- Hello.
My name is Yvette Esprey, and I'm wanting to speak today
about a subject that is particularly important to me
and has particular relevance for me both in my life
as a clinician and in my personal life.
That topic is the one of race,
and specifically the topic of race in psychotherapy.
I want to clarify at the outset that my slant
and my specific focus in this lecture
is going to be from a relational perspective,
looking particularly at the subjectivity
of the therapist and of the clinician.
I think that typically, certainly historically,
when people have spoken or written about race
in the clinical dyad or in psychotherapeutic contexts,
the focus has been on the racially-imbued material
or the racially-imbued dynamics
that the client brings to the space,
and I think that whilst that is of course
of absolute importance and relevance,
what does sometimes get missed
is the subjectivity of the clinician.
Certainly, if we are thinking about
an intersubjective space and relational space,
we cannot but look at the subjectivity of the clinician,
and that is really going to be
what I want to focus on in the next short while.
The topic of my lecture is Raising the Color Bar:
Thinking about Race in the Dyad
from a Relational Perspective.
I want to give just a little bit of context
to my particular interest in this area
and my particular experience,
because I do think that when it comes to
talking about race in the dyad,
there is often an implicit, if not overtly articulated,
question about whose voice is doing the speaking,
and there's the implicit question around whether or not
my voice is the right voice to be doing so.
I stand here as a white person, talking about race,
and do I in fact have license to do so?
I think that that is an ongoing question,
it's an ongoing debate that certainly I sit with
and I would ask you to sit with as well.
I am South African, and I work in clinical context
in Johannesburg, South Africa.
That, by implication, means that every day of my work
and every day of my life is steeped in some way
in racially-imbued history and context.
Coming to America, I have been struck by
some of the similarities between our contexts
in terms of the relevance of race.
In fact, I recently read a book
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called Americanah,
if you haven't read it, I highly recommend it,
where she really speaks with such clarity
and accuracy and intimacy about some of
the racial dynamics that she encountered here in America.
It's written in fictional form,
but I think it's largely autobiographical,
and I would really recommend it just in terms of offering
a particular kind of lens into the context
which immigrants experience when they come to this country.
I had my own experience of that,
coming to America a few years ago.
I was studying in the Smith College MSW program,
and coming from a context of apartheid
and of racial segregation that I do in South Africa,
coming into the Smith College context
was really the first time in my clinical experience
that I had the opportunity to openly speak about race,
to openly interrogate race in the dyad,
but also to openly interrogate
my own racial identity and my own racial history.
It was an enormously challenging experience.
It was enormously painful,
but it was also enormously hopeful for me,
and I took that experience and made a contract with myself
to return to South Africa and to in some way
continue that dialogue, not only within myself
but also within my professional context.
What has arisen from that is a reading group,
a study group which I facilitate.
We've been running now for three years,
and within that context,
it's a context of multiracial clinicians,
we talk not only about the clinical manifestations of race
but we also talk about the racial selves
that we take into our clinical contexts,
and the racial selves which we imbue
and which we live in within our professional contexts.
It has certainly been a journey
of extreme growth for all of us in the group,
and it has certainly broadened
my internal dialogue in a very, very profound way.
I'm positioning myself quite deliberately.
I'm positioning myself as a white woman
born into South Africa in the 1970s,
and I'm doing that with a purpose.
I strongly believe that we cannot speak about race
without speaking about context,
and that is different to other clinical factors.
If we're talking about mood disorders
or if we're talking about personality disorders,
or if we're talking about specific clinical issues,
we very, very seldom contextualize that particular issue
in terms of place and historical context, et cetera.
But when it comes to race, I firmly believe
that context is enormously important,
which means that the way that I speak about race
is going to be different to the way that you
speak about race or the way that you think about race,
and I want us to hold that tension throughout this lecture.
When I first came here, I sat in on a lecture
given by Neil Altman, who is really one of the current
contemporary thinkers around race in the dyad.
He described race in America, racism in America,
as the raw nerve of the country and he spoke about
the openness and the vulnerability of that raw nerve.
I was aware, in listening to him, and aware in speaking now,
how fragile a conversation, any conversation about race,
can be, because there's always
that possibility for misunderstanding or misconstrual
or inadvertent injuring, and so, once again,
I hold that in mind as I speak to you today.
Before I continue into the substance of the lecture,
I want to create a little bit of
a context for it in your own mind,
and in order to do so I'd like to ask you some questions,
and I ask you to give a moment or two
to reflecting on these questions.
The first question is this: when was the first time
you thought about your racial identity, your race?
When was the first time that you became aware of it?
Do you think about your race when you
enter into clinical or professional contexts?
Is it something that you hold in mind in a conscious way?
Do you think that race is a factor
to be held in mind in psychotherapy?
Do you think that race is something that
we should be always thinking about in psychotherapy?
Now, the way in which you reflect upon these questions
and the way in which you answer them
will inevitably be impacted on by a number of
your own personal characteristics,
by your own subjectivity, by your particular race,
your particular racial history and identity and context
in whatever country you may have been born
and whatever social context you may have grown up.
Your answers will be context-specific.
I'm guessing, and of course, again, this is something
that I'm extrapolating about and I might be wrong,
but I'm guessing that if you are a white person
it is entirely possible that your race has been something
you have not had to think about.
As one of my colleagues in my group said, a white colleague,
when we were talking about whiteness
and what it means to think about whiteness,
she said, "Thinking about my whiteness is like
"a fish trying to think about itself in water.
"It's impossible to do,
"to separate myself from my whiteness."
I would imagine that if you're a person of color,
that your response would be very different to that,
that in all likelihood being aware of your race
has been an intrinsic part of your life awareness
and an intrinsic part of your history.
Of course, thinking about these questions is relevant
as we go into the context of our clinical work.
The subjectivity which we take into our clinical contexts
is profound and powerful, and it is really only in the last
I'd say 25 years, 30 years in terms of relational thinking
that we are thinking increasingly
and considering more intently our own subjectivities
and the way in which we take that into the room.
The way that we speak about race,
the way that we think about race,
depends on where we come from.
I'm acutely aware that coming to this country
and speaking about race is far easier for me than it is
to do so at home, and that again is something that
I'm going to be holding in mind throughout this lecture.
I have one final question to ask before I continue.
How well do you think that you were trained
to hold race in mind during your clinical training?
How much of a focus was it?
Do you think that it was adequately covered?
