A black colleague once said to me, ‘I always assume that all white people are middle-class unless they tell me otherwise’. If this is the case, how are we as white psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to position ourselves in the analytic encounter? What do we reveal about ourselves, intentionally or inadvertently? How might this be heard transferentially? In this paper I will be exploring the inherently middle-class bias enshrined in the traditional analytic stance of therapeutic ‘neutrality’, via my own experiences as an analysand and in my work with a black British patient.
A key signifier of class position—as plain as the nose on our faces—that is often overlooked in written explorations of these subjects is the spoken voice: accent. I will meditate upon the puzzling yet invigorating experience of hearing the ‘wrong’ (Estuary) accent in the ‘wrong’ place; I am thinking of Jamie Shea, the official NATO spokesman during the 1999 offensive in Kosovo. What are the changes that need to take place in psychoanalysis in order to construct a pluralistic Tower of Babel? In conclusion I will be arguing for a more free-associative, id-driven subjective fragmentary stance on the part of the psychoanalyst and psychotherapist so that the Ivory Tower may be replaced by that of Babel.
I was ‘thrown’ into the world in 1960 in suburban Essex, firstborn of a devout Roman Catholic father of Irish ancestry, born in north London, and an atheistic Church of England mother of mixed cultural heritage—English, Irish, Indian, Romany gypsy-born in the East End of London. Both of my parents found themselves in Essex as a result of the dislocations of the Second World War. My father worked as a shipping clerk for the whole of his working life, apart from a spell of unemployment. My mother was a school dinner-lady and worked part-time in a grocer's shop. I grew up surrounded by other refugee relatives, in a
context where possibly 90% of our neighbours and fellow citizens originated in the East End; and yet I never felt that this was where I ‘belonged’. (How many people ever do feel as if they ‘belong’?). As a child of mixed cultural heritage, albeit white, I didn't see myself accurately reflected back to myself by any one person. The first overt cultural fragmentation occurred at the age of five, when I began attending the local state Roman Catholic primary school, unlike my cousins and friends who went to the non-denominational school just down the road. Nonetheless, at the Catholic school there was a kind of ‘unity in diversity’, in that most pupils came from mixed backgrounds: a different mix to me, but mixed anyway.
This constantly-shifting, kaleidoscopic fragmentation became my version of normality as I transferred at 11 to a Catholic comprehensive school in a nearby large town. I always wanted OUT. Growing up in a tight-knit extended family can be suffocatingly oppressive. I wanted olives, Sartre, supremely unfashionable University Challenge-type hairdos and spectacles. I wanted anything that wasn't me, ‘us’. A friend once said to me, intending to criticise film-maker and playwright Mike Leigh, ‘Oh, yes, let's all laugh at working-class people’, to which I responded ‘Yes please! And yet as a child and adolescent I wouldn't have been able to say what class I was in… until I wasn't in it any more. While I was growing up, that part of Essex was to my eyes a class monoculture. While there were vast differences in wealth, with builders, car dealers and big-league criminals at the top of the tree, I didn't encounter any adult with higher or further education, or anyone whose parents weren't from deprived backgrounds. We were poorer than most of my friends, but not of a different class. It was only the radical shock of arriving at university that served to locate me in a hitherto fantastical symbolic order that until then had been confined to Monty Python sketches or ‘quality’ TV drama. I realised that being or becoming middle-class wasn't simply an act of will, of actualising a fantasy. And where have I ended up? ‘Uprooted and Anxious’, as Richard Hoggart would say in The Uses of Literacy. ‘Neither fish nor fowl’, as Billy Prior's father would say about his upwardly-mobile son in Pat Barker's Regeneration.
In the late 1980s I began seeing a psychoanalytic psychotherapist for individual therapy. Nice enough bloke—but he didn't say much; never said anything about himself; always pretty non-committal; a bit dull really.
After a while, I began studying psychoanalysis, and learned about something called ‘therapeutic neutrality’, a stance adopted by psychotherapists in order not to influence or lead their clients in any particular direction—allegedly. One metaphorical manifestation of this stance is the so-called ‘blank screen’ onto which the analysand can ‘project’ thier unconscious fantasies of significant others, the repressed residues from traumatic life experiences and the hidden complexes that are causing him or her to suffer. The blank screen is characterised by silence and ‘abstinence’ on the part of the therapist. According to this psychoanalytic theory, once the analysand becomes aware of these hidden unconscious imperatives, via a re-experiencing of them in therapy using the conduit of the relationship with the therapist, then he or she can begin to live differently—more freely.
