothing very shocking to him, or it’s just something,
something that has struck an interest in him and urn, he 3 11 soon re¬
turn to studying,
D.B.: What might it be?
S; uh...I think It’s something in, whatever the subject, that re¬
lates much more closely to his own experience than the rest of the
subject matter had. If it’s uh is a novel or uh any type of liter¬
ature, he has come across a a character who3s experienced a feeling
that he’s very recently had or is in a situation very similar to
something he’s had, urn In a more, if it's a more scientific subject,
he’s it’s it’s a fact or an interpretation of the world or urn some
particular aspect of the world that he recognizes that he’s sort of
hand intuitively on his own and never seen really written and uh
articulated very well, It’s just It’s something that he sort of
intuitively agrees with and he!s thinking through this, It’s sort
of a good experience to run across a thing like that, He’s just
thinking about about uh the relation between him and the book, It’s
closer than it was, He’s finding more meaning in it than just an
object for study.
Picture six: A young white woman is leaning against a pillar
in front of a brick building. It Is night.
Story six: (Rubs hand through hair). This girl’s in a has
come to a place that she’s not familiar with. I’ll say she’s, I’ll
say she’s run away from home just because it’s a very institutional
sort of a building uh and she looks out of place in it. She’s got
a look on her face that ’ s .. .lonely and sad and sort of reflective.
She’s come to this place uh without a direction, without knowing
actually where she was coming, just heading somewhere, and has gotten
here as an as an end almost or or now sees it as an end and is look¬
ing for somewhere to go on, somewhere to, well, looking for whether
to go... to go back or to continue uh in whatever travel, well in her
travels. She’s, It’s sort of the first time she’s uh questioned her
her decision to leave her home. It’s the first time she’s felt bad¬
ly and begun to wonder uh more about where she’s going than where
she’s coming from, uh I think she’ll probably go on rather than
come back, rather than return to her home. It’s not, it she’s just
beginning her trip. She’s not uh very much beaten down by traveling
life and she she’s wondering where to go, pausing more than ending
it, anything like that.
Picture seven: A young white man Is standing next to an old
black woman. He is turned toward her, while she is facing away from
him. There is a table with a toaster.
Story seven: There’s a young a black kid, child, uh and, pictured
here are his mother and his uh this sort of old white kid that comes
and uh takes him out. He and a group of four or five other kids uh
they go do crafts, or the park, or YMCA, things like that. In other
words, it’s an older kid working with the younger kid, uh The young¬
er kid has in his home caused a disturbance. He he’s caused some
trouble and uh while his white friend is there and while his mother
is there together and its just beginning. The white guy feels very
very uncomfortable, not knowing his role. He’s uh he’s there he’s
there and has been almost a father figure for the kid but now he’s
„
66
in the home where the mother9 s been very definitely in control and
he feels almost as if the kid might be testing him, uh and so uh
He9s going to wait and let the mother take the lead, He’s not about
to discipline the kid in his own home, not about to say anything,
uh The mother 9 s yeah, is used to the kid making trouble, uh She
knows what he’s doing and will handle it as soon as he gets out of
hand. She 9s just waiting, uh, but not nearly as uncomfortable as
the other guy, as the guy. They’re both looking at him.
D.B.; And the outcome?
S: (sits forward) The outcome is that the mother will uh, very
soon step in, do what is necessary for that particular child. She
will know what what the kid is up to, you know. If he’s beating up
on his little brother, she’ll know how to stop it and will do so,
uh, much to the white kid’s great relief.
Picture and story eight: See page 29, (Paired with three).
Picture and story nine: See page 21. (paired with two).
Picture ten: An old black man in shirt and tie is sitting on
the edge of a chair. He is slightly bent and has a soda in his
hand. Behind him is a vending maching. (Paired with one).
Story ten: This is a guy uh taking a break from his work, not
at the end of the day, but in the middle of the day, uh say mid¬
morning, and has a specific problem on his mind, uh that’s bothering
him pretty seriously, not like the professor in the first picture
who’s just evaluating his whole day. This guy’s got a particular
thing on his mind that’s troubling him. uh Again I’ll say he’s a
professor, and in this instance it’s a class that just immediately
preceeded him coming out and taking his break, uh It’s a small class
and it it’s just upset him very much since he knows the students on
67
an individual basis and can judge , therefore, how much work they’re
doing and and the commitment they have to the course, that that They
don’t have the commitment he wants and uh when that’s so it’s use¬
less to try and be a good teacher because, you know, even if you
are a good teacher they’re not going to benefit that much from it
unless they are are good students and he’s finding that the students
are not in this particular class giving what he wants, and uh so
that uh He’ll come out of it with a resolve to uh improve his own
teaching hoping that it will inspire the uh the uh students, rather
than to sort of harangue them about you got to start reading the
books. He will uh come out of it hoping to be able to inspire them
to get more into that course. That’s all.
