Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy: Mockingbird 9780367426828, 9780367426774, 9780367854423

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Abstract
1 Why Another Book on Difference?
Introduction
My Own Experiences with Privilege
Cultural Context
Importance to Counselling and Psychotherapy
The Psychotherapy of Oppression
Methodological Underpinnings
Summary
2 Intersectional Privilege and the Other
Defining Intersectionality
Defining Privilege
The Gift of Privilege
Privilege and Supremacy
The Intersectional Marriage of Privilege and Otherness
Summary
3 Hatred, Shame, and the Unconscious Other
Hatred and the Other
Shame and the Other
Othering and Narcissism
Superiority, Hatred, and Shame in Therapy
Summary
4 Death of the Other
Privilege and Death
Killing the Other
Theorising Death and Privilege in Psychotherapy
Intersectional Identity and Death
Summary
5 Individuation, Privilege, and Otherness
Psychological Supremacy Versus Individuation
Case Presentation
Fear and Death
The Acculturated Psyche
Unconscious’ Truth to Power
Union of the Opposites
Rise of the Ethical Self
Summary
6 Afterword
Index

Citation preview

Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy

Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy presents an in-depth understanding of the role of privilege, and of the unconscious experience of privilege and difference within the world of counselling and psychotherapy. To address the absence of the exploration of the unconscious experience of privilege within counselling and psychotherapy, the book not only presents an exploration of intersectional difference, but also discusses the deeper unconscious understanding of difference, and how privilege plays a role in the construction of otherness. It does so by utilising material from both within the world of psychotherapy, and from the fields of post-colonial theory, feminist discourse, and other theoretical areas of relevance. The book also offers an exploration and understanding of intersectionality and how this impacts upon our conscious and unconscious exploration of privilege and otherness. With theoretically underpinned, and inherently practical psychotherapeutic case studies, this book will serve as a guidebook for counsellors and psychotherapists. Dr Dwight Turner is Senior Lecturer within the School of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Brighton, a psychotherapist and supervisor in Private Practice both online and in London, and a part-time lecturer at the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education (CCPE) in London.

Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy Mockingbird

Dr Dwight Turner

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Dr Dwight Turner The right of Dr Dwight Turner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in- Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 9780367426828 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367426774 (pbk) ISBN: 9780367854423 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgements Abstract

vii viii

1

Why another book on difference? Introduction 1 My own experiences with privilege 3 Cultural context 5 Importance to counselling and psychotherapy 6 The psychotherapy of oppression 8 Methodological underpinnings 12 Summary 14

1

2

Intersectional privilege and the other Defining intersectionality 18 Defining privilege 23 The gift of privilege 26 Privilege and supremacy 31 The intersectional marriage of privilege and otherness 38 Summary 41

17

3

Hatred, shame, and the unconscious other Hatred and the other 47 Shame and the other 52 Othering and narcissism 57 Superiority, hatred, and shame in therapy 63 Summary 67

46

4

Death of the other Privilege and death 72 Killing the other 78

71

vi Contents

Theorising death and privilege in psychotherapy 84 Intersectional identity and death 94 Summary 99 5

Individuation, privilege, and otherness Psychological supremacy versus individuation 107 Case presentation 110 Fear and death 111 The acculturated psyche 115 Unconscious’ truth to power 121 Union of the opposites 124 Rise of the ethical self 128 Summary 131

105

6

Afterword

135

Index

139

Acknowledgements

This text has been a long time coming, and there are a few people I owe a huge debt of thanks to for their efforts in getting me to this point in my career. First, to Professor Jane Callaghan, and Dr Alasdair Gordon-Finlayson, for guiding me through my doctorate and unleashing the activist within me. To all those at the University of Brighton, but in particular Dr Niki Khan, Pamela Howard, and my colleagues and friends in the Counselling and Psychotherapy team within the School of Applied Social Sciences. To everyone at the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education (CCPE) in London, but in particular Dr Nigel Hamilton, Angela Gruber, Paul Margrie, and Allan Pimentel, without whose wisdom and friendship this book would still be that imperceptible glimmer in the moat in God’s eye. To the oppressed, just a few of whose stories I have the pleasure of presenting here, my eternal thanks to you. To the ‘soft allies’ who through their often silent deeds of proffered wisdom and simple kindnesses (including cake) did more than those who spoke of promises but delivered little. I see you, and my respect to you always. Finally though, my love and thanks go out to Fernanda and Joyce, my daughter and my mother, this is for you as we close the ancestral transgenerational loop together.

Abstract

Most of us have read ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ the story of a black man, wrongly accused of rape by a white woman, a story explored through the eyes of Scout, the daughter of the lawyer Atticus Finch. Although written a generation ago, from a modern-day vantage point what this book also shows us is the intersectional nature of difference: the projections of fear and hatred upon another together with their dehumanisation. Then there are also the intersectional layers of privilege: from the white patriarch and his children, to the white men who accuse a black man of a crime he did not commit, to the white women who gathers the white men to her cause to fight for her honour against the brutishness of blackness. Whilst this classic literary perspective recognises the multi-layering of power and privilege that resides within any study of difference, within the world of psychotherapy, this more nuanced understanding has been missed. So, whilst there is literature around the political or post-colonial need to acknowledge difference, any exploration within counselling and psychotherapy of the unconscious experience of privilege and of difference has often been absent or misunderstood. Using client case studies and techniques common to understand unconscious processes, this book addresses this absence by not only presenting an exploration of intersectional difference but also discussing the deeper unconscious understanding of difference, and at how privilege plays a role in the construction of said otherness.

Chapter 1

Why another book on difference?

Introduction I am a black, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, academic, psychotherapist, and I live and work in the United Kingdom. These 19 words make up some of the aspects of who I am. They show you, the reader, the aspects of my intersectional identity. In the world of difference and diversity, though what most people focus upon most of all will probably be my black identity or the fact that I am a man, facets that when put together mark myself as a threat. For example, when I used to live in London, it was not uncommon as a child or as a teenager, to walk down the road towards someone, and have them cross over to the other side of the street walk along and then cross back to my side, or they might grab their handbag tighter against their hip, or lower their gaze lest they accidentally catch mine. The importance of these experiences should not be underestimated here as they immediately mark myself out as an outsider. I am the other here within these experiences. My blackness when combined with my maleness therefore marked me out as a threat within the community I resided within. I was seen as a potential mugger, a thief, an aggressor who might hit, beat, or rob those from the majority culture where I was living. People were afraid of me because of my otherness. They didn’t talk to me, they chose not to relate to me, and for whatever reason, they refused to acknowledge me as much as they might have done someone from their own culture, class, or creed. As an adult though, these experiences still occur when I travel through London on my way to work, or on a night out with friends. For example, there was the time I was in a world-famous hotel for drinks, and whilst waiting to take my seat, the Maître D walked right past me to the couple standing behind to ask them their names. Or the time several taxi drivers refused to take me from Paddington to Victoria in the rain, but accepted fares from pedestrians standing just along the road. The experiences of being the other and having to deal with the prejudices encountered when one is cast into this position come in fast and frequently, and can be experienced as anything from barely annoying to downright infuriating.

2  Why another book on difference?

My reasons for sharing this experience here in this introduction though are not to highlight how isolating and anger making the experience of being other was (and still is from time to time). It is to begin to show the narrowness of our perceptions of the other when we stereotype, or when we other said other. Returning to the very first 19 words of this introduction, what we do when we stereotype the other is we narrow that person down to a set of characteristics, in this case the obviously visual ones, taking either one or two of those and merging them together to form a caricature of something we do not like, of someone we can then claim to be afraid of. What we also do though is ignore all the other aspects of that person that make up their whole identity. Their job, their family, where they live, and their physical able-ness. We choose to take a narrow, binary-based, us and them approach to difference and diversity, rejecting the important multi-faceted intersectional nature of identity out of fear that this other we have created may have more in common with us than we choose to realise. To focus upon my black identity, or my male identity, thereby means one has to ignore the other possibilities that make up my identity, be they visual or otherwise. We sit within our own experience of what we believe that other to be, rejecting any type of relationship that might leave us better informed about our decisions, that might actually confirm our initial diagnosis, or might challenge what we think we know. When we do this, we are also choosing to reside safely within a narcissistic fantasy about the other of our own creation, and we do so out of a sense of privilege and superiority. This book looks at the intersectional nature of identity, and how this challenges any ideas of us and them. An important aspect of this book’s exploration involves the recognition that we also hold all aspects of privilege. For example, my position as a black academic means I am now afforded more privilege than I would have had previously. This comes in from students of colour, for example, who might place me on a pedestal, or who might also stereotype me as ‘that type of academic’, maybe meaning that I have become more white and middle class and that I surely no longer listen to 80s Hip Hop on Spotify. These are just a couple of examples, and whilst these are important and whilst these seem positive, I will also be discussing the other side of my positioning later in this book. Other forms of privilege though whilst not so obvious are just as important. For example, I have also had to work with client’s disabilities, hidden or otherwise, my perceived able-bodied status having a huge impact upon whether these aspects of my clients come into the therapeutic space. The fact I am heterosexual also often plays a role in my work with clients and students who identify otherwise, our work often leading to an exploration of how this identity either aids or hinders their growth in the therapy room. So, whilst identity politics and the recognition and the importance of understanding experiences as the other have made a major contribution to how we view difference and diversity in the modern age, the one aspect

Why another book on difference?  3

that they have failed to explore is the complex interaction between privilege and the other. What this quite recent struggle also recognises is just how within counselling and psychotherapy equality politics’ focus mainly upon the white feminist narrative has left other groups, LGBTQ, BME, Disability groups, and others, floundering in a type of wilderness of marginality. This book therefore considers the experiences of being the other, as well as how privilege needs the other to identify by itself.

My own experiences with privilege A year ago, whilst I was having tea with my now elderly mother, she gave me a picture of myself aged around four or five years. In the picture, I am posing, seated in a photographer’s studio. I am wearing a black and white sailor’s uniform of shorts and a top, with a necktie. I have an enigmatic smile on my face. Whenever I show people this picture will people obviously coo and go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at the sight of a young boy, not long out of nappies, wearing a black and white sailor’s uniform. Yet, there is a problem with this image, an issue with this idea. My parents were from the Caribbean, travelling to London at various times during and post the Second World War, to settle in the United Kingdom, to look for work, find a partner, and get married. They chose to become British and to fit in with the culture here as they recognised it. A land of red double-decker buses, of Saville Row suits, and of smog filled streets. A land of stereotypes of Britishness underneath which was ultimately the land of their colonisers. This is especially obvious in the picture I have just described. There is nothing of my cultural background; nothing of my Caribbean or of my African histories. There is an attempt to whitewash any sort of cultural narrative that would have marked me out as the other. Yet, these aspects of my difference, my colour and my race especially, were parts of myself that I could not escape. Growing up in the United Kingdom in the 1970s was a difficult experience at times. London was very much coming to terms with its recent influx of immigrants from the former colonies and struggling with how to integrate or encourage the assimilation of these minorities into the ranks of the English. On a personal level, the experiences I previously discussed of being the other were commonplace, as were the microaggressions endured in school or social interactions with friends or their parents. There was little to no acknowledgement of my racial difference at school, where stories like Little Black Sambo were read regularly as part of my learning to read. Whilst at home BBC2 reruns of Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan films often presented otherness, not just blackness but the feminine as well, in stereotypical forms that left me feeling confused at the very least, or angry and ashamed at the very most.

4  Why another book on difference?

It was only when I moved to Berlin in the early 1990s that I began to question this historical narrative of my being the other, and therefore less than. Engaging with the words of Malcolm X (Hayley, 1965), the films of Spike Lee (1989) and the music of Public Enemy (1988) began a process of reformatting what it was for me to be both a man and to be black and allowed me to find a space for myself within a world where I was quite obviously the minority. It was also around this time that I read numerous other texts, as I began a long process of trying to understand otherness from a variety of perspectives, taking in the texts of Butler, de Beauvoir, and Davis as but a few of many authors who have influenced my search for self-understanding over the past 30 or so years (Beauvoir, 2010; Butler, 1990; Davis, 1983; Lorde, 1984), a search which only continues through this volume. A search that stalled during my training to become a psychotherapist. It is an established cliché emerging out of a truism that training courses in counselling and psychotherapy in the United Kingdom struggle with regard to acknowledging difference, and how best to work with topics such as race, gender, and sexuality within these frameworks. My experience of having just one tokenistic two-hour lecture on race for a four-year postgraduate diploma course is not unusual. Nor are the subsequent stories from other trainings of the drama, the anger, and the fragility that is often unleashed when attempts are made to explore the said topic in these mainly white, middle-class, female environments. Counselling and psychotherapy, which are often mirrors of society, have struggled and failed to incorporate ideas around racism, sexism, and privilege within their training as a result of marginalising such topics to the sidelines, or making them absent altogether. The importance of these narratives is to show the complicated nature of the discourse around otherness. All of the extensive, ground-breaking, conscious awakening, perspectives mentioned as part of my own journey have given me aspects of understanding as to who I am as the other, but where they all sometimes struggle is that with their self-identification against the subject, they often neglected to offer an understanding of both who the subject is and how the subject/other relationship is formed and maintained. Also, whilst the subject of privilege is often addressed, often it appears in one of its singular forms, patriarchy, whiteness, etc. That my complicated multi-faceted understanding of my identity should jar against such narrow, near marginalised explorations of difference within counselling and psychotherapy is another reason why this book is so important. In my own experiences as a trainer, I have often utilised the ideas of intersectionality, and this is where the ideas of Kimberle Crenshaw (2010) come into play. Emerging out of black feminist theories of difference, Crenshaw rightly posited that experiences of women feminists of colour differed from those of their white counterparts. Her understanding that difference carries many intersectional layers recognised that dependent upon the many

Why another book on difference?  5

layers of difference one carries, that this person’s experiences of oppression would be compounded accordingly. It is a perspective maintained for example in a series of online podcasts by Scene On Radio (Biewen & Headlee, 2018), where the intersectional nature of difference through the fight of black women during the Civil Rights era of the United States is explored. For example, it considered the bus boycott of 1957, made famous by Civil Rights Activist Rosa Parks, and how this actually arose out of the struggle of women of colour who were being sexually and physically abused by men upon those same buses for years beforehand. The interconnectedness of both white and patriarchal privilege versus the intersections of race and gender shows how complex this struggle actually was, and yet when we focus upon difference and diversity in the modern era we try to make it simple by just focusing upon one aspect. The reality is that difference and diversity are far more complex, but it is this complexity that makes the study of otherness more accessible for all. This would have been especially important for that boy way back in the 1970s in London in that although he was male, black, and the son to immigrant parents, it was these same parents who wanted him to fit in. Who in dressing him up in a black and white sailor’s uniform tried to make him as non-threatening as possible by minimising his gender, his racial, and his colour differences. They too tried to make the complex nature of difference simpler, both for themselves, for their offspring, and for those who had been their former colonisers. Their attempt to present their son as safe driven as much by this same need to simplify difference as anything else.

Cultural context Across Europe and the United States, the last decade had seen a sharp political movement to the right through the rise of Donald Trump and the Far Right in the United States, and the re-emergence of Nationalism across Europe (Wilson, 2017; Yan et al., 2016). This, it seems, has been countered by the increased awareness of the LGBTQ community, through the legalisation of their right to marry for example. The Black Lives Matter movements in the United States and the United Kingdom have increased awareness of the disproportionate number of persons of colour who endure violence and death at the hands of the police. Whilst the importance of social media in the rise of the #MeToo movement for women around the world has maintained the questioning of the role of women, and in fact the questioning of what gender actually is, moving some cultures to shift away from a binary notion of gender to something more fluid. Encounters with otherness have been blamed for everything. For example, they were the reason for Brexit in 2016, the referendum which prompted the UK decision to leave the European Union and which was debated mostly on the rates of immigration into the country (Stone, 2016). In Central Europe,

6  Why another book on difference?

this argument has led to the rise of Neo-Nazism, leading many countries from France to Sweden to shift their policies towards the right (Huggler, 2018). In Russia laws have been put in place to stop what is seen as ‘gay propaganda,’ actions which have led to an increased number of hate crimes being committed against those of the LGBTQ community there, whilst in Uganda, as with several African countries ages old colonial laws have led to persons from those same communities seeking asylum elsewhere (Litvinova, 2018; Onyulo, 2017). In India though the opposite has recently occurred with the repeal of a law entitled Section 377, an edict dating back to the time of British colonial rule, and giving the LGBTQ community in India back their rights (Suresh, 2018). The fights for equality are many fold and worldwide. From the refugee crisis in Venezuela to the fight for equal pay in the British Broadcasting Corporation, there is a pushing back against the privileges of a few by those who have less and have been oppressed, often for many generations (Feline Freier & Parent, 2018; Unknown, 2018). Each one of these cultural revolutions, and many more besides, has therefore highlighted the role, the oppression, and the distress of the other when faced with the abuses of those with the supposed privilege, be they white, male, Western, or all three. In the context of this book though, these brief examples underline not only how often we encounter the other but also how challenging these encounters actually are in reality, both for the subject and the other themselves. It also shows how in this changing global landscape encounters are going to be more frequent, and therefore ways of working with these encounters are going to become increasingly necessary.

Importance to counselling and psychotherapy Given this present cultural awareness of difference, diversity, and otherness within the wider culture, it is important to now briefly begin the exploration of these facets of our societal makeup within the worlds of counselling and psychotherapy. As stated, even with the enormity of these experiences, the world of psychotherapy has remained largely immune to the impact of these oppressions within the therapeutic dyad, failing to recognise how the position of the therapist, be it that they hold the privileged position of being heterosexual, or male, or white, or able-bodied, for example, might be consciously or unconsciously oppressive for the others they will undoubtedly encounter. It should also be noted that books which take an intersectional consideration of privilege and how this moulds the experience of the other in counselling and psychotherapy are extremely rare. Of those currently in publication, the main texts tend to consider the experiences of one of the main politicalised categorisations of difference. A perfect example of this is the wonderful book Black Issues in the Therapeutic Process by

Why another book on difference?  7

Dr Isha McKenzie-Mavinga (2009), which looks at the experience of race and racism in the counselling and therapy relationship. Another book is the excellent Therapeutic Perspectives on working with Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Clients, by Dominic Davies and Charles Neal of Pink Therapy (2000), which is designed to understand the unique experiences of the LGBTQ community and considers how an awareness of this client group is essential to psychotherapy. Other volumes include, Gender, Sexuality and Diaspora (Routledge advances in feminism and intersectionality) by Fataneh Farahani (2017), or Intersectionality and Criminology: Disrupting and revolutionizing studies of crime (New directions in critical criminology) by Hillary Potter (2015), with both bringing together the idea of political difference and intersectionality before exploring how without their combination any exploration of difference is immediately hampered by the unconscious layering of privilege that prefers either, for example, the heteronormative or whiteness. The problem with many of these example texts is that they follow the well-worn, but still very necessary, route of considering difference as an individual construct that is not informed by an experience of the subject, namely through an encounter with heteronormative or racial privilege. My work though builds upon the ideas presented within these texts through an exploration of these and other forms of privilege whilst also adding an understanding of the intersectional to show how interlayered they are. There are though two final examples which shift the potential discourse suggested here towards my work below. The book Whiteness and White Privilege in Psychotherapy by Andrea L. Dottolo and Ellyn Kaschak (2018), which eloquently explores the positioning of whiteness, privilege, and power within the therapeutic space, but again presents its ideas from a more psychodynamic angle than the one I am proposing here. Then there is White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism by Robin DiAngelo (2018), which brings in white privilege as a construct and allows for an exploration of the conscious blocks to exploring prejudice, racism, and oppression, and opens the door to how white privilege works to maintain its superiority over the other. So, whilst there are numerous texts within the world of counselling and psychotherapy recognising the politically correct narrative of respecting difference, there has always been a marked paucity of texts actually exploring the unconscious experience of being the other and of working with difference. These unconscious experiences, presented here through the guise of creative work common to psychotherapy, explore the unseen reality of being the other; for example, the unconscious simultaneous draw and repulsive interplay between the other and the subject is presented within the chapter ‘Hatred, Shame and the Other’. Whilst the chapter, ‘Death of the Other’, explores the psychological cost of othering, where the other has to psychologically sacrifice that which makes it unique, in order to be seen

8  Why another book on difference?

as acceptable by the subject. The chapter, ‘Individuation and the Other’, explores how an engagement with one’s unconscious sense of otherness is actually a route towards psychological wholeness. A recent example from my own work, my article in Therapy Today, entitled Privilege, Shame and Supremacy (Turner, 2018), offered an exploration of the intersectional nature of difference, together with presenting an intersectional experience of privilege. Using the narrative emerging out of an encounter with a client, I presented evidence of just how unconscious, yet also how powerful, the expression of unconscious privilege is within the therapy room, and how this impacts upon therapists of difference. The article also explored the link between privilege and supremacy, offering insights which will be expanded upon within this book as to how they bond together, and how this conjunction can be really quite harmful towards the other. So, whereas most books relating to difference and diversity rightly recognise the importance of being from the LGBTQ community, or the importance of a Feminist or BAME discourse within society, few of them consider how an intersectional approach to working with difference and diversity impacts upon, and actually ties together, all of these disparate struggles to understand the experiences of the other. This book therefore looks to expand upon these ideas, bringing counselling and psychotherapy into the modern era by discussing and considering intersectional otherness and privilege and considering how these important areas interact with each other.

The psychotherapy of oppression Given the complex nature of intersectional otherness, and as this book is primarily interested in exploring systems of oppression, I feel it is essential to offer my understanding of just what oppression is from an intersectional standpoint. This is essential for two reasons: first, discussions abound about just what prejudice and racism actually are, often to no conclusion. Oftentimes, when discussed on television shows here in the United Kingdom, persons of colour are often asked just what racism is, yet when they give their answer they are then told, mainly by their white co-presenters, that their definitions are flawed or just plain wrong. That this frustratingly repetitious type of interaction is actually racism in action is often missed by many of those in television studios around the country, and also sadly by some within those minority groups the persons of difference represent. This therefore brings me to my second point, that there is a common misconception that racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other type of oppressive system is singular and happens in a vacuum. It does not. What is often missed is that these actions occur in relation to the other, so any definition of what they are must also include how they both create and therefore impact the other as a consequence. In order to do this, though, it is important

Why another book on difference?  9

to utilise the skills of counselling and psychotherapy to offer a definition of what systemic oppression actually is. For example, prejudice is normally described as ‘an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, group, race or someone with other supposed sets of characteristics such as their gender, ability, colour, or age’ (Oxford Languages, 2012). This becomes more complicated when we look at how prejudices are utilised in efforts to oppress the other. As will be discussed later, sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, are some of the means used to dehumanise the other through the means of stereotyping, objectification, or othering. Whilst it could be argued that these terms have distinct differences, for this book, I will be predominantly using the term othering as it pertains most accurately to the impact upon the other in a process of dehumanization, or simplistically put, the reduction of the complex identity of the other into a part which can be used and projected upon. Ideas of racism or sexism though become more complex when we combine these with issues of power. For example, when exploring racism, this is produced via one group’s inherent superiority against another because of a perceived racial difference, or therefore because of their own set of prejudices. Therefore this simple equation as presented below holds some credence when we start to explore the interesting layers of oppressions from a more psychological background (Barndt, 1991; Figure 1.1). Utilising terms common to psychotherapy and counselling, we already see the importance of a more nuanced understanding of just what these prejudices lead to, or in other words, how they are used against the other. The reduction of the other into a part object is nothing new; it is exactly the stage of development a baby must move through in order to access the fullness of the parent or caregiver before them (Mitchell, 1986). The aim though is for the child to recognise the humanity of the parent, and to feel some type of remorse at their treatment. The fact that we regularly re-utilise this process of dehumanisation of other humans therefore shows just how easy this is to do to others, and how from a counselling and psychotherapy

Ageism Prejudice

Power

Othering

Figure 1.1 Understanding oppression.

