If we accept that structural and institutional racism is a problem of our times, then we also need to accept it as a problem in psychotherapy training organisations. Institutional and structural racism manifest in policies and processes, both conscious and unconscious, which do not serve those that are outside of the white majority culture. Black and brown people who do train and stay engaged with psychoanalysis struggle to survive institutional racism by enduring the crippling interactions of micro-aggression, colour blindness and racism. How to address these issues, the psychic pain of racism, is something that has been ignored for a long time in the psychotherapy professions.
The fear and stigma associated with working with black and brown people need further examining. Those that work with colour-based racism need to be more aware of the historic and cultural issues in working with difference. They need to be ready and willing to examine their own internalised biases which are very much alive and present in black and white interactions. A black client is more likely to be well adjusted to living in an environment where the majority is white, and would have more knowledge about racism and racial dynamics than white clinical practitioners. As a practising psychotherapist, I feel change cannot come quickly enough. Psychotherapy has been exclusively promoted to those that can afford it, but the wider proportion of those that can benefit are ruled out because psychoanalysis seems at a loss as to how to work with the traumas of racism – racial trauma being the cumulative effect of racial oppression on both the mental and physical health of the individual.
Which brings us to the purpose of this writing not only as a way of adding to the well-executed research out there by both those within and without the fields of psychotherapy, but also to highlight that there is potential for change if we are radically to explore how we can make
psychotherapy accessible and applicable today to those that can benefit. Therapy trainings and the therapies that are offered are not adequately supporting trainees and clients from black communities because we are not trained fully to engage with the issues; neither are we attracting a wider pool of diverse people to train as therapists. My experience of black trainees in therapy with me is that they can't wait to finish their training and get their qualification. This seems sad to me as a wealth of experience is being missed: they are not able fully to share in their experience and as a result they do not express how they truly feel for fear of being stigmatised and problematised. This is not limited to race issues: psychoanalysis has also lagged behind in addressing those minoritised by virtue of gender, sex and nationality. There is the illusion that we are here to learn one thing – psychoanalysis – and that we are all the same. We cannot expect any real learning to be taking place as we are not ready to embrace any thinking that would upset the ego outside of the framework that we know and expect.
Training insists on creating an environment of awareness, which appears contrary to the experience of some black trainees who find themselves feeling ‘psychologically gagged’ and excluded. Trainees are apprehensive of engaging with white therapists who are not versed in working with diverse client groups and struggle to know how to engage.
Psychoanalysis prides itself on awareness and considers itself a listening profession, yet there is a contradiction and a very loud silence within it. The scream is insurmountable, yet the silence is deadening. What can exist in the gap between the scream and the silence? It is to the body of psychoanalysis that I turn in order to explore these issues, as I believe it has the potential to contribute and help. The hope is that we can find new possibilities that will break through our defences of anger, fear, guilt, shame, hopelessness and helplessness, and speak to the humanness in each of us. Our collective silence is complicit.
Hoggett (1992) states that we must be able aggressively to break through the limitations of our own assumption and challenge the ‘squatting rights’ of the coloniser within our own internal world. There is possibility for new discoveries only if we are able to challenge our
assumptions and in so doing, discover something new about ourselves and each other. Avgi Saketopoulou encourages staying with the situation of discomfort by not focussing on the upset and by ‘bending one's will’. She adds that what is on the line when the subject bends their will is not a diminishment of the self but its expansion.
As a black person, the problem and reality of racism is something I have avoided in the past. I felt and I have been told that it's something you bear and move on from. Ignoring its impact felt like the only way to survive. I hoped for something else on my psychotherapy training, however. I did try to speak up when the discomfort of race and racism was brought up, but when the problem was articulated in the way I felt it and saw it, it became my problem. It just felt like too dangerous a territory to enter into, a territory I wish not to enter. I was met with common responses such as ‘you've got a chip on your shoulder’ or ‘we don't see your colour’. I have often felt firmly disappointed with the lack of engagement, and no avenue to take it to.
I have come to realise that ‘bending my will’, i.e. staying with the uncomfortableness, pain and disappointment, is truly where the answer lies, as it has come to strengthen my internal resistance. I have come to realise that my ultimate silence, my not wanting to ‘rock the boat’ too much was a survival strategy. I wasn't equipped to deal with the issues of conscious and unconscious biases or microaggressions in the early part of my training.
