You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It was in a supervision group where Ankhi Mukherjee’s Unseen City first caught my attention. We were discussing race and difference, and the book was mentioned as having a lot to contribute on the topic. The group agreed to the importance of naming and exploring the meaning of racial difference between a therapist and her patient. But how best to go about it, the group wondered, and what does that mean for other categories of difference? Luckily, a clinical example emerged. It related to a mixed-race patient who responded angrily when the therapist pointed out their different racial backgrounds. The patient explained with exasperation that only her blackness had been seen, not her whiteness, and anyway her sexuality felt much more immediately pressing. Yes, to avoid tokenism or our own agendas, we better stick closely to the material the group agreed.
This patient makes an important point about the potential partiality of visibility, whilst instructively suggesting that, in relation to race, the gaze needs to be directed at whiteness as the object of enquiry. Unseen City starts in a similar vein, directing the gaze at a universalising tendency within psychoanalysis that has been blind to the impact of social and historical influence. Despite Freud’s varied and nuanced use of concepts like primitive, and the dual positions he occupied as an Austrian Jew (an imperial subject and a persecuted minority), the tendency within psychoanalysis cross-culturally became an appropriating one where the primitive was entangled with poverty and an assumption perpetuated that ‘to be poor is to have an impoverished inner life’ (p. 7). This assumption is seen as underpinning the lack of mental health care provision for poor urban populations today, and an excluding, ethnocentric version of psychoanalysis is contrasted with a pluralistic, democratic one, best symbolised by the Freudian Free Clinic.
Mukherjee, a Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford, takes