Fanon called the black body ‘phobogenic’ prone becoming the repository of white/colonial neurotic projections. Part of what happens to black bodies in white spaces is a reproduction rather re-enactment of historical configurations.

We need to understand this. Some of this stuff does not belong to us. At all. Nothing to do with our ‘personal’ history. But...occasionally our personal history & collective history interact. NOT always...

Clinically when someone is facing discrimination, we have to enquire about abuse histories. Again sometimes that history will be located in someone personal history (in group analysis this is referred to as personal matrix)...

Sometimes, it will be located in parental context histories (still personal matrix), sometimes in the broader collective or group history (in group analysis this is called the foundation matrix).

So we have to be careful not to assume if someone is facing difficulties in groups, the difficulty or disturbance belongs to them/them alone. Traditional therapy & analysis does this, I have written (academically) elsewhere this in the case of race, amounts to structural racism.

Most mental health & psycholgical practitioners not only have little clue about racial trauma, they receive little by way of psychoanalytic thinking certainly nothing in relation to group analytic, unless they are dually trained & even then...racism is usually not well taught.

So that is why I am alarmed so many are now purporting to be able to work with racial trauma. Be careful. This area is extremely complex, the risk for damage & retraumatisation is very high. The potential to reinforce destructive self-fulling prophecies is high.

The most helpful clinical model to understand or formulate racial trauma & work with racism, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind, is group analytic, then close second psychoanalytic.

Why group analytic? Because firstly it is an integrated model, bringing sociology, psychoanalysis, psychology & systems thinking together. And its emphasis on group processes, systems & contexts.

I really wish more black ppl would enter the discipline*. It needs us. We need it too. It’s very white paradoxically. If you are a member and want to read my group analytic papers on racism, get in touch.