I have, however, found something helpful in the body of psychoanalysis which informed and supported a part of who I am posttraining: workshops and training that I offered, teaching on Difference and Diversity, additional training, reading, supervision and analysis, discussion groups and, most crucially, client work, as well as art, music and nature. Realising that the issues we are grappling with are extremely complex and beyond current understanding, I couldn't return to a place of homeostasis – a state in which I don't allow any turbulence to disturb or dysregulate me.
Racism is about hatred of the Other, and of difference. It is underpinned by a hostile attempt to control the object in such a way that they are not allowed to express themselves as a separate person with an identity (Kovel 1988). The whole notion of racism operates in the paranoidschizoid position. It involves splits and a projection into the Other of attributes that the racist really wants for themselves (enjoyment). This is an extreme state of being, unlike the depressive position, which is more of an acceptance of our ambivalent state. In the paranoid-schizoid position, we are looking to blame someone for our mishaps and into whom we can project our hatred: those who have been minoritised become the target of the perpetrator's projection – by virtue of race, class, gender, nationality – as they are deemed sufficiently different, worthless or dangerous to warrant such hatred. The foreigner, the refugee, fits this bill. They look different, talk different and have different cultural practices. There is an element of ignorance and gullibility in racism and a wish to resist the foreigner in ourselves.
When a black client reports being told she has a ‘chip on her shoulder’ by a white trainee, we cannot address it simply in terms of difficulties arising from Oedipal struggles. The black person's anger has a historic context: fury against years of oppression, marginalisation and persistent colonial mentality adopted by western civilisation. Black people are being told, and some also recognise, that they are hypervigilant about this issues, but there is reasoning behind the hypervigilance. Fanon's writing in Black Skin, White Masks, even though it was published in 1952, is of contemporary relevance and ought to be compulsory on psychoanalytic training reading. His anger is born out of grinding experience, painfully long self-analysis, thoughts and reflection. Psychoanalysis tries to explain difficulties arising from Oedipal struggles in the internal world as indicative of an external reality. In the wish to be loved and not lose the loved object, the hope is that the early loved object is accessible and meets the child's needs. The early loved object is continuously searched for in life, and feelings and needs get transferred onto suitable others such as teachers and others in authority. It seems deeply insulting that when
a black person's distress is articulated it is ignored for what it could reveal, with the focus only on the Oedipal and that person's response to oppression, as if that is purely an internal problem of the black person rather than an external problem for the black person.
Here is where psychoanalysis can help. The availability or lack of availability of the early object gives us an insight into how equipped we are to respond to a given problem. If the early object is cruel, then the child faces psychic pain and as a result may struggle to acknowledge their need and wish for others. There is a strong wish to disavow the pain of rejection, which is now ‘not me’. A suitable container is required for the negative feelings and the target container are those recognised as not like oneself. The hatred which was internal has now been put into others, who carry the negativity and often internalise it. We cannot omit the bit psychoanalysis does not want to engage with, which is the question of why black people are the targeted container and not any other group (pilots, for example). Here we enter the terrain of blackness and whiteness and what has been written into language, thereby legitimatising it.
This psychic dynamic is representative of the experiences of black people today. Rather than being oneself with all one's complexities, most black people experience a feeling of not being free. The lack of freedom centres on not being seen or when seen, being seen through the white gaze. Moss (2001) defines misogyny, homophobia and racism as structured forms of hatred that are organised as defences against the danger of recognising one's own wishes. The danger of recognition is so great that all manner of ego distortion takes place to support hatred.
It is the inability to accept and take back these projections, and accept that the good and the bad feelings actually come from within, that is the problem. For a black person, there is no telling when they will be the target of racist projection, and for this reason black people often find themselves in a state of hypervigilance and often feel the need to be armoured. Black people often feel disrespected, and of course there is both reality and fantasy to this thought. As we become so sensitive and hypervigilant, we close down our curiosity. Once beaten twice shy, so to speak.
This inability to ascribe sameness and ‘sensibility’ to black people frustrates and enrages, as they cannot be seen for who they are beyond the colour of their skin. White people go about their day-to-day business without thinking about race. Race comes up only when they come up against difference. Black people don't have the liberty not to think about race and racism as they are on the receiving end.
Dropping the white and black binary positions will allow a collective mourning, which is what is required. We know the black/white binary is an unhelpful categorisation. The search for identity is universal. The symbolic internal representation of what it is to be black or white is linked to the memories and images of the colonial past and current social realities. Black and white people have different memories and images of this colonial past, which has also led to differences in their intrapsychic development.
