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In a recent talk, Steve Portugues (2021) called on white psychoanalysts “to learn how to explore race and treat racism within ourselves and our patients and to do so with compassion for the racist in us all.” He urged that analysts set aside a false idea of neutrality in the interest of identifying oppressive ideologies that distort our and our patients lives, presumably in order to demystify and expunge them.
Portugues's call is in the spirit of a growing turn in psychoanalytic practice to attend to the social dimension of our patients' lives and is given more urgency following the murder of George Floyd and burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement. Racism hurts us all, dividing Black from white, keeping us from joining in common interest, and in this way contributes to the largest context of whatever problems in living our patients present to us. Racism is at once an omnipresent feature of our social world, and an easy thing for many white people to ignore. I admire the intention behind Portugues's project, as well as its ambition. As Beverly Burch notes, white people's privileged ability to avoid dealing with race leaves us ill-prepared to talk about it; Portugues seems up for the challenge.
The idea that we might use the clinical space to explore and perhaps challenge racism raises many conceptual and technical questions. For instance, outside of the rare circumstance in which a patient seeks therapy to address their racism, how to raise the issue when it doesn't arise quote-unquote “organically.” Do we wait for some relevant context to bring it up, and what does it mean, to us and the patient, if we deviate from our usual practice of following the patient to raise it ourselves.
The idea that in our clinical work we might set about “treating” racism—by which I take Portugues to mean identifying racist attitudes with the aim of changing them—needs to be subject to psychoanalytic scrutiny. My reservations about this undertaking break down roughly into three areas: The