Ableism Racism Sexism Homophobia

10  Why another book on difference?

perspective the process of dehumanisation is utilised as a weapon by adults and therefore by groups. Whilst this book will discuss how the interpersonal prejudices play a major part in all our interactions, this book will also be interested in exploring the impact of systemic oppression upon the other. In offering a thorough approach to understanding just what systemic oppression actually is, the clearest definitions that we have thus far emerged are in the field of politics. For example, in their report on institutional racism, the Runnymeade Trust offered this amongst many other suggested definitions, stating about racism, ‘does not require overtly racist individuals, and conceives of it rather as arising through social and cultural processes…the culture of an organisation is far more powerful than formal instruction in indicating how staff are expected to behave,’ (The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: The Parekh Report, 2000, p. 70). The meaning of this statement in this context is that there is a challenge for any organisation, or organisational system, when it encounters the other, and that this is where racism arises, out of a collective fear of the said other. A closer approach arises out of the psychology arena, with an interesting definition of institutional sexism as posited by Capodilupo, who defined it as practices derive from systemic sexist beliefs that women are inferior to and therefore less capable than men. An example of institutional sexism is the differential pay rate between men and women, even when occupying the same role…Institutional sexism affects people’s self-concept and can shape their work identity and professional aspirations, making it extremely relevant to the topic of psychology and gender. (Capodilupo, 2017, p. 941) Therefore, in explorations of institutional racism, sexism, and homophobia though there is often a recognition that one culture is struggling with its encounter with difference. In common parlance, we often talk about Boys Culture, for example, and the struggles of Men’s Clubs to admit or acknowledge the role of women, or of persons of other types of difference. The problem though with the earlier equation is that it struggles to explore how prejudice and power combine to express the intersecting layers of oppression we all endure and doesn’t meet the institutional layers of racism discussed in the Runnymeade Trust report for example. The reason for this is that given the systemic oppressions that we all endure happening so much of the time that much of this will be repressed in order to survive the impacts of such. So, whereas unconscious bias trainings are designed to explore the barely unconscious prejudices we all hold in order to get on with our day to day life, this book opens the door to psychotherapeutic methods and experiences, which leads the reader to a better understanding of the interacting layers of systemic othering and oppression which we all encounter but are often blithely unaware of.

Why another book on difference?  11

Collective Prejudice

Projection

Projective Identification

Power

Systemic Oppression

Figure 1.2 Systemic oppression.

My own research has therefore sought to present just how systemic oppression occurs utilising terms common to counselling and psychotherapy. Figure 1.2 outlines this succinctly. To explore this further, it is important to recognise the role that projection and projective identification both play in the maintenance of the systemic oppression of the other. A term used a lot by Klein (Mitchell, 1986), projection was an essential part of ego formation, where the child goes through a period of splitting apart aspects of itself, before projecting these on to another person or object where they are hopefully held. When this unconscious material is not contained by an other though, as Bion says, if the projection is not accepted by the mother the infant feels that its feeling that it is dying is stripped of such meaning as it has. It therefore re-introjects, not a fear of dying made tolerable, but a nameless dread. (Bion, 1962, p. 308) Bion and Klein’s ideas when considered alongside systemic oppressions therefore speak clearly of the fear that the subject has of the other when they encounter such. Yet, how does the subject manage this fear? The answer here lies with the process of projective identification which underpins any process of systemic oppression. For Ogden in his exploration of the link between projection and projective identification, he states that first, there is the fantasy of projecting a part of oneself into another person and of that part taking over the person from within; then there is pressure exerted via the interpersonal interaction such that the ‘recipient’ of the projection experiences pressure to think, feel, and behave in a manner congruent with the projection. (1979, p. 358) Ogden therefore sees projective identification as an attempt by the child to control those aspects of the self-projected outwards onto the adult. This is not just a process used in childhood though, as it often appears in the therapy room as our clients will always use us to hold aspects of their self they are as yet unable to own.

12  Why another book on difference?

For von Franz (1980) though, this process of projection and projective identification occurs on a more collective scale, where whole groups project aspects of their unwanted group identity onto the collective other. What von Franz also recognised was that this process also involved the manipulation of said collective other into acting out the projections of the subject group. So, systemic oppression therefore involves the fear of an encounter with the other, together with the manipulation of other into being the projections it cannot own. This is where the role of power in said relationships becomes so important, and in later chapters we will be considering the varying types of power plays the subject makes against the other, or that we do towards ourselves when caught in the pull of systemic oppression. As a final point though, although much of this presentation here involves the external expressions of oppression, this process is also reflected internally. We all split off, we all project, and we are all constantly manipulative of others. We try to get them to meet our needs, to feel our anxieties, to be the ideal we deny within our self, yet see so much in our partners or others. The process of projection and projective identification involves the regular oppression of that which gets driven into the shadow, forced there through a process of psychological manipulation.

Methodological underpinnings This book draws upon research conducted between 2012 and 2017 as part of my doctoral thesis through the University of Northampton and the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education (CCPE) in London. Its rationale was that we all have an experience of being different and that the intersectional nature of difference is core to our identity as human beings. To access the data inherent within these experiences, 25 participants were interviewed about their own experiences as the other. These semi-structured interviews involved participants who were asked to use creative techniques such as drawing, visualisations, and sand play work to explore the unconscious and internalised experiences of being the other. The creative activities involved a visualisation and a sand tray exercise. It was felt that the internalised experience of difference could be accessed in a number of ways, for example through the free association techniques preferred by Jung (Storr, 1979) or by using visualisations, but one of the most powerful starting points for understanding internalised experiences is by working with the body. Lowen (2013) strongly felt that the body holds memory, acting like its own unconscious. Merleau-Ponty(1962) also wrote about this, seeing the body as a conduit into the unconscious, and in my experience as a psychotherapist, it is only by working with the body that one is then able to access the impact of an internalised experience. It is for this reason that the visualisation work conducted with the participants allowed some time for them to orientate themselves within their physical self,

Why another book on difference?  13

allowing themselves to feel comfortable in their body, before accessing the hidden feelings, and therefore the symbols, located there. The visualisation exercise involved the participant reliving one of their memories of difference and being taken back into that experience. This exercise worked in a similar fashion to the waking dream technique of psychotherapy where imagination is used to recall the unconscious felt experience of the dream(Storr, 1979). The participant was encouraged to reconnect with that episode, and feel the feelings of that time, feelings which would then be presented in a symbolic form. After the visualisation, participants completed a drawing that reflected their symbolic experience of being the other. This exercise allowed an expression of the internalised experience of the phenomena with the drawing being the bringing forth of the repressed emotional impact of that said experience, and follows on from Cox and Thielgaard’s (1986) idea that symbols presented would be the echoes of the same symbol within the unconscious. The sand tray is an established method for accessing unconscious material (Bradway, 2006). It was used in this study because, again, working with symbols allowed for the unconscious presentation of internal or repressed unconscious material around difference (Cox & Thielgaard, 1986). The exercise, which was designed by myself, involved the participant selecting three objects from a thousand predetermined toys to represent themselves, myself, and our relationship. My design for the exercise took its direction from the Buberian idea that there as well as an I and thou/its position there is a third one, that was the in-between space, from where often springs creativity or spirituality (Buber, 2002). These toys would then be placed in a tray of sand. The exercise, much like the visualisation exercise above, was chosen to move beyond the rational into the unconscious truth of an experience. Another perspective on the use of sand tray in psychotherapy involves its ability to move beyond the limitations of the verbal and connect with the pre-verbal, and perinatal, consciousness, crossing cultural, gender, sexual, and other boundaries and offering a more universal experience of an unconscious phenomenon than say using just words might (Labovitz Boik & Anna Goodwin, 2000). Whilst yet, another crucial consideration when working with symbols and sand tray in this context is its ability to hold the duality of ‘psychic opposition’ (Turner, 2005, p. 38). In this context, this brings us back to a consideration of the limitations of the dualistic perspectives of difference that are often presented from more political, developmental, or social perspectives. The other cornerstone of this book arises out of an heuristic exploration of my own experience of being the other, whereby over a six month period, I explored moments, times, and experiences of being stereotyped, othered, objectified, and other aspects of my own day to day experience of being the other. The research for this book therefore also recognised that also employing a heuristic epistemology would allow myself to gather a lot of

14  Why another book on difference?

worthwhile research material available to this research should I also engage with my own sense of the other. A longer study into the impact of relational difference was employed as one of my aims of this research was to prove that when we relate to the other, then we are ultimately relating to aspects of oneself that have previously been split off and projected onto another. These aspects could then lead to significant personal growth. This is one of the key tenets of the heuristic research method in that it should lead to a period of personal transformation which, as discussed previously, from a psychotherapeutic perspective, involves the accessing of unconscious material (Moustakas, 1990). This heuristic methodology was also employed to assist this research in shifting the focus from the political to the relational (this time the relationship to one’s inner self), echoing the move beyond Jung’s (1971) ego perspective and into the unconscious. As per the work conducted with my participants in the previous section, play and creativity would also be utilised allowing my own process to move beyond the rational to the irrational, or beyond the idea of ‘Aristotelian logic’ as suggested by Rowan (1993, p. 8).

Summary So, whereas the previous volumes discussed here in this introduction have, from within each of their own forms of difference, offered their own explorations through case material, where this volume differs is in its creative expression and presentation of the unconscious exploration of these experiences. This book also recognises that these explorations mean little without offering ideas as to what privilege is and how privilege actually works to inform, oppress, or assimilate the other, thereby leading the internalisation of these experiences. In any text, though it is important to offer a definition of privilege, and an understanding of just how privilege forms and is maintained. It is not only essential to explore intersectionality, its origins, and how this approach complicates the discussion around both difference and diversity, but also simultaneously makes the debates around this much more inclusive, recognising that positions of privilege and otherness reside within each of us all the time. The next chapter will therefore explore intersectionality and privilege, at how these constructs create the other psychologically, and the importance of understanding this interrelationship within counselling and psychotherapy.

References Barndt, J. (1991). Dismantling racism: The continuing challenge to white America. Augsburg Books. Beauvoir, S. de. (2010). The second sex. Vintage Books.

Why another book on difference?  15 Biewen, J., & Headlee, C. (2018). Men (Series 3): Dick Move. Scene on Radio. http://www.sceneonradio.org/episode-47-dick-move-men-part-1/ Bion, W. (1962). The psycho-analytic study of thinking. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 43, 306–310. Bradway, K. (2006). What is Sandplay? Journal of Sandplay Therapy, 15(2), 7–9. Buber, M. (2002). Between man and man. Routledge. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. Routledge. Capodilupo, C. M. (2017). Institional sexism. In K. L. Nadal (Ed.), The SAGE encyclopedia of psychology and gender (pp. 949–951). Sage Publications Inc. Cox, M., & Thielgaard, A. (1986). Mutative metaphors in psychotherapy: The aeolian mode. Tavistock. Crenshaw, W. (2010). Close encounters of three kinds: On teaching dominance feminism and intersectionality. Tulsa Law Review, 46(151), 151–189. Davies, D., & Neal, C. (2000). Therapeutic perspectives on working with lesbian, gay and bisexual clients. Open University Press. Davis, A. (1983). Women race and class. Ballantine Books Inc. Diangelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press. Dottolo, A. L., & Kaschak, E. (2018). Whiteness and White privilege in psychotherapy. Routledge. Faranhani, F. (2017). Gender, sexuality, and diaspora (routledge advances in feminist studies and intersectionality) (1st ed.). Routledge. Feline Freier, L., & Parent, N. (2018). A South American migration crisis: Venezuelan outflows test neighbours’ hospitality. Migration Policy Institute. https://www. migrationpolicy.org/article/south-american-migration-crisis-venezuelan-outflowstest-neighbors-hospitality Hayley, A. (1965). The autobiography of Malcolm X (q). Golden Press. Huggler, J. (2018). Fears of a far-Right mole in German police after leak sparked Neo-Nazi riot. The Telegraph Online. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/2018/08/29/arrest-warrant-leak-fuels-fears-far-right-police-links-riots/ Jung, C. G. (1971). Psychological types. Routledge. Labovitz Boik, B., & Anna Goodwin, E. (2000). Sandplay therapy: A step-bystep manual for psychotherapists of diverse orientations. W. W. Norton and Company. Lee, S. (1989). Do the right thing. Universal Pictures. Litvinova, D. (2018). LGBT hate crimes double in Russia after ban on “gay propaganda.” Reuters Online. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-lgbt-crime/ lgbt-hate-crimes-double-in-russia-after-ban-on-gay-propaganda-idUSKB N1DL2FM Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider. Crossing Press Limited. Lowen, A. (2013). The language of the body. The Alexander Lowen Foundation. McKenzie-Mavinga, I. (2009). Black issues in the therapeutic process. Palgrave. Merleau-ponty, M. (1962). The phenomenology of perception. Routledge. Mitchell, J. (1986). The selected Melanie Klein. Penguin Limited. Moustakas, C. (1990). Heuristic research design, methodology and applications. Sage Publications. Ogden, T. H. (1979). On projective identification. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 60, 357–373.

16  Why another book on difference? Onyulo, T. (2017). Uganda’s other refugee crisis: Discrimination forces many LGBT Ugandans to seek asylum. USA Today. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/ world/2017/07/13/uganda-other-refugee-crisis-lgbt-ugandanss/475353001/ Oxford Languages. (2012). Oxford English dictonary. Oxford University Press. Potter, H. (2015). Intersectionality and criminology: Disrupting and revolutionizing studies of crime. Routledge. PublicEnemy. (1988). It takes a nation of millions to hold us back. Def Jam. Rowan, J. (1993). The transpersonal: Psychotherapy and counselling. Routledge. Stone, J. (2016). EU referendum: Baroness Warsi subjected to Islamaphobic abuse by Brexit supporters after defecting. Independent Online. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum-baroness-warsi-defect-islamophobic-abuse-brexit-supporters-remain-leave-a7091076.html Storr, A. (1979). The art of psychotherapy (Second). Butterworth Heinemann. Suresh, M. (2018). This is the start of a new era for India’s LGBT communities. Guardian Online. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/06/ india-lgbt-homophobia-section-377 The future of multi-ethnic Britain: The Parekh Report. (2000). Profile Books Ltd. Turner, B. A. (2005). The handbook of Sandplay therapy. Tenemos Press. Turner, D. (2018). Privilege, shame and supremacy. Therapy Today, June, 30–33. Unknown. (2018). BBC women: Their pay gap stories. BBC News. https://www. bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-42872377 von Franz, M.-L. (1980). Projection and re-collection in Jungian psychology. Open Court Publications. Wilson, J. (2017). I was in Charlottesville. Trump was wrong about violence on the left. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/ charlottesville-violence-right-left-trump Yan, H., Ellis, R., & Rogers, K. (2016). Reports of racist graffiti, hate crimes in Trump’s America. CNN. http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/10/us/post-election-hate-crimesand-fears-trnd/

Chapter 2

Intersectional privilege and the other

For those who have already noted, the reason for the title of this book is that there is an interesting link between intersectionality and one of the most famous literary novels of the last century. In the book, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ (Lee, 2004) the story of a black man wrongly accused of rape by a white woman is explored through the eyes of Scout, the daughter of her lawyer father Atticus Finch. This story of him protecting a black man who had been accused of raping a white woman is considered a classic of literature, a story as much about the racial disparity of the times as anything else. From my modern-day vantage point though, what this book also shows us is a few things. For example, there is the idea of how the projections of fear and hatred upon another occur, with Boo Radley been regularly presented as some(thing) to be feared. He is often dehumanised even though he acts in a very empathic and considerate ways; for example, leaving gum in the tree for Scout and her brother to eat, or protecting Scout from the evil Bob Ewell on Halloween. There are distinct layers of privilege here. From the patriarch and the children, the white men who accuse a black man of a crime he did not commit, the white women who gather the white men to her cause to fight for her honour against the brutishness of blackness, all sit central to this story. Although I am using this exploration of a legendary book as a metaphor, these layers of intersecting identity, and of otherness and privilege regularly unconsciously sit within client work. For example, we look at the case of my client Susan, who was a 40-year-old white, English, heterosexual woman. Her presenting issue was that she had a two-year-old baby girl and had been suffering from post-partum depression on and off ever since birth. Susan had a good job with a prestigious company in the City of London and had been employed for a number of years working her way up to a fairly senior level. Within the company, she had worked hard to fit in: putting her wish for a child on the shelf in order to maintain her focus upon her career, looking disapprovingly towards other colleagues who expressed more positive feelings about the idea of motherhood. Susan was someone who was aware of her sense of otherness, having worked incredibly hard through

18  Intersectional privilege and the other

school to be the first child in her family to attend university, and then to work in the City. She was aware that being a woman had led to many doors closing for her along the way, but Susan was also aware of her privileges: that her parents had worked hard to send her to a good state school in London, and that she had been to a Russell Group university. Susan’s story held many facets of her intersectional identity in its presentation, as well as its intersectional privilege. So the aim of this chapter is to offer a definition of intersectionality before considering just how privilege is formed, how it shifts axis to one where it incorporates supremacy, and how an intersectional angle on seeing privilege recognises that for many of us the idea of power sits central to who we are.

Defining intersectionality In understanding intersectionality though, it is important to recognise how different groups are oppressed for one or more aspects of their identity, and how these varying layers of oppression have resonated not just through society, but also have found their footing within the supposedly more liberal world of counselling and psychotherapy. An opening example is emergent from some of the horrific experiences endured by the LGBTQ community. Through gay conversion therapy (GCT), a type of therapy seemingly created by German Psychiatrist Albert von Schrenk-Notzing in the late nineteenth century, he claimed that he cured a gay man using hypnosis and several trips to a brothel (Young, 2018). Later utilising anything from Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) in mental health institutions to 12 step programmes designed to cure one of the addictions of gay sex, this type of therapy has been used upon thousands of quite often unwilling, or unwitting, participants to change their sexuality to something more socially acceptable, often with horrific results (Nichols, 2016). Shockingly, it was only in 2017, over a 100 years later, the BACP, UKCP, and the LGBTQ rights charity Stonewall issued an updated joint memorandum of understanding outlawing the idea of GCT (Various, 2017b). Emergent out of the predominantly patriarchal, heteronormative perspective of early psychoanalysis, GCT was very much based upon the premise that homosexuality was due to unresolved issues from the oedipal stage of child development (Kernberg, 2002). This pathologising of the sexuality of tens of thousands of people has had a hugely detrimental impact upon the lives of many, with horror stories abounding of the ruination of relationships to the destruction of the mental health of those impacted by such procedures. Therefore, in the fight for equality, this very late recognition of the impact and the illegality of GCT upon a huge swathe of the potential client populations of counsellors and psychotherapists, whilst very welcome, has also brought with it a recognition of how prejudiced counselling and

Intersectional privilege and the other  19

psychotherapy has been towards LGBTQ groups over the past century, and before. This is a point argued by Davis, suggesting that one of the ways to combat this marginality is by taking a more nuanced vision of equality, arguing for a more intersectional approach to difference. As she states ‘intersectionality is offered as a theoretical and political remedy to what is perhaps the most pressing problem facing contemporary feminism – the long and painful legacy of its exclusions’ (2008, p. 70). What she means here is there is a clear recognition of the importance of a multi-faceted approach to the discussion of difference and diversity that broadens the debate out of the white male versus white female dyad, thereby making it more inclusive of all women. Of huge importance to my own work, the ideas of intersectionality were originally coined and developed by Kimberle Crenshaw (Cho et al., 2013) who recognised that the experiences of women of colour often found little traction, and were often silenced, within the white world of feminism. For Crenshaw, intersectional difference reveals the complexities of identity, moving it beyond the structural dyad of subject and object, and explores the multi-layered experience of the other in their interactions with those who hold power and privilege (Carastathis, 2014). The brilliance of Crenshaw’s work though, especially in the modern era, is that it brings into focus experiences of women from different cultures, and in doing so automatically challenges the white normativity of the feminist discourse of that time. By presenting race as another aspect of oppression, alongside patriarchy, the debate automatically broadened, challenging some who, in my view, believed that the fight for equality was merely to do with gaining parity with said white patriarchy (an idea not limited to the feminist movement, but also one that infects the political discourse around difference within many minority groups). Intersectionality is therefore a challenging topic area to consider as it markedly complicates the debate around difference. This is important for my own work. As a reminder, the first line of this book discussed the varying aspects of my identity. Each one of these when combined makes up a good amount of who I am. What they also do is speak of the varying levels of oppression and otherness that I experience each day; for example, my blackness marginalises me racially, whilst my masculinity (often coupled with my black identity) means I have to deal with being seen as a threat to women of varying cultures. So, returning to my work with Susan, it soon became apparent that what she had done in order to achieve her goals was to suppress much of her feelings, or her feminine self; a compromise constructed in order to fit into her more dominant male working environment. The depression therefore became a sign of the re-emergent aspects of her intersectional identity, and how she expressed them, in her world, allowing her to be these other parts of herself she had previously judged as weak when witnessed within others.