I was born in Nigeria and I grew up there up until my teenage years. Nigeria is a former British colony and gained its independence in 1965. Even after its independence, the influence of colonial rule could be seen in the systems and structures of the country. For example, when I was at school it was compulsory to speak English as the first language and there was a penalty for speaking Yoruba, the traditional local language in Lagos. This sadly discouraged a lot of people from learning and writing it. In this way, long after colonial rule, the country was still seeing itself through the lens of its European rulers and prioritising the colonial doctrine.
It was common and favoured among Nigerians who could afford it to send their children to schools in Britain or America. Britain took on the role of colonial parent and Nigerians were keen to go and live in the ‘mother’ country. In those days, Britain welcomed people from its former colonial countries to support the infrastructure or as overseas paying students.
In Lagos, where I grew up, l had the usual challenges of any other young person, but I did not have to think about my colour. It was when I moved to England that I began to notice and to feel my colour to
be a problem for the Other. This was in the 1980s, when racism was pronounced and overt. In my school, black students formed friendship groups separate from white groups. I remember finding the sense of exclusion frustrating. I grew up in a community where difference was celebrated and embraced. I was confused by the lack of curiosity and struggled with the segregation. Outside of school, the locals often seemed surprised that I spoke ‘good English’, which baffled me as I had always spoken English. This was the beginning of a period of racial awakening.
Black people didn't come to know themselves as lazy, noisy, bad, dirty and so forth. Black people have reported white people not wanting to sit next to them on buses on trains, and crossing the road to avoid them. There is so much projection that hinges on the colour of one's skin and for black people it is often negative. History continues to uphold whiteness as the mantle against which others are to be judged. This has to do with the power of mythology and belief systems, which are maintained in the interest of the gains for the coloniser and the wish to maintain a status quo.
Slavery was the origin of this ideology. Slavery was a system of social relations in which one person is the private property of another and can be bought and sold on a market. Women of childbearing years and young strong men were captured. Children could be taken from parents and sold. Slaves could be tortured and killed with almost no restraint. Rape of slaves was never a crime. The system of slavery was quickly followed by colonisation, which began the systemic conscious and unconscious distortion of history.
Slavery and colonisation were the birth of the binary and polarity of what it means to be white and black, and I am not sure how much we have moved away from this legacy, as the internalisation of these oppressions and the identification with the oppressor have been a lasting legacy of slavery experienced today through racism. And even though none of us alive now were present then, its ghostly transmission persists and cannot be let go, both in terms of history and the way in which the
trauma lives on in modern-day racism. From this binary, those that fall into blackness as a result of the empty category of skin colour continue to be oppressed, and whiteness continues to benefit. The effects of racism have been acknowledged as a key risk factor for mental illness in black people (Jackson et al. 1996). This transmission is kept alive in both white and black thinking, upheld by the systems and institutions we all live in, and it is legitimatised through the policies and processes the system and institutions produce.
There is no avoiding racism. To shelter black people from their blackness, black families will often talk to their children from an early age about racism. This is an attempt to warn them against what they will inevitably have to face, another way of keeping the trauma alive. Children are told from an early age to keep their heads down, to be careful around the police and to stay on the good side of their teachers and others in authority. These are messages that condition them into being hypersensitive and vigilant about their environment, messages that the environment is not safe and is not designed to help or support them. This is a burden that white children do not have to carry. The ongoing impact of the discrimination of racism causes confusion, irritability, sleep disturbances, in some situations self-medication through substance abuse, and in the worst case early mortality.
The problem is entrenched and deep-rooted. All young people have to navigate the complexities of life but for the black child there is the additional problem of how to fit in. Writing of the situation in 1971, Coard stated that the British educational system makes black children educationally subnormal by making them feel ‘inferior’. Of the plight of the black youth at school he states: ‘He is told by a variety of means that he is intellectually inferior. When he prepares to leave school, and even before, he is made to realize that he and “his kind” are only fit for manual, menial jobs.‘ This is sad to read but not surprising. I had my early years in Nigeria, and I believe that helped me, as the challenge was not about who was prioritised on the basis of skin, and we competed equally. The overt
aggression and microaggressions young black people experience in the current education system should not be underestimated. They are already starting on an unequal footing, on the back foot, so to speak. They either censor their thoughts and bear it or speak out and get pathologised. Some can't endure the direct and indirect racism, and it is no surprise that some young people end up dropping out or, worse, joining gangs and ending up in the criminal justice system.
