ABSTRACT
I am a middle-aged, African American psychologist who was trained during the 1980s as a psychodynamic psychotherapist at a traditional, APA-approved doctoral program in counseling psychology in the Northeast. I received both my predoctoral and postdoctoral training at a private psychiatric hospital in a wealthy New England suburban town. There I became very skilled at listening to my client’s narratives, making few, if any, comments except when it was clinically appropriate to provide feedback or, better yet, interpretations that would facilitate my client gaining much-needed insight into her inner feelings and psychic conflicts. As a psychologist of color, I was acutely aware of multicultural issues, and often felt the need to adapt my traditional psychodynamic approach to meet the culture-specific needs of my clients of color. But my understanding of myself as a therapist, and the “appropriate” therapeutic role to maintain with my clients at all times, remained the same. As a psychodynamic therapist, self-disclosure was to generally be avoided unless it could be strategically used to facilitate the development of insight for my client. This was the only way to conduct psychotherapy, and for the first few years of clinical practice I never really questioned the legitimacy of the “blank slate” demeanor that was expected of a well-trained, clinically sophisticated psychotherapist.