20  Intersectional privilege and the other

This client example aside though, whilst intersectional theory has many admirers, it also has its critics. For example, Nash’s (2008) paper raises four interesting areas where the intersectional approach proves problematic, with these being, first, the placing of black women as central to an intersectional approach, and second, the lack of a defined intersectional methodology, its vague definition, and its lack of empirical validity. These are views Carbado (2013) recognises and challenges in her paper on the topic and perspectives that also rankle with my own experience and understanding of it in my research. First, although there is the suggestion though that an intersectional approach, at least initially, struggled to see identity as very complex, and that it was rooted within the experiences of black women is fine, it should be noted that the mainstream feminist narrative of the time also struggled to do so as well. Second, this approach also allows me to bring an alternative lens on difference and diversity into psychotherapy, which is predominantly white, predominantly female (at least in the United Kingdom), and predominantly middle class. The other three in my view speak of intersectionality’s growth in that it is developing its methodological underpinnings as it grows, like any new philosophical awareness. An awareness that will be tested and moulded by the growing amount of research that has been conducted about it over the past few decades since its inception. For example, in the last decade there have been an increasing number of research projects that have used intersectionality as a philosophical framework from which to observe these layers of difference. Another issue with intersectionality is the idea that the more layers of difference one holds then simultaneously the greater the levels of disadvantage. This flawed thinking does not recognise the unconscious privileges that each person holds, and therefore is unable to explore just how these privileges may, or may not, offset those experiences of oppression. Offering an example from my own work as a therapist, I once encountered a young gay black man whose mother, a woman of colour, had rejected him because of his sexuality. That one is therefore always a victim of oppression is questionable, and this confusion around otherness is one of the important issues this chapter looks to consider in depth, especially when we come to explore the intersectional layering of privilege. Returning though for now to intersectional difference, whilst it would be near impossible to counter all of these perspectives in this book, it is also important to recognise that the consideration of an intersectional lens for witnessing difference moves diversity politics out of the realm of the race and gender dyads, and broadens its scope so that it incorporates all aspects of difference. In exploring further this broadening of the philosophical and research perspectives of intersectionality, it is worth discussing some of the other debates around other types of difference. For example, in their paper combining queer theory and intersectionality Few-Demo et al. (2016) looked

Intersectional privilege and the other  21

to move family theory ideas from an exclusionary anti-LGBTQ perspective to one that was more inclusive of LGBTQ couples and styles of parenting. Alternatively, Damaskos et al. (2018) looked at how the combining of intersectionality and LGBTQ alters the way cancer patients are treated. In a research paper underpinned by an intersectional approach to race and disability, Mereish (2012) explored the increased levels of poor mental and physical health for those who have endured both racism and ableism, than for those who have only endured the impact of say racism. Another example emerges out of the work of Zingsheim and Goltz (2011), who explored the layers of whiteness from an intersectional perspective, recognising that ideas of whiteness, have become so formalised as to make invisible types of whiteness deemed undesirable by those in power. What intersectionality allows us to do, therefore, is to bring to the surface, like a free diver, that which has increasingly been left in the depths of the unconscious, with these multiple layers of difference being pulled to the surface and made visible for all to see. This is hugely important because, as Crenshaw herself recognised, without these increasing efforts too many minority groups will continue to fall between the gaps of our knowledge and understanding, and will remain invisible and unable to challenge their oppression (Cho et al., 2013). This ‘invisibilising’ of the other when considered from within a psychotherapeutic framework means that we never totally see the other in their entirety. Many of the cultural structures we adhere to in the Global North mean that we refuse to see the other, or deem that which we choose to see to be wrong in some fashion so we blank it from our vision or awareness. Alternatively, in our day to day interactions with people, because of our lives, or just how fast the world moves, we are practically unable to sit and observe all of the others around us in their entirety because we do not have the time to do so, or because it is just too difficult. An excellent example emerged out of a training course I ran a few years ago alongside a colleague. The session was on difference and diversity, and as part of the training, the students were shown a series of pictures of varying people from around the world such as Arabs, Hindus, Africans, South Americans, the British, and the French. At the end of this particular session, in offering his feedback, one of the students, a man of colour, stated that at first, he found himself observing each of the pictures, in turn, with a certain openness, allowing himself to witness the cultural dress, food, or other aspects on the screen that identified them as the other. Then at some point, he decided that this was just too hard, and it was easier to just go back to stereotyping each of the groups in turn. The student’s recognition of his struggle between staying with the relationship to those on the screen and the objectification of each of these others, in turn, though is not unusual. Difference is difficult. It is complicated. It is nuanced. This is why it is so important.

22  Intersectional privilege and the other

On a wider scale, the corruption of political correctness by the political right-wing has revealed its failures to recognise the intersectional nature of difference, and the varying double jeopardies, or the crossovers of oppression, which many of us endure in our lives. In its more extreme moments, political correctness also became an attempt by the political Left to make diversity politics simple, by placing rules and structures around almost everything that is said and done, and in doing so it has become as covertly oppressive as the views or the politics of those of the right. Political correctness has, at times, therefore fallen into the very trap I am discussing here, in that silencing of alternative perspectives, especially those of the right; this means that we end up just perpetuating the othering of the other by not seeing them, or not hearing them, thereby making them as equally invisible as any other minority group. This form of political correctness has made diversity politics too simple, which it was never thus. So, following on from the student example, within the world of psychotherapy, it should be noted that recognising the intersectional nature of identity also becomes useful when watching the projections of our clients. Wonderful examples are emergent from the clients who use phrases like ‘you are only a man, you wouldn’t understand,’ or the client who decided she only wanted to work with me because I am a therapist of colour. In both instances, the other aspects of my identity are either put down or have to be suppressed, as they are seen as too threatening for the client at this time. A therapist’s ability to recognise this, and to stay with the therapeutically othered aspects of themselves that have been pushed to one side by the client, therefore becomes an inherent indicator as to the fears of the client, but also the future direction of the therapy. Intersectional approaches to difference, whilst probably challenging for student practitioners and those who are more experienced, open up counselling and psychotherapy to a world and a breadth of clients who would previously feel othered by the field. Indeed, given that Queer theorists have often presented their own intersectional narratives around difference and otherness, whilst simultaneously questioning the positioning of power within these, it is important to reframe these narratives accordingly so that they are more accessible to all (Read, 2013). Intersectional approaches to difference and diversity also give consciousness to the power structures hidden with in equality politics, especially challenging the self-righteousness of the narratives of the left, and echoing the calls of thinkers as wide ranging as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X as they unconsciously recognised the spectre of supremacy, raising it into view so that this too can be explored (Hayley, 1965). For my own work though, intersectional perspectives allow me to observe and sit within the true complexities of identity politics, the power dynamics, the experiences of othering, the objectification of the others that occur a dozen times daily. In my external world, from the moment that I

Intersectional privilege and the other  23

leave my house in the mornings on my way to work, my identity is witnessed through a series of varying perspectives; the black person, the black man, the invisible one who I choose not to see or hear. This is echoed in my work as a psychotherapist, where I am an object for the projections of my clients; from the client who sees me only as black, and wants to work with my because of this cultural similarity, and therefore objectifies, or ignores, the facts that I am a man or that I am heterosexual. It is from these heuristic experiences that I am then able to witness, empathise, and contain the varying client, student, and supervisee encounters with the differences of themselves, their peers, or their clients. It has proven to be an invaluable tool within my teaching and my practice.

Defining privilege Privileges are a complicated aspect of human nature and one that is as poorly defined as it is understood. Building upon the introduction to this chapter, what I will be doing is presenting some carefully considered ideas as to some of the forms that privilege takes. These are not exhaustive because, as I will be exploring here that privilege is actually intersectional, what some of these ideas do is that they show the conjoined relationship between privilege and the other, be it an oppressive one or otherwise. To open this exploration, in her excellent book, Bhopal (2018) discusses the notion of privilege from a number of angles, seeing it as having an institutional basis. Her work here discusses how the privilege of whiteness oppresses the other, the forms that this oppression takes, and how institutionalised this form of oppression has become for those in the Global North. Her view contrasts well with some excellent podcasts out of Duke University, where Biewen (2017) explored the formation of race, and how this privileged the positioning of whiteness in relation to the other. In one of their episodes, they explore how even though during the time of slavery there were slaves from Scotland and Ireland, and what began to happen during  this early period was that there were definitions of who was and wasn’t white, and therefore who was and who was not considered a slave formed the demarcation line between those who were accepted and those who were the other. What we see in this example is the ideas of whiteness as privilege and how the dividing line between those who were seen as acceptable for the privilege of whiteness was one of race. Returning to the United Kingdom, Andrews (2018) considered the means by which the state worked to exclude Black people from the nation state, highlighting the infamous Rivers of Blood Speech delivered in 1968, and its supposed prediction of the future chaos that would reign were the mass immigration of migrants from the former colonies not halted. The interesting aspect of this argument though is that the people Powell was referring to were not migrants as such; they were British subjects, members of the

24  Intersectional privilege and the other

Empire, choosing to come to the motherland. They were therefore judged as unfit not on their affinity to the United Kingdom, but clearly upon their racial difference. The importance of this narrative here though is to show the lengths cultures often went to maintain their own implied sense of privilege (and superiority, although this aspect will be discussed in more depth later). This sense of privilege is a cultural one, and it is therefore also important to understand how these attitudes which, as I have already discussed, are often just as much systemic as they are individual. This dividing line for white privilege though is not always racial. In Bhopal’s (2018) writings, she states that this measurement occurs in varying forms, observing the treatment of the traveller communities in the United Kingdom. What she notes here is that the discrimination against the traveller communities is rooted within the idea of majority whiteness being a privileged group, and there needing to be a white outsider. This mirrors the experience of the Jewish population, many of whom were seen as the other by the white British establishment, for example during and after the Second World War where many of them, Sigmund Freud included, worked hard to fit into a culture that was often hostile towards them (Jacobs, 2003). What these examples so far highlight though is the almost arbitrary nature of white privilege, its formation often being constructed out of prejudices, and then, as per the examples Biewen discusses above, reinforced through laws and regulations. A wonderful now ancient but no less oppressive example of this is the original declaration of independence, a text built upon the idea of equality for all men, excluding women and other minorities, whereas a more modern perspective might be the dog-whistle politics of Brexit Britain where although equality is encouraged and even legalised, there is still the need to denigrate and marginalise the other (Sian et al., n.d.). Although this exploration of privilege has started with an understanding of whiteness, there are many other forms of privilege that should be explored and noted. The next obvious example emerges with perhaps one that is more prevalent than that of whiteness, that being patriarchy as privilege. Literature about the privileges of patriarchy are numerous and have formed the basis of feminist thought and literature for over a 100 years (Beauvoir, 2010; Butler, 1990). Via the lens of some of these early texts, the idea that the other is identified by the masculine has rightly challenged the patriarchal positioning, categorising, identification, and controlling of the women as the other. In its more modern incarnation, struggles against patriarchy have led to the #metoo movement. Through the lens of social media, this movement re-recognised, and re-ignited the important debate about the abuses of the patriarchy through the often-implied privileges certain men felt they had over women and numerous others. These perspectives have led to the repeated debates around issues about women’s bodies in the United States.

Intersectional privilege and the other  25

The problem with both white privilege and patriarchy though is that they have evolved, so they are not so much rooted within the original racial or gendered paradigm that originated them. Now though, they have become something more; an unconscious system that exists, is often hidden, and the unconscious ways that influence the behaviours of many on either side of these divides. For example, the number of women who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 US Election, even given his obvious sexism and misogyny, is an indicator of the entrenchment of patriarchy (Williams et al., 2018). Another example could be those former migrants who voted for Brexit in 2016, citing their own fears of the migrant hordes who were projected to invade these shores from the Middle East by the likes of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and others which shows that the ongoing oppressiveness of whiteness has moved beyond its traditional shores of the white race and become something more subtle and multi-racial (Boffey, 2018; Khomami, 2016; Stone, 2016). Theories around the struggles of those labelled disabled also hold echoes of the privilege. This time the privilege of the able-bodied. In their interesting paper discussing the intersections of LGBTQ issues with those of the disabled, Jean and Samuels (2003) discuss the difficulties endured by those who inhabit both means of being marked as the other, and how this struggle leads to them not feeling seen both by those deemed by society to be able-bodied and within their own LGBTQ communities. Not being seen or acknowledged because of one’s disability is a factor in other forms of discrimination. In an article in the British newspaper Guardian, it was revealed that only 46.5% of adults with a disability are employed, with this number plummeting to an incredible 6% when one factors in those with learning difficulties (Ratcliffe, 2017). This seems to be an uncomfortable companion of the current Conservative Government’s target to have one million disabled people in work by the year 2027. Even though this initiative was launched in 2017, the then Chief Executive of Scope, Mark Atkinson, soon poured scorn upon this idea stating that for the initiative to even get close to succeeding it ‘needs to include an overhaul of out-of-work support for disabled people and greater access to specialist employment support, and we also need to see reform of sick pay to enable more disabled people to remain in work’ (Various, 2017a, p. 1). So, through watching the challenges that the disabled have to overcome to even achieve the same levels of employment as their able-bodied counterparts, it is therefore important to recognise the privilege that said being fit and able-bodied brings with it. For psychotherapists and counsellors though, the most important aspects of this brief exploration and recognition of privilege are that they are manyfold and they are often used to oppress disadvantaged groups. Yet, as one can see from even this brief narrative, there are many other types of privileges which have not been discussed such as the privilege of youth over

26  Intersectional privilege and the other

age, the privilege of being middle or upper class over those deemed to be working class, or the privileges held in being more literate than the other. What this means is that within each of us we sit with varying layers of privileges at all times, and that privilege is a construct, be it formed out of the culture or through religion or otherwise. For example, I opened this book discussing the intersecting layers of my identity. Yet, within these, there is the privilege of being an Academic, the privilege of being born and raised in Central Europe, and the privilege of being born male. Returning to my earlier client example, Susan, although she held some privilege because of her financial position and her job, these had been earned through her education. Being raised in a traditional working-class family meant she was originally an outsider during her schooling. She also chose to live in a fairly affluent part of London. Much of her intersectional privilege identity though was unconscious, her heterosexuality, her being able-bodied, which meant in this instance that we failed to look at how these privileges might have oppressed others. This was until we discussed her opinions towards the other women in her department, how she would denigrate their decisions to have families, for example. During our work though her racial privilege, and how this aspect might influence our work, was not directly discussed. For Susan, she felt that the fact she had been raised in a very multi-cultural part of London gave her an understanding of difference, unlike others from her school, for example, who lacked the same types of cross-cultural awareness. Her partner was Irish, and she did recognise how he was often seen as the ‘wrong type of British’ when he was growing up, a stigma that he still held even as an adult and a father. There is one problem with this approach to privilege. If privilege is intersectional, then as we all have some aspect of it, does this mean we are all wrong or bad in some fashion?

The gift of privilege For my client Susan, the closest person to her was her maternal grandmother. From as early as she could mention, the client spent a lot of time with her, baking cakes, going for walks, sitting in the garden, and just talking. For Susan, these times were invaluable times of learning, and she was devastated when her grandmother died. Susan was only 12 years old at the time. One of the things her grandmother taught her was about how in more Afrocentric cultures, being older was a privilege, as it meant she was not only closer to the ancestors but also she could pass on wisdom to her granddaughter from both them and from within herself. Susan noted that whilst in Global Northern cultures being an elder, or being of old age, meant she would be marginalised, from her own background she craved that same emergent privilege, and the gifts it would bring (Galaty, 2014). The importance of this type of privilege is important, especially from a

Intersectional privilege and the other  27

cultural perspective. It also speaks of the varying types of privilege that exist. But what are they? And how might they be constructed? In the previous section of this chapter, we considered some of the varying types of privileges that one might encounter. Here, though, we look at how these structures are formed. Whereas some privileges are innate, others are constructed in a variety of fashions, both consciously and unconsciously. For those which are conscious, this sense of privilege is often made conscious and held in consciousness by the opposing presence of the other. This is something covered in Memmi’s (1974) excellent book, which explores the intimate, intertwined colonial relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. It is an aspect that Hegel (1976) also recognises within his Master/Slave dialectic, and something witnessed by Fanon (2005) as well. The importance of these positions of privilege for all these authors is emergent from the combined sense of identity; that the person or group privilege is defined by the presence of the other, and that definition cannot, or should not, ever be challenged or disrupted by said same opposition. Yet each of the Master, Colonizer, Heteronormative, or the Patriarch positions holds a different origin point. For example, the idea of the patriarchy as a privilege, as I have previously stated, is an aspect that only originated some 10,000 or so years ago. So, it is clearly culturally created. Yet it is also reinforced by religious rules that keep men in a position of prominence. The important aspect to recognise here though is just how much of this is enforced from without, or on high. As Butler (Salih, 2002) recognised in her work, for example, ideas of what it is to be a woman are often imposed from without the gender, by men, for men, and not so for women. This privileging of the masculine has then become so enshrined with the assistance of laws from governments or from religious edicts that it has been incredibly difficult to challenge never mind to actually change. As Gilligan discusses in her paper on the binary nature of the split, giving women back their voice in this dyad then brings, ‘questions about manhood to the fore, challenges the patriarchal gender binary and hierarchy where being a man means not being a woman and also being on top’ (Kiegelmann & Gilligan, 2009, p. 5). The idea of heteronormativity holds a similar route, with a similar type of reinforcement, for example, with the Bible having been used to marginalise and criminalise homosexuality until just a couple of generations ago (Hope, 1998). This could also be said of ableism, and the idea that those who were disabled were seen as being cursed, and the marginalisation of those who endure difficulties with mental illness (Mizock & Russinova, 2015). In all of these examples, the social construction of privilege of one group over the other whilst although having physical aspects is rooted in the social and cultural need to have dominion over the other, and the simultaneous fear of the same said other. This is then enforced using the indoctrination of religion.

28  Intersectional privilege and the other

These types of privileges though are only one side of this conscious arrangement. Class, wealth, and economic privileges are in part earned forms of privilege. For example, whereas in the past the elite classes of Britain worked hard to maintain their sense of separateness and specialness, today there is an increasing drive for many former others towards that same status; something we witness for example in the plethora of reality television shows on all our media channels. The drive towards celebrity, the 15  minutes of fame, is in part driven by a narcissistic need to be seen as special, to be seen as privileged, and can lead to temporary levels of grandiosity that said society is often as willing to provide as it is to destroy. Like the story of Icarus, who failed to listen to his father and flew to close to the sun, stories of stars who fell from grace and disappeared without a trace are as frequent as they are disturbing and sad. The idea of the ‘American Dream’ is another crude example of groups questing for economic privilege, with the idealisation of all that is Western seen as its pinnacle; the lifestyles, the education systems, the jobs, and even the potential partners. These ideals though are promised by the culture from whom they are desired; in advertisements, in films and media, through connections made in social media. The other is often seduced into believing that what is promised at the end of the cultural rainbow will actually be theirs. Should the other be lucky though, then there is a good chance that these privileges become entrenched and are passed down through inheritances. This would include several generations of the same family being sent to the same school, going to the same university, entering the same profession, leading such similar lives; all of these with the prerequisite level of privilege and entitlement, all of which is maintained by the upstairs/downstairs presence of the supplicated other. In his book on the subject, de la Boetie (2015) discusses the positioning of the other and critiques their willingness to accept their submissive position in relation to the French elite. What he does not do though is recognise the entrenched nature of trans-generational privilege when it is reinforced by a sense of trans-generational superiority as it in these instances. It should be noted that these are in no particular order and they are not hierarchical, but they do feed into each other intersectionally. So, there are both conscious and unconscious layers of privilege. Within the conscious realm sit mainly aspects that are culturally and religiously created such as whiteness, patriarchy, gender differences, and being able-bodied. The unconscious side of this relationship to privilege though is equally important. As I have suggested already, we all have some type of gift within us, be it as a good parent, as an artist, or as someone who is good with the number or with the sciences. Yet, even though we have gifts, these can either be wasted, or become suppressed depending upon many varying factors; the family or the cultural environment we’re born into whereby we do not have access to the required tools, the money, or some of the other

Intersectional privilege and the other  29

aspects of privilege that we feel we need to succeed. Our worldly impressions may lead us to either make the most of these gifts or to feel that we have wasted our lives in some fashion by not living up to our potential. Or we may not express these gifts just because of a lack of plain luck. Privilege therefore becomes an overly complex, far more nuanced behemoth than perhaps anything out of realisation; hence it feels difficult to focus upon any other position privilege than the one we are most drawn towards at any time. Although this idea might sound fanciful, or even a bit grandiose, there are grounded reasons for this approach. Levinas (2006), in his work exploring the relationship between the self and the other, clearly recognised the mutual interrelationship between the pair as being something born out of responsibility for the other. Although he may not have suggested that this was a gift, he stressed the importance of this positioning of the subject against the other, not promoting one over the other as a consequence. It was Buber (2010), a friend of Levinas, who took this argument into a more esoteric direction, suggesting that this relationship between the subject and the other was akin to that with God itself. Within the world of psychotherapy for Jung, although he resisted working with the external other, he did recognise that the other was the shadow (Stevens, 1990). It was von Franz (1980) who broadened this discourse, rightly recognising that only when we work to reintegrate our projections onto the other can we truly walk a path towards reintegration and individuation, a journey which then puts us in a different type of relationship with the other opposite us, the other who we start to see anew. Ways of seeing this vary though. As this book is written and published within an I culture, the idea of using one’s Gifts for the benefits of others raises challenges. Yet, given that a good number of immigrants, for example, are from cultures which would be considered ‘We’ cultures this relational aspect is more apparent and more important (Khan, 2018). This difference in how we approach otherness is important to recognise as it dictates a different relationship between the one who holds the privilege and the other. This echoes cultures that, for example, adhere to the concept of Ubuntu, where through the other one knows oneself (Oppenheim, 2012). This concept encourages the interrelationship between subject and the other, not a hierarchical one, and therefore utilises the gifts that the one with the privilege and the power has in its connection with the other. Cultures, such as Muslim, traditional African, Maori, Indigenous American, and many others, are actually We cultures, where the collective experience holds importance, and where the relationship between those who have privilege, or gifts, is one of aid and encouragement for the other, be it human, animal, or environmental. Offering other perspectives, positions of privilege, and the gifts that we inherit accordingly is something that different cultures have been aware of

30  Intersectional privilege and the other

for centuries. In a good number of traditions, Shamans are seen as holding a specific role for the community. Whilst often seen as separate, they are often afforded certain credits, or privileges one could say, that the rest of the community does not have (Peters, 1990). Yet, this does not mean that the Shaman is better or worse than those it serves. This is to reciprocate for the gifts of knowledge, or wisdom, that the Shaman has for those it serves. There is a mutual relationship here, built out of service by the other and for the other by that which is seen as holding gifts and is then given a certain amount of privilege accordingly. Expanding upon these ideas further, from a transpersonal perspective our gifts are those qualities that we all have access to, like the archetypes in the collective unconscious (Hamilton, 2014; Tyagi, 2008). There is a danger here that the idea that we have a gift of some type means that our lives all have meaning. Existentialist thinking would challenge this, I feel, through the opposite view that life is essentially without meaning, and that we don’t necessarily have a path in life, some destiny to fulfil (Kierkegaard, 1989; Yalom, 1981). The idea that there is no meaning in life though undoubtedly leads to a sense of worthlessness, and in some instances depression and suicidalities for many. This contrasts with a more transpersonal perspective on human existence, which holds that we each have a life process and that it is up to us to discover what that path actually is (Jung, 1963; Tyagi, 2008). Perhaps one means of countering this potentially narcissistic position that we are all special emerges when the gift is actually earned. For example, I became an academic relatively late in life, at the age of 47. This was far later than many of my peers where I work, and my personal journey has meandered from the outskirts of society to one where I am expected to uphold some type of position of knowledge and model of self-worth as a trainer of counsellors and psychotherapists. This positioning is not just for myself, or within my institution, but I am also increasingly positioned as someone of privilege within my community, especially given my experiences as a therapist of colour. So, returning to my question of does having privilege mean we are automatically bad. As this chapter says, the simple answer is no, it does not. The reasons why though are especially important in understanding how privilege works and the best way for me to do this is through using a personal example. As stated in the introduction to this book, my identity is multi-faceted. Within this identity there are aspects that I will assume people will use to oppress me (my race, for example), and there are aspects which mean I have gained a level of privilege. Taking one of these, such as the fact I am an academic, how I use this role then becomes hugely important. The complex interrelationship between privilege, the gifted, and the supremacist therefore presents itself though the varying relationships with the other. Figure 2.1 shows the visual complexity of this structure. As discussed already

Intersectional privilege and the other  31

SUPREMACY

Power (Trauma)

PRIVILEGE

OTHER

Humility

GIFTED

Figure 2.1 Privilege and the other.

in this chapter, the one with Privilege often has a moral, or cultural, responsibility towards the other. In order to facilitate this responsibility, the one with Privilege therefore has to build a relationship with the other, be they disadvantaged or just in need. This takes humility, an awareness that they are whole as they are, and a recognition of the humanity of the other. Privilege therefore becomes something gifted to the subject by the other. It is not ripped from the other by force of will, it is earned, it is recognised, and it is held respectfully between the pair. Yet, when we start to recognise ideas of privilege and power over the other, the next part to explore is exactly what is it that makes those with privilege move to a position of supremacy?

