Adam Phillips in conversation with Abi Canepa-Anson on the traumas of racism

could we start with you just telling us something about what actually happened to your brother so um adebayo had always struggled with um just issues around mental health um and i believe that this was brought on after my mother died my mother died my mother was killed in nigeria adebayo was 14 at the time and this was devastating for all of us um adebayo tried to carry on as best as he could and part of the time he lived with me and lived with his father who was my stepfather but he began to he was isolated and he he withdrew basically um and then he did try to carry on with his studies and went to university and i think in university he basically just couldn't do it anymore and he fell into a depression and went back home to live with his father and then he the next thing i heard was that he's been diagnosed with um schizophrenia to which i thought well hang on a minute this seems quite a jump from somebody who is um depressed um struggling with loss um and i spent 20 years of my life with him just going in and out of hospital basically and what really happened to adebayo and i think which is what is difficult for me to reconcile and is that he struggled with the illness because he didn't feel that he was ill in the way he was prescribed to be and he was medicated and and he kept saying that the medication wasn't working but he continued to be medicated and he then um had all sorts of symptoms from you know just not being able to focus or concentrate or dizziness and it was just terrible because as a family we were very helpless to the the doctors and psychiatrists and social workers because you know we went party to this because for whatever reason they felt that his treatment needed to be he was 18 and you know they took over the treatment basically um and um on the 27th of september in 2017 he um he died and the cause of death was said to be schizophrenia which um just felt very inconclusive to me because you know the next day he was due to be seeing his um social worker and he'd planned meetings to um to see you know the consultants and psychologists and he was beginning to feel better in your really very i think remarkable paper calling for a live third you have quite a lot of research about the effect of racism on psychiatric treatments and simply the statistics are horrifying if nothing else did you feel as this as he was being treated over time that there was an element here of some kind of racial discrimination going on two things that by always complained about he always said that the staff didn't care and it was very difficult to get him the support he needed because you know the staff were saying it was because he wasn't taking his medication but in retrospect i entered that arena where i was trying to speak to the people that were responsible for his care be it psychologists psychiatrists and i just met a very blank wall and i just felt that given that somebody has died in their care surely there should be something you know some sort of response but i think that people particularly people of color who have been diagnosed with mental health illness who are living within the or who are in um institutions mental institutions tend to be disregarded and this is not just me saying so this is statistically the case because it is there is racism within there in the sense that they're not considered they're dehumanized in a way in that they're not also given the same treatment so i think it just feels to me the worst place you could possibly be yeah and also given he was insistent that he wasn't being listened to seems to me this is keeps repeating itself and the it's as though the more he says he isn't being listened to the less he's listened to the more he's diagnosed that's right i i think part of the reason for him not being listened to also is because of a fear around the so-called element of schizophrenia i mean you know he was perfectly i could hear what he had to say about the world and i really couldn't understand why he couldn't get the response and he couldn't get the support he needed it was almost as if he just could not be heard for whatever reason yeah and you could imagine i don't know if you agree with this but you could imagine it being at least possible that they were frightened of listening to something that was supposedly schizophrenic and also frightened of listening to a black man and the combination became a sort of huge well protection racket effectively in the sense that the people who are nominally caring for him are very very frightened and the more frightened they are the less they will be able to listen that is true um schizophrenia seems to be one of those things that we seems to be something that's ascribed to somebody who i guess doesn't um i'm not quite sure actually because there doesn't seem to be any real meaning behind it and there's never been a consensus about what it means this is it so i'm not quite sure people are scared because somebody has a different sense of their reality and that just seems too difficult to hear i wonder whether being scared is also something about the exposure people have had i know that from my experience that people within because i also worked within um a mental health psychiatric uh ward where you know patients were struggling with issues around schizophrenia and personality disorder how difficult it is and how scared the um the the support workers were and i think the other issue is that the support workers that work within this institutions are not necessarily trained to work with complex uh personalities as well as the fact that they're not adequately paid yeah to do so so and it could also be true couldn't it i mean you're saying that makes me think that and and we could imagine this being taught to people which is there's a real fear of listening and what what you know what that fear is about so that for example in the work we do as psychotherapists it seems to me there's never any teaching or training about simply the fear of listening what the fantasies are about what will happen to you if you listen to somebody especially somebody who's really into stress that is so true um and i never thought about it that way actually that there isn't actually a training i mean when i think about my training um the training just focuses on sort of trying to stay with the client yeah and still do it how to do it as opposed to how to think about what they're bringing and what is the fear is it the fear of the fact that you're going to you know