Until recently, in many clinical programs, race has been
taught through the lens of good cultural practice,
or through the lens of cross-cultural sensitivity,
and there was a great deal that has been written about
how to work cross-culturally, or how to work cross-racially.
Whilst I think that many of these inputs
have been enormously important
and a lot of their thinking is highly relevant,
quite often the subjectivity
of the therapist has been overlooked.
However, if you look at the journal
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, it's a relationally-based journal,
and if you're not familiar with it
I encourage you to seek it out,
you will see that a great deal has been written in
the last 15 to 20 years from an experience-near perspective,
in other words from the perspective of the clinician,
and some of the foremost writers in that area
are people like Kimberlyn Leary, Melanie Suchet,
Neil Altman, Smith Hama, and reading their papers
and reading their incredibly honest portrayal
of their own experience in the room around race
and racial dynamics is profound and certainly
enormously informative and I would encourage you to read.
I want to think a little bit and to give some detail
about the relational lens that I bring to this lecture
and the way in which I think about race overridingly.
It is without a shadow of a doubt that if we
are analytically-oriented clinicians, which I am,
and if we think more psychodynamically about our work,
we have to, by imperative, move beyond
classical analytic theory in order to consider race.
A relational way of thinking and working psychoanalytically
has really paralleled a shift away
from that core initial classical assumption that
the psyche is solely governed by epigenetic forces.
In other words, if we think about
incredibly formative assumptions in analytic theory,
one of them is the belief that the psyche is driven
by particular forces and is driven by its own experiences
in the way that it is formed and relationality
really moves us beyond that in saying that
we need to look beyond the closed system of the psyche
and to consider the impact of the environment around it,
and object relations obviously did that, to an extent,
but I think that relational psychoanalytic thinking
takes it one step further.
It extends that influence beyond the enclave
of the domestic environment into
the broader social and historical context.
The emphasis in relationality is on the social,
and one of its premises is that class and race
are foregrounded in the way in which
we present ourselves in clinical context,
both ourselves as clinicians and for our clients.
Class and race, therefore, and all other aspects
of subjectivity and identity, become enacted
in the transference-countertransference dynamic.
Now, if we just think about the shift that that proposes
away from the original notion of therapeutic neutrality,
how as therapists we can no longer pretend
or even hope for a sense of neutrality
in our subjectivity when we are in the room,
we resoundingly bring ourselves
to the space and to the dynamic.
Lynne Layton, who is one of the current writers
in the relational sphere, describes this
as the politicization of the psyche,
and she suggests that the psyche is very,
very strongly molded and influenced
by political, social and cultural factors.
Of course this is an ongoing debate
and somewhat of a controversy in the analytic arena,
where more classical thinkers will say that
that falls into the realm of social psychology
and in fact it's not analytic at all,
whereas psychoanalytic relationalists really argue,
and I think quite compellingly,
that the external environment has a very, very direct
and shaping impact on the psyche, and we carry that
through our unconscious life, throughout life.
This is a recognition that our internal world
are crucially impacted on by the social and cultural
and political systems in which we are reared.
I want to say that again:
it's a recognition that our internal world
are crucially impacted on by the social, cultural
and political systems in which we are reared.
I want you to, for the moment,
to think about what that means for you.
If I think about what it means for myself,
I was born at the height of apartheid in South Africa,
which means that I was born into
a political and a social system
which legitimately advocated for racially-based segregation.
It legitimately advocated for a division between
the superior and the inferior based on skin color.
That's the context into which I was born.
That is the environment which will have been
pressing against my development,
and I have to own and acknowledge that that will have had
an impact on the growth of my psyche and my internal world.
And so I want you, as we go through this lecture
and in any thinking that you might have afterwards,
to think about where you come from,
the context in which you are reared
and how that might impact on your internal scaffolding.
Another core relational theme is that
of social constructionism and social recognition.
Social regulation, sorry.
If we consider this in the context
of our particular paradigm, then we need to
recognize the history of psychoanalytic thinking,
and we need to recognize that psychoanalysis developed
within a particular cultural and political hegemony,
where aspects of identity such as gender, race, class,
sexual orientation were assigned certain valances,
and we need to be able to reflect
on that hegemonic history within our own paradigm
and to interrogate it quite powerfully.
And so, if I summarize that, if we come from
a relational perspective, the social environment,
what is considered to be socially normative
in a particular context have the potential to contaminate
and to shape the shade therapeutic space.
I bring my subjectivity into the dyad
and the client brings her subjectivity into the dyad,
and those two come together to create a particular context,
which I suggest very strongly that we need to
interrogate with intent and with curiosity.
Part of what enters into the clinical dyad along with us
is what we refer to as normative unconscious processes,
and I am going to go into that a little bit.
I want to define normative unconscious processes
a little bit later on.
But there is something powerfully unconscious that happens,
so whilst we might think that we are
aware of what racially-imbued material
and what racially-imbued dynamics we take in,
or what we might think is going on in the room,
there is also a powerfully unconscious
component to it which I'd like to emphasize.
I come into this lecture holding a particular assumption,
and that assumption is the following: race is in the dyad.
Race is in the room.
There's no condition to that; it just is.
It doesn't matter whether this is
a same race dyad or a cross-race dyad,
race is always present in some form or other.
Certainly sometimes it's far more overt,
and at other times far more tacit,
but it is always at play in terms of how it shapes
our identity and how it shapes our being in the world.
In the last two decades of writing about race,
this has really been strongly emphasized by current writers,
and what has been affected on historically
is that race for much of the last century
was ignored in analytic writing.
It was considered to be at times
an extraneous external factor;
or, if brought into the room, it was labeled as resistance;
or it was avoided or denied completely.
It's only with the more relational trend
that this writing has begun to emerge.
Race has so many parts to play within the dyad,
and I think that part of our challenge
as clinicians is to really sit with all of
the possibilities of what race might mean.
Sometimes, it is race itself that is the issue.
My race and your race,
and my race and your race outside there in the world.
Sometimes race is a red herring;
it's a disguise for a deeper internal psychic dynamic
which is being cloaked in the guise of race,
but it is in fact about something different.
I had a particular client, and I don't want to
speak too much about clinical material
but I'll give a skeleton of this particular case,
who struggles with her race.
She is a young black woman
and she struggles with her blackness.
She believes that her sense of inferiority
and her low self esteem is directly linked
to the fact that she is a black woman.
Upon further interrogation and as we have peeled away
the layers, and there were many layers still to come,
we have slowly started to understand that blackness
is a metaphor for a deep-seated insecurity
which is related to her particular position
in her family hierarchy and in her sibling hierarchy.