Privilege and supremacy Mitchell was a white British 35-year-old client of mine who lived in London. He was white, middle class, and had been educated at state school in central London, which he attended since the age of seven. Mitchell’s parents both worked, his father was a successful businessman, whilst his mother was a GP, and he had two older siblings, both female. Being the only son in the family meant that he was not that close to his sisters, shuttling between one or the other of them dependent upon what the relationship was like between both sisters at any given time, or who disliked whom.

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Mitchell was separated but not divorced from his previous partner, who was also white and middle class, and who he had been married to for seven years, he had joint custody of his five-year-old daughter from that relationship. They had met towards the end of his time at university and had moved back to London to be together subsequently, marrying several years later. His current partner was of the same age as himself but was of A frican descent. The reason for his coming to therapy was that he was under investigation following a physical altercation with his new partner. When he came to see me, he told me he felt mortified, not only about his physical aggression towards his partner but also by some of the things he had said to her and his daughter at the time. It was his partner who had made the initial call to myself to organise the therapy session, as she felt there were issues around their cultural difference that he needed to address. On meeting Mitchell, he told me a number of stories about their relationship, and in particular its difficulties. For example, on the night he had been arrested, at the height of the argument, his daughter, who was staying with him, had begun to cry, prompting Mitchell to shout at her. When his partner had said he shouldn’t speak to his daughter like that, he turned his anger on her as well. He told her he could say what he wanted because he was the child’s father, and that she (his partner) should shut up because she wasn’t even the child’s stepmother. He then went on to berate her for her cultural background, especially in comparison with his. While his behaviours undoubtedly raised serious issues about domestic violence and physical and emotional abuse, issues that we spent a lot of time working within the therapy, for this chapter the predominant area of consideration is just how privilege and supremacy then filtered into Mitchell’s behaviour. Thus far, this chapter has been concerned with exploring the roots of privilege in its many forms, presenting conclusive evidence of just how much the wedding of conscious and unconscious privilege sits central to our lives in the Global North. From patriarchy and its link to privilege, to the economic privileges enjoyed by many, it is impossible to ignore or escape its impact upon all our lives. Yet, as I have discussed, privilege is as much about the gift we all hold as it is about those we inherit, or those passed on to us from our culture, our gender, or our religious affiliations. The issue with many of the books on the subject of privilege and supremacy is that they conflate one with the other. Bhopal (2018) in her book on the subject of white privilege, recognises the trap of privilege but does not separate this from the movement from a more supremacist positioning of white Europeans over the white other. This confusion is, I would argue, fairly common. Another example emerges from the work of Andrews who explores this from a different perspective, clearly recognising the importance of positioning black radicalism as the other against structures of post-colonial whiteness, yet, whilst recognising the intersecting nature of struggles of persons of colour and the LGBTQ community, says that ‘it

Intersectional privilege and the other  33

is not reasonable to expect a radical politics to engage in liberal struggles within the state’ and ‘that black radicalism also unapologetically privileges Blackness analytically’ (Andrews, 2018, p. 174). I am not convinced that Andrews is saying that black radicalism is superior to the struggles of say the black LGBTQ community, but there will be those within these communities who will clearly denigrate and see themselves as better than LGBTQ minorities within their own communities. It is therefore essential that any radical approach to difference recognises and holds the tension built into it, meaning that we work to understand the intersectional interrelationship between those who are marginalised already and those within said group who hold yet another experience of marginalisation. When approaching difference, privilege, and supremacy from an intersectional paradigm, it is important to recognise how easy it is to dismiss, or distance oneself, from one struggle, whilst placing the priority of one’s own over the other. The issue for this part of the chapter is to therefore explore how and why privilege morphs into the more destructive idea of supremacy. First of all though it is worth exploring what supremacy is and some of the forms that it actually takes, before considering just supremacy is culturally created and systematically maintained. To begin with, supremacy, as defined in varying dictionaries is normally that which is seen to have the greatest power or has dominion over something or someone. Power is therefore a core component of that which is supreme. In their article on settler whiteness and white supremacy, Bonds and Inwood make a clear distinction between supremacy and whiteness, also suggesting that more research needs to be done to explore the differences and similarities between these two culturally constructed positions (Bonds & Inwood, 2016). For example, they recognise the power struggles that are implicit within a supremacist culture where white supremacy more precisely ‘describes and locates white racial domination by underscoring the material production and violence of racial structures and the hegemony of whiteness in settler societies’ (2016, p. 716). This they see as different from an exploration of the cultural privilege of whiteness. Issues of superiority have sat centrally within the feminist discourse. For example, Butler (1990) argues that feminism should closely consider how patriarchal power categorises women, placing them within a stereotype as a form of control. This is a point followed upon by de Beauvoir (2010), where from the name of the actual book, The Second Sex, through its exploration of this positioning of women of other, there is a consideration of the supremacy of the patriarchy. Within the discourse around disability studies, there is often a privileging of the able over the disabled (Goodley, 2014). One of the important insights of this exploration is the impact of the power of the able over those designated as disabled. They cite examples where the other has been left without a voice, where they have not been seen, echoing for example cases where

34  Intersectional privilege and the other

those who are disabled have made accusations of abuse against those who are able-bodied, their consent pushed aside by the superior will of their abuser (Mintz, 2017). There were echoes of this sense of superiority in Mitchell’s story. During one session he expressed that had met his current partner at a social event organised through his workplace. He found his partner to be very different from many of the women he normally met at work events, in that she was obviously uncomfortable within this type of arena as she was a little shy and reserved something he found attractive. When they started dating, he would often try to bring her out of her shell, entertaining her, and showing her a side of life that he was comfortable with but one that she had little knowledge of, such as nice restaurants, weekend trips away, buying her nice items, and making regular efforts to surprise her. Yet, although it can be uncomfortable to see supremacy as a conscious and/or unconscious entity in its own right, this exploration of supremacy has been ongoing for generations now, and in different arenas. Another means of seeing supremacy though is through the lens of hubris. A Greek term, which means one with ‘excessive self-pride or selfconfidence that can end in deadly retribution’ (Trumbull, 2010, p. 341), this accusation that one holds excessive self-confidence, and is therefore superior, has often been levelled at leaders as diverse as Hitler, Castro, and George W. Bush. In a paper delivered to the Royal College of Physicians, the former British MP, Lord David Owen even recognised hubris as a syndrome, linking it to a ‘narcissistic propensity to see the world as an arena in which (one) can exercise power and glory’ (2008, p. 428). This link between hubris, supremacy, and narcissism is very important in understanding the positioning of privilege and its movement from a gifted state of being to one where there is a need to take power, or to have dominion over the other. This quest for supremacy, this attainment, and maintenance of hubris over the other, although explored here, needs though to be seen through a wider lens to understand the breadth and depth of its whole apparatus. In his paper Keaney (2013) explored the dangerous and self-destructive route of US foreign policy and its drive to dominate other nations both near and far, recognising that this was driven predominantly by a form of cultural hubris. What all of these papers recognise though is that these systems actually feed off themselves and ultimately destroy themselves in their attempt to remain self-sustaining. They are the collective cultural versions of Icarus (Unknown, 2017). Within the world of psychotherapy though, hubris I will argue here is really a type of cultural psychological inflation. As Jung states, ‘an inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It

Intersectional privilege and the other  35

inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead’ (Jung, 1968, p. 563). Moving even further into the world of psychotherapy, the issue of how supremacy forms finds one of its roots within the arena of child development. Duffel (2014a) in his exploration of the British education system recognised that the Boarding School system was one route towards understanding the link between privilege and supremacy. Born out of an exploration of the origins of boarding schools, where this ancient system was originally constructed by the Ancient Romans to provide leaders for the varying conflicts and conquests they were engaged in at the time. The privilege of this education system though was built upon the idea of a hierarchy, where the strong abuse the weak, where the initial trauma of separation leaves the child vulnerable to those systemically superior to them (Schaverien, 2004, 2011). What both Schaverien’s and Duffell’s work suggest here though is that the shame of being seen as less than by a superior peer within such an environment builds up a sense of superior defence against such humiliation. Psychologically, the idea of enforcing broken attachments leading to a real sense of inferiority, was an idea posited by Adler (Way, 1956) in his works. His idea though was that to offset this sense of inferiority the child builds a superior defence, a false self that acts as if it is more than it really is and avoids the pain of the separation with that initial caregiver. This hothousing of childhood though has implications for the relational suitability of those who have been through it and who have risen to the top; meaning there is a cost for the attainment of such privilege and superiority. For example, Duffel (2014b) himself recognised though what we actually ended up with is leaders who are seriously wounded and lead from this unconscious position of vulnerability such as David Cameron and Clement Atlee, and many other British leaders. This is also important to recognise as these leaders are not just those who inhabit the corridors of political power, they also run our corporations, govern our schools, and provide us with our services. Although it might appear that this is a British problem, it is not. As previously stated, the boarding school is a system that has been in place for over 2,000 years now and has aided in the bedding in of patriarchal systems both in Britain and around the world. In fact, Donald Trump, the 45th American President, and an obvious advocate for White Supremacy and the politics of the Far-Right attended perhaps the most obvious type of boarding school, a military schooling establishment. Other examples include Robert Mugabe, the former leader of Zimbabwe, who was also educated in a Boarding School, and Gandhi came to the United Kingdom to study Law at the University College of London. Even the founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg attended a boarding school. In the modern age, European boarding schools have often been presented

36  Intersectional privilege and the other

as the pinnacle of education by those from the former colonies, with numerous students travelling to France, Britain, and the United States of America to take the chance of learning from the presupposed best. A recent article by Adams’ (2016) in the Guardian put the level of foreign students attending boarding schools in the United Kingdom at around a third, with the largest number coming from Russia. The top European schools and universities have therefore been much revered since the time of colonialism it could be argued, if less so beforehand when the balances of knowledge and therefore power was spread in a vastly different fashion. For example, the great library of Alexandria, in Egypt, was a major centre for knowledge across the world for hundreds of years. Yet these centres of knowledge were not known to foster learning but then to create leaders who would then look to dominate the world. This educational embedding of narcissism, hubris, and supremacy, therefore, means that we often do not witness just how much this system of supremacy sits around us, impacts and invades us, and influences our interactions on a day to day basis. When it is presented in the form of White Nationalists on television rioting in Charlottesville, or as members of the English Defence League marching in their dozens through the streets of London, then we recognise it. Yet, what we do not do is consider that we are as much a part of this system of supremacy as those subjects whose ideas are more obviously right-wing. For Mitchell, issues of power and privilege therefore weaved their way throughout his life. From his privileged upbringing with his schooling and his middle-class presentation to his having the opportunity to attend a decent university, to his attaining a good job in the City of London, simplistically, Mitchell’s life was one of privilege. Exploring this unconscious position of supremacy with Mitchell meant he had to acknowledge that some of his actions towards his partner, and also (interestingly) towards his daughter, were rooted in subtle lessons that he had received from his family and his upbringing. The racial sense of superiority that he even admitted towards in a brief moment meant Mitchell had to recognise he held some deep seated, unconscious, prejudicial views about women of African descent. He acknowledged that his own father hated his girlfriend because of her racial difference, and was able to speak about how as a child his parents had often laughed at the natives on the old Tarzan films they used to sit around and watch during Christmas time. As we continued to discuss his need to feel superior, we then began to look at his prejudices towards the few women in his workplace; how he would often join in with the sexualised banter, how he would occasionally talk over female colleagues in meetings, or how he rarely bothered to include any of his supposed female friends when there were discussions about meeting for lunch. The weight of these aggressions towards his female colleagues staggered him, reminding him of how his father treated his mother,

Intersectional privilege and the other  37

and how his maternal grandfather dominated his grandmother, his mother, and the two sisters, favouring the one son he had, Mitchell’s maternal uncle who not surprisingly was also a successful businessman. Once both of these not so subtle senses of superiority had emerged, other subtle actions came to light, such as his various micro-aggressions towards me – subtle put-downs about my way of working, criticisms that there was no change, and shouldn’t I be doing something more to assist him. The unconscious supremacist had entered the therapy and was asking to be seen. As we have discussed, privilege is multifaceted, it can appear in a series of character traits one is born into, or it can be a series of gifts that are inherently one’s own. How we use these gifts though comes down to the individual, and there is a distinct difference between using one’s gifts to aid someone else to get to where they need to be and using them to oppress the other. The level of supremacy though in this simple exchange says a lot about the day to day experiences of the other. Built out of a need to compete against someone, to best them, be better than, or to just dominate them, the subject here has formed a narrative of their own which says they are ‘better than.’ This unconscious creation helps us to explore this important aspect of the debate; how does privilege then become supremacy, where the subject is not in service of the other, but sees the other as a threat to their self-established dominance, and therefore something that needs to be contained or destroyed. Supremacy therefore involves the comparison between a subject and an object/other, together with a belief held by that subject that it is superior to the said object/other. This belief could be that the subject is stronger, worth more, holds a more central position in society, is of a better class, is of the right sexuality, is better able bodied, or has used their definition of God to justify their position of superiority over the object/other. Supremacy is something we see so much of in our day-to-day lives that we often forget it is there, in fact I would summarise that because we are so immersed within this intersectional world of privilege, we very rarely recognise the unconscious supremacist within us all when it appears. Privilege becomes supremacy, only when we reject our responsibility for the other, and when we reject the idea that the other is a part of us. It becomes supremacy when we deny it the gifts that we have, instead, making these gifts, our money, our schools, our ways of life, something to be aspired towards, as we see ourselves as superior. Supremacy is therefore so embodied within the cultures of the West that to deny its reality is either done from a position of ignorance of its presence, a fear of its absence, or a wilful unwillingness to admit to existence out of a sense of shame for the pain and destruction wrought in its name. From how we treat the environment, to how we silence or denigrate or annihilate minority groups, to how we use each other for our own ends, a position of supremacy leaves us out of touch with the rest of society, and therefore from the rest of the world.

38  Intersectional privilege and the other

The intersectional marriage of privilege and otherness The aim of this chapter has been to explore privilege, what it is, the forms that it takes, and the differences between privilege and being gifted in some fashion. Then we considered how privilege becomes supremacy, clearly showing that although supremacy is now systemic, it had its origins in a number of areas built out of a need to dominate the other, be they women, other cultures or races, etc. Yet we began this chapter with exploring what intersectionality is, and why an intersectional approach to understanding difference is an important cornerstone in broadening our understanding of inequality and recognising how power plays a dominant role in the fight for equality for all. This section therefore looks at how combining intersectionality to our understanding of privilege offers us a still more nuanced perspective on privilege, and begins to show the reader how even though we are the intersectional other, we still hold intersectional privileges, and how recognising this might be a route towards a greater understanding of our self, and the hidden power we hold in our lives. As discussed in the previous section, supremacy has as one of its cornerstones within most Western cultures the link between childhood experiences of abandonment and the separation from primary caregivers, an experience that led to the almost primal fight for survival within a schooling system designed to create persons who would lead. As discussed, this is a system that has filtered down into every aspect of Western society and had an influence over most of the colonised world, and still rumbles onwards through the guise of commercial systems run by these same leaders. Yet, as discussed previously, privilege is not limited to how one is educated. Privilege can be something we are born with, a gift that we have that we can either offer to those who lack said the same gift, or that we can use to oppress those same others. An intersectional perspective on exploring difference though recognises that we often have more than one experience of being the other to endure. With Crenshaw’s work recognising the double, or even triple, jeopardies of difference, and studies showing these additional layers of otherness compounding the experiences of otherness, isolation, and invisibility, it seems challenging to propose that whilst we are all the other, we all also simultaneously hold some type of privilege that we are often unaware of. This is the merged together understanding of intersectional privilege that sits central to this book and allows the debates around difference and diversity to explore in a more nuanced fashion this complicated interplay of the aspects of one’s identity. The importance of this approach should not be understated. Often, in debates around difference and diversity one of two things happens; either the debate is centred purely around race, meaning

Intersectional privilege and the other  39

that those who are alternative others within those same spaced (be they from LGBTQ, disability, or other backgrounds) then feel silenced by the narrative on display; or, the debate is tagged onto the end of a workshop, a course, a year, where the fear of what might emerge out of a discussion of difference is then improperly held or explored leading to a feeling of dissatisfaction across whole cohorts of students. The most important aspect in any discussion around difference is its grounding within a framework of intersectional privilege. Assisting students to recognise that any one of us holds multiple layers of privilege at any given moment or time is an essential factor within this, as is helping students to recognise how truly complex the power dynamics in the field of difference and diversity actually are. For example, using my initial identity from the introduction to this volume, the fact that I am male gives me a certain privilege over someone female; the fact that I am raised in Europe privileges me over someone Non-European; the fact that I am able-bodied means that I exist in a world of privilege over a person considered to have disabilities. Conversely, my colour is seen as a disadvantage against someone white; the fact I am in my fifties means I am not seen in as positive a light as someone who is in their twenties; or the fact I come from a working-class immigrant background is seen as a disadvantage against the backdrop of someone who is middle or upper class. Offering another perspective, students in most counselling and psychotherapy courses in the United Kingdom tend to be female. Yet, although they may experience oppression in the eyes of the patriarchy, often their positions as white, middle class, heterosexual, European, or any other types of privilege seem to become missed in the narratives around otherness. Even the brief example I presented earlier of the gay man of colour whose mother, a woman of colour, rejected him because of his sexuality, speaks volumes of the layers of privilege in the mother’s positioning as a heterosexual woman. These basic, more static, perspectives on intersectional privilege though belie the fact that these positions are fluid, and one can become stuck within a position at any time, forgetting that we hold both certain privileges and positions of otherness all the time. Again, using the previous examples, to hold onto one’s sense of otherness then denies the fact that one has the privilege and may oppress others, whereas to cling to ones sense of privilege risks can be seen as a defence against recognising the often detrimental impact one has upon the other. Developing this further, as a benchmark Hegel (1976) recognised that the other holds a symbiotic relationship to the subject, and vice versa, whereas Fanon (2005) saw this as being based around the idea of responsibility; the master has it whilst the slave does not, and only when the slave gathers their will does this ever change. The problem with these ideas though is they are incomplete. This may mean that as I take up my job as an academic at a

40  Intersectional privilege and the other

British university, in the South East of England, I immediately hold privileged identities. This contrasts with the fact that at the same time I am a black, son of immigrants, from outside of the United Kingdom, and I am now middle-aged. I am therefore both the unconscious master of and the unconscious slave to my psyche. Another aspect to recognise is that privileges ebb and flow over time, and if this happens for privileges, then it will occur for one’s sense of otherness also. The most obvious example being my moving from a position of youth, which in this culture is seen as a privilege and gives me a certain power over those who are elderly, to one where I am that same elder. Or the fertility of most of us, although maybe not consciously considered a privilege, is often cast as such by the society, and by our gender groups. This though is something that changes over time, moving us to a position whereby our wish to have children dies out or ends, be it naturally or otherwise. These life changes therefore shift our position to one where we are on the inside of the group, where we have the privileges of culture, to one where we can become marginalised by the said grouping, either consciously or unconsciously. Another means that some find to cross the divide into a position of privilege is by the attainment of such. Attainment of privilege through a relationship with a person of privilege presents this perfectly. There are lots of stories about persons from minority cultures marrying, for example, Europeans or Westerners, or choosing lighter-skinned or white partners over those of their own culture. Whilst there will be some very reasonable reasons for this, including the love of another, it should not be forgotten that the promise of privilege, and the perceived increased social standing that this brings with it, is also a factor in many of these relationships. Alternatively, the movement of migrants, or those from the colonies, to the Global North or the lands of their former colonisers could be seen as an attempt to gather towards oneself a certain amount of privilege and worth. Intersectional privilege is therefore a very powerful add-on in our understanding of diversity politics and needs to be explored further to just begin to recognise just how clients relate to each of these categorisations they have been cast into, or they have positioned themselves within. Ideas of intersectional privilege need further research to understand that the double jeopardy ideas that sat at the beginning of this chapter are actually just one side of the multifaceted dyad that pits the powerful against the powerless. Gathering some of the research about this very topic, Herk et al. (2011) in their work in the nursing arena, consider the intersecting layers of privilege, power, and the oppression of the other. This is an angle echoed in a study out of the Social Work arena, where Case et al. (2012) consider the intersections of privilege, recognising that for the privilege to exist now that it has to have become a system, meaning that it operates almost unconsciously, almost unseen. This then brings up an interesting paper by Anderson and Middleton (2005) who explored the intersections of privilege

Intersectional privilege and the other  41

and oppression within the arena of education, seeing privilege as a nuanced systemic force that is never ending and is difficult therefore to challenge. So, when we add this intersectional layer of understanding to the marriage of privilege and otherness, the interplay between powerful and powerless becomes not only more complicated but also becomes more inclusive. This is hugely important for books designed to understand how we work with difference and otherness within psychotherapy as they then move beyond the unconscious racism of the tick-boxing exercise of tagging diversity sessions onto the end of training, but they actually show that we understand difference, diversity and the position of privilege and how all these positions interact, oppress and embolden each of us in turn. Figure 2.1, considers just some of the many positions of privilege. The idea here though is not to generalise difference. Quite the contrary. It is to aid therapists and other health care practitioners in recognising its complexity and its beauty. It is to show that difference, diversity, otherness, and privilege are incredibly complex topic that deserve fuller exploration. And it is to start building a roadmap to assist practitioners at all levels in negotiating these diverse waters we are all trying to fathom. That these are also areas of human culture-based identity and interaction that none of us should shy away from, especially given the wealth of material about ourselves hidden within our interactions with the other should we venture beyond our own cultural shore on the island of safety.

Summary Whilst this book looks to consider differences and otherness, one of the underpinning tenets of my work here is to show that otherness cannot exist without privilege. Throughout this chapter, it has therefore been important to explore just what privilege is. To show that privilege is more than just being white heterosexual or male, and to explore just what it means to hold privilege and how this can either be used for the benefits of, or the oppression, of the other. This contrasts against, whilst also building upon the ideas of excellent theorists such as Bhopal (2018), who mainly sees white privilege as a problem that needs to be recognised, and Andrews (2016) who hints at white privilege as being something akin to an illness. I would suggest that it is not so much whiteness that is the illness, but it is the intersection of privilege and supremacy that is the problem here, not necessarily the idea of privilege itself, and that this consideration can only become apparent when we apply the lens of intersectionality. When we consider privilege through an intersectional lens, as shown in Figure 2.1, we begin to recognise that this is a very complex topic, and one that is not easily understood by many, but one that needs to be before we even approach a truly inclusive understanding of difference and otherness.

42  Intersectional privilege and the other

Also, shining an intersectional light upon privilege simultaneously reveals the interconnected relationships with privilege and otherness we all manage and deal with, in each and every moment of our busy lives. Remembering my initial 19 words in the introduction begins to shine a light upon the privileges I have. The difference in how I use these is based upon my own sense of humility and respect for those around me. This does not mean there are not times when the others around me might feel oppressed, unseen, or unheard of in my presence. What it does mean is that my responsibility for them means my interactions with them are vastly different from those who have been taught to dominate, objectify, other, or stereotype. It is these latter interactions that form the vast map of inequalities that we witness in societies in the Global North today, and it is these that as minorities we struggle against constantly. Dealing with everything from the unconscious biases of the subject, to their microaggressions, to their overt racism or sexism, the other lives in constant fear of their existence, and deals regularly with a sense of shame for who they are and what they represent. It is this aspect of the interactions with the subject that I will look to discuss in the next chapter, an aspect that was clearly prevalent in the work with the client Mitchell, as I explore the link between oppression and these often difficult to contain emotions.