disintegrate as a result of of hearing somebody else but or or you're going to feel something you are very frightened of feeling or think something that you've tried not to think and that does make me think that to some extent what we do diagnose as schizophrenia or paranoid schizophrenia or personality disorders are things that we actually also carry within ourselves we're not ultimately so different to those we label um well one of the great things about the antipsychiatry movement because i'm older than you and so when i was training there was a very alive anti-psychiatry movement and the anti-country movement of lange and cooper and was saying a there isn't enough in them we're all involved in this b um we should stop talking about people being ill and just think people have difficulties in living and see um people need to be properly looked after this is absolutely fundamental it's about looking after people not about diagnosing them of course diagnosing people can help towards looking after them but can also be a way of dismissing them or over fixing them over describing them yes um you said quite a lot i think uh yeah something about the diagnosis means that it takes away from and you know we need to bring in you know the um the medical world here um the parapharmaceutical world where i think there is a wish to treat something and fix something and make money and you know we know that it doesn't work bio said it endlessly every single time that this medication is on is not helping him but yet they kept giving him the same medication and one of the questions i asked at the um the the hearing the the coroners was that um why was it that the medication why didn't anyone listen he said the medication wasn't helping i mean they gave him things like mood stabilizers you know and they said well that greatly helped him and you know here is somebody that he's saying he can't take this medication it's giving him hallucination he can't sleep yeah yeah i just think it's just been really terrible the way he's been treated and i think and i feel that i mean part of the reason for doing this is to say that we need to learn from this experience um and hopefully you know not keep repeating things i mean there is a need to so his dad is not in vain yeah yeah but and and we may need to keep two things alive in this one is to do with psychiatry and diagnosis and the other is to do with racism because they're both factors in this in your paper the statistics about the number of black people who diagnosed are horrifying and there must be reason or many reasons why this is the case that is right i mean there is the percentage of black people within mental health is ridiculously high and you know no one seems to be really focusing or talking about it or it seems to be the people that talk about it tend to be people of color saying things needs to change around it bio when he was first um when he was first taken to hospital he resisted and pushed and fought because they were trying to hold him down and medicate him and he was fighting against that and they put down in the report that he was violent and he was aggressive and those are two words that just does not go with him because he is just such a gentle person but also you can't drive people mad and then accuse them of being mad i mean if you attack people and then you accuse them being violent you're driving them mad exactly i mean it's it's almost as if he is not meant to do anything and it's a it's a what is it meant to do but this actually sort of goes back to the fact that when there is a black person who is screaming and shouting because of any form of injustice it seems to be categorized as being aggressive and they need a very very strong medication in order to to to um to put them down basically and also i'm sorry but also no one ever says that aggression is a form of intelligence that an aggressive response or something can be a very accurate response to something people are usually aggressive when they're attacked i mean if you live as we have done in a white supremacist culture for hundreds of years then it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of work for people to become aware of what's actually going on here because everybody's going to feel this is just the way the world is or this is just the truth this is just real there isn't a problem here and then when somebody says there is a problem they become the problem that's right and there's no end to this so in a way the question associate comes for us specifically in terms of our profession but obviously it's a larger question which is you know and i'm not asking you this and ask you to answer this but the question is how how say in psychotherapy training any help in profession trainings can people become aware of the sheer scale of what it's like to live in a white supremacist culture because most things will be invisible yes i mean this has been my biggest project i think of my life really just trying to raise this awareness and i i don't know how i have lived my life to some extent up until bio died and all of a sudden i think it was almost like a wake-up call um where i just felt in a week just trying to work out what is going on quickly i was made to feel very unwell and i just felt that if as a person of color you're marginalized in the sense that you haven't got the money to seek the right help you need then illnesses like schizophrenia and any other sort of complex mental health issue is very highly possible because you're isolated and nobody believes what you're feeling you know it's almost as safe you're pathologized because you know you're not trying hard enough and a lot of people try to link it to the fact that you know it's the black person that's come from a broken home or whatever but this is not really the issue we do need to be looking at the way society has been structured and we do need to be thinking about just the fact that color in itself it's such a vehicle for projection of all the negativities which means it just becomes incredibly difficult to have any form of equal rights yeah or even just have any form of just being able to go by your daily business and have a a life and this is where you might think that psychoanalysis could be useful not as the solution remotely but as an ingredient as a part of that because at least in psychoanalysis people are in a position to reflect on their projections and there is there's space to think ideally because i was struck as i imagined you were too and this was literally 40 years ago when i trained to be a