Chapter 6: The Experience of Race on the Couch

Essentially, one might say, the cure is effected by love.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

If, how, and in what ways does race get discussed and processed in someone's personal/training analysis? In reviewing the literature and our own experiences, we see that many times analysands are troubled by their analysts' responses to their bringing up issues related to race. Ofttimes, it seems analysts did not acknowledge the pernicious reality of pervasive racism, instead directing their analysands to try to understand their feelings about race as stemming from so-called deeper and more universal fantasies and conflicts. This will be reviewed later in the chapter. Initially, how the participants in this study experienced their analyses will be described.

The survey instrument and interview protocol developed for this study focused on several topics the Commission identified as of interest during the first months of the study. As the study progressed, additional topics of interest that were only touched upon in the survey instrument emerged. One such topic was the ways in which race and racism were “experienced on the couch” during personal/training analysis. This section begins by presenting the limited data collected via the survey instrument specific to the experience of race on the couch. For instance, we do not have data on the experience of BIPOC training/personal analysts work with BIPOC or white candidates, which would provide needed perspective. This lack of data speaks to the paucity of diversity in this essential aspect of training