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44  Intersectional privilege and the other Jean, E., & Samuels, E. (2003). MY BODY, MY CLOSET invisible disability and the limits of coming-out discourse. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 9(1), 233–255. Jung, C. G. (1963). Mysterium coniuntionis (2nd Ed 1970). Princeton University Press. Jung, C. G. (1968). The collected works of C.G. Jung. Vol. 21 (G. Adler & R. Hull (Eds.)). Princeton University Press. Keaney, M. (2013). From hubris to nemesis: Tackling US decline. Political Studies Review, 11(3), 358–368. doi: 10.1111/1478-9302.12006 Kernberg, O. F. (2002). Unresolved issues in the psychoanalytic theory of homosexuality and bisexuality. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy, 6(1), 9–27. doi: 10.1300/J236v06n01_02 Khan, M. (2018). When two cultures present in the therapy room. BME Voices Talk Mental Health Inaugural Conference 2018 ‘Identity and Belonging: It’s Not So Black and White,’ 1. http://www.bmevoices.co.uk/ Khomami, N. (2016). The vote made people just explode: Polish centre reeling after graffiti attack. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/27/ brexit-polish-centre-london-reeling-after-graffiti-attack Kiegelmann, M., & Gilligan, C. (2009). Making oneself vulnerable to discovery Carol Gilligan in conversation with Mechthild Kiegelmann about the interview. Forum: Qualitative Social Research (Sozialforschung), 10(3), 1–19. Kierkegaard, S. (1989). The sickness unto death. Penguin Classics. Lee, H. (2004). To kill a Mockingbird. Vintage Books. Levinas, E. (2006). Humanism of the other. University of Illinois Press. Memmi, A. (1974). The colonizer and the colonized. Souvenir Press. Mereish, E. H. (2012). The intersectional invisibility of race and disability status: An exploratory study of health and discrimination facing Asian Americans with disabilities. Ethnicity and Inequalities in Social Care, 5(2), 52–60. doi: 10.1108/17570981211286796 Mintz, K. (2017). Ableism, ambiguity, and the Anna Stubblefield case*. Disability and Society, 32(10), 1666–1670. doi: 10.1080/09687599.2017.1356058 Mizock, L., & Russinova, Z. (2015). Intersectional stigma and the acceptance process of women with mental illness. Women & Therapy, 38 (February 2015), 14–30. doi: 10.1080/02703149.2014.978211 Nash, J. C. (2008). Re-thinking intersectionality. Feminist Review, 89, 1–16. Nichols, J. M. (2016, November). A survivor of gay conversion therapy shares his chilling story. Hufifngton Post US, 1. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/ realities-of-conversion-therapy_us_582b6cf2e4b01d8a014aea66?guccounter=1 Oppenheim, C. E. (2012). Nelson Mandela and the power of Ubuntu. Religions, 3(4), 369–388. doi: 10.3390/rel3020369 Owen, D., Gee, S., George, D. L., Thatcher, M., George, W., & Blair, T. (2008). Hubris syndrome gled out as having developed hubris syndrome. Clinical Medicine, 8(4), 428–432. Peters, L. G. (1990). Shamanism: Phenomenology of a spiritual discipline. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 21(2), 115–137. Ratcliffe, R. (2017). Inequality: “I don’t think employers see what disabled people can do.” Guardian Online. https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/ oct/03/i-dont-think-employers-see-what-disabled-people-can-do

Intersectional privilege and the other  45 Read, K. W. (2013). Queering the brothel: Identity construction and performance in Carson City, Nevada. Sexualities, 16(3–4), 467–486. doi: 10.1177/1363460713481744 Salih, S. (2002). Routledge critical thinkers: Judith Butler. Taylor & Francis. doi: 10.4324/9780203163986 Schaverien, J. (2004). Boarding school: The trauma of the privileged child. The Journal of Analytical Psychology, 49(5), 683–705. doi: 10.1111/j.0021-8774. 2004.00495.x Schaverien, J. (2011). Boarding school syndrome: Broken attachments a hidden trauma. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 27(2), 138–155. doi: 10.1111/j. 1752-0118.2011.01229.x Sian, K., Law, I., & Sayyid, S. (n.d.). United Kingdom the media and Muslims in the UK. 1–42. Stevens, A. (1990). On Jung. Penguin Limited. Stone, J. (2016). EU referendum: Baroness Warsi subjected to Islamaphobic abuse by Brexit supporters after defecting. Independent Online. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum-baroness-warsi-defect-islamophobic-abuse-brexit-supporters-remain-leave-a7091076.html Trumbull, D. (2010). Hubris: A primal danger. Psychiatry: Interpersonal & Biological Processes, 73(4), 341–351. doi: 10.1521/psyc.2010.73.4.341 Tyagi, A. (2008). Individuation: The Jungian process of spiritual growth. In A. Hussain (Ed.), Explorations of Human Spirituality (pp. 128–153). Global Vision Publishing House. Unknown. (2017). The myth of Daedalus and Icarus. Greek Myths and Greek Mythology. Various. (2017a). Data reveals government will fail on pledge to get one million more disabled people into work without rapid action. Scope. https://www.scope. org.uk/press-releases/government-will-fail-one-million-disabled-people-work Various. (2017b). Leading UK psychological professions and Stonewall unite against conversion therapy. BACP. https://www.bacp.co.uk/news/2017/16-october-2017leading-uk-psychological-professions-and-stonewall-unite-against-conversiontherapy/ von Franz, M.-L. (1980). Projection and re-collection in Jungian psychology. Open Court Publications. Way, L. (1956). Alfred Adler: An introduction to his psychology. Penguin Books Limited. Williams, E. A., Pillai, R., Deptula, B. J., Lowe, K. B., & McCombs, K. (2018). Did charisma “Trump” narcissism in 2016? Leader narcissism, attributed charisma, value congruence and voter choice. Personality and Individual Differences, 130 (November 2017), 11–17. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2018.03.010 Yalom, I. D. (1981). Meaninglessness. In Existential psychotherapy (Vol. 32, Issue 9, pp. 645–646). Harper Collins Publishers. doi: 10.1176/ps.32.9.645 Young, N. J. (2018, August). Gay ‘conversion therapy’ in ‘cameron post,’ ‘boy erased’ is far from a thing of the past. Huffington Post, 1. https://www.huffingtonpost. com/entry/opinion-conversion-therapy-movies_us_5b7f1e64e4b0348585fee692 Zingsheim, J., & Goltz, D. B. (2011). The intersectional workings of whiteness: A representative Anecdote. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 33(3), 215–241. doi: 10.1080/10714413.2011.585286

Chapter 3

Hatred, shame, and the unconscious other

In 2019, whilst writing this book, I was exploring an issue around hatred and shame in my own therapy. The issues had arisen out of my experience with my father; a distant man, with gambling problems who I always felt afraid of as his malevolent presence would change the entire feel of our house when he arrived home. My explorations of hatred and shame though were circled around his, and therefore also my, experience as migrants in the United Kingdom. His was a world where finding work was often difficult as you were foreign, where any housing opportunities were taken away from oneself should one be black, Irish, or a dog, where political parties, much like now, were divided along racial lines, where politicians were predicting a racial holocaust. My father was a difficult man. Abusive towards myself when I was young, his behaviour meaning I often felt unmet, undermined, or unseen, leaving me often feeling ashamed of myself. My sense was that I was hated when I was growing up, scapegoated for any misdemeanour that occurred within our home, with these gradual marginalisation’s of myself, and the adaptations I underwent in order to survive such a tough home life, eventually meaning that it was increasingly difficult to express any form of authenticity. These experiences also meant enduring regular bullying at secondary school, feeling alone, depressed, and often angry at having nowhere to turn to in a time when I was a teenager growing up and trying to find my place in the world. Enduring the regular micro-aggressions of women crossing the road when they saw my teenage self-walking towards them, or the extra sharp comments directed at myself should I enter an environment where I was not wanted (and therefore quickly left) were just some of the more simplistic ways I witnessed a hatred for my racialised sense of otherness. My awareness of how much hatred has played a role in my life even filtered down to my love of comic books as a child. My personal favourites were the X-Men; a superhero team created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, the X-Men were designed as mutant heroes who banded together to fight crime in a world that hated and feared them. At the time I did not

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know this, but their design was influenced by the Civil Rights struggles in the United States of America, the lead protagonists, Professor Charles Xavier and Eric Lershnerr (aka Magneto), being modelled upon Dr Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (Morris & Morris, 2005). There was a resonance for me in these stories, especially given my own cultural and racial background, with my being of a different culture, being a particular factor in the difficult days of secondary school, the stories often leaving me feeling at home and seen, my pain of being an outsider being recognised. Looking back upon some of these experiences I now recognise that much of the hatred of my father towards myself was also a means of his distancing himself from the hatred he would have inevitably endured over his previous 30 years in the United Kingdom. The hatred of my father towards myself also served another purpose. It elevated my father into a position of superiority over myself, leaving me not only afraid of him, but coated in the shame of being the black sheep of the family, or the outsider. It gave him a sense of superiority. Hatred and therefore the shame of being the other is though often driven by the narcissism of the subject. It fully believes it is better than, that as we have already discussed in this book it is superior, and this means of inhabiting this superior space is important in maintaining this sense of grandiose narcissism. Yet, as narcissism is an important factor here in the creation of the other it is important to explore just the form it takes, and how it influences or breaks the other.

Hatred and the other For those of difference, be they culturally different, gendered different, of a different ability, encounters with both hatred and shame are extremely common, emergent from in a world where the other is not wanted. There are many examples where hate for the other has bubbled to the surface, for example, the attacks upon gay and lesbian couples and groups are sadly a common aspect of the experience of being hated as a minority (Stults et al., 2017). Alternatively, the regularity of abuses against those labelled disabled be they verbal or physical is an aspect of their experience which is often not noted, but of equal importance (Jean & Samuels, 2003). From police shootings of non-white persons in the United States to the rape and abuse of women leading to the rise of the #metoo movement, the degree to which the other lives in fear of the hatred of the subject has rightly become a focal point in the struggle against the oppressions of the intersectional other. One of the most potent, and sadly obvious examples, that arose out of recent British history happened in 1999 where, over three weekends, three homemade nail bombs were detonated respectively in Brixton, Brick Lane, and at the Admiral Duncan Pub in Soho, Central London. The bombs were targeted at the Black British, British Bengali, and the Gay communities of

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London, and were set up by David Copeland, a Neo-Nazi with links to two far-right groups (Hopkins & Hall, 2000). Although all of these examples presented thus far are recent, crimes and aggression against the other, otherwise known as hate crimes, have been a constant experience of those who are different for generations. From the burning of witches in the Middle Ages to the hanging of runaway slaves, those who have dared to stand up to their oppressors, be it overtly or covertly, have regularly been denigrated, abused, or destroyed. Whilst these examples are presented from generations since it is not as if these sorts of actions against the other have disappeared. The reality is that they are now termed as ‘hate crimes.’ Offering a definition of the phenomenon Chakrabarti saw ‘hate crimes as a politically and socially significant term that cuts across disciplines, across communities and borders (Hall et al., 2014, p. 13). One of the more challenging of this crime though is the fact that reporting rates differ so markedly from country to country. The important aspects though are that in taking a more generalised perspective, the experience of hate crimes is generally an accepted term, together with the recognition of the more unconsciously intersectional roots of the term, as suggested in the three examples presented above. Expanding upon his definition, Chakrabarti (2015) goes on to mention that the term hate crime refers to acts where a person is targeted because they hold one of the sets of protected characteristics, for example those listed in the 2010 equalities act. The importance of this definition is obvious, but it is also problematic for a number of reasons. First, as stated in an earlier chapter, we all have experiences of being the other, and more often than not the experience of our otherness is not rooted within the legally protected characteristics. My own experience of being marginalised or denigrated because of my colour is one aspect but dealing with the fear of my presence as a black academic within majority white spaces can often lead to my being criticised, put down, or marginalised. Children offer a better set of examples, whereby their need to exclude one of their peers could often be created out of the other being too skinny, their having red hair, or their being seen as a geek. They do not hate or marginalise or denigrate based upon the political categorisations of difference. Their struggle, or their fear of the other, is based upon a totally alternative, and often indeterminate, set of criteria (Weil & Piaget, 1951). The other problem with this definition is that it marginalises the microaggressions many minorities, many others, experience when they are seen as the other. These could range from the black person on the train who no one wants to sit next to, to the lesbian couple who are refused service in a restaurant because they dared to hold hands. This distaste and hatred of their difference from those around them whilst presented passively is actually a constant factor of life for the other. Because the other swims in this sea of daily hatred though this aspect, this side of being the other, is rarely recognised for what is it, an experience of daily survival.

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Given therefore the expansive experiences of hate, as counsellors and psychotherapists, it is important to recognise its presence and impact in the therapeutic space. To begin to explore the roots of hatred, and one of the most important theorists here is most probably Melanie Klein. Beginning with the process of splitting love and hate, Klein (Mitchell, 1986) saw this process as an essential aspect of childhood psychological development where, for example, the weaning baby would split off its difficult feelings for the objectified mother in order to receive food or comfort. As therapists though our awareness of these splits in a client’s psyche is a cornerstone of the work. As Winnicott (1969) discussed, therapists often use themselves as objects for the unconscious projection of the client’s discarded said aspects, meaning that as therapist we often have to hold negative or positive projections until the client is ready to reintegrate these back into their psyche, thereby moving from a more paranoid-schizoid positioning to the depressive position. Bringing this back into the context of culture and the other, Bhabha recognised that splitting was a key facet of formulating the other, where she notes, the discriminatory effects of the discourse of cultural colonialism, for instance, do not simply or singly refer to a “person,” or to a dialectical power struggle between self and Other, or to a discrimination between mother culture and alien cultures. Produced through the strategy of disavowal, the reference of discrimination is always to a process of splitting as the condition of subjection: a discrimination between the mother culture and its bastards, the self and its doubles. (1985, p. 153) Relating this to the narrative of this book, Bhabha saw this colonial splitting as being reinforced by the discrimination of the subject against the other, suggesting that ideas of hatred, power, and dominion over said other are also markedly employed in order to maintain this distancing from one’s own double. Although presented from a cultural perspective, this binary narrative holds more obvious roots within feminist discourse. De Beauvoir (2010) saw this in some of her seminal writings, recognising the role of woman as the other to privilege, to men. For Benjamin this goes even further, involving the territorialising of the normal aspects of identity whereby ‘splitting human qualities into “masculine” or “feminine,” the gender binary forces dissociation, and the hierarchy undermines trust,’ (2014, p. 95). What both authors recognise here is culturally there has been a patriarchal marginalisation, or splitting, of those aspects deemed to be other, together with how problematic this division is for our clients, as well as for society, with behaviours such as toxic masculinity, and its rejection of anything deemed

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to be feminine and therefore other, being a perfect example of this hatred of difference (Haider, 2016). For the other though, through the lens of psychotherapy their experience is often one of projective identification. To expand upon this idea further, ideas of just what projective identification is stem back to the work of Klein (Mitchell, 1986) with definitions varying within the psychodynamic traditions. What is most generally understood though is that projective identification involves casting out of an aspect of the subject’s psyche that the client does not want to own, followed by pressure exerted by said subject to force the other to feel and act in a manner cognate with the aspect which has been discarded. There are though at least two problems with this process when looking at it through the eyes of the other. Within the therapy room, projective identification also involves an aforementioned third stage; that where through the managing and containment of said projection by the therapist or counsellor, the client eventually retrieves that which has been split off and projected, so the client achieves an aspect of wholeness (Bion, 1985). If the aforesaid process of splitting aspects of our intersectional self which have been cast off and projected outwards on to the wider world around us actually occurs, then this reintegration of who we are, of those aspects we dislike in said others, is rare to say the least. The second problem involves the sheer number of projections we have outwards onto the world. When, as therapists, we discuss ideas of transference, countertransference, projection, projective identification, etc. we do so from the perspective as though these are singular incidents, that as therapists we assist clients in collecting these projections one at a time. The reality is that this process of projection and projective identification is happening frequently, with many projections being cast out at the same time, and like the rays of sun, it is near impossible for a psychotherapist to catch them all, or very many of them. For the other therefore, or for most people in a binary society, being disturbed by the projections of the subject is a regular, daily, hourly, secondly, feature of life. The distortions of one’s own psyche as the other by the projections of the subjects encountered are constant, near unavoidable, occurrences. Returning though to projective identification and its link to hate, what is also not recognised is that for projective identification to function properly, the other has to be objectified, it has to hold the source of said projection. As we have previously seen therefore, what this means is that hate and projective identification are actually important mechanisms in understanding stereotyping, othering, or objectification. Hate is the bridge across which the said aspect the subject has discarded travels. Combining this with the term othering on this occasion, this is therefore the enforced containment by the other, of an aspect of the subject that it does not want to own, cannot own, or will not own.

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As Conran (2008) noted in an article on regression and dependency, the subject needs the other, that without the other the subject is lost. This symbiotic relationship is similar to the narcissist who abuses their friend or partner, then tempts them back, not with an apology for their actions, but with an expression of their own process; what they were going through is used as a lure to draw the other back into the fold, from whence the narcissist will use their hate upon the other once more. Hate crimes against the other are therefore driven as much by an externalised fear of that aspect of otherness held by said other, as they are by the Kleinian need to control said split off aspect of the true self. The drive towards supremacy, when coated in hate, uses anything powerful to shame the other into submission, be it its power or its laws, to its more subtle micro-aggressions and put downs in public. Ultimately, when it comes to hatred, the other lives amongst it. It swims within it, it breathes it, day to day, from birth to death. Yet, the other finds a means to cope with the hate it is ingesting, in its poetry, in its songs, in its arts. It works hard to survive the hate, to ignore the hate we are all imbued with. Adaptations therefore against the hate one so regularly endures are obvious. From the dual consciousness of Du Bois (1903), where the racial other develops an alternative persona to survive in a white world, to the adaptations of women whereby aspects of their true nature are hidden, or shielded, from the destructive gaze of men, to the changing of one’s name because of a fear of being seen as too foreign, there are many means of altering oneself because of the fear of the hate of the subject. Recognising also that one may bear witness to experiences of hatred means whoever we are we form a defensive shield against said hatred of the subject as a means of safety, whereby allowing oneself to be othered could also provide a means of remaining hidden within an environment where one is an outsider, where one is truly the other and might therefore have to experience the hatred of said subject community. Offering an example, Cameron was of Jewish parents who fled to Scotland from Estonia after WWII. As he said about his parents: My father’s family came to this country from Estonia, and they settled in Scotland, changing their name as there was a lot of prejudice against foreigners, They changed their name to something sounding more regional as they also didn’t want to be associated with being English, because then that might lead to questions of where they came from. Whereas if they were Scottish then they didn’t necessarily have to. They were businesspeople in Scotland, and they did it for purely practical reasons then. But again, it was because of prejudice, and people were prejudiced against them. I believe my grandparents did go to synagogue. My father rejected religion totally. He did have another sister, but she died when I was very young. My mother rejected god after the war, I think.

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For Cameron’s family, self-othering as a form of protection involved them essentially adopting a totally and culturally acceptable new identity. The suppression of their previous cultural identity was a part of this, the changing of their name being another aspect. Both of these were driven by the prejudices of times, the fear that were they to maintain their sense of cultural identity they might be destroyed for doing so. Alternatively, when there is hatred of myself as a man of colour in the therapy room, or in my role as a lecturer, then it emerges as a subtle aspect of the negative transference when I am under attack. For example, the time I was working with a student who I was tutoring on an essay she was writing but did not receive the same grade as her peers, and who eventually decided to not only blame and berate me for my failings in not providing the support she required to prove she was as good as them, but to then subsequently discard me as her tutor. Or the client who felt the need to challenge everything I said, telling me I was there to serve her and her only, constantly attempting to draw me into arguments with them about something, anything, in order to prove that they knew more than I might have done about said subject. The countertransference in these spaces is one of fear. I feel fearful for myself, my skin crawls, and I find myself carrying home some of that anger, if I am not careful perhaps manifesting it as some form of shame about myself. This double consciousness is therefore subconsciously created, meaning there is both a conscious attempt to remain safe and an unconscious awareness of the cost of such an adaptation. These means of adaptation can seem simple, but have deeper, more unconscious, impacts upon the psyche, and can be  psychologically damaging in the longer term. Yet, whilst we have for now looked at the role of hate in enforcing this doubling of consciousness, it is also important to recognise that shame plays a role in its maintenance as well.

Shame and the other One of the most important aspects of the essay student’s experience in the previous section was the unconscious shame of her own student identity. As previously discussed, the dominance and supremacy of the subject give the subject power and dominion over the other. So, be they patriarchal structures, gendered, racial, political, or religious, their efficiency in oppressing and binding the other to their will is a cornerstone of their survival. A second cornerstone though is the means by which the other is then made unconsciously complicit in their subjugation. As de la Boetie (2015) suggests that, the class other is often aware of its own complicity, yet struggles to move beyond this co-dependent position of compliance. This questioning of the how and the why is something echoed by many other authors from many varying perspectives. For the purposes of this book, this section

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builds upon the idea of hate being an emotion the other lives within, seeing that shame also has a huge role in this subjugation of otherness. As we have seen, experiencing the hate of the subject, be it within the therapy room or out in wider society, will illicit many emotions within the other; be they fear, sadness or anger. Shame though holds a particular importance as it acts as the glue which binds the other to the subject. Offering an idea of just what shame is Schore suggests that ‘shame is the reaction to an important other’s unexpected refusal to co-create an attachment bond that allows for the dyadic regulation of emotions’ (1998, p. 65). What this means in the context of othering is that the other unconsciously blames itself for its failure to build the type of relationship with the subject within which there would be nothing to fear, or where the subject wouldn’t hate them. The issue with this unconscious belief is that it is based upon the misunderstanding that relationships are co-created spaces, not singular ones, this belief often reinforced by the grandiosity of the subject, and their own refusal to take any responsibility for this mutual co-creation. Within the field of politics, a perfect example emerges out of the idea that the cultural other must assimilate itself into the world of their new adopted home. For example, in an article from the BBC (2014) on aspects of the Scarman Report which was compiled in 1981 after the Brixton Riots, there was widespread surprise within the then Conservative Government that the cultural others from the former colonies of the United Kingdom had not been assimilated as much as the government had hoped. These were the first-generation children born though of migrants who had come to the United Kingdom at the end of colonialism on top of a wave of hope and desire for a better life in the motherland. They were migrants who had learnt to speak the Queen’s English, who had been raised on a projected diet of Sunday lunches, cricket, and who aspired to buy clothes on Saville Row in London. This was also the generation who looked down upon many of those left behind in the former colonies, who rejected speaking patois, or Rastafarianism (before it became popularised by Bob Marley). As happens with otherness in these instances, the shame of one’s own true authenticity then leads the other to reject those aspects which are not of the subject and have been deemed by said subject to be unsavoury, unworthy, or shameful. These could be aspects of one’s gender, sexuality, race, or culture. It could also be how we speak (taking on a more English sounding voice as opposed to using colloquialisms), to how we walk (head upright and tall, not slouching with a bit of swagger). This rejection of personal or group authenticity is therefore emergent out of a sense of shame enforced upon us by the messages passed on to us by the subject. Here shame is therefore used as a tool of politically driven assimilation. For the other to comply it must be made to see its authentic cultural, spiritual, gendered, or other identities as shameful, its name, its sexuality, its behavioural norms, even its language.