child psychotherapist there were virtually no black child psychotherapists it was an entirely white middle-class profession and lots of the children we were seeing were of course of different different countries different races different sorts of and religions and it was never remarked upon so it was as though retrospectively this is crude it isn't as simple as this but it was like sort of colonialism by other means in the sense of we were as it were imposing these theories on a huge range of people for many of whom it didn't link up at all with their own traditions histories preoccupations etc but it was under the guise of and it was partly true it was under the guise of doing good doing some sort of good um but it took an awful long time for this to dawn on anybody and that in itself is very revealing because it shows you in in sacramento language the wish to remain ignorant the repression of this is an issue the determination not to know and it's and it's still true and it's kind of startling and it must be reflective of what the fear is here of taking this seriously yeah it it it's it makes me think about where does the owners lie and for a very long time a lot of black people have spoken you know quite a lot about it you know the likes of fannin um who is a was a psychiatrist and you know written beautifully about what beautifully is not quite really the right word but you know very accurately and very um succinctly about you know the black journey and challenges i don't feel that at the moment it's really about a black person trying to explain the effect of racism on on them because that doesn't really seem as you've just said to serve it doesn't seem to get anywhere and i'm not quite sure why it's difficult to and if we look particularly within our work if we say that the work is about a search for truth why is it then not possible to be able to listen to someone who is distressed does that mean that your thoughts and your thinking and your beliefs will be superseded i'm not quite sure where the difficulty lies i do wonder whether as you say there is a wish not to know and i do wonder whether there just isn't the capacity i started writing children's book amongst other things because i'm thinking with my child i would say oh look there is somebody who is different to you and i'll bring it to his attention i think the point i'm trying to make is that you don't need a child to go out you know for the first time and see a black person and stand there thinking oh my goodness i've never really seen anyone of color because i think it's something about a wish to avoid and omit and moving forward it is something it's a language that we need to embrace in my opinion because we're all in it together what do you think is being avoided or omitted that people of color just do not matter and this is what the whole black life movement is about they are not seen it's almost they're not present but you i don't know if you would agree with this but you'd have to be pretty traumatized in some way to need to so absolutely abolish or negate a group of people do you think it's trauma because then we're talking about a huge amount of people being traumatized well i i honestly do because i don't know what it is but the question in a way is what makes people so cruel or why are people so frightened of each other or why are people so inquirious because you could think at a most basic level it's a failure of curiosity or a fear of curiosity we don't want to know about or know people who seem to be too different from ourselves so it's as though difference is always linked with hatred yes we don't want to know about people who are so different and in one of my papers i did write that i wonder whether there might be something about similarity that just seems to be you know you look like me so you are like me yeah um yeah which then stops curiosity for anything different to you i mean i was brought up to embrace difference you know when i was growing up i grew up with people who were very different to me and so in a way it really wasn't it wasn't a question that i had to think about the question i had to think about really in my later years is how do i as a black person work and live within a world which is majority majority which the majority is where the majority is why what does the phrase embrace difference mean i'll say to be curious about difference i think it's something we really do need to do in our work as a psychotherapist but i will extend that to generally all clinicians because there is a something about not seeing the person in front of you um and which carries on you know so it's not just what's actually happening externally and psychoanalysis seems to want to focus on the internal and given everything else that's going on at the moment we can't just keep it within the internal world it's it's political it's social it's economic we need to be embracing all of that and so to embrace difference mean to be able to get in there because you thought a strange thing that seems to be repressed in this sometimes anyway is is the idea that actually difference could be very enjoyable that there could be a great deal of pleasure in it because you could think on the one hand there's tremendous fear we all know about that the thing people talk less about is their fear of the enjoyment of difference or the pleasure that difference might bring yes no absolutely and that just made me think about um sort of uh black people coming to the uk and you know the caribbeans and black africans and every other black person black oliver from different worlds who come with their own culture and how you know they've kind of integrated into the uk into into the british culture and what makes britain what it is is just the mixture of all the different cultures and you know they've brought music and you know i can't see how that can't be interesting i mean i'm i just think that difference should difference is something that can be celebrated um be it in food be it in art a language a long time ago you may know this but a long time ago an anthropologist called mary douglas wrote a book called purity in danger and in a way it's all in the title because it's as though there are fantasies of purity that are sustained with a with some weird wish for security or familiarity or something and then there's the danger of anything makes something supposedly impure and it's a very weird way to think about these things because it means you're always on guard you're always primarily protecting your culture from being poisoned you never