For my dissertation paper, I carried out my research on young black boys in a school in inner-city London. This was in 2005 when black boys were underperforming (not the case now) and there was interest in the reasons for their underperformance. Research reports pointed the finger at black dysfunctional families, i.e. the lack of father figures and male role models, and single mothers. These reports failed to address the issues of inequality and seemed to want to put the blame on the black individual. Phoenix (1987) and Robson and Berthoud (2003) highlighted this problem. I wanted to interview those who were successful as I was interested in their ‘choice locator’, i.e. to what these boys attribute their success. The odds seem stacked against them. They came from single-parent families, all lived in poor neighbourhoods and on the poverty line, yet they were determined, high achievers and earmarked for Oxford and Cambridge universities.
They attributed their success to their strong friendships and their ever-present mothers. The unrelenting and dedicated effort of their mothers was clear to see and it wasn't a surprise but a familiar story. There is a strength of black motherhood that endures. When we talked about racism, they were aware of the impact it had on their lives. What was surprising was the way they spoke about it:
‘I'm sometimes afraid to wear my hoody up, you never know they (the police) may arrest me or something because they're scared …’
‘I sometimes get the impression the man [teacher] doesn't want me in his class … he is always picking on me about my hair … it's just there … in his eyes … the hatred … the contempt …’
There was a quiet resignation and acceptance due to lack of ability to change the situation. It is often thought that if you are a black person from a poor socio-economic background, you will suffer more intrapsychic difficulties, including success neurosis (Holmes 2006). Not for these boys. For some, the challenge of discrimination and social and economic inequalities would contribute to an inability to focus on education, and success would be too hard to reach. Even when success is attained, people often talk of ‘imposter syndrome’ – a sense of not feeling they belong in that place of success because of persistent discrimination.
Some black people will not engage in psychotherapy training and therapy because they don't feel understood or feel the white therapist is unable to think about their different intersecting experiences to do with race and racism. My experience of training is that race issues are often either not on the curriculum or scantily covered. During my training, I hardly brought up issues of difference because it didn't feel safe to do so, and to do so would have furthered a feeling of exclusion. On completing my training however, it felt important to share some of my experience and thinking. I returned to teach Difference and Diversity to trainees on the postgraduate psychotherapy training. My experience of teaching the subject of racism is that it often provokes anxiety, understandably, which therefore makes it difficult to engage the trainees. By ‘engage’ I mean have a helpful conversation which we can all learn from. The black trainees feel safer to engage because they have the space to talk about their experience with a black trainer. They know that they would not need to explain what the experience of being at the receiving end of a racist projection felt like or that they have to justify the feelings provoked in them as a result of overt or covert forms of racism. Often not all the students show up. Those that do are often anxious about saying the wrong thing. Some feel they may offend and are frightened about being seen to hold racist ideas or thoughts. Some trainees deny difference altogether and take a colourblind approach:
‘How about my oppression, we are all marginalised one way or the other.’
‘I'm tired of talking about black people. I'm jealous of them because no one is talking about my struggles that are non-visible but just as challenging.’
Ignoring colour difference in this way maintains the problem. Dalal (2002) explains that one common reaction evoked in white participants in a group to bringing up difference is one of hostility; another is couched in liberal thinking such as ‘I don't see colour.’ Both responses are designed to dismiss and deny the fact that the seminar is about race and racism. Dalal goes on to ask, ‘what does the white denial seek to achieve?’ He concludes that it is to render the difference meaningless.
Rendering the difference meaningless in this way makes us all the same. However, we are not all the same. A people of sameness leaves no room for new thoughts and ideas. The wish for sameness and commonality is often desirable as a wish to minimise anxiety but also a false sense of safety. The problem is that we are not versed in talking about race and racism, as I also found while on my training. Given that no experiences are the same, it requires staying with the uncomfortable feelings that the topic evokes. As most trainees are white and middle class, they can avoid the topic altogether. There is no possibility of letting in different perspectives particularly when it offsets the status quo. Given that we live in a society where white thinking is reinforced by the system at every stage, it is feasible to see this way of thinking as the norm. It is a system that is written and legitimised and unconsciously communicated through exclusion. It promotes thinking and feeling that those who are different are to be feared and problematised.
