A white psychoanalyst has published a paper in a respected academic journal branding whiteness 'a malignant, parasitic like condition' that is 'incurable' and triggers 'perverse appetites,' it has been revealed.
Dr. Donald Moss published the article titled On Having Whiteness last month in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the abstract of which is available online.
Dr. Moss, who teaches psychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, has been slammed online by other psychologists and psychiatrists for the new research.
'Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which "white" people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one's body, in one's mind, and in one's world,' the abstract for the article reads.
'Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts' appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples.'
The abstract continues: 'Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions.'
Dr. Moss wrote that such interventions 'can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness's infiltrated appetites' while calling whiteness a 'chronic condition' for which 'there is not yet a permanent cure.'
'The ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning ('never again') or as temptation ('great again'). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression,' he wrote.
DailyMail.com has reached out to Dr. Moss for more information on how he came to his findings, as well as additional comment.
Last February, Dr. Moss taught an On Having Whiteness course with the same messages as the new journal article. Tickets for the course cost $40 for members of the general public to attend at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies.
A flier shows that 'learning objectives' for the course included teaching participants how to 'explain the concept of internal racial identity' and 'identify obstacles to clinicians' working effectively with issues of race in the therapeutic relationship.'
Dr. Moss appears to have taught that same course in a presentation at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, though the description for that event was slightly different.
In that course outline, Dr. Moss wrote that whiteness is 'malignant because it spreads/metastasizes, targeting an ever-widening sphere of objects.'
'It is parasitic in that it is contagious, passed on by other infected people. Biologically 'white' people have a particular susceptibility. to 'Whiteness',' Dr. Moss wrote.
'This susceptibility is grounded in pre-existing hierarchical representations of self and object — in any representation that organizes self and other in a vertical relation, powerful and powerless.'
He added: 'For Whiteness, the most perceptually available category over which to establish hierarchical relations is 'color'. Race provides 'Whiteness' its easiest target.'
Now change white to black
Now change white to black
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
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MajGenl.Meade
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Re: Now change white to black
Daily Mail, Gob. You blew your witness! (Not like THAT)For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts
Re: Now change white to black
Obviously, if it's reported in the Mail it cannot be true.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
Re: Now change white to black
And the next class will be self-entiltled "Kareness". I guess academics have to publish or perish, and even unsupported silliness counts counts as a publication. But it does appear that the journal this was published in is a fairly respected one, which surprises me. FWIW, does anyone know what "social-historical interventions" are and how this applies to psychoanalysis? The term mental masturbation seems to be more applicable here.
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Sue U
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Re: Now change white to black
Moss seems to be just re-packaging white privilege as a psychiatric "hot take" -- which, like all hot takes, is meant to be provocative if not actually insightful, but more frequently comes off as silly. But let's face it, you don't generate much attention for yourself by framing a subject the same way everyone else does, and this framing seems particularly well-tailored to gaining the attention of the Daily Mail/NY Post/Fux News outrage manufacturing conglomerate (viz. the ridiculously over-the-top lede for the story).
GAH!
Re: Now change white to black
Agreed, but I am still surprised a peer reviewed journal would publish it. I doubt many would argue that white privilege can result in some of the behaviors he mentions in the abstract, but to say that this elevates it to the level of a psychiatric condition does not appear to be supported in any way (at least anymore than something like demonic possession is). And I would still like to know what "social-historical interventions" are,
Face it, there is academic peer reviewed science, and there is pop psychology; this appears to be the latter--maybe to grab headlines in the tabloids. But I do not think an academic should resort to this. Dr. Oz--sure, but not someone claiming to be a serious researcher. Or maybe he's just trying to become a pop psychologist.
Face it, there is academic peer reviewed science, and there is pop psychology; this appears to be the latter--maybe to grab headlines in the tabloids. But I do not think an academic should resort to this. Dr. Oz--sure, but not someone claiming to be a serious researcher. Or maybe he's just trying to become a pop psychologist.
Re: Now change white to black
Neoracism is all the rage right now. Got to wonder how they figure more racism is how we combat racism.
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ex-khobar Andy
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Re: Now change white to black
The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association: "According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2017 impact factor of 0.538, ranking it 4th out of 12 journals in the category "Psychology, Psychoanalysis", and 130th out of 142 journals in the category "Psychiatry (SSCI)".
By comparison, Nature - one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals, had an impact factor for 2017 of 41.577 . Impact factor is a measure of how frequently a scientific paper in that journal is cited by other authors over the subsequent 2-year period. The American Science was just behind at 41.058 for the same year. Even the lowly International Journal of Environmental Analytical Chemistry, whom I allowed to publish my first paper as a grad student was at 1.418 in 2017. Back in my publishing days, impact factor had not been invented.
It might be peer-reviewed but it does not appear that many people pay any attention to it.
By comparison, Nature - one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals, had an impact factor for 2017 of 41.577 . Impact factor is a measure of how frequently a scientific paper in that journal is cited by other authors over the subsequent 2-year period. The American Science was just behind at 41.058 for the same year. Even the lowly International Journal of Environmental Analytical Chemistry, whom I allowed to publish my first paper as a grad student was at 1.418 in 2017. Back in my publishing days, impact factor had not been invented.
It might be peer-reviewed but it does not appear that many people pay any attention to it.
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Burning Petard
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Re: Now change white to black
Reading the stuff in the first entry at the head of this thread, I am wondering if this is a parody.