‘Oh, fair enough’, I thought. Yet what British psychoanalytic orthodoxy terms ‘neutrality’ doesn't seem very neutral to me at all. In fact, it looks very much like the tight-arse withholding behaviour I've experienced all my life at the hands of the white English protestant middle-class. This wasn't a manifestation of my transference to this therapist. Transference—the transferring of past patterns of relating and fantasising into the analytic encounter—is supposed to be unconscious. I was very conscious of my feelings and knew where they came from. As Frantz Fanon writes in Black Skin White Masks, ‘Since the racial drama is played out in the open, the black man has no time to “make it unconscious’” (Fanon : 150). This comment applies to class drama too.
My interminable analysis ended, and as I began to make sense of what had happened, it became clear to me—from signs and symbols secreted and excreted—that the therapist was himself a son of toil. Thus, we were conducting the analysis in a mutual second—or third—language. This reminded me of a stilted conversation I'd conducted in French some years earlier with a fellow Anglophone, neither of us being aware that we shared a ‘mother’ tongue. The therapist and I had been fed through a middle-class mincer; mutual alienation. To quote Dick Blackwell:
In this way the mind of the working-class patient becomes colonised; her identity re-written; her relationship to her body, to her friends, family and culture, reinterpreted in a
Page 43language and syntax that purports to be scientific, objective and universal, as the language of the coloniser always is. (Blackwell, 2002: 374)
Yet, like many of us, I was sucked in deeper and deeper to the Masonic Lodge of psychoanalysis. Even if I grumbled about blank screens, I couldn't really come up with a viable alternative. I didn't know enough yet, and in any case blank screen/abstinence/neutrality was the lingua franca: the price of the ticket. Until, until…
Since 1995, I have worked in primary care in the NHS in South London. Consistently, 30-40% of the people I have seen for therapy have been black British women, predominantly of African and Caribbean ancestry. In the late 1990s I began working with a black British woman in her early 20s of Caribbean heritage, whom I shall call Elaine.1 Elaine brought with her a diagnosis of ‘endogenous depression’, that is a depression with no obvious or apparent cause. For most of the first year of our meetings Elaine was silent or monosyllabic. Trying to ‘do the right thing’, I sat silently with her, waiting. The longest sentence she ever spoke was ‘I'm tired’. Grateful for this gift, this opening, I explored every possible angle as to why Elaine might be tired: was she not sleeping well? Had something distressing happened? Was her diet okay? How was she getting on with her medication? Was she tired of me? Of the therapy? None of the above? In the middle of yet another protracted silence, the revelation came to me: I've got to say whatever comes into my mind without censoring it, not Elaine. And so I began to. In the midst of a silence, I once said, ‘I feel like that diver who replaced the foundations of Winchester Cathedral brick by brick over a twenty year period, in freezing cold water with no light whatsoever’. In the midst of yet another silence, Elaine said, ‘Tell me a story’. It just so happened that at that time I was reading the novel Paradise by the African-American writer, Toni Morrison. I told Elaine the story of the novel so far as I had read to. Elaine asked, ‘And what happens in the end?’ I replied that I didn't know—I hadn't got there yet. Elaine responded, ‘Drat: that means I'll have to come back again’. At the next session she asked about the ending of the novel. I told her, ‘They all got shot’, (referring to the demise of the informal community of multiracial women living in an abandoned convent on the outskirts of a small
African-American farming town). Elaine replied, ‘And that's why I don't like Toni Morrison!’ These sessions marked a change in the therapy, and Elaine began to speak increasingly frequently and more openly.
Elaine and I continued to work together for several more years, finishing therapy in 2003. One morning in autumn 2008, on arriving at the clinic where I work, I received a message to telephone someone called ‘Elaine, but with an unfamiliar surname. When Elaine answered my call, it was indeed the same woman I had worked with years before. She was moving out of the area, and wanted to say goodbye. Elaine updated me on how she was faring. She said, ‘I'm happy and healthy; I can't believe it!’ adding, ‘You really helped me: I can't thank you enough’. I accepted her thanks, and said, ‘You really helped me too. I learned a lot from our work together.’ Elaine responded, ‘I don't believe it! You had to put up with all my strops and silences!’ I said, ‘Before I met you I used to try to do things by the book. But I realised that the book wasn't going to work with you. So I threw the book away and I think that's made me a better therapist’. Elaine said, ‘Oh dear, I'm crying now!’ We made a little more small talk and shortly afterwards said goodbye.
