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This thoughtful book by a senior Jungian analyst with much experience of psychoanalytic institutions is at once timely and well overdue. Timely, because of the growing demands to challenge racism in all areas of our social life, and for white people to own and deconstruct their whiteness, rather than perpetuate racism by enacting it. Timely also because of the backlash, seen in the growing ideological and legal assaults against critical race theory and anti-racist actions. Overdue, because there pre-exists a very long history of anti-racist thought and struggle, eloquently documented in many powerful writings over centuries, and yet positive change is so slow and partial. It is especially overdue within psychoanalysis because aspects of our psychoanalytic concepts are marked by racism and there is a woeful absence of reflection and curiosity about how white hegemony is embedded and embodied in our psyches, and in our writings and trainings. Overdue also because the experiences of many black and ethnic minority trainees on our courses have been and still are those of misrecognition, discrimination and exclusion, while the whiteness of our theories and practices go unacknowledged and unproblematized. Attempts to address this within the psychoanalytic organizations of which Helen Morgan has played a leading part have been stubbornly resisted and change has been very limited, despite the growth of psychoanalytic theorizing about internalized racism.
Morgan substantially adds to the psychoanalytic literature by broadening the focus in an examination of how whiteness, as an unmarked hegemonic term, operates in and through us, socially, institutionally and personally. She shows how whiteness came to connote superiority, as an historically entrenched conscious and unconscious assumption. She locates the domination of whiteness in centuries of imperialism, dispossession, slavery and exploitation, whose intergenerational effects