The Return to the Body is the key concept of the Black diaspora. When Black people reembrace the body, relish kinky hair and skin hues from brown to beige, toffee to obsidian, revel in it, squeeze from it deep pain and pleasure, a nuclear blast of energy is released that transports one to a psychedelic state. It fuels the forward motion into new Black consciousness, one that envisions the end of this cruel, racist nation and the start of a new one. Which is why, reading the Black Literary Canon, one can trace this powerful nostalgia. In the mountain of books by Black authors, activists, and leaders, the Return to the Body is a bright vein of Pan-African gold.
Thirty-six years before The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published, Black author Zora Neale Hurston published in 1928 an essay titled “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” in the journal The World Tomorrow. In it, again, the Black author writes a head-spinning story about music and joy and ancestor worship in language that evokes synesthesia. Hurston retells an experience at a jazz club:
“For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is the New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen—follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow, and my body is painted blue, My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something—give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat smoking calmly.”
READ: The “Psychedelic Renaissance” Is a Product of Late-Stage Capitalism
“Good music they have here,” he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.
Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored. (1032)
Again, the Return to the Body. Again, the recycled racial tropes of African primitivism that were standard white supremacy, but reversing them, Hurston exposed the buried body and released it. Malcolm called it “African instincts.” Hurston calls it “the jungle way.” Neither are accurate. It is Transference, where the prototype or image of a free African ancestor functions as the blank surface to project desire. The image of the preslavery African (even if a historical fiction) was a way to express rage at white supremacy and bypass internalized racism. When she writes, “My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something—give pain, give death to what, I do not know,” it’s clear from the line, “with a white person, my color comes,” Hurston is “slaughtering” her own white superego.
The Return to the Body through Collective Transference works in a series of identifiable stages and interlocking various elements. First is the heady thrill of submersion in the ocean of others, the ecstasy of being one drop in a flowing river of people. Snatching Sigmund Freud’s 1921 book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego from the shelf, I read that “in a group the individual is brought under conditions which allow him to throw off the repressions of his unconscious instincts” (666). Second, the body does in public what the patient’s speech does in therapy: it undergoes free association. It moves. It grooves. It reenacts. Desires repressed by the white superego rise to the surface and are pulled magnetically by the imago or prototype of a parental figure; at times it is the ancestors who are conjured, whether in symbols worn (cowrie shells, Boricua T-shirt), a leader’s presence (Rev. Al Sharpton, a Santería priestess), or ceremony (Middle Passage offering, BLM protests) or anniversary. Overwhelming the white superego by this Collective Transference is signaled by joyful euphoria, an intense psychedelic “oceanic” perspective of oneness, often followed by synesthesia and creativity. The Return to the Body heals us and rejuvenates Black consciousness. The “I” flows into the immense river of birth and death, cleansed of shame, fear, or pettiness by realizing it is a mere drop in an eternal force.
It is important to note that elements can be present but not combine into Collective Transference. In Hurston’s 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expressions” where she talks of Southern jook joints, she said, “Jook is the word for Negro pleasure house. It may mean a bawdy house. It may mean the house set apart on public works where men and women dance, drink and gamble” (1049). She described the barely held together shacks of the Black Belt, trash-filled yards where folks gulped down gut-wrenching moonshine. Yes, the drugs and drink and dancing are present. Missing is the link to the larger history, the Transference to the ancestors, and the healing of the people.
Closer to Collective Transference are the Vodou dances in the West Indies, where a priest or priestess pounds a drum as devotees are “possessed” by Shango, Ogun, or Yemeya. Entering a trance, the dancer is gripped like a rag doll by the immense power of a god. Limbs spasm as if by supernatural voltage. Missing is the political dimension that commits one to action in the here and now. Otherwise, it becomes religious escapism.
The Return to the Body that leads to a Collective Transference has been and remains a key dynamic of the Black diaspora. One sees it in the past. Native peoples and enslaved Africans scooped up the shards of cultures that survived European genocide and the Middle Passage. Old songs were sung in the master’s language. Old gods worshipped in secret. Old ways passed down in fables and myths.
It is odd to look through enslaver records and see how furiously people fought to feel. On plantations when the sun dipped and work ended, or at a funeral or Sundays at Congo Square in Louisiana, enslaved Black people shook off chains and then the very memory of chains. In John W. Blassingame’s 1972 book, The Slave Community, he cited a Southern white who described Black dancing: “Clapping hands was their music and distorting their frames into the most unnatural figures and emitting hideous noises . . . ” (39). One can see rage and trauma jetting from limbs like a fire hose.
I put the books back and see embedded in the whole library flasing scenes of Collective Transference. You see it in works from Fred-erick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1935 Black Reconstruction in America to Sapphire’s 1996 novel, Push. I could just close my eyes, pluck a book out, and with enough time, be sure that here it was again.
Here was the truth. Transference or the “actualization of unconscious wishes” is for the oppressed innately political. In modern therapy, in a clinic with a psychodynamic therapist trained in one of the Freudian branches, free association eases the superego. The pressurized memories and emotions surge to the surface and projected onto the therapist. When the patient is a Person of Color, not all of the material, but a lot, is connected to how much racism walled them off from themselves. A catalog of symptoms, projections, introjections, complexes, traumas, and Double-Consciousness are congealed like gooey Jell-O in the brain. A deep curing transformation takes place, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. Who knows that when a butterfly flaps its wings, it causes a hurricane to spin across the world?
Here was another truth. In the Black Literary Canon, Collective Transference does not occur in a therapist’s office. Black, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous people had little access to therapy. Even less to the psychedelic therapy that was briefly legal that W. V. Caldwell wrote about in his LSD Psychotherapy. Transference was not channeled through the Medical Model but through community; Transference rocked streets in both party or protest. Malcolm X and Hurston describing the joy of rediscovering their bodies at a club were minuscule portraits of a larger dynamic. When the lens is pulled back, what happened to them happens to millions who are an immense river of consciousness breaking through the dam to irrigate the body. It is a power that sweeps whole peoples in its currents. So far, in these two examples, we only glimpsed this titanic force as if peering through a peephole.
READ: Psychedelics Could Become Extractive Capitalism—Unless We Hold Stakeholders Accountable
After looking at the Black Literary Canon, we can already see the promise of psychedelic therapy is betrayed by the Medical Model. Yes, it will succeed in making it legal. Yes, a therapist will place a pill in your palm. The doctor’s office will be clean and comfy. You can lie on a bed or couch. Scented candles will perfume the room. A glowing crystal and music will create a relaxed vibe. Yes, you can dive deep into yourself, the pressure increases, and you will be tossed and thrown by memories and wrestle with versions of you, clawing like monsters in the dark. All of this is needed work. All of this cures.
Leaving the therapist’s office, you will have a small healing. One that fits in your hands. Outside in the world it must be protected, like holding a candle flame close so the wind doesn’t blow it out.
If that is the extent of psychedelic therapy, then the true meaning of Transference will be lost. What we experience, what we see, what we project on the therapists is a montage of archaic pain trapped inside us. If we look through it as if holding up a lens, our pain teaches us to see why others suffer. How it repeats across our separate lives because it is stamped into our bodies by the same systems as being trapped on a conveyor belt in a demonic factory where soft flesh is pulped and hammered by steel pins. Call it patriarchy. Call it capitalism. Call it white supremacy. Call it by its many names. Call it out.
From Black Psychedelic Revolution by Nicholas Powers, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2025 by Nicholas Powers. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books.
