Is it coz I'm white?

CHAPTER FOUR Is it coz I'm white?

I come from a rather non-diverse background. Indeed, in the rural area I grew up in, the closest I ever came to racial diversity was via the Black and White Minstrel Show, the film The Blackboard Jungle with Sydney Poitier, B. B. King, Miles Davis, Cassius Clay, and from there to an appreciation of jazz and blues. In fact, it was many years later that I found out that much of the music I was playing on records during my youth was derivative from, or had roots in, black American and Afro-Caribbean culture.

When I trained as a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, and psychoanalyst, almost all my fellow trainees were white like me, and the trainings at that time hardly touched upon diversity in the clinical setting. This was something I only gradually became aware of as I encountered patients, and, later, supervisees, who confronted me with the confusing experience of difference. This included both sexual orientation and ethnicity. My own analysis and training had not prepared me as much as I thought to encounter this difference, and my patients now made me aware of my own defensive strategies, which I used to manage this confusion. It is perhaps questionable whether these courses represent tokenism and box-ticking genuflections to a politically correct world, or the beginning of a real change. I think prejudice should be embraced, acknowledged, and explored rather than airbrushed away through well-meaning politically correct conscious-raising exercises.

I did remember hearing about Masud Khan, a psychoanalyst from Pakistan who had a complex reputation. I often wondered whether the difficulties he enacted could have been, at least in part, the result of being the only black person in the analytic village. I wondered how much his analysis had been able to explore this while he was in training. This has since become a question in my mind with other aspects of human diversity: race, sexuality, class, and gender.

At university, many of my colleagues had come from differing backgrounds, which in itself felt like enough of a culture clash for me to manage. This was more a class issue, involving discovering that others had attended private schools and even, to my astonishment, public boarding schools. This was my first exposure to the English upper-middle class, which seemed very foreign to me and owed more in my imagination to the fictional worlds of Jennings (a precursor of Harry Potter without the magic) than to anything I had ever experienced. My own world resembled more a "Just William" story of rather ordinary secondary schools with the odd smattering of "Swallows and Amazons", a sheltered experience undisturbed by any awareness of racial or ethnic difference. As already indicated, during my own psychoanalytic training, race or culture in particular were never really addressed. I knew that my analyst was Jewish and old enough to have been in the shadow of the Holocaust. And I was aware that my own Welsh background, which was important to me, with roots in the South Wales coal-mining industry and North Wales agriculture, seemed at odds with the urban and urbane world of psychoanalysis in London.

So, not having the benefit of any preparation to work with diversity, or even basic equal-opportunities training, I discovered differences through exposure to my patients, travel, and living in a culturally diverse area in London. I also supervised a number of therapists from ethnic and cultural backgrounds that were quite different from my own. I must acknowledge that I have struggled to manage and think about diversity, and at times this was a painful experience as it exposed prejudice, which I had not anticipated, in areas in myself and in the analytic milieu. To illustrate the struggles I faced and how I grappled to work with them analytically, below are a few reflections of some work with patients from different cultural backgrounds to myself.

Mr A

Mr A was young man who had been in analysis for a few years. He came from a relatively orthodox Jewish family. His original reason for seeking treatment was his inability to make and sustain relationships with women, any women. He was thirty-three years of age and had not managed any sexual relationships. There was a strong ethical prohibition on sex before marriage from his religious orthodoxy, and Mr A seemed locked into a powerful oedipal dilemma, unable to separate from what seemed to be a rather infantilizing mother. She still cooked his dinners and did his washing although he had at least physically left home and was living in a flat with a friend.

He used to wish that his parents would help him select a wife for him as many of his friends' parents had done for their sons. But he also somehow felt he should be able to do this for himself, something he put down to his ethnically diverse school and the influence of his peers. The idea of arranged marriages was anathema to me, as I imagined with horror the woman my own mother might have chosen for me. In his background up, until his generation, it had been the norm for parents or matchmakers to do the arranging. While it is something I have encountered with several patients from ethnically diverse cultures, to me this is an antiquated idea, one of a number of cultural practices that I struggle with. For instance, a young Sikh woman decided to have her daughter at her mother's home in Birmingham, leaving her British husband in London for the birth and for an indefinite time afterwards. It is difficult for me not to be judgemental at these times. However, in so doing I recognize the need to be open to thinking about the views of those who may have a different perspective. Where is the feminism? Aren't these cultures regressive, using religion and tradition to coerce the next generation for economic and/or social advantages? I could frame a context in which these religious and cultural ideas might have been regarded as reasonable strategies in difficult times when survival was paramount, but I viewed them as no longer practically necessary in twentieth-century London. But this ethnocentric outlook did not inspire confidence, and I had to recognize that my black-and-white (paranoid-schizoid) thinking was sometimes a way of avoiding other, just as valid, perspectives on the matter.

As Mr A's treatment progressed, he began to meet women via an ethnically focused dating site. He explored his sexuality and eventually met his wife independently. She was someone who was not from an orthodox background but, rather, attended a liberal synagogue and was from a family who seemed more interested in the symbolic manifestations of their rich Jewish heritage than the more concrete, more fundamental interpretation of the Torah.

Looking back, I do wonder how much my unconscious influence, with my ostensibly liberal values and non-religious background, may have influenced my patient's subsequent development.

This conflict between different value systems, his wife's and maybe his analyst's, came to a head later on in his treatment. He married this more liberal Jewish girlfriend, and within a year they gave birth to a male baby. In his analysis, he explored the issue of being a father and how much he wanted his son to adopt his religious and ethnic background. He had by this time-in fact, from the first month, when I betrayed my ignorance of Jewish holy days-realized that he was not of Jewish descent. We had explored throughout his analysis how my ignorance of his ethnicity (religion and culture?) was both a hindrance and in some less obvious ways an advantage. Indeed, I have observed that many Orthodox Jewish patients prefer a "non-frum" analyst to someone who is Jewish.

It inevitably came to pass that the question of circumcision became prominent. He was in no doubt that he would follow tradition and would have his son circumcised. However, his wife was very concerned about the procedure, as she knew of a friend whose son had had complications following the ceremony. In my countertransference, I struggled with my own views-for example, that it was an anachronism, from desert cultures, a position I felt legitimized by Jewish friends, mainly psychoanalysts, who had foregone this procedure. I therefore wondered why anyone should go along unthinkingly with the words of the prophets. However, other friends told me of the dis-identification from the father that non-circumcision represented and how non-circumised boys often