The Invisibility of Colonial Influence in the Formation of the Brazilian Social Identity: Psychoanalytic Mediations

Abstract

The article discusses the formation of Brazilian social identity based on the criterion of race, considering the social and psychic consequences of structured racism in the social symbolic chain. The invisible but deeply rooted character of racism makes the social, economic, political and subjective effects of our colonial heritage hidden. In this sense, racist attitudes and behaviors are made invisible around the myth of racial miscegenation, so that racism and whiteness emerge as symptoms of our slaveholder past. Psychoanalysis serves us as a clinical-political apparatus for recognizing the consequences of this erasure at an unconscious level, as well as it offers itself as a reading of the social symptoms crossed by racist jouissance. Through the excerpt of a clinical case, we will analyze how the symptomatic effects of racism reach the clinic. The bet on the real as an unstoppable field in the face of the significant repetition guides us towards a praxis that is actually involved in the defense of the plurality of our social identity.