How the Therapist Can Journey Toward Being an Anti-Racist

 In order to challenge oppressive cultural norms and their implicit assumptions, we need to recognize that components of identity, such as race, are not essential and biological, but, instead, are socially constructed through history, language, culture and custom. Often the designating of differences is to make those in power more comfortable.

When we ‘other’ what is different as unworthy or dangerous on the basis of race - often without even being aware that we are being racist - we are engaging in racism. We too are diminished alongside the harm we cause the othered for we limit our omni-potentiated multiple selves and truncate our capacity for varied identifications, empathy and creativity. 

I wrote in a post on February 28, 2020 about  Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist (2019). I thought it might be interesting to consider how we might strive in our clinical practices to be ‘on the journey’ to anti-racist behavior. Our profession usually emphasizes internal factors such as defensive othering to bulwark our fragile selves; fear and its consequent hatred of difference to calm our anxieties about difference; operating in the Kleinian paranoid schizoid position instead of the depressive position; failure to reflect, in Bionian terms, to think; failure to maintain the tension required by Benjamin’s intersubjectivity. But no matter to which theoretical explanation we subscribe, we, as therapists, in order to behave as anti-racists, can, to name a few:

 

 - refuse to deny class differences with patients, and consider  the impact of ethnicity and culture in the clinical setting; 

- be “aware of both gender and racial difference and of the need to negotiate such differences rather than [to treat them] as fixed identities” (Kaplan,1993);  

-“acknowledge that our assumptions and beliefs … towards those who are culturally and racially different may well be over simplistic, judgemental and discriminatory” (Hawkes,1997)

We can 

-when working with any patient, keep in mind the damage to identity that racism engenders;

-think about the intergenerational transmission of trauma--from slavery; -think about how Adverse Childhood Experiences affect physical and mental health;

-not treat “race as a “content” whose symbolic meaning is already established (Leary, 1995);

-recognize that pathology is not only located within a mind but also has external origins in Society;  

-provide a thinking space, a transitional space, a third in which to deconstruct assumptions about so-called race; 

- be aware of the capacity for destruction and racist beliefs in each of us; 

- understand how binaries are used by us and by others;

- not let ‘neutrality’ mean turning a blind eye to difference; 

- reserve a % of our work hours to treat those of a different class, and at a reduced fee; 

- and serve as witness.(1)

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(1) Donnell Stern writes that witnessing--an important function of therapists-- provides “metaphors for the organization of meaning.. We need a witness if we are to grasp, know, and feel what we have experienced, especially trauma. Someone else must know what we have gone through, must be able to feel it with us.”  Evans writes “Sometimes the witness's function is to break the dissociative spell and free up unformulated experience. ...we give voice in the private domain that which one day will be discourse in the public space whereas issues previously out of awareness or in denial can be confronted by the body politic as a whole and serve to inform and enlighten legislatures.” 

Hawkes, B. (1997). Race, Culture and Counselling by Colin Lago in collaboration with Joyce Thompson. Published by Open 

      University Press, Buckingham, Philadelphia 1996 British Journal of Psychotherapy, 13(3):433-435

Kaplan, E.A. (1993). The Couch Affair: Gender and Race in Hollywood Transference. Am. Imago, 50(4):481-514.

Leary, K. (1995). “Interpreting in the Dark” Race and Ethnicity in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. Psychoanal. Psychol., 

      12(1):127-140.

Colonization and Racialization

Psychology has made much of racism as a defensive mechanism --a projection--of, for example, asserting superiority to manage anxiety about Difference. Kleinians would say that we see the other as only part object when operating from this paranoid schizoid position. So called race is not simply about difference; historically it is also about power (Foster 2014) and about “the colonial attitude of assumed Western superiority.”  [I recommend Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste , and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, to learn more about “the effects of colonization on the behavior, social systems, and subjectivity of both colonialists and colonized.”]  

It is important to remember that race and ethnicity represent amalgams of real social consequences as well as fantasy (Leary, 1995). Racism appears as internal - hatred of difference - but actually reflects internalization of external racialization rationalized and justified on biological, religious and psychological grounds (Davis 2007). Racism is a socially sanctioned form of hatred; death by cop a permissible persecution; projection not only exploits Difference, but creates it. (Evans,2004). 

Dorothy Holmes (2006) contends that “our culture's attitudes and practices regarding race and social class inevitably cause significant and lasting damage to the self for all who live in this culture.” Recall that Sullivan noted that self esteem does not come from the self but from accretion of myriad interactions with others. Society, with its socially sanctioned beliefs about race, with its policing -- whether by law enforcement, segregation, Jim Crow Laws, red-lining, voter suppression or multiple, daily microaggressions -- ‘colonizes’ the mind through the learning from a myriad of cultural cues that demonstrate that one is excluded and that one’s self is experienced as inferior, dangerous, etc. 

