Discussion of Ionas Sapountzis's “The Scarred Rapper and the Poems of Always”

Reading this beautiful paper stimulated a number of thoughts about the way we talk and write about race and racialized interactions in and out of therapy. Having written a good deal about race myself, I have wondered how one takes account of racial difference without losing the sense of common humanity. It is illuminating, up to a point, to note how race is socially constructed for psychic defensive purposes (Altman, 2000). Having made this point, however, one is in danger, clinically and extraclinically, of becoming preoccupied with the ways we distance ourselves from one another when there is a racial or cultural or social-class difference. Sapountzis's paper provides a valuable alternative way of writing about difference in psychotherapy.

This paper is not self-consciously about race, class, or culture or about the differences between therapist and patient, yet the differences and the way they were transcended are at the very heart of the paper's concerns. The paper is first and foremost about a human encounter and how two people found each other despite the many obstacles in doing so. What makes this paper and the experience recounted therein so meaningful and moving is that it records the meeting that evolved as therapist and patient struggled to find some sort of common ground. If similarity had been taken for granted, or if difference had been felt to be insurmountable, the magical, moving, quality of this interaction would have been absent. It was the fact that difference might well have been insurmountable, but was somehow transcended, that makes this such a memorable experience; it is one that speaks very specifically to racial, cultural, and class difference while