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Shame also resides within cultural groups normally annotated as the other. Gay shame, which could be seen as an internalised sense of shame at not being able to achieve what Munt terms the position of the ‘proud iconic gay’ of media cultures in the global North results in a traumatic double bind of being ashamed (2019, p. 223). Her statement here explores the shame which already exists within LGBTQ communities and is exacerbated by the internalised narcissistic need to set an ideal to which one can never aspire towards meeting. Shepherd explored shame from an alternative angle, amongst those of the African diaspora living in the Caribbean and their uncomfortable connection to their past history as slaves where she states ‘pride about the past had still not substituted for that feeling of shame among segments of African diasporic communities, some of whom continue to try to bleach away the evidence of that DNA connection; that hereditary blueprint’ (2016, p. 6). This sense of shame about the history of slavery is not uncommon. The problem here is it blocks out the potential felt experiences derived from the knowledge of that time, as well as the period pre-slavery. So here, shame acts as a barrier against the authentic history of said other. Offering another example, Hunter (2010) saw white shame though as a humanising aspect which allowed the other to move from a position out of relationship with in this case the white subject to one where there is a sense of humility and mutuality. How deep this sense of shame goes should therefore not be underestimated. Even within the world of psychotherapy, it holds importance. For example, Wurmser (2015) recognised shame as a total body experience. It impacts upon the whole of one’s sense of self and can lead to deeper physical and psychological impacts as the other attempts to survive its suppression within the shadow. Pines (1995) explored shame from a number of perspectives, culturally, socially, and developmentally. In his paper, he saw shame as being a barrier to personal privacy. My idea here is that shame acts as a societal boundary against acceptance or containment within the controlled world of the intersectional subject. What this means, for example, is the shame of racial or cultural otherness is a barrier against being included within the world of whiteness or that of eurocentrism. The only means of shedding said cloak of shame is by assimilating said singular identity as prescribed by the subject. Another angle for understanding shame is its link to narcissism. Originally established by Freud (2014) he saw the patient’s negative experience of shame as prompting the need for some psychological defences, recognising that another means for one’s ego to protect itself was by forcing some of that shame into the superego. The problem with this for the other is this superego is then projected outwards onto the subject, meaning this shamebased reinforcement that one is not good enough as a woman, because of a disability, forms a pattern tying us even further into the relationship with said subject.

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Adler recognised that a grandiose defence was most employed to defend the ego against the waves of shame endured when clients were faced with their own sense of inferiority (Way, 1956). Shame in these circumstances is obviously often employed when we compare ourselves to another or even to a perceived perception of how we should be. We are both envious of what the person sitting opposite us is wearing on the train, and often simultaneously ashamed that we do not look as good as them or are able to afford that same garment. Alternatively, we may feel we should be further along the imaginary road to success we have created for ourselves in our mind’s eye, and therefore in the comparison against said ideal feel ashamed that we do not measure up. Bradshaw (1988) though suggested that another of the ways toxic shame manifests is from perfectionism. Considering his ideas in relation to being the other, perfect examples of this include the idea that the other needs to work twice as hard in order to achieve the same level of success as the subject. Or that to fit in, to be accepted by the subject, one has to lose that which makes one other. The link between shame and narcissism is constructed early in life and is though often driven by an external pressure to conform. As we have discussed, this need is reinforced by the hatred and the anger of the subject, so when it is internalised by said client or group, the other levels of self-hatred and self-shame then endure. The defences employed by the subject when faced with the other are also employed to use shame as a means of avoiding relationship with one’s own sense of otherness. Nick’s case is a perfect example. Born in the North West of England, his parents were from Valencia, and he was raised speaking Spanish for the first four years of his life. When he went to school, he therefore found it difficult to communicate with others, feeling like an outsider for the first part of his life. Nick was also diagnosed with a physical disability at an early age, which also added to his sense of difference, something that he constantly attempted to hide, especially when engaging in adult relationships. Currently living in London, Nick worked in the City of London, an environment he felt was particularly masculine and able-bodied, an environment which in comparison left with the impression that there was something wrong with him. Nick discussed this in our meetings, saying: the physical bit is going to hospital or, and people going what’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you? And I guess something being wrong with me. The feeling of there is something wrong. A lot of times I just forget about it, and what’s interesting is it doesn’t get mentioned in most of my interactions with people. Interestingly in the relationship his disability was also not mentioned, partly because Nick decided long ago that he didn’t want to talk about something that made him different from others. He states:

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I can have these types of conversations but it doesn’t get talked about, and um even with girlfriends, and if I was dating someone and they bring it up, most times it doesn’t get brought up, and if it does I just shove it down, because it just feels too big, or it’s like it’s not part of me. It’s like I feel like I don’t want it to be part of me. I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want it. I overcompensate, I guess I learnt to try and overcompensate. I do it in a very like, and very few people that ever, like I was in a relationship for ten years and we could have had probably number of conversations we had about kids was on one hand, and the number of conversations about how I relate to my body was on one hand. And I look at that and I go that is very controlling, that somehow it didn’t get raised. Or maybe it’s not that big a deal you see. For Nick and his partner, his disability is something he feels he needs to control; it is an aspect of his identity neither of them is comfortable with. This is where the hatred, as discussed earlier, plays its part, as hiding himself means it, means he, is unacceptable. His disability is not part of him, and he doesn’t want it as it raises too many questions about his identity. Nick has to endure the oppression of other’s constant questions about him as if there is wrongness about him. This, as Abberley (1987), would suggest, is where the oppression of disability becomes apparent. Yet it also becomes internalised along with the repressed shame he experiences, a shame which resonates throughout all of Nick’s words, and it could be argued, is also acted out by his partner in her compliance with the shame around his disability. To escape this, we then see the privileging of his being able-bodied and a denial of his difference. As he says, he doesn’t want to be different, he overcompensates for it. In not admitting to its impact on his life Nick talked of it thusly: Someone has thrown me a difficulty, and I’m really tenacious. And I do long distance running and I ended up running for my county and for my school. Actually, in my late 20s I started having pain and I had to at some point say I have to stop running regularly it’s bad for you. But I didn’t, I would just go through the pain. I think I do that in life. If something doesn’t feel good, I just keep going. I never want to stop working. I don’t know when it’s enough. The drive to be seen as the same as those without his condition, to overcompensate, and to hide his difference here therefore pushes him beyond his own personal set of physical limits, leaving him in a space of not knowing where his boundaries are. In their paper on disability hate crime, Richardson et al speak of one response being the internalisation of said experience as a disabled person, whereas a means of understanding the hatred of the subject one means of making sense of this is by blaming oneself (Richardson et al., 2016).

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In this context, what this exploration of the link between othering and shame shows through Nick’s experience is how easy it is to be ashamed of one’s own otherness, and simultaneously how much we subconsciously blame our self for being different, and attempt to hide this shameful aspect of oneself out of fear we might be marginalised accordingly. In his example, Nick projects this superego onto his partner self-stereotyping himself in order to reduce his identity into something she could manage, even though she does not consciously look for him to do such a thing to himself. This self-shame though could also be seen as being driven by the self-hatred discussed in the previous section. Here though, whereby he is unable to change his name, Nick works hard to overcome his sense of difference by overcompensating for this supposed deficiency in his bodily self. His fear of being marginalised, of being othered is what drives this. Fear of being an outsider, of being stereotyped, or of being invisible. All of these here converge around the intersectional experiences of difference, I will argue here, with othering being a core condition or experience of the other, as discussed further in the next section.

Othering and narcissism So, in any exploration of the roles of hatred and shame in formulating the identity of the other, it is important to consider the mechanism that makes the other ashamed of its own difference. From the experience I had at a workshop I attended in 2008, where I was told I looked less like a psychotherapist and more like a nightclub bouncer, the experience of being othered can often be quite traumatic (Turner, 2009). The hatred of the facilitator towards me, her need to stereotype and other myself, picking upon my racial identity and my physicality, leaving me feeling ashamed in a room full of participants. Yet, whilst this was a difficult experience for myself, how often do we walk into a coffeehouse and ask the name of the barista who is serving us? How often do we ask how their day is going? Or how their family is? Rarely, because we see them in a certain fashion befitting to the role they are playing. We reduce them into what we think the barista should be, and how we believe they should act, which is to serve us our coffee so we can be upon our way. Othering is therefore also an aspect of ourselves that we use in the appropriate circumstances. To therefore offer a couple of definitions of othering, from a sociological perspective, othering occurs when rather than always remembering that every person is a complex bundle of emotions, ideas, motivations, reflexes, priorities, and any other subtle aspects, we make it easier to dismiss them as being in some way less human, less worthy of respect and dignity than we are. In fact, as Hall (1997) adds in a paper on the subject, we use the other as a means of identifying ourselves, be they other persons, other communities,

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or the earth itself. This differs to a more psychodynamic perspective, where othering is a process that may be applied to oneself, whereby one experiences oneself as a stranger, indeed Lacanian theory views this ‘self-othering’ as a process whereby the symbolic order is established – the unconscious is the stranger within ourselves (Homer, 2007). From a transgenerational perspective, this self-othering thereby becomes potentially very damaging to one’s psychological identity. Yet, this is not something new, it is a technique which was used during the times of chattel slavery, for example, where those slaves from Africa were forced to give up everything from their names to their cultural and spiritual practices (Akbar, 1984). Modern political ideas of integration are often presented in such a fashion that there is a sense that the cultural other, in order to fit in with the world of their coloniser, has to give up that which makes it different, and that doing so is desirable and provides a route out of oppression and radicalisation (Emejulu & Bassel, 2018). To expand upon this a little further, a Lacanian approach to the other involves varying stages of mirroring, and recognises that we form a sense of self by being witnessed in the gaze of the other, in this case, the mother (Lacan, 2003). The problem with these and other perspectives is they leave the other invisible, making othering an event where the other sacrifices its identity to be a mirror for the ego formation of the subject. For example, the baby does not recognise that the mother has a life, or an identity, of her own. To the baby, the mother is there to serve it. This is where the first ideas of narcissism occur from, yet hopefully, this sense of omnipotence is something the child grows out of as it gets older, comes into maturity, and develops relationships with the varying others it encounters in life. Buber’s work though provides an alternative around the nature of the I itself. Although he does not say so himself explicitly, there is a large difference between the I of the I-Thou relationship and the I of the I-It objectification. For example, to fix another in place for one’s own need means I have to access a different part of myself than I would do were I seeking out a relationship with another. This objectification speaks of the I holding a selfishness within itself, a self-serving aspect that Freud (Morrison, 1986) discusses when considering narcissism, or from the developmental perspective of early life attachment theories (Mitchell, 1986). The narcissism of the I position is also important in the building of types of othering, where the I avoids an I-Thou interaction or the potentiality of relationship. Or, from a transpersonal angle, the I instead takes on the position of the divine placing the other as its servant, repositioning the other accordingly (Walach, 2008). This hiding being driven by an anxiety provoked within the I by the prospect of the It becoming potentially another Thou in its presence. My idea here links with those of Whiteness theorists, whose ideas in the context of this research centred on the anxious motivation that led to the conquering and stereotyping of different sexes, groups, or cultures (Huddart, 2006; Proctor, 2004).

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Buber also understood that an individual can inhabit many types of I, for example, I could choose to be seen as a therapist, black, a man, or anything else that I choose to be. From a more phenomenological perspective and more philosophical and intersectional angles, these aspects then represent the totality of who I am as a human being when placed together. But from a stereotypical perspective if someone relates to me as just a black man then they are denying all the other aspects of who I happen to be, that I am middle-aged, that I am a therapist etc., coupled with an acting towards that sliver-It as they think it should be. It is this narrowing of the other individual that is important here, as we can often forget, or choose to ignore, the fullness of the person opposite us in our interactions with the other. This shows how easy it is to vary our relationship to the Thou to that of a stereotyped It be it enforced by the subject or internalised sotherefore dictated unconsciously from within. There are means though to manage this internalisation of othering, and most of them involve some type of narcissism or narcissistic defence. This means of escaping the more painful experiences of being the other emerges from Sasha’s story. Born in Wales, her family moved to England when she was a child meaning she was an outsider from an early age, with things like her accent setting her apart. Sasha’s experience, for this part of the interview, involved her comparing her experiences as a divorced mother of one, to the other mothers in middle-class area where she lived. As she explained: When I had my daughter as well and ok, she is 12 years old now. I had her, and I didn’t think I’d be a very good mother and I struggled with being a mother, and I was the only mum out of the mums who had babies at the same time still breast feeding, all the others at 10 weeks their babies were sleeping through the night and doing what they should be and I was in chaos. I was the only one breast feeding and not giving solid food at 3 months. And I guess I could list all my differences. And even now when I’m out with friends and they’re all like mothers and domestic goddesses and they bake and they have beautiful houses, and I’m not house proud, I have a house, but it is lived in. Sasha’s shame resonates throughout this section. For example, she compares herself unfavourably as a mother to other mothers around her, seeing herself as struggling for not breastfeeding her child or living in chaos in comparison. Not being able to make her child sleep through the night or get her child to do what she felt it should be doing means she was in chaos, a chaos that also sets her apart from the others. Sasha also saw herself not only as other but also as bad in this passage presented here, as if being able to have her child sleep on cue or on solid foods at an early age were a badge of honour she had failed to obtain. It was not explored where these

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ideals of how she should be as a mother emerged from, or were real, but at the very least they spoke of societal norms that most mothers would have encountered at some time. This tension is clearly recognised within Benjamin’s work where she states ‘the demand to respect the different other (and its negative form, the objection to being silenced), has no basis other than a problematic form of guilt, a projection of one’s own injured narcissism on to the other. Likewise, the demand to be recognised in one’s difference, raised from the position of other, would have no basis other than narcissism’ (1998, p. 98). I would challenge the suggestion though that these positions are entrenched. For some, the idea of being other in relation to the subject brings up nothing more than abject horror, forcing the narcissistic other to find a means of being a subject in its own way. Here though, for Sasha there is an undercurrent of a need to be the same as the other mothers, and to feel recognised for her difference, which relates to the narcissistic other that Benjamin speaks of. Understanding the narcissistic other in this section very much involved understanding the role of narcissism for my participants, and how narcissism plays a role in the formulation of the narcissistic other. Psychotherapeutically, Jung (1990) saw the narcissistic retreat into fantasy as a barrier to actual individuation, the idea here adds to his seeing narcissism as a defence against the other, and therefore the shadow projected upon it. My argument though is that the other is also able to use this defence but by creating others of its own. This suggests more than one type of narcissism, and brings to the surface Zondag’s (2004) ideas, defining two different types of narcissism. First, centrifugal narcissism involving the narcissistic I being identified by the relationship to the other. The other here lifts the narcissistic I onto a pedestal, and the narcissistic I works hard to maintain its presence thereby not acknowledging the presence of the other as an I in its own right. The second version is the centripetal narcissism, where the other is ruled by the subject, is easily hurt and open to criticism, where the narcissistic I display’s a type of false humility that garners it sympathy. Where there is a distinct difference in how the narcissistic wound presents for the other is in its more defensive nature, or as a protection against the other I discuss in the introduction to this section. Using these ideas about narcissism through the lens of Sasha’s story, she then offered an example of just how she coped with these experiences where she states: I think there’s an illusion that I have a sense of specialness, of being untouchable. If I say that out loud, it is safety in being different but specialness, if I think about specialness, it is a defence I think it is linked to grandiosity, it is one of my defences, being intellectually superior, in

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groups particularly. An example of this is I’ve started a placement and the supervision group is um, it is people of all different, I was going to say faith, modalities, so there is an psychodynamic person and a TA person and Person Centred supervisor. The first time I obviously felt a bit insecure in the group the grandiosity kicks in big time, and I’m like showing off the things I know, all the unconscious stuff, and haven’t you ever done visualisations or that kind of thing, and blah. And I took it to therapy thinking I’m so fucking grandiose as I was feeling so threatened. Sasha acknowledges that positioning herself as special is a defence against feeling less than those that she has found herself, or placed herself, in comparison with. Offering a working example, she sees the grandiosity she displays in relation to her peers as a defence against the feeling of threat that also emerges out of this unfavourable comparison with others. The other here therefore feels powerless in relation to the majority, its narcissistic grandiose defence a means of snatching power back from the perceived majority. Underscoring Adler’s ideas around the superiority complex, in making herself powerful here Sasha therefore does not have to feel as worthless as she did with the mothers from the previous quote. The narcissistic other ultimately assumes the narcissistic defence as a protection against feeling the full emotional impact of being seen as less than, or from a transpersonal perspective it makes itself everything in order to avoid being seen as other by the perceived majority. As the interview progressed Sasha did explore the benefits for her in having her own group where she felt she belonged. When asked about when she felt like she did not need the defence, she stated: My friends come along to see me, my real friends. Also, they’re scattered around London so there’s not that community, but I feel I belong. I don’t feel different then, I feel connected, but the grandiosity and shame is gone. I just feel connected with friends. Within Sasha’s statement she importantly ties together the shame of being the other, of being powerless, together with the defensiveness of her grandiosity. Her need to be a part of the majority also brings into question her authenticity, as with her friends there is no desire to be anything more than she is, there is no comparison, and the feelings of shame and guilt that emerge from being less than then disappear. To explore these feelings further, shame and grandiosity are often presented as opposing sides of narcissism, for example in Spivak’s (1993) paper on narcissism where she clearly presents narcissism as a block towards working with or acknowledgment of the other. Here though, it is the personal experience of being the other that is being avoided. So, where this is

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important for Sasha is that her antidote to the position of the narcissistic other comes with her relationship to her friends, who although separate to her by the distances present in a metropolis, allow her to feel connected and a sense of belonging when they are together. Here this narcissistic othering holds significant echoes of points raised from within the post-colonial field of whiteness theory (Seshadri-Crooks, 2000), where this time it is less so the anxiety of the majority that creates the other, but the anxiety of the other that then, in turn, creates more others. Intersectional otherness and othering are like ripples on a lake that can move forever onwards creating more and more others in their wake, a metaphor exemplified by Sasha’s experience as other in comparison with the mothers around her and her subsequent grandiose need to other her peers in her supervisory group to make herself feel superior and powerful. It was her anxiety at being made to be seen as ‘less than’ by her peers, together with the shame this would have entailed, that led to such a reaction and a snatching of power by creating their own other. Here though in the manipulation of our intersectional identities this experience repeats itself meaning that not only will we all experience being the other, but that we all in varying ways will other the other to protect our fragile sense of self. Our discomfort with our otherness, or our hatred of that which makes us different, means that we are in a constant process or projection, and projective identification, with those we keep closest to us as we distance that which is a part of ourselves out of fear and shame, whilst simultaneously unconsciously knowing that this same aspect will need to return home at some point in our development as human beings. This is therefore a constant struggle and reveals the lengths the ego goes to in order to maintain its Lacanian order over the real (2003). Yet, as previously suggested one of the most important is by maintaining a sense of superiority over this sense of otherness. This is where counselling and psychotherapy add something new to our understanding of the process whereby prejudice becomes something far more, something much more insidious. Racism, sexism, and homophobia, for example, when witnessed through this lens of unconscious communication, are therefore the means for the subject to maintain its separation between the persona and the self. These power relationships involve the constant unconsciously aggressive, enforced projective identification of aspects of the self by the other. This is therefore the power structure which sits behind not just the political structures which create conflict, but the microaggressions which we all endure every day. The -isms, and the -phobias all have similar versions of this root, I would argue here, whereby the rage and conflict of the subject ego, individual or collective, captures the other within its domain and uses it to settle said conflict, or to at least calm it temporarily. How this process continues will therefore be explored further in the next section as I explore the link between supremacy and racism.

