I attended a talk by Analyst Dr Farhad Dalal yesterday and my mind is still processing the depth of it. Dalal is a brilliant mind & such a compassionate and warm human, very grateful to have had his support this year. I want to share the key messages re: racism & psychotherapy.

The talk was about institutional racism within the psychotherapy profession. Out of respect I will not share any biographical anecdotes, simply my take away messages.

Racism is endemic in all psychotherapy disciplines but it continues to be met with staunch resistance which manifests 1) denial of the reality of racism 2) pathologisation & exclusion of those who speak out 3) unseen physical & psychic harm.

These defensive enactment (of racist violence), rely on 1) the humanistic tendency to believe humans can will into being their experience thus racist experiences are engineered by the racialised subject for pathological reasons.

If you experience racism...it’s because you want racism to happen to you.

And 2) More analytically...you have in your family or personal history learnt that you are deserving of violence, thus there is repetition of your history. And so you kind of attract the same patterns. Fix your internal objects, and you stop experiencing racism. Simples

The target of racism is forever responsible for the violence they receive. People of colour are simply thus responsible for racism. In the same way pushed to the extreme, ill & disabled ppl are responsible for their ill-health, and sexual abuse victims willed rape onto themselves

I tell you I have heard/seen psychoanalysts tell women who were sexually abused *as children* they made it happen. They *seduced* the adult often the relative. I kid you not. It still happens. Let’s keep it real. The darker side of analytic thinking.

But whilst most of us, in or outside psychotherapy would find such views abhorrent, somehow when it comes to racism the same displacement of responsibility/violence onto targets rarely causes disturbance.

Dalal posits 1) these dominant ways of thinking about racism expose...institutional racism 2) individualise systemic violence 3) depoliticise psychotherapy/analytic work. I would add reproduce & protect the status-quo.

Finally by way of conclusion 1) Dalal posits the absence of thinking around social system & power relations in psychotherapy render us liable to reproducing violence & trauma via interventions or upholding of norms positioned as ‘benevolent’.

And 2) that is is power that racialises & create experiences of racism. And primarily racialisation exists to maintain economic interests & division between the haves & the have not. And if this is so, then supporting the racislised subject in psychotherapy is of course political

Nothing I had not conceptualised or already understood/experienced. But the lecture was still an experience of feeling seen & heard. And being in conversation with a like minded scholar. Of course it made a few ppl uncomfortable but I felt it was delivered with such gentleness...

This is really my experience of Dalal. Gentleness. Sharpness of mind and unbelievable kindness, do you know how tough this is to achieve when speaking about such violence? A combination of skills I aspire to keep developing