Black people are seen as a homogenised group. and are known often only by the colour of their skin and not by their talent or for themselves. It is interesting that some of the trainees who live outside of London in rural areas confide that they haven't conversed with a black person before, never mind worked with a black trainer. By the end of the seminars there
is a change and conflict in thinking brought about from a realisation that we can indeed learn from one another. Encouraging students' participation by not being ‘the expert’ seems to me a helpful way forward. What black people want is not so much about, as Fanon puts it, ‘seeking equality with white people’, but about wanting to be awarded the same subjectivity. A form of freedom so to speak – being allowed to be oneself in all its multiplicities and contradictions.
The use of the ‘gap’ in the title of this writing is suggesting that there is a place to do that. Therapists play a pivotal role in the lives of their clients. I have come to believe that psychotherapy is not enough. My beliefs since the training have been enriched and informed by theology, the arts, poetry and political activists.
What is worth bearing in mind, as expressed by Altman, is that
Despite all the important anti-racist advances in the legal structures of the United States in the conscious minds of many of its white citizens, there remain critical forces at work perpetuating racism, which operates below and outside of the white radar screen. These forces are built into the political and economic structures of our society, into the value systems by which we were raised, into the selves we construct to feel good about ourselves. It is very difficult to be aware of these forces.
The unconscious made conscious of the idea of colour blindness needs further reflection. The question being when something becomes conscious, what then do we do with this consciousness? We can't afford to go back to sleep.
There is a school of thought that we ought not to focus on racism. However, this becomes a challenge when black trainees in therapy complain about not being heard and waiting to qualify. The training is failing both the black and white trainees, and the teachers and the
establishment are not as invested in bringing about the necessary training to allow people to hear and address distress. With this in mind, black people need to see racism for the empty category it is. Their efforts need not to be directed at fighting racism alone, but must also engage in what gets internalised. Black internalised racism is not talked about much. Perhaps because it is not seen for what it is: the reaction and response to racism. For black and brown people it is a lived experience. It is impossible to avoid it. This is not just at an individual level but at a systemic one, as the systems in place disenfranchise some and privilege others. Both a black and a white person's task, therefore, is to understand their own racial identity and work towards healing and wholeness.
I believe we can learn from the progress made in the writing of psychoanalysts and critical thinkers in the United States and lately in the UK. The wish to retain it for a selected few is also entrenched in whiteness. For the purpose of psychoanalysis that is encompassing, whiteness would benefit from the views of black people's experience, as they have lived as a minority in a world where the majority is white. This is a move towards helping all people. It would be a challenge, given that white folks have resisted giving recognition to the black person's experience and speaking up against the injustice of racism – and it is this fear that needs radical attention.
As a black female psychotherapist, I am also engaged with based on my gender and colour. Dropping the need to be something Other for the other needs attention. When I started work as a clinical supervisor at a training institution in a leafy suburb of Hertfordshire, I arrived at work on my first day to be greeted with suspicion by a person who seemed concerned that I may have been in the wrong place. On explaining I was a new supervisor, I was met with surprise and embarrassment, which culminated in an uncomfortable silence. We could have had an interesting conversation. However, this was sabotaged by the assumption of my white colleague that they were superior to my lower status, and their subsequently feeling too ashamed to engage further.
In these situations, I try and move past the awkwardness, but I chose on this occasion not to, waiting to see what might happen. Nothing
did. How could my colleague break past the uncomfortableness of getting it wrong? To do this would require undoing a well-laid set of assumptions. To do this would require ascribing the same subjectivity to me, the foreigner. It would require moving past the feeling of shame and the pain of guilt. The uncomfortableness and shame were clear to me in my colleague's demeanour and body language. If I were to pursue the effect on me of my colleague's dismissal of me, it would become my problem. It would culminate in what is termed by DiAngelo (2018) as ‘white fragility’. Even though I don't believe this is the right term, I think we all know what she means: a state in which a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable and a challenge to white authority. We moved past this over time and had some productive conversations. However, it is not black people's role to normalise and lessen white shame.
Black people who achieve professionalism and success are often questioned, whereas white people who achieve the same professionalism, the same economic and social privilege, are neither questioned in the same way or denied success. The challenge for whiteness is to reassess the belief in white privilege and white superiority. DiAngelo explains white privilege as:
When you take one group's racial bias, and you back it with legal authority and institutional control, you transform it into a system that becomes infused and embedded across the entire society. It's not dependent on an individual's agreement, belief or intentions; it's just the default of the society. That society will continue to produce an advantage for those whose bias is backed with power, and disadvantage … those whose is not.
