ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at what are essentially identity struggles that are acted-out on the stage of ethnicity through preoccupations about ethnicity, race, or racism in the clinical situation. L. Calvo’s work suggests that the central anxiety in racist hatred is both a fear and desire of mixing or miscegenation, experienced in the most primitive layers of the mind as a violent contamination. When the patient’s tentative steps to become more curious, imaginative, and concerned about his object or himself creates anxiety, some patients will retreat into a racist state of mind that aims to temporarily hijack or crush their momentary growth and development. One of the most difficult tasks for the therapist is how to help the patient take ownership of their racist projections and to assist them in metabolising or integrating them within their psyche so that reparative processes can be potentially set in motion.