Which in fact has nothing to do with race at all,
but because of the context in which she has been reared
and because of the particular emphasis placed on race,
it has become a very, very convenient receptacle
for all of her internal insecurities and anxieties.
Of course there's no formula to working out
what race might mean in a particular clinical context.
It is always something to be
teased out within the dyad itself.
But whatever place it has and whatever role it plays,
it is always present in some way.
Even in same race dyads, where it might not be something
that comes up directly in the material,
I certainly find, for example when I'm sitting
with a white client, that I am tacitly invited to collude
around certain ways of thinking about race.
That doesn't necessarily mean
that it's a negative racial connotation
or a racist connotation, but I'm aware,
if I fine tune into what is happening between us,
that there is this invitation to acknowledge our sameness
and how our sameness differentiates us
from other people outside of the room.
It is really only when we think consciously
and with intent about that kind of interaction
that that insight can surface.
Race is always in the dyad,
and deciphering what it means can really only happen
within that particular intersubjective space.
So race is in the dyad.
It is always present in the room in some form or other.
Yet, why do we struggle so much to confront it?
Why do we struggle so much to talk about it?
There is a powerful trend towards avoidance of thinking
and talking about race in psychotherapeutic contexts.
Kimberlyn Leary, who really is one of the foremost writers
within the relational realm, describes race as
one of the most vulnerable of social discourses.
She says that the most common
enactment around race is the relative silence
in both clinical and professional contexts,
and I like her emphasis on both clinical and professional
because of course we can't separate our consulting room
from what happens within our own profession,
and there is a silence and there is
a difficulty in talking about race.
I certainly experience that in my own country,
and my experience is also mirrored in some of
the writing that I have read within the U.S. context.
Loya wrote two articles in which she looked at
the racial attitudes of white social workers.
In the first one, she looked at
the color-blind attitudes of these social workers,
and then she looked at the racial attitudes
of these white social workers.
She concluded something I find
very, very telling and very, very interesting,
and this is research that's been done in the last few years.
She found that even though cultural competency
and cultural sensitivity are prerequisites
in clinical social work training,
many white social workers still feel extremely uncomfortable
when working with cross-culturally diverse populations.
In fact, the discomfort is such that if they were
given a choice not to, they would choose that.
She also found that white social workers
tend to express a color blind stance.
In other words, saying that race is not important.
In fact, race is not relevant,
and often quoting the current
state of affairs in the country and saying
that race is no longer the issue that it used to be.
We no longer have to think about it in the same kind of way.
This notion of color blindness is one
that is universally understood as being
some kind of a form of racism, in fact,
where an avoidance or a denial of race,
an avoidance and a denial of the place
of race in society is a form of racism.
Just talking about that reminds me
of an experience that I had, once again at Smith College,
one summer where I became aware of the t-shirt
that many of the students walk around campus wearing.
It's a t-shirt that expresses the antiracism stance
of the college, and it says on the t-shirt, "I see color."
It puts out in a very, very clear
and unambiguous way that to avoid color,
to avoid the reality of race in our society is being blind,
and that's something to consider,
and I ask you to consider it in terms of your own work
and your own experience clinically.
Why else might we be avoiding
this incredibly prevalent issue?
I think that there is a denial of prejudice.
I think that to acknowledge
any kind of racially-based prejudice
or any kind of racially-based thinking is shameful.
I think there is such an imperative to disavow racism
that that is easily and readily done
even if it doesn't necessarily mirror
what is happening at a deeper, internal level.
Derek Hook warns us against the dangers of disavowal.
He says that there is an interesting
and a very common paradox where racism is denied,
but then it is coupled with racist behavior.
Of course, when I talk about racist behavior,
I'm not talking about overt racism
in the kind of blatant, gross way.
I'm talking about subtle forms of racism.
I'm talking about microaggressions.
I'm talking about the way in which race becomes
part of our thinking and being without us realizing it.
But because we have disavowed it,
because I have said, "I'm not a racist.
"I don't hold any prejudices.
"I don't discriminate in any way,"
I have let myself of the hook in terms of acknowledging
and taking onboard some of my own racially-based behavior.
When colleagues look at me in confusion when I say this
to them, I give the following example, which is next.
If you are asked to refer a client to a therapist,
how easily would you refer
a person of color to a white therapist?
I'm guessing that that might happen quite easily.
Certainly in my context it would.
How would it be to refer a white person
to a person of color for therapy?
I'm guessing that that might involve some thinking.
Once again, certainly in my context,
it is something that clinicians grapple with.
The stock response when I asked some of my white colleagues
whether they would do this, is to say,
"Well, I would prefer to refer a white person to
"a white therapist because there's more cultural resonance."
My response is, "Well then, why would it be okay
"for a person of color to go to a white therapist
"if we are seeking cultural resonance?"
It's that kind of clinical or professional behavior
that we need to begin to think about and interrogate,
and I don't suggest a knee jerk reaction to it
in terms of suddenly doing things differently.
I'm asking for a thoughtfulness and a self reflection
and to start to really distill some of the thinking
and some of the impulses which shape
our professional and clinical conduct.
Disavowing racism, disavowing prejudice
also means that it becomes invisible.
This might be considered as what
Stein describes as an ignorance contract.
I really like that term.
She suggests that in society, all of society
tacitly engages in a contract around ignorance.
In other words, we might all agree
or choose to agree that we no longer need
to think about race in a particular way.
We might all agree or choose to agree
that race is no longer the issue that it used to be and,
in so doing, it means that we don't have to interrogate it.
Certainly coming from my country,
that's a construct that resonates for me
both amongst black people and amongst white people
where we are all very happy to agree
that we are a rainbow nation and that we have
achieved integration through democracy,
but if we begin to really filter what's happening
at the societal level, it's very, very quick
to see that that is not the case.
What this ignorance contract does
is it maintains entrenched power dynamics in society,
and I would argue that it maintains those power dynamics
within our profession as well,
and that is something to really ponder on.
What in ourselves are we avoiding?
What in ourselves is so hard to face up to?
When thinking about this question,
what comes to mind is Judith Herman's
seminal text on trauma, trauma and recovery.
It really is one of the most insightful,
if not the most insightful, book on trauma
I think that has been written.
She starts off the book by talking a little bit about
the history of trauma in the world and mostly in America.
