Excerpt from "'All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother': Psychoanalysis and Race" by Hortense J. Spillers:

Among all the things you could be by now if Sigmund Freud's wife were your mother is someone who understands the dozens, the intricate verboseness of America's inner city. The big mouth brag, as much a sort of art form as a strategy of insult, the dozens takes the assaulted home to the backbone by "talking about" his mama and daddy. It is a choice weapon of defense and always changes the topic; bloodless, because it is all wounding words and outrageous combinations of imagery, and democratic, because anyone can play and be played, it outsmarts the Uzi -- not that it is pleasant for all that -- by re-siting (and "reciting"?) the stress. The game of living, after all, is played between the ears, up in the head. Instead of dispatching a body, one straightens its posture, instead of offering up a body, one sends his word. It is the realm of the ludic and the ludicrous that the late jazz bassist Charlie Mingus was playing around in when he concocted, as if on the spot, the title of the melody from which the title of this essay is borrowed. Responding to his own question -- "What does it mean?" -- that he poses to himself on the recording, he follows along the lines of his own cryptic signature, "Nothing. It means nothing." And what he proceeds to perform on the cut is certainly no thing we know. But that really is the point -- to extend the realm of possibility for what might be known, and, not unlike the dozens, we will not easily decide if it is fun.

We traditionally understand the psychoanalytic in a pathological register, and there must be a very real question as to whether or not it remains psychoanalysis without its principal features -- a "third ear," something like the "fourth wall," or the speech that unfolds in the pristinely silent arena of two star witnesses -- a patient and he or she "who is supposed to know." The scene of assumptions is completed in the privileged relations of client and doctor in the atmosphere of the confessional. But my interest in this ethical self-knowing wants to unhook the psychoanalytic hermeneutic from its rigorous curative framework and try to recover it in a free-floating realm of self-didactic possibility that might decentralize and disperse the knowing one. We might need help here, for sure, but the uncertainty of where we'd be headed virtually makes no guarantee of that. Out here, the only music they are playing is Mingus's or much like it, and I should think that it would take a good long time to learn to hear it well.

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