For very personal reasons, I have been reading carefully the book "the Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD And because I like his stuff, I have also been reading "Being Ram Dass" which is a sort of autobiography, edited and published after his death. Before he was Ram Dass, he was Richard Alpert, PhD and a highly regarded research psychologist. Kolk's book is about treatment for highly emotionally traumatized people. Most of his focus was on those who had been sexually molested as children, then evolved into the new group of veterans with PTSD. Interesting to me, anti-depressant drugs had some utility for the sexually traumatized, and nearly none for the veterans.
But the parallel in the two books is their early experience as lab workers and research assistants before they were academically qualified to do any 'real' therapy. They both found the research to be so narrowly defined, that actual improvements were regarded as 'subjective' and not scientifically interesting.
I had some second hand anecdotal information about Dr. Alport. His parents had a summer place in New Hampshire. Dr Alport (better known as Ram Dass by then and booted out of academia) would stay there for extended visits and became an accepted part of the local community. There was a state mental institution there and my brother-in-law with a MA in Psychology, was employed as the intake evaluator. He sat in on staff meetings, but was clearly not qualified to have a useful opinion about anything.
He told me about a continuing burr under the saddle of many of the Md and PhD staff. Under certain conditions, the patients would be permitted to go into town on their own to demonstrate their ability fo function in 'normal' activities There were repeated complaints that those who did this often ended up in a bar where Alport was sitting in a back booth and they would sit with him for a time. The staff complaint was that when the patient returned from one of these trips to town, if they sat with Alport, the mental problems which put them in this institution were always reduced. What bugged them no end was that the patients were surreptitiously observed during their entire visit. That hippie phoney from Harvard never did anything to them--he just sat with them and they drank beer and talked about the baseball game on the tv.
The point I am trying to make is that there is a huge gap between research in the fields of psychology and psychiatry; and the way life is lived by ordinary people.
snailgate
For very personal reasons, I have been reading carefully the book "the Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD And because I like his stuff, I have also been reading "Being Ram Dass" which is a sort of autobiography, edited and published after his death. Before he was Ram Dass, he was Richard Alpert, PhD and a highly regarded research psychologist. Kolk's book is about treatment for highly emotionally traumatized people. Most of his focus was on those who had been sexually molested as children, then evolved into the new group of veterans with PTSD. Interesting to me, anti-depressant drugs had some utility for the sexually traumatized, and nearly none for the veterans.
But the parallel in the two books is their early experience as lab workers and research assistants before they were academically qualified to do any 'real' therapy. They both found the research to be so narrowly defined, that actual improvements were regarded as 'subjective' and not scientifically interesting.
I had some second hand anecdotal information about Dr. Alport. His parents had a summer place in New Hampshire. Dr Alport (better known as Ram Dass by then and booted out of academia) would stay there for extended visits and became an accepted part of the local community. There was a state mental institution there and my brother-in-law with a MA in Psychology, was employed as the intake evaluator. He sat in on staff meetings, but was clearly not qualified to have a useful opinion about anything.
He told me about a continuing burr under the saddle of many of the Md and PhD staff. Under certain conditions, the patients would be permitted to go into town on their own to demonstrate their ability fo function in 'normal' activities There were repeated complaints that those who did this often ended up in a bar where Alport was sitting in a back booth and they would sit with him for a time. The staff complaint was that when the patient returned from one of these trips to town, if they sat with Alport, the mental problems which put them in this institution were always reduced. What bugged them no end was that the patients were surreptitiously observed during their entire visit. That hippie phoney from Harvard never did anything to them--he just sat with them and they drank beer and talked about the baseball game on the tv.
The point I am trying to make is that there is a huge gap between research in the fields of psychology and psychiatry; and the way life is lived by ordinary people.
snailgate
Re: Now change white to black
This is but one more proposal to cast racism as a disease, a concept which is hardly novel:
Is Racism an Illness?
Is Racism a Disease?
Is Racism a Disease?
Is Racism an Illness?
Is Racism a Disease?
Is Racism a Disease?
"Hang on while I log in to the James Webb telescope to search the known universe for who the fuck asked you." -- James Fell
Re: Now change white to black
Hardly novel, but the first I saw in a peer reviewed journal in the relevant science. It doesn't look like the most respected journal in the psychiatric universe based on what Andy posted, but it still appears to be a journal related to that area. There may be similar publications, but I woudl hope they are better substantiated.
Re: Now change white to black
Now, change white to black...
The controversial psychiatrist who said that she fantasized about shooting white people during panel at Yale University in April has doubled down on her attacks saying white people are 'psychopathic' in a new interview.
Dr. Aruna Khilanani, who runs her own practice in Manhattan, delivered a talk titled Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind virtually to medical students and faculty back in April after being invited by Yale School of Medicine's Child Study Center.
Khilanani made stunning statements during her talk, including admitting she has had violent fantasies about shooting white people.
'I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a f**king favor,' Khilanani said during the talk.
Khilanani appeared on Marc Lamont Hill's Black News Tonight on Thursday and elaborated on claims she made in her Yale speech.
'Would it be fair to say, based on your expertise, that white people are psychopathic?' Hill asked Khilanani.
'I think so, yeah,' she replied. 'The level of lying that white people do that has started since colonialism, we're just used to it.'
When pressed by Hill about what specific lies she was talking about, Khilanani said white people reframed the horrors of colonialization.
'Every time that you steal a country, you loot, you say you've discovered something,' she told the host. 'This level of lies is actually part of history. We don't say that we killed all these people, we got rid of all the native Americans, we say we discovered America. You don't talk about the level of death, you don't actually talk about the level of what actually occurred.'
Khilanani told Hill that white people's re-telling of colonization 'sanitizes' the violence and that white people take credit for discovering things that already existed.
'This level of discovery is everywhere,' she said. 'You've discovered vegetarianism, you know. You've discovered yoga. Everything is a discovery. And it's all actually stolen.'
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”