She describes the history of trauma as
one of episodic amnesia and what she says
is that every time there was a war which brought shellshock
or battle fatigue or gross stress reactions
or posttraumatic stress disorder,
however you might think about it,
whenever those issues were brought to the fore
through a war, they were grappled with
and thought about by clinicians of the day.
In 1918, Freud wrote his Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
highlighting the posttraumatic stress disorder
of World War I soldiers.
In the 1940s, much was written about the shellshock
and the battle fatigue of World War II soldiers.
Then there was the Korean War.
But between these wars, very little was written about
and very little was spoken about in relation to trauma.
It was really only with the Vietnam War where there was
a coming home of a massive population
of profoundly traumatized veterans
that it became impossible not to consider
posttraumatic stress disorder as a legitimate illness
and something to be incorporated
in our thinking at a clinical level.
Herman says that the reason for this episodic amnesia
is because facing trauma, working with trauma
and dealing with trauma means that we have to
face the human potential for destructiveness
and the human potential for evil
and we have to face the damage that
as human beings we can do to one another.
I would argue that part of our avoidance
in clinical context around looking at race is similar.
Looking at race means having to look at ourselves.
We risk implicating ourselves in a societal trauma,
which is part of the societal weave in which we live
and that is painful and it's hard and it's easier not to do,
but it is imperative; it is necessary.
Looking at race means having
to acknowledge what may appear in the room
and this is extremely uncomfortable.
It's inconvenient and it's very distressing.
If I reflect honestly back on my years of clinical practice,
I am readily able to recall particular interactions
and particular cases where I have
turned away from the very powerfully
racially-imbued dynamics in the room.
If I think about why I did that,
if I think about what was happening for me in the room
at the time and in that particular relationship,
I'm acutely aware of the discomfort that I felt.
In particular, my discomfort around my whiteness
and my position within my societal context.
I recall the physiological discomfort, the racing heart,
the internal anxiety which accompanied any thinking
that I might introduce around that material, and so I recall
how much easier it was to turn away from that.
I want to talk a little bit later on
about how to challenge ourselves
in those kinds of experiences and contexts.
Moss suggests that in order to really grapple with issues
of race and racism, prejudice and discrimination,
we must take ourselves as object of scrutiny.
We must examine our own prejudiced selves.
I think that one of the things that I have found is that
if we can do that without sinking into shame or into guilt,
it can be enormously constructive.
In other words, I do worry at times
that the kind of obsequious guilt,
and that is a direct quote from Lousada,
the kind of obsequious guilt that white clinicians
and white people feel clouds the issue that
in a way we need to not use guilt as a buffer.
We need to somehow be able to interrogate ourselves
far more clearly and far more visibly
in terms of our own prejudiced selves.
This means looking at our deep-seated
and often unconscious prejudice.
If we think about unconscious prejudice,
what do I mean by that?
Am I suggesting that we all hold unconscious prejudice?
Am I suggesting that in fact there may be
developmental origins of prejudice?
I want to look a little bit
at some of the current thinking around that.
There is strong agreement amongst developmental writers
that all of us hold within us a human imperative to other,
to separate self from other along
various lines of identity, of characteristic.
People like Peter Fonagy, Gil Straker, Neil Altman
suggest that prejudice is ubiquitous.
Prejudice based on a number of factors is ubiquitous
and is at work in all of our interactions.
They suggest that the tendency to discriminate
is an evolutionary and a psychic compulsion
which is shaped in very, very early development.
In fact, we can go as far back as Freud.
In fact, I'm sure that there are many people
who came before Freud, but yeah.
Freud for us, certainly for me, is a seminal writer
and he described the concept of the group ideal
and he described the notion of stereotyping
and categorization as a universal
and pervasive human tendency with the objective
of preserving the group to which one belongs.
We really do go back to quite primitive functioning
in this aspect, where in order to survive,
in order to preserve our integrity as a homogenous group,
we have this tendency to stereotype into other groups
which are dissimilar to our own.
Freud suggested that we classify and respond
to ourselves and others along lines forged by identity.
These lines are characterized in terms of race,
gender, sexual orientation, for example,
and we do this mostly unconsciously.
Smith also suggests that there is a universality
in the need to create boundaries between self and other
both internally and externally, and says the following,
and this is a direct quote from Smith,
"It is around difference and otherness,
"be it real or imagined, that our earliest
"and most primitive defenses gather
"to split our objects into them and us,
"the feared and the safe, the loved and the hated,
"the privileged and the excluded,
"the envied and the denigrated, the different."
This notion of splitting is a strongly Kleinian notion,
and Fakhry Davids, who is a South African-born
British psychoanalyst, has also written about
the imperative that we have to split.
He suggests that we have an instinctive
and an evolutionary urge to other
in order to manage intolerable anxiety.
He goes one step further to say that this means
that the relationship between self and racial other
exists universally as an aspect of the internal world.
He says quite controversially that within our internal world
there is a stable, non-pathological racist organization.
In other words, he suggests that within our internal worlds
there is a racially-based structure, which is ever ready
to hold the intolerable anxiety that comes from
having to deal with a threat of the racially-based other.
I think that there are obviously
strong criticisms to Davids' particular theory.
I know that in our degree that there are many people
who suggest that to name this as a specifically
racially-based structure is perhaps a little too specific,
but certainly there would be agreement
that within ourselves we have structures
that allow for the splitting off of otherness,
whatever form that may take,
whether it is about race or class or gender
or sexual orientation or age or whatever it might be,
that internally we have structures that will
readily hold that, and that that is not pathological.
In other words, it is universal for each one of us.
Davids suggests that there is a developmental process
which leads to this creation of
a specifically racist organization
which is ever ready to be mobilized.
What he's suggesting there is that perhaps most of the time,
as we make our way through life,
we can behave in racially impartial ways.
We can behave in socially normative and civilized ways
when it comes to managing self and other,
but when faced with a threat,
when faced with any kind of tension around self and other,
that racially-based organization
is going to rear its head and come to the fore.
In some ways this makes sense to me,
certainly in terms of my work in trauma,
and perhaps you've had some experience of this for yourself,
that when an interpersonal trauma has occurred,
a criminal trauma has occurred, such as,
we'll give an example, a hijacking,
which has been violent and aggressive
and incredibly intrusive and powerful,
it is very, very easy for the client to resort
to racist explanations for the behavior of the perpetrator.
I've had a number of experiences where
a client might say to me, "I'm really not racist, but ..."