Picture eleven: A young white man is sitting in a chair and
holding a telephone receiver several inches off its base. His foot
is on a book, and there are bookshelves behind him. (Paired with
five ) •
Story eleven: This guy is uh has spent the last couple hours
trying to study or trying to read, uh but he’s got a personal pro¬
blem on his mind, I mean a uh a problem about his relationship with
with a girl, and uh it’s just really thwarting every effort he tries,
you know, to study that he makes. He can’t can’t concentrate but
he’s been trying because, one, he just doesn’t want to uh let the
girl get him down right now, and two he he’s feels that he should
be studying this stuff for the next day’s class, uh But finally with
uh, he’s sort of dropped his book uh here and has decided to go ahead
and call the girl to work out what it is, what the problem is, and
uh, by doing so sort of clear his head, so he can go on and study.
He will, well uh, depending on the phone call. It it turns out to
.
68
be a bad call he might have to uh go out uh see the person,, or or
go out on his own, sort of walk around, that sort of thing, uh If
things work out the way he hopes, then he 3 11 be able to just settle
back and do that studying that he wasn’t able to do before, (laughs)
I can’t say which it would be, uh.
Picture twelve: A young white man with closed eyes is lying
on his back on a couch. An old black man in a suit is standing over
him with one arm outstretched. (Paired with four).
Story twelve: (long pause) Two uh colleagues, two friends,
two teachers, that know each other uh and are friends, uh The one
lying down has uh well he’s resting. He’s not asleep, but he’s just
resting after delivering a lecture and he’s tired of standing up
(laughs). The other comes in, that has come in, and uh sort of
feeling pretty good uh for whatever reason, his own reason, either
he had a good class or life looked good in the morning or whatever,
and comes in, sort of going to slap the guy on the back, uh yeah uh,
just getting ready for a greeting here. He’s just walked in and
they are good friends and he’s just gonna sort of to refresh the
guy that’s lying down. It’s just a very happy scene. Both will go
on to uh finish the day in good spirits.
Picture thirteen: A young black woman is sitting on the steps
in front of a brick building. It is night. (Paired with six).
Story thirteen: It’s a woman uh outside of a building in which
she works, waiting for a ride, uh to be picked up by uh. She’s
married uh, but her husband’s not picking her up. It’s a a friend
of, a female type friend of hers, who’s also married, uh And both
are sort of upset (looks away from the picture) because their
husbands are good friends and are always going out together without
69
uh uh paying a whole lot of attention to to the wives, the wives feel#
And so they they’re together fairly often in this situation where
the husbands are are out# un and so She’s she’s waiting and she’ll
get picked up and they’ll exchange, you know, hellos and little
gossips and such things and then uh possibly get together uh for a
for a little while before each goes home to uh, to take care of the
kids# They both have very young children# They can't, they would
like to be able to spend the evening and the night together, doing
something like the husbands can, but they have to care for the kids,
and they don’t like it. She’s very sad, so she’ll go and commiser¬
ate for a little while with her friend. You know.
Picture fourteen: A young white man is standing several feet
from an old white woman, who is sitting in a chair. He is facing
her, while she is looking into the distance. There is a newspaper
on the table beside her, (Paired with seven).
Story fourteen: A son and his mother, uh The son uptight over
a decision he wants to make, concerning his future that’s very
important to him, and that his mother disapproves of# uh He’s pretty
much decided that he wants to uh drop out of law school and she has
lived most of her life with a very distinguished lawyer and can't
understand her son’s wishes to uh not continue and be a lawyer him¬
self, because they’re new to him, or uh they’re newly expressed by
him. Although it means a great deal to him and has been sort of
growing in his mind for a while, he never uh has never expressed
much of it to her because they’re simply not very close, uh If he
was trying to decide whether to drop out of law school or not his
mother would not be one of the first people he’s turn to to talk
about it with# And so she doesn’t uh doesn’t approve at all and is
70
upset that he’s going to go ahead and do it, upset that he uh uh
must incur his mother 9 s disapproval uh which means. It doesn’t
mean anything like uh they 3 re going to disown him or anything of
that nature, It!s not a very violent scene at all, uh They9 re both
just upset with each other uh each other’s attitude. He will go
ahead and do it uh. She won’t approve, and it’ll just be one more
strain or uh one more. They’ll just be standing another foot apart.
They just, just one more incident serving to uh undo any closeness
they’ve had uh which means that he’ll be even pushed more before he’ll
tell her anything in the future.,, But he’ll go ahead and do it.
*
71
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The Psychoanalytic Study of Society , I {i960), 243-247®
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Sciences, I (1947), 411-427.
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. .
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