These negative attributions take their toll. Colonized in this way by Society’s projections, one begins to believe that one is inferior, and may, of course, lead to self loathing and dysphoria. The mind has been colonized not only by the projections from those who believe themselves to be white-- who see this injustice as normal and even natural-- but from experiences of being treated as inferior or dangerously other by institutions. This is one thing that is meant by the colonized, rather than a mentalized, mind.

Evans, P. (2004). Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialization: New Perspectives from Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis and 

        Sociology Farhad Dalal Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge 2002 251 pp. £17.99. J. Child Psychother., 30(3):376-378.

Foster, A. (2014). Thinking Space: Promoting Thinking about Race, Culture and Diversity in Psychotherapy and Beyond edited 

        by Frank Lowe. The Tavistock Clinic Series; series editor: Margot Waddell. Published by Karnac, London, 2014; 266 pp; 

        £26.99 paperback. Brit. J. Psychother., 30(4):547-550. 

Frosh, S. (2004). Aboriginal Populations in The Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis. By Celia Brickman. New York: 

       Columbia University PressPsychoanalytic Review, 91(3):457-460

Holmes, D.E. (2006). The Wrecking Effects of Race and Social Class on Self and Success. Psychoanal Q., 75(1):215-235.

Leary, K. (1995). “Interpreting in the Dark” Race and Ethnicity in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. Psychoanal. Psychol., 12(1): 

       127-140.

Race, Constructed and perspectival

It has been generally accepted in psychoanalytic circles that Race, like gender, is a socially constructed concept. It has been used politically to justify exclusion, marginalization, disenfranchisement, and worst: slavery. Race is used to legitimize the existing hierarchy of wealth, power and domination. (Evans, 2004) Race is an ideology. Evans writes “It is easier to exploit, torture and even exterminate people … [when] they are ‘othered’ [and] rendered less than fully human.”

Race has no genetic basis, and yet we live in a racialized society that is considered in terms of white and non-white, whereas, in the consulting room, remember these terms and meanings are to be negotiated between therapist and patient. Those who think of themselves as white also possess these categories. But race and ethnicity are not the sole domain of people of color. It is perspectival: It is not only the other who is other. 

The assumed dominant culture, ‘whiteness’ , is the assumed universalized subject (Kaplan, 1993), the default position; Whiteness goes without saying, and you may have noticed that therapists, when presenting cases, often only state race when it is other than the Euro-normative white subject. Whiteness assumes a homogeneity within race, marks clear delineations between races, and obscures and oppresses any contradictory subjects’ positions. (Layton, 1998).  The Euro-American culture is assumed normative, and stature and standard by which all others are contrasted. The Black Lives Matter movement seeks, among other things, recognition, and seeks redress of this black/white binary. 

Evans, P. (2004). Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialization: New Perspectives from Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis and Sociology Farhad Dalal Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge 2002 251 pp. £17.99. J. Child Psychother., 30(3):376-378.

Kaplan, E.A. (1993). The Couch Affair: Gender and Race in Hollywood Transference. Am. Imago, 50(4):481-514.

Layton, L. (1998). Beyond White and Other: Relationality and Narratives of Race in Feminist Discourse: S. S. Friedman. Signs. XXI, 1995. Pp. 1-49Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 67(2):348

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society on November 7, 2020 offered a panel on race where four panelists reviewed contemporary books. The panel: Decolonize Your Mind: Antiracist Literature, featured Aisha Abbasi, MD; Lycia Alexander-Guerra, MD; Linda Berkowitz, LMHC; and Carolyn Smith, LMHC. Aisha Abbasi reviewed Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. 

PBS Newshour, on Aug 5, 2020, spoke with Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the New York Times, and author of Caste, the Origins of our Discontents. Wilkerson sees us [U.S.] on the “cusp of an awakening, an awakening to a part of, much of, American history that many people may not have known. The goal of this work [Black Lives Matter] is to allow us to see again the structure that we have inherited, to be able to push forward,” -[doesn’t that also sound like the work of psychoanalysis?] - Wilkerson continues: “but most importantly, to recognize that we all have a stake in it and to recognize that it will take each and every one of us to make it the strongest house possible.” 

Caste, a hierarchy, is an infrastructure. Hidden like bones, it is larger than race, the foundation, the framework for how people interact with one another. Wilkerson: “I think of caste as the bones and race as the skin...Race has been used as the cue, as the signal, as the indicator of where an individual sits in a pre-existing hierarchy ...”