ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the failure of psychoanalysis to face its own truths about issues of race and white racism in the selection and training of psychotherapists and in the delivery of psychotherapy. It explores possible reasons for failure and calls for action to make psychotherapy less racially exclusive and more responsive to the needs of a multiracial and multicultural society. The chapter concerns white racism, which is rooted in a specific period of British and European socio-economic history. Psychoanalytic thinking has undoubtedly made significant contributions to our understanding of the dynamics of racism. It focuses on the avoidance of race and racism in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, it reflects a wider social struggle to achieve a less infantile approach to the issues. Thinking of white racism as borderline phenomena helps us better understand the white's inability to make contact with the black other because it arouses immense anxiety and there is a fear of loss, of fragmentation/dissolution of self and identity.
