A Load off Whose Heart? Psychiatry and the Politics of Respectability and Race Representation in Harlem, 1943-45.

In wartime Harlem, liberal mental health professionals, eager to serve the black freedom struggle, sought to depict the minds of troubled black children as human without reinforcing pernicious racial stereotypes. This paper examines how psychiatrist Viola W. Bernard and the Community Service Society struggled to portray the black community as both psychologically damaged and morally beyond reproach when publicly presenting the cases of her male and female clients. As a consequence, liberals helped champion the mental health needs of delinquent black males as a matter of racial justice while rendering young unmarried mothers effectively invisible.

'Racial differences have to be considered': Lauretta Bender, Bellevue Hospital, and the African American psyche, 1936-52.

This paper examines one US psychiatrist's engagement between 1936 and 1952 with a racialist strain of evolutionary thought. When Lauretta Bender began working with Bellevue Hospital's disproportionately black population, the psychiatric literature still circulated the crude evolutionary proposition that blacks remained stuck at a more primitive stage of development. In the 1930s, drawing insights from holistic, mechanistic and environmentalist thinking on the relationship between mind and body, Bender developed her own more circumspect racialist position. Although she largely abandoned her underdetermined version of racialism in the 1940s for an approach that left out race as an active factor of analysis, this paper contends that she probably never wrote off black primitivity as a theoretical possibility.

"Where the need is greatest": social psychiatry and race-blind universalism in Harlem's Lafargue Clinic, 1946-1958.

SUMMARY: Between 1946 and 1958, Harlem was home to a small psychiatric facility, the Lafargue Clinic. An interracial institution run entirely by volunteers, the clinic helped expand mental health care into underserved African American communities. Relying upon extant case files, this article examines how the Lafargue staff handled clinical situations with African Americans. In its attempt to forge a new antiracist approach, the staff struck a balance between viewing Harlem patients as psychological products of their unique social context (social psychiatry) and applying modern psychiatric principles to African Americans without adjusting for racial or sociological difference (race-blind universalism).

"A fine new child": the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic and Harlem's African American communities, 1946-1958.

In 1946, the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, a small outpatient facility run by volunteers, opened in Central Harlem. Lafargue lasted for almost thirteen years, providing the underserved black Harlemites with what might be later termed community mental health care. This article explores what the clinic meant to the African Americans who created, supported, and made use of its community-based services. While white humanitarianism often played a large role in creating such institutions, this clinic would not have existed without the help and support of both Harlem's black left and the increasingly activist African American church of the "long civil rights era." Not only did St. Philip's Church provide a physical home for the clinic, it also helped to integrate it into black Harlem, creating a patient community. The article concludes with a lengthy examination of these patients' clinical experiences. Relying upon patient case files, the article provides a unique snapshot of the psychologization of postwar American culture. Not only does the author detail the ways in which the largely working class patient community used this facility clinic, he also explores how the patients engaged with modern psychodynamic concepts in forming their own complex understandings of selfhood and mental health.