ABSTRACT
This chapter recounts the psychotherapeutic treatment of an 11-year-old African American boy by a white male therapist. Prominent in the treatment was a racial enactment around power, privilege, and trust that featured the child seizing and holding the therapist's chair during sessions for the majority of the treatment. The therapist grappled with his own loss of control and subsequent countertransference feelings of diminution and ostracism as he became the object of the patient's hostile projections and mistrust. This mode of relating reflected a traumatic repetition of this preadolescent's experience of racism and ridicule at the hands of white teachers in his school. Understanding of the enactment was achieved through the therapeutic action of clarifying and interpreting the therapist's acceptance of the patient's critical attitude around the therapist's racial blind spots.
