Black client, white therapist: working with race in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in South Africa

In post-apartheid South Africa we speak about race extensively. It permeates our workplace, weaves a thread through the fabric of our professional and personal lives, as well as our private conversations and public interactions with others. From within psychoanalytic theory, the thread weaves through the unknown content of our racialized unconscious. When there is a focus on race in the South African psychoanalytic context it largely takes the form of the struggle to articulate the complexities of working with difference, as Swartz notes, or the struggle to map out issues of race. Such struggles are not localized in South Africa, but strongly reflect a much broader struggle within the global psychoanalytic community, as mirrored in the expanding focus on race. Although the consulting rooms seem far removed from the ongoing political tensions that have recently emerged in South Africa, psychoanalytic psychotherapy remains a space of meaningful engagement with the other, and where the therapeutic dyad is one of racial difference it permits an encounter with our racialized unconscious. This article seeks to document the experience of my black client and my white response to her racial pain and struggle; in doing so, I describe the racial 'contact' between us and within us that triggers a racialized transference and countertransference dynamic, which contains the space for racial healing for both of us.