>I also still find it insulting to make assumptions about what
>motivates people to be racists or what have you. It's fine on the
>analysts couch, but I have never bought this as social explanation.
I don't think of it as social explanation either. I was reading something from Guattari just the other day where he says he wasn't interested in building a bridge between Marxism and psychoanalyis. The idea was rather to skip around from one way of looking at a problem to another and have them inform each other.
But I also don't think the psychoanalytical vantage point should be reduced to the analyst's couch. If that's the case how do you account for the James Baldwin stories I mentioned?
On the other hand, this stuff has been helping me in a very personal way lately, so I'm biased right now.