 EDITED
BY KATE WHITE
Publication
in March 2006 by Karnac
This book addresses the often hidden
and ignored subject of attachment, race and culture.
It is argued that too often issues of race, culture
and ethnicity are seen as relevant only to black and
ethnic minority psychotherapists and clients. It is
felt that all psychotherapists and their clients bring
a rich diversity of ethnic and cultural narratives to
the clinical encounter. Each of us has a unique and
complex sense of who we feel ourselves to be, as well
as who others expect us to be, in the ever-shifting
contexts of our individual families, societies and cultures.
Each of us is likely to grapple with feelings of inclusion
and exclusion, belonging and alienation, visibility
and invisibility, power and powerlessness.
Some
of the key questions the book explores are; How can
we as therapists use our own experiences of difference
in order to get alongside our clients, without collapsing
difference and sameness into each other? Can we hold
the tension between them? What is our responsibility
as psychotherapists and supervisors for engaging in
these issues, both in our own individual development
and in the clinical setting, in the context of a society
that structures our identities on the basis of colour
coded racial categories?
The implications of the development of our identities
within attachment relationships which are themselves
embedded in particular constellations of racial and
ethnic power dynamics are discussed. Chapters explore
how we can we understand the very real impact of categories
of identity such as race on the formation of our selves,
at the same time as recognizing their socially constructed
nature. Other questions posed by the contributors are
about how these categories help to give us and our clients
a secure sense of identity? And how do they constrict
our sense of our own and our clients' possibilities?
The
book aims to bring together personal experience of difference
and how this emerges in our work with clients. At its
heart three CAPP members, Barbara Ashton, Cascia Davies
and Irris Singer, share their experience in response
to the following challenging questions; Can our individual
narratives in relation to race, culture and attachment
be unmasked in the therapeutic dyad to reveal our human
connectedness? How can the exploration of our own racial
and cultural identities provide us with therapeutic
tools to work within and across multiple categories
of cultural identity?
Kimberlyn Leary's John Bowlby Memorial Lecture How Race
is Lived in the Consulting Room, forms the centre piece
and the scene is set by Farhad Dalal: Racism: Processes
of Detachment, Dehumanisation and Hatred, with a response
by Zack Eleftheriadou providing a clarifying and complementary
discussion of his paper. This book provides a sustained
and deep engagement with the subject at a level of complexity
not often possible with a theme that is associated with
such pain and conflict.
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