think what could be added you think what could be endangered yes i can't see it in a way from a white perspective in that way i mean as a person of color i've always thought what can be added i don't know how to think what can be endangered because it's not really the way i have been brought up or the way i have lived my life but i do feel that a lot of what's also going on you know we can't not bring the issue of colonization into the picture and slavery where for years and years black people have not been thought about as being equal you know they're they've been thought about as being the inferior race and so it is something that seems to be in the psyche and something that doesn't seem to be able to we can't move away from color continues to be the signifier color continues to be something that tarnishes and it's just all a lie in other to preserve white supremacy and i think there is a lot of power and dynamics in that the wish to do that um something about not wanting to go back to the past something about not wanting to revisit um where we got it wrong i mean you know it is a basic fault of humanity for that to have happened and also you can see in a way again just in secondary language which is that when people are traumatized they close down to survive it and they repeat they go on repeating things and it seems to me that the the one of the terrible things many terrible things are being traumatized as say you know huge historical traumas like the slave trade is that it makes it very difficult for the people who have been traumatized to have any new thoughts to improvise or innovate because it's as though in order to survive this they've had to close down and then they're closed down and so it's almost like the question becomes how can people come back to life can they can they bear to come back to life and if they can bear to come back to life what kind of life can they come back into because after experiencing such a hostile persecutory reality who'd want to live in that world and who would really want to live in a world in which there was a slave trade or a holocaust or one of the many atrocities in this life i think the perhaps also in addition who would want to live in that life is the fact that the trauma never really goes away that trauma gets transmitted through the generation because either through things that were said or things that were not said through behavior and through language um and so it's very hard to be free yeah yeah um because it's another nice word for trauma is tradition but actually an awful lot of suffering and brutalization exploitation is passed down absolutely i mean it my family my great grandfather my mother's great-grandfather was herbert mccauley and he was one of the original founders of he was founder of the first political party in nigeria the reason i mention it is because that is something that transmitted through my family in terms of my mother particularly what she actually wanted to do was return to nigeria to work for the unit and she wanted to work for the united nation because she really believed in making a difference um and i guess you know that's also sort of been passed through her children yeah you know in the wish to to to make a difference yeah and by the same token what makes you want to be here here is in what makes me want to be here i didn't actually have a choice in whether i came here or not so when i was 13 my parents decided to come and live in the uk um so that was no choice that they consulted me on i was just told that this is what it was and yes we kind of thought yes it's something we'd like to do because it was exciting it was different it was scary um but at the moment what so many years later what makes me want to be here is i have this is home you know my family are here my children are raised here my education is here my friends are here a lot of the people i trained with could we talk particularly about training yes because it's something obviously of interest to both of us and i wonder i don't at all want to put you on the spot here but i wondered if you were designing psychologic trainings now what would you be what would be in what would be in the course in terms of addressing this issue these issues of race and culture how would you do it that is a very difficult one because the psychoanalytic training which um i did i studied the likes of freud and klein and various other people when they caught they are all people within the psychological we can't do without them that they are they've influenced the training the only other thing i can think about is we need more people of just a lot more diversity it's not just actually just limited to people of color it's this is all about but how's that going to be done how is it going to be diversified i think we just need more writers i mean one of the things that i think is a fault within the the the training in it in a way because just trying to write and publish is that it takes about a year to publish anything which just puts anybody else you know why would you do it yes we need to simplify that um and there need to be journals and there needs to be journals so that and and a lot more so that people are actually encouraged to share and talk about their own experiences i taught difference and diversity on one of the um on the postgraduate training and one of the things i did feel teaching that is just making it a lot more experiential and you know perhaps not sort of been too focused on on the literature and you know just more focused on people's experience um i just think just more books more diversity i don't know how we're gonna get that diversity because you know it's one of those things that it's quite clear that there is a need for it but people of color are not coming forward first of all the training is super it's incredibly expensive but also it doesn't really cater for them well there's no wish to interest people of color in the training absolutely and that's really strange well i mean we live in a predominantly white world i mean how can we change that other than having people of color who are on the training who are taking various aspects teaching various um things from clinical supervision to you know lecturing but um i don't actually think it's just about that because it's a bit like equal opportunity you employ somebody of color and there's a tick box i mean something else needs to change and i don't think that i don't believe that that owners lies within a person of color to make that change because they're having to work incredibly hard to convince