Two accounts of the management of racial different in psychotherapy

Abstract

In this paper, the authors present material from their clinical work, in which racial difference impinges directly on the psychotherapeutic encounter. They examine the primitive origins of racism from a psychoanalytic view point and discuss their management of related issues within the framework of psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Part of a session from a psychotherapy group is described by Sue Davison, in which one member is excluded as part of a dramatisation entered into by all the group members for defensive purposes. The therapist, by calling attention to the painful reality which was banished from awareness, enabled the group members to recover their capacity to think, rather than re-enact the trauma.

The case study by Fakhry Davids describes work with a woman whose struggle in life is against a racist, intolerant mother. This mother is projected onto her black therapist, and a session is described in which the dynamics of this projection begin to be unravelled. Her therapist is experienced as an intolerant, oppressive mother to whom the patient's own hatred and intolerance has become attached, and the patient is enabled to take back some of these projections. The defences she uses illustrate a common way in which so-called “liberals” disown their hidden racism.