by Danni Biondini, LMFT

Are our futures foreordained by history? Or can we revise the life given us? These are two of the questions psychoanalysis poses, and as a clinical treatment promises that revision is possible.

But are there limits to that revision? Are there some histories too brutal to edit, or too doomed by a history outside of the dominant culture’s awareness?

Mitchell S. Jackson’s recently released memoir, Survival Math ((2019, Scribner), addresses the question of how to revise a life foreordained by generations of oppression. The book tells the story of Jackson’s family: a Black family in predominantly white Portland, Oregon. In his immediate family, his mom becomes addicted to crack cocaine, the drug which he, the son, will eventually spend 19 months in prison for selling. Then there’s the series of “fatherish men” in our author’s life, many of them pimps and hustlers.

But to think that’s all they are is to gravely miss his point. Throughout his narrative, Jackson always humanizes his subjects. To humanize is, in this case, to historicize. It is to put them in the context of the historical and social forces bearing down on them. For Jackson’s family, this history begins with slavery, then the subsequent and ongoing disenfranchisement and institutional racism that has kept his family from their equal share of the American dream.

Every biography in this book is put into history. Jackson doesn’t just tell us about his mom’s addiction — he also traces the history of cocaine, from the pre-Incan Andes to Sigmund Freud to the racist Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 to the resurgence of crack cocaine in South Central LA in the 1980s. As he says of his “fastidious-ass de facto dad,” Big Chris, who taught him pimping and hustling, “The physics of his neighborhood was such that he would’ve had to have been a superhero to best the inertia.”

By placing his family in their historical context, he takes white America to task: these neighborhoods, these conditions, this family, the denigration of Black fatherhood and subjectivity — all of this was created by white America and our complicity in the ongoing historical traumas of Black degradation.

Jackson writes,

[W]hites forged The Other America. Since then, it’s been called the Jim Crow South, the ghetto, the slum, the North Side, the South Side, the East Side, the West Side, the Northeast Side; it’s been called the hood, the block, the curb, the trap, the numbers; it might be more well-known as the Appalachias (yes, it includes poor whites) or Brownsville or South Central or Skid Row. But no matter what it’s called, it features substandard living and hella-sundry tactics to stunt legitimate means of building wealth. (pp. 210-211)

This is the kind of history-taking we need in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is all about how the past plays out in the present, yet for various reasons—the whiteness of psychoanalysis? the general US aversion to history?—we too-little consider the impact of history on anything other than one’s internal objects. The psychoanalytic project focuses on the unconscious as an amalgam of family constellations, but with little attention to the broader historical context. Jackson points to the conditions that help us understand his All-American family as American-made.

Social oppression is replicated on the familial level. As therapists, we can learn from Jackson how to place one’s symptoms in their proper context.