Or, "I'm surprised by my racially-based
"response to this experience,"
or, "I'm taken aback by how racist I feel.
"This is not who I thought I was."
What's happened in that experience is that really,
driven to the bare bones of trying to
survive an interpersonal attack,
the psyche has mobilized an internal structure which then
becomes the recipient for this othering on a racial basis.
Davids suggests that there is this internal structure which,
because we need it as a hold all
for anxiety around the other,
is stubborn and resilient and enormously hard to counter.
It's enormously hard to grasp in order to counter.
Moving a little bit away from Davids
and his Kleinian explanation,
I want to move on to Peter Fonagy,
who is an attachment theorist,
and he offers what I find to be certainly
a very compelling explanation for the ubiquity of prejudice.
He suggests that prejudice is part of the human condition
and that our tendency to other is an adaptive one.
He suggests that what he called normal prejudice
arises from early attachment to contexts,
and he differentiates this from
more malignant egosyntonic prejudice,
which is more in the psychopathic spectrum
and I'm not talking about that.
I'm just talking about the ordinary person, you and me.
I'm talking about what Fonagy describes as normal prejudice,
which might seem contradictory, but there we are.
He grounds his theory of prejudice within
the context of secure versus insecure attachment.
He suggests that ordinary prejudice arises from
the early experiences which happen
outside of the immediate attachment environment,
which then activate an insecure model.
He's saying that in context where caregivers are
mostly able to provide a secure attachment environment,
when they step out of that immediate
domestic milieu into the external context,
they may encounter interpersonal situations
which create anxiety within the caregiver.
This anxiety is then communicated to the receptive infant,
creating an insecure working model,
which is directly linked to that particular
interpersonal situation in the environment.
Now, if I step back, and I would ask you to do the same,
and I consider the kind of external context
into which I was born, and if I consider that
I may well have grown up within a context
of secure attachment within the environs of my home,
but that when myself and my parents
stepped out of that environment,
we stepped into a world where othering
was part of the social fabric of life,
where encountering the racially based other
would have been an experience of anxiety,
perhaps even an experience of threat,
and how through the unconscious communications
from my parents I must surely
have internalized some of that anxiety.
That's what Fonagy is saying, that moving from
the immediate context into the external environment,
the attachment system becomes the messenger
for what is happening in that societal context.
By nature, part of what happens within
that societal context is going to be about othering
and that is going to be internalized.
That means that early identifications begin to
be organized around us and them, along lines of othering.
These early identifications are used to regulate
an internal equilibrium in order to restore a secure base.
In other words, using splitting,
us and them, threatening, non-threatening,
splitting then becomes a way of restoring equilibrium
and that becomes entrenched in the unconscious.
In order to heighten the sense of identification
with a particular group, characteristics belonging
to the self tends to be homogenized
and characteristics belonging to the other,
which are different to the self, become exaggerated.
What happens then is that rather than seeing
the resonance of a likeness between ourselves
and the racially-based other, we see only the differences,
and those differences are highlighted in order to
maintain some sense of internal security.
One of the consequences of this is that the racial other
becomes seen as wholly different and as alien.
Once again, coming from the context of apartheid,
where the population of the country
was kept apart, it was so easy.
It was such an invitation for black people
and for white people to build assumptions about each other
that were not based on any kind
of real interaction between the two,
but based on a need to keep the separateness
in order to minimize the threat of the other.
For black people, whiteness was frightening
and anxiety-provoking, and for white people blackness
was frightening and anxiety-provoking,
and so internal representations and identifications
became grouped along those lines of identity.
I wonder in your context whether
you are able to relate to that at all.
Fonagy says that prejudice then is a function
of normal neuro-cognitive social functioning,
and this is strengthened during early attachment systems.
It's quite challenging to have to consider this.
It's quite challenging to have to think about
what this means in terms of our own
internally constructed identification systems.
Fonagy suggests that a consequence
of these early identifications is that
attachments throughout life then become
more easily created amongst individuals
who share our characteristics of identity,
and of course we see this all of the time
that for many people it is far easier to gravitate towards
people who seem obviously like ourselves
rather than to actively seek out the company of those
who are different to us along so many lines.
In fact, there are some neuro-cognitive studies
that show that it is easier to mentalize
when in the company of those similar to us
than when in the company of those who are different.
I want to just unpack that a little bit.
Mentalization is the capacity to attribute mental phenomena
such as intentions and desires and beliefs
about the internal worlds of others.
Mentalization is about being able to make sense
of the complexity of the internal world of the other.
These neuro-cognitive studies suggest that
being able to mentalize across sameness is quite easy.
Being able to mentalize across
difference becomes more difficult.
What we tend to do, and there was a particular study
which looked at different ethnicities,
what we tend to do unconsciously
when faced with difference is to mechanize,
which means to resort to previously held stereotypes,
rather than to mentalize.
I'm reminded here of a particular vignette,
a clinical vignette of mine, where a white male client
was talking about a recent trip that he had taken overseas.
He was talking about being in Europe
and saying that he had been going up an escalator somewhere
and he had bumped into a South African.
He had recognized the accent.
He said that as soon as he saw this person,
in the first few moments of speaking to them,
he was able to guess where they came from,
what school they might have gone to,
what their particular socioeconomic class was,
and he was able to extrapolate a whole lot
of fairly accurate things about them
and about their internal worlds.
Then he paused and he said to me,
"I can do that when I run into South Africans,
"but only white South Africans.
"If I run into a black person, I'm lost."
I felt that that was such a clear expression of how,
when faced with difference, it's possible to feel blind,
and then what do we do in order to fill the gaps?
We resort to mechanization and we resort
to attributional behavior based on physical descriptors
rather than anything that we might
actually know about this person.
Normal prejudice then involves
the temporary relinquishing of mentalization.
Once again, these are really
uncomfortable thoughts to have to consider,
to have to consider our inherent prejudice,
but the discomfort of that thought I would hope
would be a motivation to consciously look
at the implications of that and to work at it.
Part of the discomfort of the thought is having to
hold in mind how the way in which we see ourselves
as unprejudiced beings might be different
to the way in which we actually are.
An example of this came up in an article
that I read recently written by a man
who is part of the Human Rights Commission
and he was describing a lecture that he had given
to a group of graduate students about human rights.
He said it was very, very interesting
because he was asking about what the class
thought about general human rights,
basic human rights and basic human equality
based on race, class, sexual orientation, et cetera.
Unanimously, this group of graduate students said
that those should be constitutionally held rights,
that there should be equality for all,
that there should be absolutely no discrimination
based on any line of identity.
