Myth, Transference and the Black Psychotherapist

When the psychotherapist is Negro certain important, but little examined, dynamic-economic and theoretical factors are introduced into an already complex inter- and intra-psychic process. The very fact of the therapist's being a Negro can motivate symbolic processes in the patient's mind which can have crucial effects upon the processes of therapy. I will discuss some of these processes as they are related to resistance and to working-through. Under the heading of “myth and fantasy,” I will consider the transference reaction and suggest that there is an interesting phenomenon, occurring when the patient(s) is White and the therapist is Negro, which I term “the pre-transference.” In discussing myth, I will endeavor but to outline ancient conceptions of “black” and “darkness,” which many times are articulated in the form of fantasies, day-dreams and dreams in the psycho-therapeutic situation.

There can be little doubt that myth is related to imagination and belief, evolving from the universal desire to overcome the drabness of life and from the naive guesses at the “true meaning” of experience. There are reasonable and unreasonable myths.6 For our purposes, myth can be defined as a complex of stories—some no doubt fact, and some fantasy—which, for various reasons, human beings regard as demonstrations of the inner meaning of the universe and of human life.15 In much of the world's mythology and religion, a frequent theme is that light and darkness, black and white, are complementary and/or inseparably related in some type of dynamic tension, or equilibrium.16 Black represents darkness, sleep, death, the