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Superiority, hatred, and shame in therapy The French philosopher Deleuze (1994) rightly recognised that identity is only emergent out of a recognition of, and an acceptance of, one’s own sense of difference. His position, when interpreted through the lens of psychotherapy, though holds echoes of Jung’s idea that individuation becomes an increasingly solitary path, as the more one becomes true to oneself, the more separate one is from the differing groups we have previously aligned ourselves within (Jung, 1990). Whilst both of these perspectives highlight the necessity of difference, what they struggle to understand is the subject’s egoic need for superiority over that which it is deemed other. This section continues the exploration of this dynamic, looking more directly at how supremacy is formed using the glue of hatred and shame both culturally and within the therapy room. We have already seen that we all live with layers of intersectional privilege. This means that none of the examples presented in this chapter are without privilege. They have either sought to hide within the privilege of whiteness by hiding their original identity as much as possible by changing their name; or like Sasha they developed an internalised narcissistic defence to protect themselves against being the other in amongst their peer group. These privileges were not absent but were hidden behind layers of self-othering. Sasha’s example though points us in the direction of supremacy. Although without any enforced shaming of the other, there are still hints of what happens when the subject struggles with its own sense of badness. The narcissistic defence of privilege therefore becomes a means for the other to defend against the shame of its otherness by making its own otherness better than, yet it does so out of an unconscious awareness that it is hated by the original subject. This struggle though is exacerbated by the rejection of any potential growth held through its interrelationship with the other. Normally, for example, this intersection of privilege and otherness means there is a space between the positions, this is something discussed by Buber (2002) where he saw this space as being necessary for something creative, for something transformative to arise, something which would change both persons, or cultures, holding said positions. Psychologically though, this unconscious in-between space could be considered as a tension of opposites, where the ego and the shadow joust for control of the psyche, challenging the persona to grow beyond its predetermined identity towards one more individuated and real (Jung, 1971). Where racism, homophobia, and sexism exist is in the movement from the relationality with otherness to a dominion over such difference. This is where supremacy becomes an umbrella term for the -isms and the -phobias, and the individual terminologies and experiences themselves. Supremacy, when considered through the lens of say Whiteness, obviously holds aspects

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of hatred of the racialised other, whilst debates about the sexist hatred women when faced with the patriarchy are commonplace. Islamophobia or Anti-Semitism, ableism or homophobia, ageism or colourism, all hold within them the idea of one group being vastly superior to said other, together with barely unconscious efforts to manipulate and maintain said sense of superiority. The metaphorical link we can now make is that hate and shame are the horsemen of superiority. Both emotions serve to drive the other away to a safe distance, whereby they might echo said subject’s privilege, the constant dance between these two emotions for the other being akin to living in a heightened state of alert as the other is constantly alert to which emotion it will be subjected to next. For the subject, the fear and cowering of the other enhances its own sense of superiority and grandiosity. Offering a client example to expand this point, Maxwell was a Black British client of mine for several years who presented with low self-esteem and depression. Maxwell’s father was part of the Windrush Generation who had travelled to Birmingham, United Kingdom, from Jamaica at the end of the British Empire. Initially excited to be in the United Kingdom, he found life here difficult, struggling to maintain a job, and having to deal with the racism of the times. Although things did settle down, his father’s initial enthusiasm at ‘being British’, as Maxwell said he saw himself, was tempered by the regular racism and prejudice that he endured. One day Maxwell presented a story from his childhood, telling me of a particular incident whereby his father was teaching him his numbers and letters. Try as hard as he could though, Maxwell struggled and he always got some of these wrong, a failure which was met with the father hitting the son across the wrist with a leather belt. Each evening this would continue, the father would force the boy to study his numbers or his letters, Maxwell would do what he thought was his best terrified as he was of getting something wrong, and yet this is what would happen, and his father would punish him the same way each time. In our session, to round off his story, Maxwell showed me his wrist, and even some 30 years later I could clearly see the welts of pale skin which had been left discoloured by the constant beatings. The scars of his shame and his hatred for his father. Intersectional privilege, when used with the humility discussed previously, obviously does not involve invoking a sense of hatred or shaming of the other. Like the parent who teaches her child to count from one to ten, the good enough parent already has a layer of learnt privilege the child has yet to gain access to. For the parent to then denigrate, punish or shame the child for not understanding, or in Maxwell’s case for not learning fast enough, then what happens to the child is they learn to hate the parent and also feel ashamed of their own inability to learn that which they have been told is actually very simple. This process of the internalisation of hatred and shame by the other is an extremely useful tool for the subject, as

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it then  becomes an emotion they no longer have to acknowledge within themselves. The enforced projective identification within the other therefore leaves the subject with a sense of its own superiority. So, in this instance the superiority could be said to be that of a father over a son as a means of escaping the experiences of othering the father had endured over a generation. This, plus the threat of being usurped by said son, was partly the driver in his punishing the child for any perceived indiscretion. Yet, whilst this example is presented from an individual perspective, this could also occur culturally as well. Hate crimes, as we have already explored, are driven by the split off hatred of the subject, as well as the enforced shaming of same said group. What is also apparent here is the grandiose defence employed by the subject group in order to maintain its superiority. Whilst an intersectional identity is far more complex than that which is presented in psychotherapy trainings, often when working with our own sense of difference in the therapy room, that which has become hated within our self is projected outwards, and we hang on to other aspects of our identity which help us to survive this self-damaging experience. In the therapy room, when I myself am working with clients who have experienced this sense of othering, then often what enters the room unconsciously is a sense of either shame that I myself, the therapist, am not measuring up to them in some fashion, or I endure their hatred because of the narcissistic defence they had built around them in order to survive. Returning to the client Maxwell, his microaggressions in the therapy often meant I would feel ashamed of myself as a practitioner. Regular supervision revealed that I was often under attack from the client, his comments often feeling like a sword piercing me through my heart in my felt countertransference. The hatred was also there in his interactions with me as his other. To save himself from relating to me, the client would act out his hatred towards me; not paying on time, arriving late for sessions, his previously mentioned comments. Maxwell recognised that within himself his anger at being an outsider was then redirected at me, the black therapist he had chosen to work with. This, in turn, allowed him to feel as if he had power over myself, as if he were able to marginalise myself in the room, often leaving me feeling silenced as if I no longer had the right to an opinion. He had learnt to disassociate himself from his shame at being the other by making those around him feel it instead. Whilst in my countertransference the temptation would be to allow myself to be dominated, to be silenced by the subject’s hatred of his own split off projections; if I no longer spoke up, or if I no longer had an opinion, then I did not exist. And yet I did exist, so the eternal battle continued. From session to session, Maxwell would attack myself over and over, again and again, resisting the movement from echoising the other via a process intersectional splitting and projective identification, to a that more depressive position

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of potential wholeness and relationality with otherness. And every session I had to survive the hatred projected towards myself, and the underlying shame of being less than or an outsider. These acts of cultural containments, these recognitions of the varying splits within Maxwell, and his fear of himself, were hugely important aspects of our work together. For him, as he was in therapy, my job was to be with this split, to survive the destructive forces of hate unleashed against me, whilst simultaneously surviving the waves of shame which threatened to overwhelm me. It is obvious therefore how delicate and difficult this work can be. With clients for whom supremacy has become a defence the emotions are unprocessed and raw, so a therapist surviving their particular brand of hate challenges said clients to be more than the projected collective ideal enforced upon them. In a way, this work returns them to their own authenticity, gives them back ownership of their identity, and meets Deleuze’s suggestions. Yet there is another aspect to this which is no less important. As someone who not only writes about being the other, I am also very much the other. Experiences of hatred and shame have played as much of a role in my life as they have in the lives of the readers of this book. A good part of my therapy has therefore been based around how I work with my own sense of internalised shame about my blackness, or about my black masculinity. Another important aspect was emergent from how much hatred has played a role in my own life. I remember on one occasion in my therapy many years ago, saying to my therapist that I often felt I could be more myself when I was walking around the streets of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, than I did when I walked the streets of West London, where I was born and raised. My therapist back then asked me why that might have been, and back then I did not have an answer for her. I now know that feeling a sense of safety, that the European otherness of the black aspect of my intersectional identity was an acceptable aspect of my identity whilst I travelled through East Africa. I had no need to suppress it, to don a hoodie in a vain attempt to hide it. It wasn’t an aspect of my identity which was hated and feared in the United Kingdom. I therefore had no reason to be ashamed of this aspect of my cultural self and I could be myself without fear of retribution. It is one of the reasons I always found returning to London post holidays so difficult, as I often felt that my journey through the customs gates at Heathrow airport not only involved the checking of my Britishness in my passport but also returned to me the cultural straightjacket of my echoism. At the same time, I also had to suppress my own otherness. Engaging with supremacy is therefore challenging, both overtly, but more importantly subtly. It is a day to day struggle to avoid the slings and arrows of hatred aimed by those who believe themselves to be better, stronger,

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more deserving. We cope by ignoring or suppressing the deep welts of racism, sexism, homophobia or gay fear, ageism, ableism against us. We try to become desensitised from their impact, or we internalise it in our bodies, or take it out on our families. We cope with the hatred and shame of living as less than in a world build upon supremacy by literally destroying ourselves internally.

Summary Maya Angelou (1996) discussed how often in private we are able to be ourselves; we can be gregarious, we can freely express aspects of our race, gender, or sexuality. We feel safe to be who we are truly. Once we leave our homes, or the safety of whichever private space we find ourselves within, and we venture out into a world which is judgemental, harsh, and threatening, we find ourselves having to hide aspects of who we are; we wear less revealing clothes, we hide under our hoods, we stop holding hands with our same sex partners. We find ways to manage the fear and shame of being the other, and of being the other out in a world which is often quite literally out to destroy us. One of the most important aspects of working with this aspect of otherness is the recognition of just how the other develops a narcissistic defence to protect against feelings of shame and fear that can be raised when one is on the outside. This narcissistic defence helps the other to manage its exit out into the world. It is the bravado of the hooded youth walking through the streets of Central London, or the change in speech, walk, demeanour of those who might also be seen as other. Out of a fear of their own outsiderness, the other manages their difference, suppressing it out of fear and shame of that which sets them apart from the crowd. Self-othering helps us to create our social persona. As Jung (1968) recognised, the persona helps us in our actions with the outer world. The idea that we are always ourselves, all the time in every circumstance we encounter, is a myth, or more importantly an active facet of psychological supremacy. We therefore need this aspect of the persona to assist us in how we engage with the external. For the other though, this interaction is fraught with another difficulty. The construction of the persona, an aspect of the movement from the Id to the Ego, is long considered to be driven by its interaction with varying forms of Superego. The ideas presented here though give rise to the idea that a secondary conscious, or the ‘Other Persona’, is therefore created within the other, and that if we are all other in some means that we all have an adaptability to a secondary ‘Other Persona’ in order to compensate for the experiences of superiority which we all endure. Given the perceived harshness of the external world,

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the other has an added layer to their persona, which then moderates our behaviours. Within this additional construction of the ego, the other loses, or suppresses, these other unacceptable aspects of its intersectional identities. This additional loss then leaves it open to the objectification, stereotyping, and or othering by the subject, so whilst simultaneously this enforced reduction in the presence and connection to oneself might save it from persecution and annihilation, there is also the deeper additional pain of psychological detachment. So, whilst the other might think it is free of the influence of the subject, this internalised hate and shame, this internalised superiority, will still be present unless challenged in some fashion. Much like my own example, when returning from holiday, there is no overt conscious message that I have to slide my racialised straight jacket on at Heathrow Airport. It is an unconscious, invisible, indicator of how hate and shame have impacted upon my own sense of otherness, how they have been imbibed, and taken root. Yet, whilst this chapter has explored in some depth where otherness is linked to shame and fear, what this book has yet to do is to consider the deeper experience of othering. Just what do we do to ourselves when we are forced to suppress our otherness, or when it is enforced upon us by society. What do we actually kill off within ourselves, and how can we explore this as counsellors and psychotherapists?

References Abberley, P. (1987). The concept of oppression and the development of a social theory of disability. Disability, Handicap and Society, 2(1), 5–19. Akbar, N. (1984). Breaking the chains of psychological slavery. New Mind. Beauvoir, S. de. (2010). The second sex. Vintage Books. Benjamin, J. (1998). Shadow of the other. Routledge. Bhabha, H. K. (1985). Signs taken for wonders: Questions of ambivalence and authority under a tree outside Delhi. Critical Inquiry, 12(1), 144–165. Bion, W. (1985). Container and contained. Group Relations Reader, 2, 127–133. Bradshaw, J. (1988). Healing the shame that binds you. Health Communications Inc. Buber, M. (2002). Between man and man. Routledge. Chakrabarti, N. (2015). Hate crime: Impact, causes and responses. Sage Publications. Clare, A. (1996). In the psychiatrist’s chair - Maya Angelou. BBC Iplayer Radio. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0420nnw Conran, M. B. (2008). The patient in hospital. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 22(1), 7–19. doi: 10.1080/02668730801962813 de la Boetie, E. (2015). The politics of obedience: The discourse of voluntary servitude. Mises Institute. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. Bloomsbury Publishing plc. Du Bois, W. E. (1903). The souls of black folk. Amazon Classics.

Hatred, shame, and the unconscious other  69 Emejulu, A., & Bassel, L. (2018). Austerity and the politics of becoming. Journal of Common Market Studies Annual Review, 56, 109–119. Freud, S. (2014). On narcissism. Penguin Limited. Haider, S. (2016). The shooting in orlando, terrorism or toxic masculinity (or both?). Men and Masculinities, 19(5), 555–565. doi: 10.1177/1097184X16664952 Hall, N., Abbee, C., Giannasi, P., & Grieve, J. G. D. (Eds.). (2014). The routledge international handbook on hate crime. Routledge. Hall, S. (1997). Who needs identity. The British Journal of Sociology, 48(1), 208. doi: 10.2307/591920 Homer, S. (2007). Jacques Lacan: Routledge critical thinkers (Kindle Edition). Routledge. Hopkins, N., & Hall, S. (2000, June). David Copeland: A quiet introvert, obsessed with Hitler and bombs. Guardian Onlinen, 1. https://www.theguardian.com/ uk/2000/jun/30/uksecurity.sarahhall Huddart, D. (2006). Homi K. Bhabka: Routledge critical thinkers. Routledge. Hunter, S. (2010). What a white shame: Race, gender, and white shame in the relational economy of primary health care organizations in england what a white shame : Race, gender, and white shame in the relational economy of primary health care organizations in England. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, 17(4), 450–476. Jean, E., & Samuels, E. (2003). My body, my closet: invisible disability and the limits of coming-out discourse. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 9(1), 233–255. Jung, C. G. (1968). Analytical psychology: Its theory and practice. Vintage Books. Jung, C. G. (1971). Psychological types. Routledge. Jung, C. G. (1990). The undiscovered self. Princeton University Press. Lacan, J. (2003). The cambridge companion to Lacan (J.-M. Rabate (Ed.)). Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CCOL0521807441 Mitchell, J. (1986). The selected Melanie Klein. Penguin Limited. Morris, T., & Morris, M. (Eds.). (2005). Superheroes and philosophy: Truth justice and the socratic way. Carus Publishing Company. Morrison, A. P. (Ed.). (1986). Essential papers on narcissism. New York University Press. Munt, S. R. (2019). Gay shame in a geopolitical context. Cultural Studies, 33(2), 223–248. doi: 10.1080/09502386.2018.1430840 Pines, M. (1995). The universality of shame. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 11(3), 347–356. Proctor, J. (2004). Stuart Hall: Routledge critical thinkers. Routledge. Richardson, L., Beadle-Brown, J., Bradshaw, J., Guest, C., Malovic, A., & Himmerich, J. (2016). “I felt that I deserved it”-experiences and implications of disability hate crime. Tizard Learning Disability Review, 21(2), 80–88. doi: 10.1108/TLDR03-2015-0010 Schore, A. N. (1998). Early shame experiences and infant brain development. In P. Gilbert & B. Andrews (Eds.), Series in affective science. Shame: Interpersonal beaviour, psychopathology, and culture (pp. 57–77), Oxford University Press. Seshadri-Crooks. (2000). Desiring whiteness: A Lacanian analysis of race. Routledge.

70  Hatred, shame, and the unconscious other Shepherd, V. A. (2016). Slavery, shame and pride: Debates over the marking of the bicentennial of the abolition of the British Trans-Atlantic Trade in Africans in 2007. Caribbean Quarterly, 56(1–2), 1–21. doi: 10.1080/00086495.2010.11672360 Spivak, G. (1993). Echo. New Literary History, 24(1), 17–43. Stults, C. B., Kupprat, S. A., Krause, K. D., Kapadia, F., & Halkitis, P. N. (2017). Perceptions of safety among LGBTQ people following the 2016 pulse nightclub shooting. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, 4(3), 251–256. Turner, D. (2009). Strange relationship. Therapy Today, December, 26–28. Unknown. (2014). Margaret Thatcher’s criticism of Brixton riot response revealed. BBC Website. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30600064 Walach, H. (2008). Narciassism – The shadow of transpersonal psychology. Transpersonal Psychological Review, 12(2), 47–59. Way, L. (1956). Alfred Adler: An introduction to his psychology. Penguin Books Limited. Weil, A. M., & Piaget, J. (1951). The development in children of the idea of the homeland and of relations to other countries. International Social Sciences Journal, 3, 561–578. Winnicott, D. W. (1969). The use of an object. International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 50, 711–716. Wurmser, L. (2015). Primary shame, mortal wound and tragic circularity: Some new reflections on shame and shame conflicts. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 96, 1615–1634. doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12470 Zondag, H. J. (2004). Just like other people: Narcissism among pastors. Pastoral Psychology, 52(5), 423–437.

Chapter 4

Death of the other

The Holocaust during the Second World War led to the desperately sad annihilation of six million European Jews, or around two-thirds of Europe’s then Jewish population. In the Global North we have therefore seen the death of the other played out on such a beforehand un-thought of scale that one would think the world would have learnt of its folly when repressing this drive towards the death and destruction of the other. This level of death and destruction is not just limited to Europe though. During the times of Colonialism, in Congo, the Belgians murdered approximately ten million Congolese nationals as part of their campaign to pacify the natives, whilst extracting from the country its natural resources. It is impossible to list the sheer number of atrocities against the other that have been enacted in the name of one supposedly dominant group over the oppressed, but the point here is to assist the reader in recognising that the death of the other is an important factor in maintaining the sense of superiority of the subject. This is echoed currently I will argue here where across large portions of the planet Earth, the return towards isolationist politics, or the politics of nationalism, is driven by a fear and a hatred of the other. Newish laws which were instituted in order to protect those of difference from such annihilation are being repealed, walls are being designed and built to keep the other out, and the other is being shipped out from countries they have called home for generations on the backs of often flimsy legal frameworks. From the United States to the United Kingdom, to Brazil, countries are shifting their politics towards the right, polarising opinions, and creating division whilst denigrating and marginalising the other. This does not mean though that death meted out upon the other is always overt. Offering examples where it is covert, but just as insidious is also important. For example, according to the New York Times, ‘African-American, Native American and Alaska Native women die of pregnancy-related causes at a rate about three times higher than those of white women’ (Rabin, 2019, p. 1). Whilst many will point to numerous medical reasons for statistics like this, one important aspect is that this statistic shouts clearly of a hatred of the other in the ignorance of the suffering of so many women of difference.

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The Femicide Census of 2018 presented the shocking statistic stating it is known that 936 women were killed by men in England and Wales. Most women who are killed are killed by a man known to them. 598 (64%) women were killed by men identified as current or former partners. (Brennan et al., 2016, p. 4) In their report, they go on to mention that 173 women were killed in a domestic abuse-related homicide using a knife, calling these murdered women the invisible victims of knife crime. The fact that society does not recognise this form of knife crime against women in the same vein as knife crimes against men shows just how society chooses not to witness the horror that is feminicide and how there is a macabre privileging of the narratives around black male upon black male knife crime, versus any other type. Offering another angle on these statistics, when 32 of the 43 British police forces were asked to respond to a Freedom of Information request from organisation United Response on issues of disability hate crimes the results were staggering. United Response discovered that there were recorded ‘a total of 5,342 disability hate crimes in 2017–18 – a dramatic 33% rise on the 4,005 offences from the previous year.’ They also stated that ‘2,271 hate crimes were recorded as “violence against the person” – more than any other single type of crime and up 17% from the year before. This includes physical assaults’ (Solesbury, 2018, p. 1). Abuses against the person, from assault to the murder of the other, occur daily for the intersectional other, be they women, of colour, disabled, or of a particular sexual orientation. This chapter will therefore consider this aspect of all our psychologies, this adaptation into sameness, towards privilege, or even to the attainment of superiority, and will look at how this aspect enacts itself in the therapy room as well. An important start point when considering the role death plays in the experience of the other, it is therefore important that it is identified from its opposite, which is existential narcissism.

Privilege and death Philosophical ideas around death are as ancient as humanity. To therefore cover them all would be an extensive work in itself, but it is worth even noting that during the times of Plato, his work emphasise the ‘personal afterlife and recommends meditation on death as preparation for this post-mortem experience, and the Epicurean, which casts doubt upon personal afterlife and encourages becoming desensitized to death’ (Buben, 2013, p. 986). Seeing these conflicting perspectives on death over 2,000 years ago, is of interest here, as it shows cultures underlying resistances against being with the issue of death.

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This process has its roots in some of the ancient philosophies of the times of the ancient Greeks, their struggles with the idea of death instead privileging notions of happiness, and the search for the meaning of life (Paczkowski, 2013). This almost obsessive pursuit for perfection thereby relegating death and its exploration to a secondary position. It could be argued that this process continued into the thirteenth century, where the popular theologian, St Thomas Aquinas, explored the ideas of life and death and his understanding of the infinite. He though held an interesting perspective whereby he suggests that we actually survive our deaths, and that our souls move on from our bodies until the time of the resurrection when we come back reborn (Toner, 2010). This exploration of death though, throughout his work, involved the separation of the limitations of the body, from the eternal nature of the soul, his religious take on death underlying a type of religious resistance against the potential endless absoluteness of death. An interesting modern-day exploration of death recognised the perhaps obvious perspective that in the Global North the older we are the less frightened of death we become (Russac et al., 2007). The problem with a statistic like this, and all of these types of studies, is they see death as purely something external to the self; a stage of life that we all have to engage with, as something that comes to us all, and happens only once. Death in these instances is not seen as a constant daily companion, or as a threat to one’s own psychological identities, but there is an underlying prejudice against death, and it is seen as the other experience. Yet this privileging of life over its end sits as a cornerstone in the movement from mortality to the narcissism of eternal life. Politically, this brings us into the realm of another type of intersectional identity, that of age, and the prejudices which motivate us to marginalise those of a certain age group. As MacNicol discusses ‘ageism and age discrimination may be closely intertwined: for example, the negative prejudices of employers (deriving, say, from a fear of their own ageing and decrepitude) may profoundly influence their personnel policies towards their own employees’ (2006, p. 6). This important linking of ageism and a fear of psychological death is essential in understanding just how deeply this prejudice runs, and therefore also how difficult this type of prejudice is to uncover and understand. In the context of this book, the fact there is so much defiance against acknowledging one’s own mortality I will argue here sits central to the philosophical core of Western society, and in the projection of mainly young women in film and other media, or the valorisation of youth over age and experience in the workplace. In his book on the subject Bytheway says ‘ageism generates and reinforces a fear and denigration of the aging process, and stereotyping presumptions regarding competence and the need for protection’ (Bytheway and Johnson 1990 cited in Blytheway, 1995, p. 16). The

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creation of stereotypes here therefore implies the rejection of the aging process in the subject; that if we see on screen, or work with, what we socially determine to be youth and beauty, then what we are actually doing is denying said aging process within ourselves, and therefore our own ongoing march towards death. Culturally, this contrasts with a more traditional vision of aging, or perspectives emergent from other areas of the globe whereby aging is seen as being a route towards wisdom, be it intellectual or spiritual. For example, a more Afrocentric vision of both youth and age privileges neither but sees them as the ends of a spiritual circle which when tied together create a whole (Day Dane Kaohelani Silva Amshatar Ololodi Monroe, 2014). This Western privileging of youth though does not mean pre-pubescent. Here it is essential to recognise that this means the privileging of a self-determined age where one individually and/or collectively felt most potent. This would involve projected beliefs that the world was one’s oyster, or that they had a fuller sense of one’s own omnipotence and control over their environment. Yet although this is a constant across classes, as MacNicol states ‘the biological aging in an individual was profoundly affected by that individual’s position in society and the socio-economic context in which they lived’ (2006, p. 141). The suggestion here is that the wistfulness of said ‘youth,’ or the privileging of a period prior to the present, holds within it the belief that said the present, and in particular our standing within it, has been impacted by an external other. It also therefore ignores any internal changes which one might have undergone as a matter of just living life, or any unconscious scripts which may be present and trying to be known or, most importantly, any personal responsibility we might have had for one’s self-perceived financial, personal, or other types of deterioration of our own personal sense of self. The fact that we need to consider what is it that we are afraid of when we encounter the other, and how does death play a part in this, is therefore an essential part of understanding difference. Governments or other organisations constantly protesting the ‘death of our way of life should we let the black, Trans, or women in’ are constant statements the other has to endure. Through this fear of an ending, this terror of the death of something supposedly held dearly, privilege here therefore equates not only to one’s wealth and societal standing but also to the valuing of a set of societally constructed values, which therefore equates to a greater length of life and a near sense of omnipotence. This longevity does not just mean personal, it could be transgenerational, meaning one has money and status to pass on to one’s offspring, that one is allowed to build a business, a company, attend certain schools of privilege, or that one establishes traditions which exist long after the absence of those who initially established them. Individuals, families, societies, and other groups, all work to avoid death by these means.

