The White Man in the Room: Finding My Position as a White Therapist

Abstract

This paper explores the discomfort that resulted from a brief exchange between a white male therapist and a black male patient. The discomfort is understood as pointing towards an absence of racial understanding in the therapist, which contributed to a breakdown in empathic communication. This absence is explored in relation to the concept of internal racism and used to highlight an inequality in the subjective experience of race between the therapist and patient (Davids, 2011; Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference). The notion of white privilege is introduced and considered as a useful counterpart to internal racism for thinking about white racial experience. White privilege is viewed as a useful concept for making present what is often missing from discussions of race and difference. It is suggested that until white experience acquires racial meanings, the burden of thinking about race will be placed upon the racial other (Davids, 2011). These themes are considered from within a psychoanalytic framework, but significant use is made of ideas from outside psychoanalytic theory to demonstrate the complex interplay of internal and external forces that give shape to unconscious racism. It is suggested that further exploration of these ideas in relation to the superego could be especially useful for clinical understanding.