My experience with Elaine was accompanied by a liminal Damascene moment when running an experiential group for a psychotherapy training. I entered the room for the first meeting and the blindingly obvious thought came to me, ‘I'm just going to be an ordinary member of this group and say whatever I think whenever I feel like it’. It led me to question profoundly my stance as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and become more of a ‘player-coach’ on the pitch and thinking on my feet, than the remote ‘Director of Football’ in the Executive Box with his Blackberry conjured up by the notion of therapeutic neutrality. To beautifully mis-recognise Lacan's ‘Twin Peaks’ of ‘aggressivity’ and ‘desire’, I ‘take the game’ to the patient, ‘Here I am—in living colour! The Word made Flesh. Get up and use me! Have another go! (If you think you're hard enough.)’ What might this playing style look like on the pitch?
Tracy, a woman from a south London criminal family, had ‘done well for herself’ to become Deputy Head of a primary school. Weighing up the dubious merits of her philandering unreliable boyfriend, she concluded, ‘he's not that bad, really’, to which I commented, ‘Yeah, Sonia Sutcliffe thought that too’ (referring to the wife of the Yorkshire Ripper). Tracy didn't immediately respond or comment on this, but
reported back next session: ‘I was talking with my friend and I told her what you'd said about Sonia Sutcliffe, and we just pissed ourselves! When I was in therapy before, it was with a white, middle-class lady, and she was really nice, but she never really said anything, certainly never said anything like that.’ So—aren't I fantastic? Or powerfully disturbed? Or ordinary? Actually, it's more a case of allowing myself to be used, a conduit, a vessel. As Lacan writes, when attempting to restate Freud's desire in relation to Freud's dream concerning the (mis)treatment of one of his patients, Irma:
[P]recisely to the extent that I desired it too much, that I wanted to be, myself, the creator, I am not the creator. The creator is someone greater than I. It is my unconscious, it is this voice which speaks in me, beyond me. (Lacan 1988 : 170-171)
And what accent does this voice have? Is it classless? Raceless?
Some years ago, a black British colleague of African-Caribbean descent said to me, ‘I always assume white people are middle-class unless they tell me otherwise’. If his observation has any degree of currency in articulating a common experience for black and minority ethnic Britons—and I believe it does, although not necessarily a universal one—what should white psychoanalysts and psychotherapists do about it, especially those uncomfortable with adopting a stance associated with the position of coloniser? While an obvious rejoinder to this would be a statement to the effect that the analyst cannot and should not attempt to control how he or she is experienced transferentially, this is not an escape from the theorising an individual analyst or therapist must embark upon in order to understand how he or she theorises him or herself as a subject and a clinician. Could one be a psychoanalyst and not be symbolically middle-class? Or, more controversially, symbolically white? If this were possible, not to mention desirable, how might this be achieved?
One of the key, if often ambiguous, signifiers of class position is the spoken voice, specifically the accent of that spoken voice. However infrequently, depending on their school of thought, an analyst may speak, his or her voice will inevitably be heard by the analysand. While
British regional accents have for some decades become increasingly accepted as conduits for His Master's Voice, south-eastern working-class accents such as Cockney and Estuary are usually only acceptable for regional roving reporters on local news programmes, or comic eccentrics. Not, as yet, to read the News. The case of Jamie Shea is fascinating in this respect. He is an established authority on international relations and modern history, and a senior NATO apparatchik. Professor Shea was NATO spokesperson during the operation in Kosovo in 1999. It was an unexpected, if slightly guilty, pleasure to hear his Estuary tones colouring the otherwise clinical daily updates during the campaign. As my (biological) brother commented in conversation with me, ‘What's a bro doing up there?’ Others were not so impressed. John Keegan wrote in the Daily Telegraph at the time, ‘It has been a terrible mistake to allow NATO's case to be presented by Jamie Shea, who sounds like the manager of a lower-division football club’ (Mullan, 1999). If Shea was clearly not an appropriate vessel for His Master's Voice, then more recently the Jamaican Radio 4 continuity announcer, Neil Nunes, has also received a similar roasting from Middle England for his non-RP2, non-U lilt.
So, what is my accent like? To all intents and purposes, I thought I had long ago adopted a ‘posh telephone voice’—at least in professional and ‘chattering-class’ circles—in order to mitigate the effect of the ‘Impostor Syndrome’. This is a phenomenon extensively documented by people of working-class origin, women, Black and minority ethnic people, whereby ‘outsiders’ who enter marbled halls or ivory towers feel they do so fraudulently. They fear they are likely to be exposed at any moment. Of course, there are always situations—‘language-games’ to use Wittgenstein's term—where a posh telephone voice just doesn't cut it. A conversation about football would sound utterly inauthentic if all ‘t's and ‘(h)aitches’ were pronounced, and it would be a crime on a par with ruched curtains in an accountant's office to pronounce the ‘g’ in ‘Cannin’ Town'. Some years ago, I asked a colleague of mine from a rough East End background what my voice sounded like. He replied, ‘You definitely sound like someone from London, but someone speaking really slowly, and trying really hard to pronounce all the ‘t's and ‘(h)aitches’. Got it in one. Incidentally, this was someone who felt like he
was ‘talking like the Queen’ if he pronounced his ‘th's ‘properly’ i.e. not like ‘f's—‘common as muck’, in other words.
