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Getting Started:Psychodynamics, Racism andAnti-RacismAndrew Cooper aa West London Institute of Higher Education ,Published online: 21 Jan 2008.

To cite this article: Andrew Cooper (1989) Getting Started: Psychodynamics, Racismand Anti-Racism, Journal of Social Work Practice: Psychotherapeutic Approaches inHealth, Welfare and the Community, 3:4, 15-27, DOI: 10.1080/02650538908413397

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GETTING STARTED Psychodynamics, Racism and Anti-Racism

Andrew Coopei“

SUMMARY

This paper mainly addresses white social workers who want to practise in an anti-racist manner. It aims to clarify common confusions about the relationship between ‘therapeutic’ and ‘political’ goals in anti-racist practice, which can lead workers to feel immobilised and unable to ‘get started’. Analysis of a case example based on the author’s experience is used to unravel the strands of personal distress and experience of racism which a client may bring to a social worker, and the corresponding strands of personal and institutional racism with which the social worker must wrestle. It is proposed that familiar concepts of transference and counter-transference can be helpful in understanding the confusions about racism which white social workers may experience in practice encounters with black clients. The importance of all this is seen to lie in the likelihood of white social workers unwittingly reproducing racism, unless they are clear about the boundaries between the therapeutic and the political domains.

WORL.DS APART

Psychoanalysis and social theory have rarely been comfortable bedfellows. GAPS is to be congratulated on tackling the relationship between psychodynamcis, race and anti-racism, but it will not be an easy path to tread. For on the one hand psychodlnamic theory and practice assumes that to a greater or lesser degree individuals construct their worlds from a hidden internal source, namely the unconcscious, which is partly amenable to change through introspection and the struggle for awareness of its influence upon conscious life. Social theory on the other hand, including that which addresses itself to the origins and nature of racism, assumes that the behaviour of individuals is shaped by their location within externally given power relationships like race, class and gender, which are amenable to change through collective action and social organisation. The point of contact between the domains of theory and practice, between the realms of human agency and social structure, *Senior Lecturer in Social Work, West London Institute of Higher Education.

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is an epistemological minefield. It is in this territory that the anti-racist social worker operates, struggling to reconcile a commitment to helping clients maximize responsibility for themselves with an understanding of the social and political determinants of their lives, and in particular that of racism. This is the search for a form of good social work practice which ‘can engage with the cultural, political or historical, in a way that recognises the limitations of therapeutic expertise, whilst not compromising theraputic stance and effectiveness’. (Ingham and Fitzgerald, 1988, p.3)

This paper aims to offer some tools to practitioners who are trying to advance their understanding of the links between psychological distress, therapeutic method and racism. In particular it addresses the dilemmas which white practitioners may face when they begin to incorporate anti- racism into their practice. Few white people feel absolutely secure in their anti-racism. However well intentioned they may feel themselves to be, and however much anti-racist work they have done on themselves, they remain prone to self-doubt and to question whether they do not remain racist at deep and, to them, imperceptible levels. Such self- enquiry may be no bad thing. On the other hand it may lead to complete immobilisation, often experienced as an inability both to be commitedly anti-racist and to adopt an exploratory therapeutic mode. ‘Emasculating the therapy in order to avoid ideological embarrasment is clearly in no- one’s service’. (Ingham and Fitzgerald, 1988, p.3) Quite so, but this is exactly the dilemma so many practitioners do experience.

I make no special claim to be able to resolve this problem, only to suggest a helpful framework for thinking ones way through practice encounters which throw up this kind of conflict. In particular I suggest that some familiar psychodynamic tools can be helpful in reaching a point where such fruitless internal struggles in the worker give way to a capacity to engage purposefully with clients. This is the problem of getting started.

