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.
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