As whiteness is the norm, the systemic construction is that white people do not see outside whiteness, and this very intrinsic belief means that whiteness is positioned as having an advantage and superiority over others. Hooks (1992) explains that as whiteness is the conductor and
orchestrator of identity formation, there is no need for explanation. Race and racism remain the problem of the Other.
The white practitioner and white antiracist need to arrive at a position where they can see themselves as the involuntary beneficiary of whiteness, and recognise that under the mantle of whiteness is a system that oppresses. This ought to be both a moral and an ethical issue. Suchet (2004) explains that this realisation of complicity, being one of the beneficiaries of whiteness irrespective of one's beliefs, values and ideals, is difficult to absorb, bear or accept. If this can be recognised, then the psychic burden can be shared. This is what has been denied and needs reintegration into whiteness.
From my training, teaching and lived experience in the UK, I have come to realise that most white people are unaware of how to think and, even more so, how to talk about race issues. For those wishing to do the work, it seems to me that what black people have experienced and how they have lived in a country where whites are the majority, may offer the opportunity. Morgan (2008) has expressed the importance of working with the racist thoughts which white therapists may avoid because it causes discomfort. For instance, the therapist may want to address the issues of colour purely as an internal dynamic. The therapist needs to ask what she is trying to avoid by so doing, and stay with the discomfort. Failure to address racial inequalities means that something, against which the racist thought is a defence, gets side-lined and is missed.
If we can redefine psychoanalytic psychotherapy to suit the needs of those we want to treat, we can see that aspects of it can help. Centring ourselves in a place of not knowing is a start – centring our thinking around the fact that there are two unconsciouses in the consulting room. All interaction including that around race should stem from a position of curiosity. The therapist should be getting to know her client and the client should be getting to know her therapist. We are not ‘blank slates’, as psychoanalytic training can make us think and believe. There ought to be two unknowns, two frightened people in the room. The therapist's
fear is born out of anxiety whether they are able to help the client, and the client's fear is born out of anxiety whether the therapist will ‘find and meet’ her. When therapy works well, it does so because the therapist is able to play, in Winnicott's terms to lose herself. As a therapist, I am humbled by my clients' experiences and the opportunity to share and learn from them. However, therapists that are unversed, or under the influence of their theoretical god, will expect that the Other, regardless of their cultural background, will behave in a way that reflects European values. For the culturally diverse person, these therapies fail and becomes a cultural whitewash. Black-on-black therapies work because of the shared experience of racism, though I also feel there may be blind spots due to an over-identification with the problem, a bringing of trauma more to life, which can mean it is somewhat unhelpfully kept living. My trainee client said she wanted to be with a black therapist because she didn't want to have to explain what it means to be a target of racism to someone white. Though I can understand and empathise with this, and work with her on self-identity, I do not feel unique in what I have to offer. My hope and wish is that that we can learn from one another – if we can only get past the colour barrier and the pain, anger, denial and guilt, and connect with our basic humanity.
The majority need to acknowledge their role both consciously and unconsciously in being members of that collective majority and how that will impact the lives of the non-dominant race. There must be a recognition that we all see through the lens of European values which values whiteness and perceives others as secondary. Those values determine who speaks and how we speak, who is silenced and who can speak, etc. An awareness of other cultural viewpoints should not have to overshadow our own beliefs.
But none of this should be news. Hook (2008: 146) states that ‘the “racial other” is needed, envied, desired far more than the racist subject can ever admit’. As our profession is about the quest for awareness, it seems hypocritical and problematic to continue to avoid this very loud silence.
This paper has been concerned with white and black binary positions, how we arrived here, and the acknowledgement that forces beyond our understanding keep this binary in place. Psychoanalytic theory has been ambivalent towards racism and the psychic pain of black people. There has been a history of neglect of socio-historical concerns, and current problems of racism in psychoanalysis should be taken seriously. Psychoanalysis perpetuates the problems of colonialist ideology in some of its writing. However, psychoanalysis also has many benefits when it talks of the racist imaginary and colonised minds. As a result of the colonisation of psychoanalytic thinking, it can operate on the false assumption that a superiority of power and knowledge lies with the therapist, as opposed to the reality of two human beings working together in collaboration. If we can step beyond the colonial practices of which psychoanalysis is also a part and offer the same subjectivity to our clients, then they may surprise themselves by who they can become.