the majority that this is the way we need to go how would you what would you suggest would be a good way of going forward i think well i do sort of believe in education sort of naively um i mean it's very interesting isn't it when we talk about this funnel we know about lots of people know about but after that how many names are there now of course there are reasons for this but it would seem to me that i would be keen i think to simply raise the fact that this is an issue that this is a this is a white supremacist culture so i think on cyclonic trainings there should be um as it were a course on what it might mean to live in a culture like that and to have lived historically for hundreds of years so that something of the evolution of this is taught and then i think i would want to make it a group project which is how do how do we trainees and supposedly trainers make this genuinely more diverse and i think the experiential thing is very very important here because i think that in a way the risk is that it becomes a seminar and there's a limit to what seminars can do it seems to me in these situations people need to be able to reflect in groups in which they feel safe enough on what their experience of these things has been like and i think that's that's one place to start i also think that the that there needs to be a sort of if you look i know you know this but if you look at there are a few references in winnicott and klein and freud to people of color very very few but they're there and they're really worth looking at because they're quite revealing or freud talks about primitive races obviously now in a way you could say well this is how they all talk to them because it doesn't make it any better it just simply said it gives it historical rationalization so that i think how people of color have sort of been incorporated into psychoanalytic writing and of course disincorporated i left out so that i think would be worth looking at i also think that there's got to be some reflection on the consequences for psychonic theory of having been part of white supremacism because it has to be there it's not you know it's not um impartial this this is a very very culturally specific moment in if we talk about british psychonauts in british psychoanalysis i think there is a shift however slight my worry is are we gonna go back to the status quo the reason being that the shift hasn't been particularly welcome by the majority and we need the majority to embrace this um baldwin said something very interesting that and it's specifically referred to as the white man would not look at something in his life in the black about the black man that he had he's not able to reflect in his own life and and i guess the point is sort of trying to make it i i or my understanding of that is why should people do it why would they want to do it yeah why would their lives be better if they did it why would their lives be better they're having to go out of their way why would you give up something that's yeah comfortable okay privileged to entertain something else that actually in a way you've convinced yourself it's problematic and discomforting and that's what it will destroy your sense of security exactly and in the meantime you know we've got the likes of black lives matter and you know people out there sort of pushing and struggling and wanting a better life but then there's black lives matter and then people turn up and say but white lives matter yes and you think and there's more of the problem and all lives matter yeah all and all lives matter exactly and so we we all agree that all life matters especially in our work all lives matter without saying it's like saying nothing yes yes but it's also like trying to shut down the conversation yeah absolutely and this has been the problem hasn't it sort of over years a wish to shut down the conversation yeah yeah but that's why i think in a way psychoanalysis is particularly interesting in relation to this because psychoanalysis claims to be the profession that wants to listen that is open for conversation so he is as it were the great cultural monument supposedly to openness to a certain version of liberalism to a certain version of um not to listening to difference what are we doing about it absolutely we're um we're where are the people of color i mean why hasn't this been embraced by a great diversity of people well the answer is because i think i don't really know what the answer is but one of the answers is it's not appealing it's not alluring it doesn't address a whole range of people's preoccupations but i think also it hasn't actually been sold to them and perhaps how would you sell to them well i think maybe there is a wish to keep it i agree with that for sure let's imagine we wanted to sell it to them whoever they are what would we do differently do you think well you certainly need a lot more people who are going to be able to think like them yeah in positions yeah of power yeah and i don't even think that's just within psychoanalysis what you know which actually works you know because you kind of need someone who is going to be able to you don't need to kind of like say this is what happened to me and that person says i get it yeah yeah you don't have to explain to me what happened to you because i know what happened to you because i can i can relate to what happened to you yeah yeah and i think this is the problem and this is the problem with the training the fact that one is having to explain why that was painful why that hurt and then you told well it's because you've got a chip on your shoulder yeah and so it goes on and it goes on and it's kind of like no i actually felt hurt by what that person said something in that conversation but then there is not an ability to understand it or enough curiosity about it not curiosity about it even though of course a lot of a lot is talked about about racism why do you think it's so difficult to talk about some people find it easy to talk about i find it a bit more difficult to talk about because the audience that i talk to about that i guess if i talk to somebody who is you know a similar color to me it was black they will know what i'm talking about there's not a a kind of a a need to i want to say make a point but that's how it feels like you're trying to convince almost and so you're working on the principle that the other person isn't going to be easily persuadable you're working on the principle from experience that you need to convince the other person something that they're not going to be able to