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In countless books, articles, symposia, and meetings, especially since the horrific, widely witnessed murder of George Floyd, psychoanalysis has been inescapably identified as a field largely formed by and practiced by white people, with the inherent racism such ancestry entails. Many—both white persons and persons of color—are trying to shine a light on, understand, and remedy this racism within the field; and the meaning of racism, race, and whiteness are currently topics of intense discussion and investigation. The fact that, until recently, mainstream psychoanalysis—within American psychoanalysis anyway—largely has disconnected the social from the intrapsychic has also been brought to the forefront of psychoanalytic consciousness.
Frequently, with faculty and students often coming to training with very different backgrounds, there is a generational split as to how the questions “what is racism? how did it come to be? how does it appear? how do we deal with it?” are asked and answered in educational facilities. This can result in a kind of paralysis around how to begin thinking about racism in the context of psychoanalysis. Helen Morgan’s pithy, concise, and often poetic book, The Work of Whiteness: A Psychoanalytic Perspective, provides a helpful common starting place for white people as they engage in the work of examining and combatting racism in themselves and in the teaching and practice of psychoanalysis. This is a book specifically for white liberals and, while it is particularly useful for mental health practitioners, it could also hold interest for any white person on this journey.
Morgan is a British Jungian training psychoanalyst and supervisor with a background in therapeutic communities with adolescents and in adult mental health. She was chair of the British Association of Psychotherapists between 2003 and 2007 and chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council between 2015 and 2018. While some of her discussions deal specifically with Jungian theory, no