Psychodynamic social workers are only too familiar with accusations that they ‘psychologise’ problems which have their real origins in clients’ social circumstances. For white workers trying to combine a psychodynamic and an anti-racist approach this allegation can be thrown into particularly sharp relief. At a more theoretical level the tensions between psychodynamic and sociological thinkers have taken a similar form. Adherents of a psychodynamic perspective have feared that sociological explanations of behaviour will undermine a central principle of the psychoanalytic project, namely the struggle for maximum possible personal responsibility

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in human affairs, by allowing the individual to blame his or her predicament on society or social factors. Equally the political theorist has feared that a concentration upon the individual’s capacity for change will divert attention from the social causes of oppression and lead to ‘victim-blaming’ ideologies. If psychodynamics is to offer anything useful to anti-racist endeavour and vice versa, then we need a framework of understanding which recognises the interpenetration of the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’, and draws a boundary between the therapeutic domain and the political, without either rendering them mutually exclusive or simply collapsing the one into the other. (Banton et al, 1985, Kovel, 1984)

Comparatively little has been written about the relationship between psychodynamics and racism. However there is a rich and extensive psychoanalytic literature exploring the interaction between socio- political structure and the individual psyche and the counterpart to this process, the possibility or otherwise of a political psychotherapy. In a recent contribution to this debate, Stephen Frosh remarks that ‘it is precisely because psychoanalytic theory so convincingly demonstrates that social forces are internalized by each individual, and live on inside to form the basis of personality, that it is politically relevant to develop ways of acting directly on these internalized forces, as well as upon the external structures which give rise to them. This is not confusing therapy and politics, but it is rescuing therapy for a potential role in politics, based on the idea that individual change is not completely determined by social change, and requires methods tuned to the uncovering Df unconscious structures’. (Frosh, 1986 pp.42-3)

This is broadly the position adopted in the present article.

A CASE - PART I

Valerie is 19, and has a three-year-old son called Sam. Valerie left home after she became pregnant, and she and Alvin, Sam’s father, were housed in a council flat. The couple’s relationship was never very stable; on several occasions Alvin left home and returned after two or three months. Shortly after his most recent disappearance the nursery noticed bruising on Sam, and a Place of Safety Order was taken. Sam was placed in a Social Services children’s home, there being no foster parents available within fifty miles. Valerie has admitted hitting Sam and causing the bruising. She attributes this loss of control to her distressed state

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following Alvin’s departure. A record in her file of a brief contact around the time she left home includes Valerie’s allegation that her own father beat her fairly frequently. Valerie has started to attend a family centre to work on her parenting and her relationsip with Sam. The Social Services Department (SSD) are intending to renew the Interim Care Order and set a date for a full court hearing.

Valerie has already complained to her social worker, who is a white man, that Sam is not being properly cared for in the children’s home, and that they do not seem to know how to look after his hair and skin in particular. She has berated him with arguments about how unhappy Sam is and how unsympathetic the staff of the home are to her when she visits. The two staff members working with her at the family centre, one male and one female, report that she has co-operated in drawing up a contract of work for Sam and herself, but has also expressed a great deal of anger to them about Sam’s treatment in the home, saying he is coming to more harm in care than he ever would living with her. Valerie has been abusive about her social worker to the family centre workers, and on one occasion called him racist for failing to act on her complaints about Sam’s treatment. However the family centre staff have also noted that most of this is directed at the male worker of the pair, and they already feel ‘split’ by her behaviour.

Nevertheless, Valerie has disclosed quite a lot of information about her family background. She has confirmed that her father used to beat her frequently, and also that her mother had two lengthy admissions to psychiatric hospital for depression. One of these followed the birth of her brother, when Valerie was three. Valerie has always felt that her mother favoured her brother over her and that she is highly protective of him.

Valerie’s worker is confused. He knows that Sam is part of a pattern in the SSD in which black children form a disproportionately large group of those received into care. From past experience he is unhappy with the children’s home’s physical care of black children. He also suspects that the staff sometimes treat the parents of abused children punitively, rather than with firmness and understanding. He is unhappy about the lack of suitable foster placements within reasonable distance of the borough. He knows that Valerie has lived all her life on some of the worst council estates in the neighbourhood, and that her father’s and Alvin’s un- employment is probably a straightforward reflection of the local unemployment figures for black men.

