Guards at the gate: race, resistance, and psychic reality

Racial difference and similarity in the treatment relationship highlight the question of what is real and apparently psychological in the different racial experiences of patients and therapists. The relationship between racial material and resistance is discussed, as well as the constancy and fluidity of race as intrapsychic content and the distinction psychoanalysts draw between social and psychic reality. Race in the mind, it is argued, is determined by both internal and external factors, and both are important in the analysis of racial material in the transference.