ABSTRACT
Some White professionals have great difficulties in hearing the racist experiences of Black people-probably because of their fear of hatred in the transference. This fear usually mobilises defences characterised by comments like ‘but this country has always been generous to immigrants’ or ‘but of course, racism always works both ways’. At this point, the professional is no longer a therapistbasically a caring and containing ‘parental’ figure-but a squabbling ‘child’. It is often in the areas of racism and sexism that professionals working as psychotherapists are at their weakest and not in a position to help their clients who might not only turn to them for solace, but to understand how their inner structures have responded or accommodated these external realities of racism and sexism.