He also wants to help Valerie and Sam stay together. In some way he

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feels that Valerie is not helping with this. Her rage about Sam’s treatment in the children’s home seems to be obscuring any acknowledgement of her own responsibility in Sam being in care. He feels he cannot defend the children’s home to her, and in some way this is tied to the fact that he also cannot confront her with the need to think about and work through the consequences of her treatment of Sam. He suspects that Valerie’s abuse of Sam is linked to her feelings about and experience of men in her life; the pattern of her attacks on workers might confirm this. He has worked successfully with this kind of dynamic before, but now he can not get started because he feels that if he directs Valerie’s attention away from her angry focus on the children’s home he will simply confirm what is probably her view - that a white social worker is bound not to care about racism.

POWER - SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL, BLACKAND WHITE

All therapeutic social work must begin with a recognition of the ’reality’ factors in a client’s life, and proceed amongst other things to address the client’s orientation and handling of these realities. Since racism in the lives of clients, in the practices of agencies, and in the attitudes and feelings of workers are all potential realities, the psychodynamic practitioner needs a clear grasp of how these operate and what, in their midst, is the scope for therapeutic work. The use of transference and counter-transference is central to the therapeutic task. Transference frequently involves the attribution by one person to another both of qualities which do not belong to them, and of power which they do not have. The fantasy of the ‘persecuting parent’ illustrates this. Because racism is about the power of white people over black people the disentangling of ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’ in the kind of social work encounter described above is as complex as it is important.

The most useful starting-point in trying to untangle this kind of confusion and to begin examining links between psychodynamics and anti-racism is to look at some concepts of power. Racism is often defined as the conjunction of racial prejudice and the power to discriminate on the basis of such prejudice. Racism may or may not involve conscious and intentional discrimination by individuals. Institutional racism is a process whereby organisational policies and practices effectively exclude participation or service take-up by a racial or cultural group, although no individual or group actually intends this outcome. The institution is

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prejudiced in favour of the majority culture because it organises itself in ways which are accessible to and meet the needs of that culture. Because the organisation also has power to give or withhold services and to change its practices or not, its prejudice is allied to power. The SSD in the above case example is institutionally racist in some respects at least.

As an individual representative of this agency, Valerie’s social worker has limited influence over its wider policies and practices. Although he is active in trying to promote anti-racist strategies and change the organisation from within, this takes time, and meanwhile he must go on working with the kind of situation described. If indeed he were black, there are many aspects of the case which would not be significantly altered. Black social workers can be part of what have been described as ‘white services’.

Valerie’s own experiences of racism, which she imports into her relationship with her social worker and the SSD, will derive partly from the structural or institutional level, and partly from contact with individuals who have abused or racially harassed her. Some of the people she has encountered within organisations will have implemented racist decisions and policies that directly affected her, although they might not have intended this or even understood that they were doing so.

Nevertheless, there is an important difference between the individual who is in a position of organisational or socially conferred power over a black person and one who is not. Between social worker and client this varies between encounters where the terms of the relationship are freely negotiated to those where the social worker is exercising a considerable range of powers over the client. In many cases, including Valerie’s, the reality is a mixture, some aspects of the relationship being negotiable and some not. But, and this is an important proviso, this does not mean that those areas of the relationship which are negotiable are not structured by feelings of power and powerlessness. As every social worker knows, the client who seeks voluntary therapeutic help will frequently feel and behave in ways which derive from a fantasy of being in the grip of a powerful and persecutory parent figure. These feelings may lead to extreme attempts to control the worker in various ways.

Psychodynamic theory seeks to clarify the origins of such feelings and behaviour in unconscious processes, and in terms of their roots in childhood experience. Even if the client was not actually subject to gross abuses of adult power, he or she may have experienced relationships with adults in these terms. By not being properly understood as a child, and

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particularly if hostile and aggressive impulses were not tolerated and given containment, the child may come to experience adults as extremely punitive and critical. Such a child is likely to reach adulthood with a whole set of limiting self-concepts, and feel and behave in ways which confirm the unconscious fantasy that they are inferior, worthy of punishment, and that other people are threatening to them. In short they will experience themselves as victims of a hostile and harsh social and personal world, and will feel and behave as though they are powerless.