In August 2008 I was a member of a group of British tourists who were caught up in the fighting between Georgia and Russia. We were safely evacuated to Armenia, and on repatriation, I was invited on to the BBC Breakfast Show to talk about my experiences. Apart from the radical shock of seeing myself—who says that TV adds two stone?—I resembled a deathly-pale superannuated freeze-dried ‘ET’ who ran lots of marathons and subsisted on mung beans. Hearing my voice was profoundly disconcerting. I sounded less like a lower-division football manager than a chief clerk of a local authority, an accountant in the automobile industry, or someone representing Thames Water. My reactions included shock, pleasant surprise (any publicity being better than no publicity) and self-hatred in equal measure.
So how am I seen—and heard—by black and minority ethnic (and working-class) patients? The obvious answer is that I am seen differently by each and every person I come into contact with. This is undoubtedly true, yet banal. A crude and outrageous but interesting generalisation would be that private patients want me to be posh—so that they feel they are getting their money's worth—and NHS patients would like me to be ‘ordinary’, like them. I was the training therapist for a Trinidadian patient who clearly wanted me to be a brainy, educated middle-class intellectual in order for him to feel that he had ‘made it’ and was moving amongst the elect. In contrast, a black British NHS patient of Jamaican parentage, in a very early session, launched into a detailed discussion of the micro-machinations of Jamaican politics in the fraught Manley-Seaga era of the 1970s, seemingly presuming at least a basic level of prior knowledge on my part (correctly, in that instance), to be followed by a discussion of the politics of ‘shade-ism’ as manifested in her family, again with an implicit and explicit appeal to my familiarity with these issues (again, correctly). This case warrants further attention elsewhere, but while writing, I am listening to a piece of music by the Icelandic band Sigur Ros. Their song, ‘Saeglopur’ (Lost at Sea), comes to mind: the voice, guitar and piano keening, chiming, disembodied, for eternal, anguished instants, yearning to be completed, found, rescued, joined eventually, emphatically, by bass and drums—all together again, safe and sound.
To address the joint issues of race and class more directly, if only in a fragmentary manner, Simone, an NHS patient of Jamaican parentage who had ‘done well for herself’ visited one of her colleagues in her home, and reported to me, ‘They're very nice people, but—you know—they do their hair in the front garden!’ again presuming I'd understand the significance of what she was saying.
I have run a group where for some time I have been the only white British member. Recently, a change in participants led to a Latin American man leaving and a white middle class English woman joining. It all kicked off pretty soon after this, around issues of race and class, with several group members taking exception to what they saw as the new arrival's ‘hoity-toity’ ways. I asked the group, ‘Why is this coming up now? Why haven't you ever had a go at me for being white and middle class?’ At this point, a Black British woman asked me, clearly somewhat surprised, ‘Oh, are you middle class?’ to which a Black British man added, ‘No, you're not middle class, you're working-class’. Next week, he apologised to me for this remark!
Colonising forces, when faced with unconquerable and ungovernable peoples or territories, sometimes accept their limitations. When the Romans were faced with the Picts, they built Hadrian's wall to keep the marauding hordes out. Similarly, the British kept a cautious distance from the Tribal Belt in what was to become Pakistan and left them to their own devices. If this state of affairs could be said to resemble anything that has taken place in British psychoanalysis, then to quote Jarvis Cocker from the band Pulp in their song ‘Mis-shapes’, ‘We're making a move, we're making it now, we're coming out of the side-lines. Just put your hands up, it's a raid. We want your homes, we want your lives, we want the things you won't allow us.’ Where's Boudicca when we need her?
I have attempted to write with Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's dictum ‘Show don't tell’ in mind. Reviewing my efforts, I am left with a feeling most aptly summed-up by a line from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T.S. Eliot, ‘That is not it at all. That is not what I meant at all.’ Finally, in defeat, I turn to the film version of Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose:
What language is he speaking in, Master?
All languages… and none.
I have altered events and dates both in order to disguise identities and to emphasise that the focus is my own development as a result of our work together.
RP stands for ‘Received Pronunciation’, the term used to describe so-called Standard (middle class) ‘Queen's English’.