James Baldwin’s Complicated Relationship with Psychoanalysis

According to JSTOR Daily, literary scholar Dorothy Stringer has identified a fascinating contradiction in James Baldwin's intellectual life: the celebrated novelist was famously hostile to psychoanalysis, yet he incorporated Freudian themes into many of his later works. Stringer argues that Baldwin had good reason for his skepticism — postwar psychoanalytic writers, particularly white ones, weaponized the discipline to pathologize his identity and that of other minorities, locating their suffering in the psyche rather than in structural hardship. Yet Baldwin eventually employed psychoanalytic concepts himself, most notably in his 1956 novel Giovanni's Room and a late essay on manhood, suggesting his quarrel was not with the ideas themselves, but with how they had been misused against him.

Listen to this story

Hear this and more stories in a personalized audio briefing.

Open The Chonkerton