It is not hard to see how Valerie’s defensive reactions to experiences of early parental absence and family dynamics may have given rise to inner world scenes of persecution and impotence which dovetail with the reality of her experience in a racist society. The difficult task for her social worker is to disentangle the different strands of what she communicates to him in this current crisis, and establish a working alliance around those aspects of her situation which can be changed. The peculiar contribution of psychodynamic thinking to social work is that it can help people transform their lives when they believed they were powerless to do so because they were in the grip of the kinds of fantasies and unconscious preconceptions I have described above. Psychodynamic social work is concerned with defining and maximising the client’s personal freedom through modification of unhelpful defences, insight into the origins of self-destructive behaviour, growth towards a more reality-oriented view of the world, and so on. Transference and counter- transference ex-periences are both diagnostic tools telling the worker what the client’s unconscious experiences of other people are, as well as one medium through which therapeutic work may be done. But as I have suggested above, before the worker can decide what constitutes a transference experience, he or she must decide what constitutes reality.

Valerie’s worker would be naive if he treated her behaviour towards himself and his colleagues as a straightforward transference reaction to authoritarian parental figures. On the other hand, in this state of confusion he is in danger of letting his preoccupation with issues of racism in her life obstruct a clear pathway to helping her address her relationship with Sam, and the powerful feelings about her own parents that she is carrying forward into adult life. It is at this point in his and our own understanding of the case that the likelihood of conflict between the political and the psychodynamic perspectives is at its sharpest. Writing about the experience of counselling work in South African townships, Straker comments

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‘It is vital for counsellors to examine not only feelings of anxiety but also their feelings of collective guilt about living within the apartheid system ... These anxieties in the counsellors, if they are not worked through are blocks to the vital task of containing the counsellee’s anxiety and aggression ... The idea that the ability to be containing is related to the therapist’s state of mind was confirmed in the present study, where counsellors who had made peace with their own inner conflicts of a political and moral nature were able to inspire trust and confidence in the children with whom they worked’ 1988, pp.15-16.

For work with Valerie and Sam to move on, their social worker must come to terms with his confusion about professional and political responsibility. Otherwise he will not be able to ‘contain’ Valerie’s aggression, part of which can be regarded as legitimate anger about racism in the children’s home, and part as belonging to a powerful transference with its roots in her difficult relationship with her own parents.. .

CROSSING OVER - TRANSFERENCE, COUNTER-TRANSFERENCE AND RACISM

Stephen Frosh has observed that some schools of psychoanalytic thought lend themselves more readily than others to an analysis which can incorporate both inner and outer world considerations. (Frosh, 1986 pp.39-40). In general object relations theory, and in particular the work of Winnicott, provides the basis for an understanding of the individual psyche as inherently and fundamentally social in its nature. If, as Winnicott maintained, there are no babies, ‘meaning that if you set out to describe a baby you will find you are describing a baby and someone’, (Winnicott 1947) it is clear that human development is a social process from the very start, albeit involving only two people in its earliest stages. In discussing the work of Hanna Segal, Frosh notes that she sees one aspect of therapy as helping the client ‘restore the capacity to assess correctly internal reality’. Frosh continues:

‘Significantly, “correct assessment” of external reality is included in the paradigm without any implication of acceptance of such reality, hence opening the way for a reading of Kleinian aims that allows for a critical stance towards the social world’. (Frosh 1986 p.54)

This seems a telling point, and one not theoretically tied to any particular psychoanalytic school. It is especially relevant to the social

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work task, with its focus on the interaction between the psychic and the social and, as Frosh hints, offers an opening to those who wish to reconcile a therapeutic mode of practice with political commitment.

