ABSTRACT
Over two decades ago, in 1987, the Tavistock Clinic, the inter-cultural psychotherapy centre Nafsiyat, and the University College London Department of Psychotherapy collaborated on a series of intercultural psychotherapy seminars. The papers arising from these seminars are full of incisive, forthright, and even courageous theoretical and clinical discussion. I quote from the introduction to the collection:
The “whiteness” of the Tavistock, the host institution, both representative and symbol of psychoanalytic psychotherapy within the NHS, was frequently pointed to in the context of this provision. The arguments for and against the Tavistock as a white, privileged institution were well-voiced. A point also made was that here was re-enactment of the characteristic intercultural psychotherapy—the “insider” Tavistock being equated with the white therapist, resources at hand, and “outsider” Nafsiyat with the black, disadvantaged patient (University College to be located in the middle). [Ingham & Fitzgerald, 1988, p. 1]
When I arrived to work at the Tavistock Clinic in 1996, my guess is that in terms of its “whiteness” and its capacity to confront the meaning of this, the institution had not changed at all in the intervening decade. 100My mother used to make a delicious hot pudding comprising a suety dark-chocolate base covered by a layer of pale, creamy meringue. It was called, without irony I fear, “South African pudding”. Early in my time at the Tavistock, I often used to think of this as an apt-enough metaphor for the social structure of this organization. It was not in fact a “white” organization. But without exception, I think, all of the so-called senior staff—the tenured clinicians—were white, while the administrative staff were significantly black, Asian, or mixed heritage, and the lowliest “support staff” almost entirely so. I experienced this as shocking. Not primarily because I experienced the situation as morally or politically reprehensible, but because of the contrast with the institution I had just left after ten years. This was an outer-London social work training department based in an Institute of Higher Education recently incorporated into an old university. In this department, a significant majority of students were black or Asian, and the teaching staff group comprised roughly half black and Asian members and half white. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed to me that London became steadily more ethnically diverse and multi-racial, as did the profession of social work. Against this background, my working context in the same period seemed just ordinary, and my new working environment at the Tavistock Clinic nothing short of extraordinary.