He then posed them a question.
He said, "What do you think and what do you feel
"about two gay men adopting a child?"
He said that the responses were very telling,
that a number of people in the class were able to
acknowledge that they felt discomfort with that,
that they thought that it wouldn't be normative,
that they felt that a child should
be raised by a mother and father,
that there was something more important
about heteronormativity when raising a child.
He goes on to say how interesting it was
to see the discrepancy between the views
that this class say that they held versus
the views that they actually held
when asked to contemplate a real situation.
I think that that is a challenge that we all have,
and that's for many of us, and I would assume that
if you are listening to this lecture you would
fall into this category that we need to believe
that we are able to hold in mind difference
in an unprejudiced way and to consider that that might
not be a core belief for us is extremely challenging.
The implications of this within the clinical sphere
are absolutely pivotal and that is a point
that I would like to emphasize in this lecture.
The potential for the increase of mentalization,
the potential for bringing into the room
our own prejudiced subjectivity
is enormously significant for the clinical space,
particularly when there are clear differences of identity
such as race within the clinical dyad.
Working across difference is hard work
and that is something that needs to be acknowledged.
Having considered some of the developmental foundations
or possibilities around the developmental prejudice,
I'd like to branch off just a little bit to suggest
that we may well also need to consider
a neurobiological substrate to prejudice.
This is something that I have written about
and something that I'm interested in.
If we consider the way in which early attachments
impact on brain functioning, then we have to also consider
the possibility that the neurobiology of the brain can also
hold messages that are related to prejudice and othering.
If we consider that in the first few months of life
it is the right brain which develops,
and within this right brain implicit templates
around the workings of the interpersonal
and the social world begin to be laid down,
and so these templates or these blueprints
become the map, as it were, for the way in which
the social world is understood and negotiated.
If we think about the unconscious messages
and communications given to us by our caregivers,
and if we think about how these may begin to describe
the internal working models which are
part of the right brain functioning,
then we can consider that messages
around prejudice and around othering
become part of our neurobiological substrate.
Bonnie Badenoch writes about the way in which
social relationships become part of that substrate.
She says that part of what develops in early attachment
is a sense of the way things are in the social world.
The way things are is what we learn to just assume
and just accept about the world of interpersonal
and social relating and we comport ourselves
along those lines of the way things are as we grow up.
It's only if we foreground with conscious intent
what these templates might be that we are
then able to look at them and to consider them
more consciously and more thoughtfully.
I have looked at some of the
developmental origins of prejudice.
I've considered why it might be incredibly difficult
to look at this within ourselves
and to look at this within clinical contexts.
Now I want to move on to looking a little bit
at what this means for the clinical space.
Most obviously it means that as clinicians we take into
our clinical dyads and also into our professional context
our own deeply internalized prejudice.
It means that we take with us our subjective histories
and our identities, which then meld
with those of the client with whom we are sitting.
It means that unless we consciously begin to
work on interrogating our rationalized selves,
we run the risk of enactment within the clinical setting.
What comprises the subjectivity
which accompanies us into the room?
I want to come back to Lynne Layton's
notion of the normative unconscious.
She describes the normative unconscious as
the internalization of societal norms which get laid down
within the relational enclaves of love and hate.
Within our early relational contexts,
we begin to internalize societal norms.
The normative unconscious is that aspect of the unconscious
which is compelled to repeat the behaviors
and the affect which we enforce to stressing social norms
specifically around the aspects of identity.
These norms tend to be organized around
aspects of identity and are very context-specific.
Once again, I'm foregrounding the importance of context.
They are derived from prevailing
social hierarchies and positions of power
and they are split along lines of identity.
Identities, gender, race, class, sexual orientation
becomes split into good, bad, pure, impure.
These splits become internalized
and create a prevailing normative unconscious.
What I want to emphasize is that these splits
are internalized by all within that societal matrix.
Let's say, for example, there is a societal split
around race where whiteness is seen as superior
and color is seen as inferior.
That societal split and that societal norm
becomes internalized, not only in white people
but also in people of color.
This then has the potential to lead to experiences
such as the racial melancholia,
which is described so poignantly by Eng and Han.
The tendency by people of color to deny or to disavow
their particular racial identity in order to be able to
assimilate themselves into what might be
considered by them to be the ideal of whiteness.
In talking about that, it becomes possible to see
the ramifications of this deep-seated
normative unconscious and just how it might
impact on the development of individual identity.
These normative unconscious processes then potentially
manifest themselves through the process of
interpellation or interpolation, pronounced differently.
Interpellation is the mechanism through which
ideology takes hold of the individual.
It is the mechanism through which
the individual is held by the state.
As a response, the individual is invited to behave
and to espouse the aspects of that identity
which are given to them by the state.
In other words, thinking about race,
thinking about race within my own South African context,
growing up as a black person during apartheid
meant internalizing a sense of otherness,
a sense of inferiority in relation to whiteness.
The hailing of this state of identity
meant that for a black person
the interpellation would be around inferiority.
Behavior then would begin to
reinforce that sense of inferiority.
Glenys Lobban, who's a relational psychoanalyst
working out of New York, wrote a very moving article
about her own experience of interpellation.
She grew up in South Africa and moved to the United States
as a young adult and has been living
and practicing in the United States for many decades.
She was a child of a white family
and chose to remove herself from
the apartheid system by leaving the country.
A few years ago, at a family picnic back in South Africa,
she discovered through casual conversation
that her grandmother, her mother's mother,
was a woman of mixed race.
This was a family secret which
hadn't been openly spoken about
and it was the first time that she heard about it.
What this meant is that Lobban herself would have been
characterized as biracial or mixed race.
She then went to have her DNA assessed and in fact
did discover that she was of mixed race ancestry,
which of course was completely different to the way
in which she had identified up until that point.
She then describes the process that she went through
after discovering this news.
She describes how she suddenly found herself
behaving differently in her
social contexts here in the United States,
how she started to feel self conscious in a new kind of way.
When she was ignored or rebuffed by people in
particular contexts, she began to wonder whether it was
because they could see that she was of mixed race.
She became startled by how she had interpolated
what being of mixed race meant at a societal level
or perhaps even means at a societal level.
She writes about how unconscious
that process of interpellation is,
which is something else to consider in our clinical work.
What have we interpolated as a white person?
What have I taken into myself
and how do I live that out in my behavior?
As a woman, what have I interpolated?
