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Those of us who have elected to spend our days exploring psychic reality have a conundrum to deal with: how ‘internal’ is the internal world? Just how do the thoughts, fantasies, images and beliefs populating the mind get there, and take the form that they do? If, as Chris Oakley (1989) has suggested, our habitual assumption that the psyche is located inside the skull has led to partial sightedness and error, what alternative sites for the location of personal suffering might there be? Oakley resituates psychoanalytic accounts of psychic reality in what he calls ‘the space of the between’. From this perspective, defence mechanisms take place between us, in language. The unconscious may well be inside us, but it is equally true that we are in unconsciousness. In adopting this frame, whilst exploring individual, idiosyncratic formations, we are inevitably simultaneously exploring cultural dynamics. For those who like to believe in a straightforwardly apolitical clinical realm, it may come as something of an unwelcome surprise to find that there is no ‘politics-free zone’ in psychic life - we not only grow up in culture, but it is part of our nature as human creatures to have culture ‘inbuilt’, as it were, as an essential component of our being. The psyche, in this sense, is reminiscent of sport during South Africa's apartheid regime: politics has not been dragged in by a few mischievous Leftists - it has always been there. As Farhad Dalal puts it in this courageous, rigorous book on racism, ‘the structures of society are reflected in the structures of the psyche, and if the first of these is colour coded, then so will be the second.’ (p. 7).
We do not need to imagine a viciously racist regime such as the apartheid system to explore racism: Dalal exquisitely deconstructs complacent liberal assumptions by showing us, in black and white, as it were, just how ubiquitous it is in our supposedly post-political liberal-democratic world (including that minute part of it called