Keeping and Crossing Professional and Racialized Boundaries

Abstract

In this article we reflect on the process of a white woman researching a Black woman's experiences of engaging in clinical psychology services. This involved interviewing both a Black woman client and her white woman therapist four times over an 11-month therapy period. We discuss issues of identifications and relationships, the interface between research and therapy, and professional and ethical responsibilities of disclosures arising from this particular study in relation to general debates about feminist research. Rather than presuming that feminist research involves identifications between women or the aim of dissolving power relations, we highlight how issues of power and difference form a continuous topic and site of negotiation within the research relationship. We explore how this parallels and informs the therapy process. Despite differences in structural relations of privilege and power and reservations about feminist research practices around disclosure, we argue that fruitful consequences can follow from an explicit acknowledgment of the multiple identifications and institutional positions all participants occupy within research relationships. These include dimensions of difference between women structured around race, class, and professional—client relations.