What are the ways in which we enact and behave
the societal identities which are bestowed upon us?
So aspects of interpellation are very,
very important to consider in terms of our work.
Something else to hold in mind
is what Curry in 1964 described as the pre-transference.
Curry, a black analyst, wrote about
his clinical work with a white patient.
He spoke about the pre-transference
that this white patient held about him, the analyst,
before he even came into the room.
He describes the pre-transference as being those thoughts
and feelings about race which we take
into the room before we have even met the client,
before we have even met the therapist.
That means that we are unconsciously taking into the room
a whole set of assumptions which we've not yet tested
or which are not actually based on anything
about that particular person.
Again, this is all deeply unconscious.
Taking our subjectivities into the room in the guise
of the normative unconscious processes,
in the guise of the pre-transference,
in the guise of our ubiquitous,
deeply internalized prejudice,
is going to impact on the clinical space.
I want to ask the question and continue now to consider
the therapeutic cost of doing this, but more importantly
the therapeutic cost of not actively interrogating this
within ourselves and within our work.
I suggest that one of the things that can happen
is a collapse of thinking, a collapse of
the capacity to think within the clinical realm.
When I talk about thinking,
I'm referring specifically to the writing of Wilfred Bion,
who introduced the theory of thinking to us.
He suggested that the development of thinking happens
in early infancy and it follows a particular trajectory.
I'm going to give a brief summary of that
for purposes of clarity because it's not necessarily
a theory that is a common or familiar one.
He suggested that in early infancy
the infant experiences all sorts of sensations,
raw sensations within their body.
These raw sensations cannot be articulated
in any way as affects or physiological needs.
They cannot be differentiated.
A sensation which signals hunger may well feel the same
as the sensation that signals anger or frustration,
but within the body of the infant
this cannot be articulated.
What happens then within the containment
of the early caregiver relationship is that that caregiver
helps the infant to metabolize those internal sensations
and to internalize them symbolically.
It is through the mind of the caregiver
that the infant begins to learn what these
raw sensations mean symbolically.
It is the conversion of these raw,
what Bion referred to as beta elements,
into more metabolized, more symbolic alpha elements.
Thinking is the pivotal link between feelings
as unknowable sensations and the creation of meaning.
What we do within our clinical contexts
is we provide a container for our clients.
Part of our job is to help our clients through metabolizing
the rawness of what they bring into the room
and allowing them to take that back into themselves
in a way that is symbolic and meaningful
and therefore bearable and manageable.
I suggest that when issues of race come into the room,
they have the potential to interact our capacity to think.
They have the potential to interact our capacity
to be a container for our client's material.
In that moment, there was a breakdown of thinking.
This is articulated in a number of articles
that have been written from the experience
near-perspective of clinicians who are grappling with race.
Many of these articles, they describe
moments of mindlessness,
moments of numb, overwhelming non-thinking.
Certainly, I can relate to that in terms of
my own experience and I can recall moments
of mindlessness where I'm unable to think,
I'm unable to make sense of what is happening in the room
and I can't find any context for that and I feel quite lost.
Straker refers to this experience
as the anti-analytic third.
If we think about the analytic third in Ogden's terms
as being that space of reverie in which
sense is made of the client's subjectivity
and our subjectivity and how they come together,
then we can understand that the anti-analytic third
is something that impedes that.
There's some truth on that.
It is a failure to think about and make sense
of overwhelming affect in the room.
Straker suggests that this anti-analytic third
rears its head and becomes dominant when previous
noxious social discourses intrude on the space.
Social discourses which are organized
around lines of identity, such as race,
gender and sexual orientation.
For me, when I'm sitting in a room in my clinician's garb
and something comes into the room that implicates
my racial history and identity and that of the client,
it is a noxious social discourse that comes in
from the outside and it comes in from the past.
It is our history and our currency,
and at that moment I lose my clinician's garb.
I become a white South African woman who is trying to
grapple with these internal sensations of my own,
let alone the internal sensations of my client.
The potential for a breakdown in thinking
is a very serious consequence to the intrusion
of racially-based subjectivity into the room.
Another therapeutic cost is a failure of skill and ethic.
There's a breakdown of thinking,
a potential breakdown of mentalization, of foregrounding,
of mechanization, a reduction to stereotyping.
In these moments there can be a real struggle
to find a resonance of a likeness
with this person with whom I'm sitting with.
This is of particular relevance
when sitting with a cross-racial client,
but equally it can happen in moments of sitting with
a same race client where I can't find
a resonance of likeness because there has been
too much of a rupture between us
and unless I can find a resonance of a likeness,
I cannot find empathy and so one of our
most taken for granted clinical skills
suddenly evaporates and cannot be found in the room.
A failure of skill.
A failure of ethic.
Stephen Frosh writes about the ethics
of working within a relational context.
He argues that taking race consciously
into account is an ethical imperative
for the relationally-orientated clinician.
He suggests that an ethical stance
includes acknowledgment of complicity
and the taking of responsibility for
our own capacity for aggression and destructiveness.
It means taking onboard our own identity
and all of the meanings that that identity has.
Within a clinical context and within
our professional context, it means taking into account
social and historical influences which impact on the dyad.
This ethical stance aligns itself also to social work values
where we are compelled to always hold in mind
the impact of the external environment on the space.
The therapeutic costs are severe
and they are significant enough to not be ignored.
The question is what do we do?
How do we confront this?
How do we counter it?
How do we begin to work with it and to manage it?
There's quite a bit that has been written about what to do
when race enters the room or to actually do,
how to intervene, how to interpret, what meaning to make,
but I want to step back from that and suggest that that is
a little too far down the line to be a starting point.
The starting point has to be with ourselves.
I suggest that in order to begin
to counter the negative impacts of prejudice
and historical racism we need to actively interrogate
our own racial history and our own racial identity,
and that is not a simple, straightforward task.
It's not a walk in the park or an afternoon cup of tea.
It is hard, grueling self examination,
but it has enormous and profound benefit.
We need to become familiar with our own history,
to have conversations with ourselves
about where we come from and about what
that might mean for our particular identity.
In the room, we need to begin to have a tuning in filter
around enactments in relation to race.
We need to be able to tune in
to the internal prompts which we might respond to,
which then become some kind of an enactment.
We need to become aware of what is happening
in the room on a moment to moment basis.
Dennis Mills, in writing about the growing identity
of social work, clinical social work students,
suggests that if we actively interrogate our own identity,
the consequence is a growing awareness
and a growing capacity for self reflection.
