Abstract
Shortly after the 1943 Detroit race riot, white men in analysis with the Viennese-American psychoanalyst Richard Sterba began to report dreams about beheading, hunting, and aborting black people. Sterba interpreted their dreams as symptomatic expressions of repressed fratricidal and patricidal wishes that animated the Jim Crow system of racial segregation and fueled antiblack violence. This paper reconsiders Sterba’s interpretations by tracking how the dreams’ metaphoric and metonymic constructions disrupt the cultural meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. Read in the broader political context of the 1940s, racism emerges as a volatile signifier for the impossibility of liberal democracy and the irreducibility of sexual difference.