Title:
Under the Strain of Color: Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry
Author:
Gabriel N. Mendes
Year of Publication:
2015
Thesis:
Argues that Richard Wright and Frederic Wertham were among the first to claim that racism worsened Black folks' mental health and that the field of psychiatry was obliged to do something about it. Their position both as marginalized outsiders, as well as their relative fame fueled their ablity to develop creative solutions and keep the clinic running. The LaFargue Clinic represents Harlem as the epicenter for progressive reforms and a challenge to the "race-neutral" psychiatry developing. (9). Runs on volunteers & sliding scale for payment. "larger campaign for racial justice" (16)
Time:
1920s- (Cold-War Era)
Geography:
Organization:
Acknowledgments
- Finishes acknowledgments with a map of "the Harlems" - Spanish (SW), Italian (E), and African American (NW)
Inroduction: A Deeper Science
- Brewer - killed wife, spent 19 years in jail, reads Wright's book & writes to him, Wright advocates on his behalf (Brewer became an artist). Gets out, joins Count Basie's orchestra, then murders a mother of two.
- Wright believed psychotherapy could reduce strain (4)
- In 1932, Wertham notes that "racism, violence, mental disorder are linked (5)
- Argues that therapeutic service should be located within the Black community & inexpensively (7)
- Shelton Hale Bishop - Reverend who provides the basement rooms
- Lafargue a social justice activist
- Mental health of individuals is important for the social order during this period (10)
- Shift from view of Black people as inherently inferior to their degradation. (10)
- Black migrants seen as a threat - concern over their being able to integrate socially (10)
- Rhetoric of difference couched in psychological terms in this period
- Shift in psychiatry from beyond the somatic means also a shift in gathering info about treatment to the environment/social milieu as well (12)
- Article looking at racism as a problem (Ray Cremin) in the military extended to general African American experience
- ***** Economic opportunity was thought to solve the problems of mental illness for African Americans, which meant little attention was developed toward serving their mental health needs. (13-14)
- Not attempting to "adjust" Black folk but to give them strength against the conditions of racism. (14)
- T.H. Marshall - civil, economic, social rights links with citizenship (15)
- Alondra Nelson - "citizenship contradiction." Rights recognized in law but daily experience does not reflect it. (15)
-
1. "This Burden of Consciousness": Richard Wright and the Psychology of Race Relations, 1927-1947
- Biographic of Richard Wright
- Wright as sociologist & interviewing Communists in Chicago
- Focuses on Wright's early work on anti-racism "The Conquest of Ourselves"
2. "Intangible Difficulties": Dr. Fredric Wertham and the Politics of Psychiatry in the Interwar Years
- Biographic of Wertham
3. "Between the Sewer and the Church": The Emergence of the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic
- Sketch of Harlem
- Located in the basement of a Church
- Shows how social psychiatry in this context aimed to link mental health and social justice together (19)
4. Children and the Violence of Racism: The Lafargue Clinic, Comic Books, and the Case against School Segregation
- Psychiatry and NAACP join to create legal arguments against segregation
- Wertham argues that comic books also fed into racism & that it was bad for both Black and white children
Epilogue: "An Experiment in the Social Basis of Psychotherapy"
Notes
Index
Type:
Social/Intellectual History
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
"Moral treatment" from Summers - the individual
Dynamic psych - dealing w/underlying causes
Universalist psychology
Keywords:
- "Negro Problem - 10 - Pathologizing black people to explain, for one reason or another, their real and apparent inequality
Themes:
Cultural competency (Freudian) vs. personal histories that intesect class & race
Psychodynamic psychiatry (12)
"Psychodynamic psychiatry sought to redirect the study and treatment of mental health and illness from the primarily somatic or bio- logical orientation that marked psychiatry as a specialty within the field of medicine. A new generation of psychiatrists, fresh from their work in the war, envisioned the psychodynamic paradigm as capable of account- ing for multifarious sources of mental disorder, many of which exceeded the grasp of somatic psychiatry" (12)
Social Psychiatry
"“Social psychiatry,” Wertham declared, “affirms that in the historical development of society and its use or abuse of science, periods may occur where seeming adaptation becomes maladaptation; adjustment, maladjustment; normal- ity, a burden; vaunted health, insidious disease. In short, where the physi- cian may be sicker than his patient." (17)
Damage imagery
Critiques:
Questions:
Curious if I will find reference to these clinics in Black Panther Party literature
Quotes:
Notes:
Clinic runs from 1946-1958
LaFargue was Karl Marx's son-in-law
"Under the Strain of Color tells the story of how Richard Wright and Fredric Wertham, along with an interracial group of intellectuals, doc- tors, clergy, and artists, attempted to establish a progressive model of men- tal health care as an integral part of the struggle for racial equality in the United States in the early post–World War II era. And it reveals the La- fargue Clinic to be a unique prism through which to navigate the contours of race on the unsteady terrain of the midcentury U.S. urban North." (4)
On "The Negro Problem"
By the end of World War II, social scientific thought and research on African Ameri- cans focused not on the bioracial but on the psychological and cultural obstacles to full immersion, assimilation, and integration into American society." (11)
On Lafargue's aims:
"Yet they resisted the general aim of the behavioral sciences to help the putatively abnormal to adjust to the norms of society. Instead, they sought to develop psychiatric knowledge and therapy that might aid every- day people in confronting the social order of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation." (16)
Discussion here: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CCcynwmhWnF/?igshid=z5b262wa04z4