Thus I want to suggest that the way through the fog of confusion that Valerie’s worker feels is to treat the situation much like any other therapeutic tangle. He must determine for himself what he believes to be the truth or the reality about racism in this case, including his own feelings and attitudes, and the nature of departmental practices. Whatever Valerie’s intentions, the consequence of the way she has gone about making her allegations has led her social worker to feel immobilised by fears about his own racism. In order to free himself to address important issues in the case work, he must be able to separate himself enough from these fears to redirect Valerie to other areas of her responsibility in the situation. He must find ways of acknowledgingthat he knows some ofthe social work practices he is associated with in Sam’s care are racist. For this to be acknowledged in good faith he must be active in trying to change organisational practices. But he need not, and should not, take on personal responsibility for racism that does not belong to him. Despite racism, he must retain faith that he and the department can help Valerie, and to fail to do so in consequence of collusion with her defensive behaviour would be professional neglect.

Quite apart from how Valerie may tend to ‘set up’ workers as particular kinds of parent figures, she may also play a part in constructing them as racist in ways they are not. In doing this it has been suggested she may be conflating past experiences of white society with past experiences of her black parents, in a way that threatens to disable both her and her worker. At any rate, the net effect is comparable to that which flows from transference phenomena; the workers become caught in a web of feelings and psychological constructions. Just as the social worker who, finding herself acting out the parent figure which the client wishes her to be, must return to her ‘real’ self in order to be able to help the client negotiate reality, so must Valerie’s social worker be able to return to ‘realities’ about his own racism and that of his colleagues and the department. To do this, he must have considerable understanding of his own racism,

and be fairly secure in what he has discovered and worked through. Otherwise he is likely to become caught in self-accusation and guilt about his feelings and actions. At this point he will effectively begin to enact a kind of counter-transference reaction in his work with Valerie, seeing her perhaps as more accusing than she really is, or holding himself

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responsible for aspects ofher behaviour that should be herconcern. At its worst, this kind of dynamic leads to white workers failing to act to protect children at risk, and failing to help black parents maximize their opportunities to repair relationships with their children. Work on the whole range of deeply rooted relationship issues concerning Valerie and her images of good and bad parenting will not even get started. As with all transference and counter-transference muddles, the irony of this situation is that the outcome is likely to be the opposite of what is intended. Sam is more likely to stay in care than to be successfully reunited with Valerie, and racism will have been perpetuated, not curbed.

A CASE - PART 11

Ironically, the solution which Valerie’s social worker finds is very similar to what he might have suggested with any other client. He proposes to Valerie that he arrange a meeting with the care staff at the children’s home, which they will both attend, at which she can articulate her concerns about Sam’s physical care. He will help her prepare what she wants to say, discuss her anxieties about asserting herself in this way, and counsel her about ways ofgetting across her message effectively. For a time he womes that he is ‘dumping’ Valerie with the problem of the department’s racism, until he remembers that what is at issue is Valerie’s legitimate concern about the welfare of her child. From a therapeutic point of view he wants to help Valierie learn to take effective action to solve a prolem, rather than use the problem to indulge her feelings of powerlessness. He also wants to address her ‘spliting’ behaviour, and help her discriminate between the different strands of her rage about her situation, and empower her to try to change or influence those aspects of her predicament where there is a realistic chance of success. He will demonstrate that he is on her side in this matter, but not therefore prepared to accept all responsibility for tackling it. He intends to say no more or less at the meeting than is called for to assist Valerie in her objective. He is experienced enough to avoid over-identification with clients. For him, the importance of this plan is that he is identifying with Valerie, because he knows she is right, and he will be addressing her present behaviour in a therapeutically positive manner.

It comes as no surprise that Valerie at first resists his suggestion, arguing amongst other things that i t has no chance of changing anything.

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But having recovered a sense of his own skills, he is able to see more clearly the boundaries of responsibility in the situation. He is able to state clearly that he supports Valerie in her objections, and wants to help her address the issue. She cannot avoid recognising that he is taking her seriously, and that despite the power of her aggression towards him, he has listened to her. A therapeutic alliance has begun and, as it must also be, a political one.

