ABSTRACT
The issue of “racism” looms large in psychoanalytic work, particularly where there is a difference of ethnicity between therapist and patient. This chapter explores two clinical situations that, though different from each other in many ways, posed great technical problems and issues to do with author’s capacity as a therapist to understand what was happening. Farhad Dalal (2012) likens racism to parasites: Parasites mutate and evolve to mimic the functioning of the host in order to fool the host into thinking that the parasite is a good and healthy part of itself. There is something compelling in the way Dalal draws attention to the perseverance of racism and to the ways it can survive in hard-to-discern ways. If racism persists despite a wish to overcome it, then how is the ordinary practitioner, particularly one working with a patient of a different ethnicity, to be aware of his or her own discriminatory processes and to avoid imposing them on the patient?