Bonnie Badenoch suggests that within a context of a safe,
therapeutic relationship, the neurobiological substrates
around social templates can be understood and challenged
and can slowly change over time.
I have to say that in my own experience, this feels valid.
I mentioned at the beginning of the lecture
that part of my own work in this area has been
to participate in a study group with other clinicians
in which we think and talk about race.
If I consider the process for myself
from when we began that group to where we are now,
I am acutely aware of how bringing into consciousness
my own internal prompts and my own impulses
has been enormously valuable in recognizing
my internal prejudice and my tendency to stereotype.
What has happened, and something for which
I'm deeply grateful, within the context of
this particular group is that we have afforded one another
the safety of being able to speak with honesty
and with integrity about our internal experiences.
I have been able to share and to listen to other people
sharing their own fears, their own prejudices,
their own threats within the context of our own
and very different autobiographies.
This has surfaced things for me that I did not know were there.
This has opened up possibilities for engagement for me
that previously I would never have imagined were possible.
It's not so long ago that I, like the social workers
and lawyer studies, would have shied away
from cross-racial or cross-cultural work.
I find myself in a position now where I actively seek it out
because the engagement feels
so much more real than it did in the past.
That is not to say that the journey is done for me.
It is really only in its infancy,
but it has been profoundly constructive.
Actively interrogating our own identity,
having dialogues with our self, with ourselves,
having dialogues with others
is something pivotal to be done.
Something else which is of crucial importance
is the understanding of theory and the understanding
of what happens at a theoretical level
around these particular issues and dynamics.
Caroline Garland talks about the importance of theory
in the context of trauma work.
She says the thing that differentiates us
as clinicians from the ordinary person in the street
who might be listening to a tale of trauma
is that we are able to bear the narrative
and to bear witness to the narrative,
because we are scaffolded by our knowledge of theory,
because we are able to make sense of the narrative
through the lens of theory.
Theory has the potential to be a third in the room,
such that if we can make sense theoretically
of what is happening in those moments of mindlessness,
of uncontainment and disregulated affect,
we can call upon the theory to bolster us
and to restore the capacity for thinking so that
they can be constructive engagement and movement forward.
Acknowledging and working with race means extending
the dialogue with ourselves into our professional context
and this also relates to Frosh's imperative around
the ethical need to interrogate race within our context.
That extending the discussion into
broader professional contexts is something
which can be very, very powerful.
What do we do within the clinical sphere itself,
when we are sitting with a same race client
who invites us to collude in a racist enactment?
When we are sitting with a cross-raced client
who surfaces in us deeply held prejudices
or uncomfortable feelings of stereotypes?
What do we actually do?
Unfortunately, there is no formula
and there are no step-by-step models.
There is debate about how to actually work with race
and there are differing opinions
about whether and when to surface race.
Certainly there are some writers,
Morgan writing from the United Kingdom
and Swartz writing from South Africa,
both white women, suggest that
bringing race into the room at the outset is important.
Now Poza, a black woman
writing within the South African context, differs,
saying that to foreground race at the outset
can feel enormously jarring and alienating
and inappropriate at such an early state of relationship.
I think it's safe to say that there can be
no formulaic response to this question.
I think that it's safe to say that it is through
an astute reading of each situation
that we will make the decision about when
and whether to foreground race at some point.
Nelson, in her writing, has suggested that we find
points of meeting and points of resonance
and sameness before we foreground difference,
which is also for me a useful way of thinking about it.
At the very least, to surface race
within our own clinician's mind is of vital importance.
Whether or not we verbalize this to the client
or bring it into the room in any direct way,
we need to be thinking about it ourselves,
knowing that if we are holding it in mind
through a parallel unconscious process,
it is being held in mind within
the inter-subjectivity of the dyad,
and to trust, as Winnicott said,
that when the material presents itself,
we will know the right moment to make an interpretation
or to make a link or to verbalize our own internal state.
In order to do this, we need to tune into
our own counter-transference reactions
and we need to tune into the verbal
and the non-verbal cues given to us by our clients.
Sally Swartz suggests that we adopt a stance of curiosity
when it comes to thinking about race,
that we need to sit lightly,
that we need to not be scared to ask questions.
We need to not be scared to ask questions.
This resonates particularly for me
as I recall experiences mostly in cross-racial dyads
where I have been sitting with somebody who feels
so different to me in terms of her history, her upbringing,
her context, that I feel afraid to ask questions
because it will foreground my ignorance.
I recall these moments and I recall the feeling
of being straight jacketed by my own fears in a way
that then stifles the spontaneity of the clinical context.
To sit back, to sit lightly and to sit curiously
I think is such a powerful suggestion
and certainly as I have started to experiment with that
in my own work I have found that it opens up the space
between in a particularly powerful and multidimensional way.
I want to, as I draw this lecture to a close,
think about the importance of a number of things,
the importance of dialogue, dialogue firstly with ourselves
and then dialogue with colleagues and with others.
I'm reminded here of a presentation I went to recently.
It was a presentation which was given
by two German analysts: one the son of holocaust survivors,
and the other the daughter of an SS Officer.
The two of them belonged to a dialogue group
which was started in Germany in the early '90s,
which is a group of children of perpetrators
and victims of the holocaust,
and these two presenters spoke about
their own journey of dialogue with one another,
which now spans almost 20 years
and how this process of dialogue has slowly, painfully,
but fruitfully allowed them to get to know one another
in a particularly nuanced and helpful way.
It made me think about the power of dialogue,
which is no easy task.
It's a brave task, but it has the potential
to open up spaces within and between
that are enormously exciting and enormously powerful.
Part of this, as I said earlier,
is curiosity, curiosity about the other.
Part of this is mutual respect, so really coming from
a position of respecting both my role in this dialogue
but also your role in this dialogue,
and it is about recognition, which makes me think
of Jessica Benjamin's construct of mutual recognition.
Mutual recognition is what happens
when two people come together
and they are able to find points of interaction,
points of resonance which are based on
acknowledgment and recognition of the other.
She says very pivotally and very movingly the following.
She says that recognition
is the life-giving exchange with the world,
and it is that recognition and it is that process of knowing
which I deeply believe can be the product
of this particular arena of work
within our clinical and professional contexts.
I would like to leave you with that
and invite you to continue on the process
of recognition of self and recognition of the other
as we progress towards reconciliation
and resolution and deeply meaningful
clinical work within the realm of race.
Thank you.