Part of his objective is to guide Valerie towards understanding the value of negotiation rather than attack in pursuit of her ends, to discriminate between assertion and aggression, to risk testing the limits of her own powers in a more reality-based way. As in much therapeutic social work, concrete reality-testing may be the most beneficial first step; more reflective work may be possible after Valerie has experienced a positive outcome as a result of changing her behaviour, and thus allowed herself to discover that she plays an active part in creating her own world, however much real power other people may have over her at any particular time.

THE BOUNDARIES OF CHANGE

In his discussion Stephen Frosh suggests that ‘psychoanalytic practice can move beyond the “analytic attitude”, towards commitment to a system of relationshipenhancing values which nevertheless are politically radical’. (Frosh 1986 p.45).

If Valerie’s social worker has done Something of this kind, it is clear that this involves definite value commitments. In particular he has chosen to ‘come off the fence’ with respect to racism, accepting it is as part of social reality and as something which must be confronted and changed rather than just ignored or handed back to Valerie to deal with. It is worth reminding ourselves that all social work and therapeutic decisions involve commitments of this kind, although much of the time they are taken for granted. Most social workers accept the reality of poverty in their clients’ lives and will work with them to maximize their incomes; they also know that the possibilities for transceding poverty at any particular time are limited, and they wisely donot encourage unreal expectations in their clients, or allow that poverty to be accepted as a total justification for destructive behaviour. Social workers need to accept the reality of racism in the lives of their black clients, in themselves, and in their organisations, before they can do therapeutic

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work with these clients with integrity and even much success. In Frosh’s phrase, this is incorporating anti-racism into ‘a system of relationship- enhancing values’.

However, it is only if we accept, as Stephen Frosh says, that individual change is not completely determined by social change, and vice versa, that we can hope to practise both realistically and politically. Even if Valerie’s social worker should represent a model of white anti-racism, his attitudes and actions do not undo the institutional racism of his organisation, or continued racism in the wider society which Valerie

. inhabits. He must expect to be approached with suspicion by many black clients. Equally he should not assume that all black people will treat him as a potential racist until he proves otherwise to them. White social workers cannot prejudge the experience of black people they work with. The domains of the social and the psychic are in perpetual and complex interaction. This does not mean that either can ever be entirely collapsed into or explained by the other; only by unravelling their presence in any particular practice encounter can social workers avoid adding to rather than perpetuating the sum total of human misery which racism breeds.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Haddy Davis, John Pitts, and Steven Trevillion, all of whom made valuable comments on drafts of this paper.

REFERENCES

Banton, R., Clifford, P., Frosh, S., Lousada, J., Rosenthall, J., (1 985) The Politics of Mental Health, Macmillan.

Frosh, S . (1986) Beyond the Analytic Attitude: Radical Aims and Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy, Free Associations 7, pp.38- 58.

Ingharn, G. and Fitzgerald, C. (1988), An Introduction to the Inter- Cultural Psychotherapy Seminars, Journal of SociaZ Work Practice vo1.3 no.3, November 1988, ppl-7.

Kovel, J. (1984), On Being a Marxist Psychoanalyst (and a sychoanalytic Marxist), Free Associations, Pilot Issue, October 1988,pp. 149- 54.

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Straker, G., (1988), Child Abuse, Counselling and Apartheid: The Work of the Sanctuary Counselling Team, Free Associations,

Winnicott, D.W. (1984) Further Thoughts on Babies as Persons. In The Child, the Fumily and the Outside World, Penguin, London.

14, pp.7-38.

FURTHER READING

Brummer, N., (1 988) Cross-Cultural Student Assessment Issues facing White Teachers and Black Students, Social Work Education, Vo1.7, no.2, Spring 1988.

Dominelli, L. ( 1988) Anti-Racist Social Work, McMillan, London. Kovel, J. (1988) White Racism - A Psycho-history, Free Associations

Journal of Social Work Practice, (Nov. I 988), special issue on Inter- Books, London.

Cultural Social Work and Psychotherapy.

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