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This is an important and timely book. As our society slowly emerges from the worst recession since the Second World War, the re-structuring of the economy seems to have inequality as a central feature (Dransfield, 2014). Environments of huge disparity are often the breeding ground for racism.
Frank Lowe has been facilitating a ‘thinking space’ in the form of a regular discussion forum at the Tavistock since 2002 and this book brings together some of the important presentations that promote thinking about race, culture and diversity in psychotherapy. It challenges the comfortable status quo of the psychoanalytic world and asks the reader actually to think. It goads us to resist remaining silent. It asks us to not circumvent some of the pressing issues facing us all today.
The central tenets of the book are that we all internalise to some extent the hatred that is part of our culture (for example, racism and sexism). Lowe suggests that we all use splitting and projection with each other in order to feel better about ourselves. He argues that the powerful in society dehumanise the weak by stressing difference (for example, race and class). ‘What is hated in the different other is what is feared in the self’ (p. 8).
In eleven chapters, Lowe as editor brings together articles that are broadly psychoanalytic but are also coherently multi-theoretical and stimulating. From the start of the book Lowe points out that despite some improvements, there is a lack of regular thinking space about diversity in most psychotherapy trainings. His first chapter starts with Klein and Bion and convincingly argues that we must become aware of our own capacity for destruction in order to resist causing unnecessary suffering to others. Lowe asserts that we all have a capacity to use others for our own benefit and to understand this is to start better to understand racism.
Onel Brooks argues that we might not be properly thinking about crucial issues like race as a result of our own identificatio