hear or understand what it is you're trying to say um or even if they understand what you're trying to say they tend to put it back on you and i remember a conversation that i had with a good friend of mine who is and i think she would probably wouldn't mind me saying this where i've been talking about my work and what i've been doing and what i've been involved in and um and the issues around racism and um you know and within our training and he then said to me um yes i do hear you but i don't know how to help you and you know she genuinely clearly wanted to help me and thought you know oh my goodness you know my friends going through all this stuff and that kind of annoyed me because it's almost like you have a problem i don't know how to help you and i'm thinking this is a problem whose problem is this whose problem is this there's a very interesting thing that there's an american poet called john ashbury and he was interviewed the interviewer said to him why is your poetry so difficult and he said well i noticed that when you try and communicate with other people they eventually lose interest but when you talk to yourself people want to listen in right and maybe we should do more talking to ourselves maybe the determination or the wish to communicate sometimes it has a kind of counter effect so that we should be all among the things we should be doing is getting into our own delirium and just saying what we think and seeing who listens in because it could be the project of persuasion itself has a has a bad effect on people people don't want to be persuaded they do want to hear things but they don't want to be persuaded right and i guess it probably hits on the nail on the head in terms of what's going on this sort of sense that people feel that they're trying to be persuaded i don't think it's so much about being persuaded i think it's about bringing a reality out there to say this is the reality i think people are struggling to be bothered to some extent yeah um also want to be shown things or want to be shown things but just going back to talking to oneself i think that's a good idea and it just reminds me of those little clips they have on tv where somebody recites a poem or they just talk at the camera about an experience you know and it really is very beautiful i actually really like watching it and listening because it seems as if it's coming from a very sort of uh reflective space and in a space a kind of you know this is me space sort of thing unintimidated exactly to be able to speak without intimidation and that's what psychonauts should be about but you need someone to you need that thinking yes you do and you need someone to show you what you're intimidated by and how you're inhibiting yourself and why you're inhibiting yourself and i'm just thinking that if we are to take that what is happening with people of color and i keep changing people of color with black people but i just mean anyone that is not white yeah you know are to be interested in psychoanalysis then for that to work the analyst would need to be able to reflect and show the client where they might be limiting or inhibiting themselves but in order to be able to do so you need to be there with the client you need to understand what the issues are and also yes and it's the same thing in a way which is that the other person has to feel that you're on their side yes in some fundamental way you're on their side and i'm just reminded to some extent i think within our training it there is also something about the therapist feeling that they've helped the client um you know integrate into the society and to be more white in inverted commerce which kind of just means that they can function but not really addressing the issues around the cultural yeah is this a society worth adapting to yeah because you could think in a way of course there have been psychoanalysts who believe this that psychoanalysis should enable people to be more discontented with the societies they're living in to be able to bear noticing the injustices the unfairnesses the humiliations that happen and an act on that it's not a refuge in politics it should actually be one of the places that makes politics possible so we're talking about sort of being something about happiness is not the normal state the depressive position is the normal state being able to accept that this is the world we live in well i don't know because i think i think nobody knows what the world that we live in is but i don't think we should be in a hurry to accept the conditions as they exist i think we should be able to discuss it but also do things in the world i mean i might sit at my consultant thinking i'm not a racist but the question is what do i actually do in the world that as a word shows that because of course i can have lots of thoughts that make me feel good about myself but actually what's the relationship between these thoughts and what i actually do in the world that's the question so i think in terms of psychoanalysis say i'm sure most maybe all many psychoanalysts are not racist but the question is what are they doing about the racism issue what's being done in the world now good thing on the one hand well we sacrifice should show people whoever's interested what we do and then they can come and take the bits they like well i mean there are other people that have a different take on who what racism is and if for instance francois davids would say if we start on the premise that we're all racist in the sense that the fact that one isn't doing anything about it is also a sign that one is part of it absolutely yeah really complicit with it now i'm not sure if it's i mean i think everybody has their part to play and i do agree that it is important that we should speak it up against injustice um because other people can't bio didn't have a voice yeah yeah you

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Keywords: internalisedracism, whiteracism, oppression, inclusionanddiversity, empathy, health, impactofracism, inequality, mentalhealth, intergenerationaltruama, prejudice, colonisation, ethnicminorities, racialinjustice, macroaggression, microaggression, blacklivesmatter, antiracism, whitesupremacy, structuralracism, systemicracism, individualracism, whitecentredness, blm, colourblindness, schizophrenia, marginalisation, black, white, stress, trauma, multiculturalism, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, NHS, Adamphillips, abicanepaanson

Id: 7asT3hOLkaY

Length: 56min 12sec (3372 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020