Article ID: CBB001201816

“Crazy for This Democracy”: Postwar Psychoanalysis, African American Blues Narratives, and the Lafargue Clinic (2013)

unapi

The popularization of psychoanalysis after World War II provided African American writers such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison with a new paradigm for exploring the effects of racial discrimination on the formation of black identity. Both were instrumental in helping the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham establish the Lafargue Clinic in 1946, the first community outpatient "mental hygiene" clinic in Harlem. I argue that the Lafargue Clinic's improvisations on psychoanalysis can best be understood as a type of blues epistemology, strategically revising and inverting traditional tropes. My approach uncovers the clinic's innovative use of patient narratives as an essential therapeutic strategy to help African American clients reframe their encounters with racial discrimination as symptomatic of a diseased democracy.

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Authors & Contributors
Mooney, Katherine C.
Mendes, Gabriel N.
Elisa Edwards
Cornelius-Diallo, Alexandra
Simon, Kristi M.
Leahy, Mark Henderson
Concepts
African Americans and science
African Americans
Science and race
Science and literature
Identity
Psychiatry
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
20th century, late
18th century
Places
United States
New York City (New York, U.S.)
Southern states (U.S.)
Iowa (U.S.)
Scotland
New Zealand
Institutions
Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic
Eastman Kodak Company
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT
Iowa State College, Ames
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