The Multicultural Imagination: "Race", Color, and the Unconscious

The Multicultural Imaginationis a challenging inquiry into the complex interrelationship between our ideas about race, color and the unconscious. Drawing on clinical case material, Michael Vannoy Adams argues that race is just as important as sex or any other content of the unconscious. He does not assume that racism will simply vanish if we psychoanalyze a patient, but shows how a non-defensive ego and a self-image that is receptive to other-images can move us towards a more productive discourse of cultural differences.The MulticulturalImaginationprovokes the reader--analyst or not--to confront personally those unconscious attitudes which stand in the way of authentic multicultural relationships.

Michael Vannoy Adams is Senior Lecturer in Psychoanalytic Studies at the New School for Social Research, New York.