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Yet, it is important here to tie privilege and narcissism to death. Excellent examples begin with Becker (cited in Bromberg, 1983) who clearly recognised narcissism as the barrier against the recognition of our own sense of mortality. This contrasts with Kristeva who saw the link between narcissism and death in psychoanalysis, stating, ‘abjection is a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego). It is an alchemy that transforms death drive into a start of life, of new significance’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 15). Her idea here is a well-made one in that death is an aspect of transformation. It is not purely a final state of nothingness. Kernberg, expanding upon this said of a client with narcissistic tendencies that ‘he cannot be touched by frustration, illness, death, or the passage of time. A corollary of this fantasy is the devaluation of other people, the patient’s conviction of his superiority over them, including the therapist’ (cited in Meissner, 1986, p. 423). In recognising the offshoots of narcissism when discussing otherness, we then begin to recognise that the normality of the human condition, the states we all engage within, are pushed to one side in order for the egoic sense of self of the narcissistic subject to believe in its own immortality. Another important aspect of this exploration involves the role of fantasy in maintaining the narcissistic positioning one’s self as superior, or how we marginalise death out of a fear of the destruction of our own narcissistic fantasies about our position in the world. It is a fear which is actually a constant as we are always assailed by the other, be they external or internal, yet because it is a constant we are often so very unaware of its presence until it overwhelms us. So, the fear of this emergent death to one’s fantasy reality means that for many living in a fantasy of superiority is the best means of existence and defence. Ways of understanding fantasy and the role this plays are many and can be complex, but the following quote here explains of fantasy that it is ‘a formal mechanism for the articulation of scenarios that are at once historically specific in their representation and detail and transcendent of historical specificity,’ (Scott et al., 2001, p. 288). This means it is a fantasy that acts as some of the glue to hold the supremacist vision of superiority in place. Yet there are other additional important means of understanding fantasy. For example, Benjamin states when discussing the attachment nature of fantasy ‘when the destructiveness damages neither the parent nor the self, external reality comes into view as a sharp, distinct contrast to the inner fantasy world’ (Benjamin, 1990, p. 41). Here, the child uses the parent as the means to manage the movement from the internal world of fantasy out to the external world, but it resists said change from the perfect, safe fantasy of one’s own creation, to that which might be seen as dangerous or threatening. The ability of the other to withstand the child’s desire or will to destroy said reality is what moves the child from a position of omnipotence and separateness, but to be able to accept the reality of now and of change. Yet, in the context of difference, this ability

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to withstand said challenge is mitigated by the power and positioning of the subject here, meaning as we have previously explored the other is often forced to capitulate, to lose, to redefine and echo itself, or it is literally destroyed. Expanding upon the negative impacts of said fantasy, within the feminist movement, understanding ideas of male fantasy and their impact upon women have a long history. For example, Lorde (1984) recognised the role of fantasy in the unconscious creation of a self-ideal when women promote themselves as the ideals of men. Fantasy here, and in particular when this fantasy is projected by men on to women, is used as a weapon to manipulate women into the position of the echo, to be less than they could be in service to men. The importance of fantasy in the creation of the fantasy ideals of the, in this case, patriarchy should therefore not be understated, as this is another avoidance of the realities of death; the death of said fantasy, the coming into relationship with reality. This promotion of the fantasy out of a fear of death is also apparent in the political movements of the present. Boffey (2018) discusses this move where the fear of the end of an age then leads to the political weaponisation of the fantasy of British Empire 2.0, which played an enormous part in the cultural debacle which is Brexit. Another example is the reaction against the supposed post-racial society, with the election of Barack Obama being a cornerstone of such an assumption of such a supposed era, this seemed to promote a reaction against the realities and the complexities of the world we all reside within, for the projected fantasy of a more simplistic, a more supremacist time where those with power narcissistically reposition themselves in the centre of such an era without end (Bhopal, 2018). The political shift back to the politics of nationalism plays an important role in the maintenance of said fantasy. In the utilisation and promotion of a fantastical, an idealised, vision of the past which is then promoted as an image of the future, the interesting thing politicians have done is to promote the narcissistic fantasies of the populaces they represent. This is something we have seen in the election of Trump in the United States and in the debate over Brexit, whereby the shift from the reality of the world and the fear of said reality and its potential annihilation of the ideals fantastically held within whole cultures be they white men, the patriarchy, the Global North, thereby led to the reinforcement of such fantasies (Boffey, 2018; Wilson, 2017). These political examples therefore hold aspects of the rejection of death for a life of immortality, versus being returned to said mortality by the will of the gods. Death, and knowledge and the exploration of said experience, is therefore a developmental necessity in understanding the experience of the other. For the other, there is an over awareness of death, of said mortality, and this is in part what leads the other to dive into the conflictual space of safety gifted by the shade of the subject.

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Yet, clinically, how does this appear in the counselling room? Liam was a young 20-year-old man who came to see me having suffered from depression and panic attacks for a number of months. He was studying Economics at Oxford University but was struggling with regular binge drinking sessions where he would often end up in fights. During one of these he ended up with a broken hand, and it was then he realised there was a problem. So, having been to see his doctor, who had prescribed him antidepressants, although the depressive moods had subsided somewhat, he still struggled with anxiety and occasional bouts of panic. Over the first few sessions, we explored his background. Born into an upper-middle-class family, he was raised by nannies, and sent to the same private school as his father and grandfather, his family name being well known within the school over several generations. From an early age though his father had marked out his path for him; through school and on to Oxford University, where he was presently studying, to prepare him for a career in the Financial Services most probably in the City of London. Over time he realised that this was what was to a large part was making him unhappy. During our work, we began to recognise that Liam’s familial traditions were having a detrimental impact upon his ability to individuate from his family, and this was what was provoking some of the periods of depression and anxiety. As we discussed his childhood though, one of the things he did say was that as a child he had always wanted to be an author, with English Literature being his favourite subject at Secondary School, yet, whenever he attempted to raise his wish to change his career direction with his father they argued, with his father eventually threatening to disown him or to cut him out of the family completely. In our work, although Liam freely recognised that he had come from privilege, he also began to recognise the debilitating trap which privilege held for him, and how this trap killed off much of his creativity, his will, and his drive for a life different to the one laid out for him by his father. Our work therefore involved empowering Liam to carve out space for his writing. Whilst this was difficult at first, eventually, he began writing short stories, some of which he brought to me and we went through them together. Eventually, he then began sending the stories out to publishers, with a couple being taken up by journals and magazines. Simultaneously, he began to find the courage to challenge his father by putting in place a plan whereby his writing, the quality, and the commendations he received for his work, would speak for itself. Eventually, his father had no other option but to assist Liam in his wish to take a different route, his only stipulation being that his son still goes to university. So, Liam ended up at another Russell Group university studying Literature. It was at this point that our work together finished. Liam’s storytherefore ties together the narratives presented in this chapter that the privilege of tradition is threatened by change and the transgenerational death it potentially represents. Whilst this example is

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emergent from the consulting room, during the early part of this century we have clearly witnessed similar actions upon a mass scale. Whilst all of this makes sense, there are still questions left unanswered. For example, if death is not acknowledged within the egoic sense of self of the narcissist, where does this drive go? Cratsley (2015) in his paper linking the ideas around narcissism of both Kohut and Freud recognised that death for the narcissist led to the activation of a more sadistic death instinct which, when displaced by the id, was then projected outwards by the superego onto an objectified other. This is an important distinction and recognises our previously discussed movement to make the other hold those aspects of our self we do not want, to make them our echo. Another angle, which ties itself to this, emerges out of the ideas of scapegoating. A Jungian concept within psychotherapy, but based on the mythological story of the animal which is tasked with holding all of the ills, the sins, of the group it represents, before being sent out into the wilderness, whilst in some cultures the animal is sacrificed (Perera, 1986). From a more therapeutic perspective though, sometimes a member of a family, or the other group, is cast into the role of the scapegoat. Whilst oftentimes these others are excluded from said group, occasionally this is not possible, meaning that person or collective has to hold the unconscious material cast towards it by those who are more narcissistic. This weight can lead to self-destructive behaviours of all kinds be they forms of self-harm, addictive behaviours, etc. The linking of narcissus and echo fits here as well. As previously discussed in this book, for the supremacist to fully exist, that which is its shadow needs to be split off and projected upon an objectified other. This non-other is the echo of said narcissus, a non-other which does not exist in its own right, but as the mirror for said subject. This is where the death of self resides. Death, and its drives, are part of that which is projected into the other. Death therefore becomes internalised within the non-other, within the echo, and must be managed, suppressed, or lived with, in order for the echo to survive as a subordinate for the subject.

Killing the other Whilst it is important to understand the connection between death and narcissism, and their combined role in maintaining the implied egoic superiority of those of privilege, it is also essential to move to a more considered understanding of the impact of this upon the other. We have already looked at stereotyping, objectification, and othering, and how these work to keep the privileged subjects in place. Here though we look at the deeper impact of these, and other processes upon the other, as there are many ways that an internalised death for the other sits within us.

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First we need to understand that in order to go through our day to day living we all need to repress or to kill off, a part of ourselves which is deemed unworthy by society though suggests that we all go through life in a constant state of inauthenticity. We perform, we put on a mask, we shuck and jive, we pretend, so we are not too loud, too angry, too gay, too female, too old, or appear disabled to such an extent that we ‘frighten’ those in front of us into some form of ableist fragility. In order to survive, we become a fantasy of what we think the world needs us to be in order for us to get through our daily existences without fear of attack, vilification, or retribution. The means of surviving in a world of supremacy often involve self othering or the killing off of that which makes us the other. For example, as part of her therapy a Ghanaian client of mine named Prudence talked of her struggles to get work as a secretary or Personal Assistant, until she realised that if she changed her African surname and used just her initial that prospective employers then gave her an interview. Whilst she hated doing this to herself, she recognised that this was the only means she could manage in order to find her way in a world where her racial difference was often a problem. Stories like this one are not unusual. From the immigrants who arrived in the United Kingdom or the United States before, during, and after the Second World War and changed their names to hide their European, Jewish, or other heritage in the face of the oppressions of the day, to being black and recognising that when we leave the house each morning for work that we are unable to be our fullest self, that we engage in a type of double consciousness in order to survive in a white world. Or from the need to repress aspects of one’s own non-binary identity to survive life in a homophobic world, to the performative aspect that some women engage in to survive the oppressions of the patriarchy, being the other often means that we repress aspects of our intersectional identity in order to survive this difficult experience (Alexandrowicz, 2017; Butler, 1990; Du Bois, 1903). Performance, and the death of that which resides within us as the other, is a regular part of the experience of being the other. Yet there is a cost to this, and it is as much physical as it is psychological. As discussed in their seminal work on self-objectification, Fredrickson, and Harrison (2005), the neurological impact of self-othering is a huge factor and leads to increased psychological complaints within women who have endured such treatment. This is echoed within the LGBTQ community where the issue of internalised homophobia, with the drive to act-straight to fit in with supposed ideals of what it is to be a heterosexual man or a woman, or as Alexandrowicz calls it ‘‘effemiphobia’ to refer to the distaste for and rejection of that which is feminine in males’ has been linked to increased mental health problems’ (Alexandrowicz, 2017, p. 7; Newcomb & Mustanski, 2010).

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During times of slavery, and even to some degree post then in the times of colonialism, ideas of performing in order to gain supposed parity masking itself as safety with whiteness led to the suppression of anything deemed to be seen as too black in order to attain said semblance of superiority, the perfect example of this being the split between the house negro and the field negro and the tensions and animosity often prevalent between them (Akbar, 1984; Fanon, 2005). This sense of their being something wrong with being black being enforced from without the racialised culture, is an aspect of the culture which still resides today in the anti-blackness of shadism, colourism, and skin whitening (Guardian et al., 2011; Veenstra, 2011). Anti-otherness therefore fits in with the aforementioned ideas of self-stereotyping, self-othering, or self-hatred explored in the previous chapters. It is the driving force in becoming the echo for the subject and is driven by death. It is important to notice though that the death of otherness is not just self-created. This is a death which is also prompted by our relationship with the subject, whereas previously discussed, stereotyping, objectification, become othering just some of the means by which the other is forced into a position as the other, to then be used by the subject to hold its own projections. Yet, there are also mechanisms within these which play a huge role in killing off that aspect of otherness which resides within us. It is therefore worth exploring some of these, and especially how microaggressions play a part in the everyday experience of the other, together with how microaggressions are utilised by the subject as a form of subjugation of the other by causing it to destroy aspects of itself. One of the best explanations of just what a microaggression is emerges out of work by Sue who suggests that microaggressions are brief, everyday ex- changes that send denigrating messages to people of colour because they belong to a racial minority group. In the world of business, the term “microinequities” is used to describe the pattern of being overlooked, under respected, and devalued because of one’s race or gender. (Sue et al., 2007, p. 273) The additional recognition of the phrase microinequities should not be overlooked here as this adds an important layer to our understanding of this phenomenon from an intersectional perspective. Microaggressions or microinequities though come in many forms, their impact upon the other varied and often very painful. To say a bit more about microaggressions, Chapman and Bhopal (2018) explore the nature of the black experience on university campuses, seeing racial microaggressions as regular slights and comments which might seem innocuous but actually hold much greater weight. Alternatively, Sue

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explores microaggressions against persons of colour as ‘subtle insults (verbal, non- verbal, and/or visual) directed toward people of colour, often automatically or unconsciously’ (Sue et al., 2007, p. 273). Another perspective on microaggressions emerges out of the LGBTQ community, where the role of microaggressions has played a prominent part in recognising the impacts upon the health, mental and otherwise, of those with the community (Flanders et al., 2016). The importance of understanding microaggressions should not be misunderstood though. Much like the death by 10,000 cuts, these are a form of psychological death. Yet, as per the examples presented above a microaggression is also a barely felt experience. It has a subtlety all of its own and is often different to spot in its aggressiveness and/or its deeper psychological impact. Sarcasm is another one of the many ways the other dies when it encounters the subject. Often misunderstood, sarcasm is marked as having an aggressive underlying feel which undermines the other, or ‘hearers perceive aggressiveness as the feature that distinguishes sarcasm’ (Sulis et al., 2016, p. 133). Sarcasm often holds within it a type of aggression in the put down of the other, and although some cultures readily employ sarcasm and see it as an aspect of humour, the pain embedded within the recipient is often unacknowledged. Sarcasm is about power. It is difficult to respond to, and it acts to raise the profile of the privileged in the eyes of their peers in the form of their ability to put down the other with some quick-witted remark. For the other though, sarcasm is also shaming, dismissing of the other, and fails to recognise the pain it causes. It leaves the other unable to respond. For example, in their paper on the experiences of a student who in her studies encountered difference, Corder and U-Mackey saw sarcasm as a normal part of the student’s interactions with difference, where they reported her experience by including the following comments, ‘she used humour and sarcasm to start conversations, which she realized was an issue (and) which could lead to misunderstanding with other cultures,’ (2015, p. 8). The fact the student’s use of sarcasm is seen as a problem and not as an indicator of the aggression raised within her when encountering difference is problematic, I would argue here. The other aspect which I would be wary of was there is no sense of the impact upon the other of the sarcasm of the student. The other is invisible in the narrative. They have metaphorically been killed off even in the research paper presentation. Bullying of difference is another aspect which is worth consideration here. Formed to be both overt and covert, bullying is an experience which is incredibly common in the competitive world of the Global North. Bullying is even used as a tool to manufacture our leaders, and as previously intimated has traditionally been seen as a normal aspect of schooling, or as a tool used in the hothousing environments of Boarding Schools. As Schaverien recognised, ‘the tradition of fagging, in boys’ public schools, meant that junior boys were compelled to be available as servants for the

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older boys – which condoned bullying as a privilege of age,’ (2004, p. 143)., Bullying here therefore is used to created and mould those of privilege, or really those who were to be supreme, but also avertedly created those who would be the other, the weaker ones unable to survive in such brutal circumstances. Bullying is not always direct though. Indirect bullying, which perhaps lends itself more directly to the microaggressive need to destroy the other has, for example, been seen as ‘linked to non-explicit and almost imperceptible actions – for example, to intentionally exclude or spread rumours’ (Raissa et al., 2016, p. 1182). The marginalisation of the other, their denigration behind their back, where they are therefore unable to fight back, can and often do lead the other into a space of despair and powerlessness. There is a whittling away at the confidence of the other, a gradual destruction of that which gave the other confidence and an egoic sense of self. To encapsulate the destructive nature of microaggressions, bullying, and sarcasm, it is probably best to offer one of my own experiences as a means of understanding these phenomena. A year or so ago, I was on a retreat for several days, hoping to find some silence and solitude and to get away from the stresses of everyday life. Normally, I would go into silence for my retreat, as I enjoy the process of turning inwards and being with myself. On this occasion though, I was informed there was an Art course being run at the centre I was attending, and they would be talking throughout. On my arrival though, the one aspect which was, as always, apparent was that as well as being the only man I was also the only person of colour there. One of the persons there told a story about finding something under a woodpile whilst out for a walk, something she then used for her art later that day. There was a general discussion about the piece created, its beauty, the spontaneity of the work, etc. and there were also jokes shared about how its author always finds something unusual to bring back to the group. Then someone else at the other end of the table made the comment ‘well, you know what else you find under woodpiles, don’t you?’ The comment was met with silence, and some uncomfortable shuffling, or nervous laughter but no one said anything more. The important part of this chapter though is my own response. Although I had obviously heard what had been said at the other end of the room, I also could not quite believe that I had heard it. The phrase stayed with me, meaning I was questioning my own self, my own ears, my senses, and my knowledge of just what might be in the woodpile. I also, interestingly went and checked on Google to see if what I thought I knew was actually right. It was as if a part of me did not want to acknowledge that I had just endured one of the thousands of cuts that I probably have experienced since the day I was born. That no one would be at all racist on a retreat. No, surely not?! Yet, the reality was that I had been a party to, nay, the recipient of a racial microaggression which had done its job to perfection. It had not only

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told me that I was hated by one, or more, of the persons there, but it had also left me struggling with a sense of shame, guilt, and questioning about if I had ever experienced such a thing in such a place. The third thing it left me though was the most important. It left me split. Not only was I angry, but I was also unsure if I should be angry, or who I should be angry with. I was on a retreat, a place of reflection, so surely it was a mistake. I wasn’t somewhere where people might hate me. Surely not. The split gave me a headache which I carried for days. The incident left a mental scar which I was unsure what to do with. Whilst, my inability to reconcile these two aspects felt depressing in the least and hating myself at most. Microaggressions therefore, by their very nature, are the most subtle form of hatred for the other. Their internalisation, and the splitting that goes on for the other, are horrific by-products of said experiences of the put downs, the in jokes, the innuendos, and the death they bring with them should therefore not be underestimated by practitioners. This is especially important given that the splitting also serves another function for the other, in that when accepted this holding of the split aspect of the subject proffers the illusion of safety within the environs of those of privilege who oppress us. This is the deeper impact of the double consciousness we all engage within. It is also important to recognise the combination of the external and the internalised experience of this phenomenon as a quite common factor in us becoming socialised as children. When we come into life, we are constantly told who we are, what we can do, what we should not do, who we should be. In order for us to play a part in our family, society, culture, gender, etc. we divide ourselves into part objects based upon these influences. This drive to self-destroy, this activation of the archetype of death is an inherent aspect therefore of our growing existence, of becoming a child, a person, a human being. So, whilst we fight to live, to live and to self-identify, we are also simultaneously at a more violent war with our self, destroying parts of who we are in a process of adaptation. Sometimes, we might do this over a long period of time, and occasionally we do this instantly in new situations. For example, when we meet someone new on a date, we rarely bring our neurosis with us because we want the other person to like us. For those two or three hours in a restaurant or out walking in the park on that date, we adapt our self to what we project the other needs us to be. Or when we go to work people might ask us how we are, and what we want to say is that we feel awful because our partner has left us, or because we have financial problems, but we don’t. For those eight hours we probably only answer that we are ‘fine’ killing off the truth of our experiences in order so as to meet the demands of being a good work colleague. The death drive is therefore so incredibly common within all of us that often do not even realise we are dying, or destroying, ourselves so regularly.

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This is, in part, the desensitisation against death the earlier philosophers have so readily discussed for generations. We deny death, because we do not see ourselves as dying at all, yet it is happening to us all the time. Another aspect is that our own inherent narcissism, ingrained within all of us, means we also actively deny the presence of death impacting upon, or within us. In holding such definite opinions, in believing that we are better than someone else, that one has more privilege than another, we deny that we are not omnipotent, that we are fallible human beings, gripped by a drive which will eventually claim us as its victim. The only time we realise what we are doing to our self comes when we end up over identifying with that sense of otherness, and something within us either reacts against our own oppression, or witnesses the oppression of our otherness which we see in projected form within our peers. This is when the life force within us becomes reactivated; when the death instinct has become too strong, its dominance too much, that the previously stifled life instinct bursts through and needs to reassert itself, to bring clarity, truth, and place back those aspects of the self-sacrificed upon the death’s mystical altar. It is this humility towards death that this chapter is concerned with, especially in relation to the other. As we have already witness, there are many potential costs to being the othered, being objectified, or stereotyped. This next section though will look at the link between the echoism of the other, the masquerade of woman, the performance of blackness, and the other means we adopt to adapt and feel safe within spaces not our own (Akom, 2008; Butler, 1988). Then I will consider the impact of the enforced inauthenticity and echoism of the other when faced with the superiority of the subject.

Theorising death and privilege in psychotherapy Within the world of psychotherapy there are a surprising amount of theories around death, and whilst we have looked at some of the psychodynamic ones, it would be remis of me to ignore one of the major perspectives about death, and that emerges from the philosophical and in particular those residing within existential psychotherapy. To do this though it is also wise to explore some of these in order to place them in context with ideas of how the other is impacted by its own loss of authenticity. Freud (1955) in particular was influenced by the philosophical, and his work is regularly considered instinctual drives, in particular in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Here Freud talks about there being two competing drives, Eros and Thanatos, or life and death. Through life we either identify with one of the other of these drives, pushing the other into the unconscious. For those of privilege, their narcissism could be seen as an

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over embrace of the life instinct, whilst simultaneously suppressing their death instinct. For the other though there is the reverse, the suppression of their own vitality, and a living with an almost existential over awareness of their own mortality, their death. Fenichel (cited in Bergman, 2011) was one of many who were critical of the idea of death instinct given that, as Marxists, they saw the innate human drive towards the destructiveness of such a drive as precluding any movement towards eternal peace post the ending of capitalism. This interesting critique though presupposes that eternal peace is the ultimate goal of humanity. Yet, what I have often explored in this book, through the lens of intersectionality, is that any move towards eternal peace is an ideal most probably never to be reached, as we are always struggling with the conflicting dyad of the Eros and Thanatos, or life and death. As we have previously discussed Klein’s ideas around the death instinct seeing it as ‘a psychological process arising in the paranoid-schizoid phase of development, wherein ‘bad’ parts of the self are split off and projected ‘into’ another person in an effort to rid the self of one’s ‘bad objects’, which threaten to destroy oneself from within. These bad objects (psychological representations of the death instinct) are projected in an effort to ‘control and take possession of the object’ (Ogden, 1979, p. 363). This expansion of the death instinct into its natural link with the paranoid-schizoid stage of development is important here as what this means is that there is a fear within the subject of the presence of the projected other, a fear which leads it to if not destroy said other to control and dominate the projected aspects of itself that is struggles to own. Turning this around to the point of the other, it is also important in understanding just why the subject projects and then destroys said other, whilst recognising the role of envy. As Gerhardt says, ‘envy marginalizes the patient as a castoff and incites her to acts of unconscious destructive envy as a way of joining, and not merely destroying, the other and acquiring the shared sense of being human’ (Gerhardt, 2009, p. 283). Whereas Gerhardt speaks about the envy of the client towards the therapist, there is a direct correlation with the envy of the other towards the subject. Where this differs is that whilst the other might wish to actively destroy that which is envied in the subject at times, what it may also do is unconsciously destroy that within itself which makes it different. Yet, whilst many theorists saw the death drive as irrelevant, Lacan though was also vocal in his support, exploring much of the destructive desires resident within such a drive, as he stated, ‘as Freud suggested in his remarks on the death instinct, which concerned a movement of annihilation to which the subject as such is prone’ (Lacan, 2003, p. 121). Lacan’s meaning in this context is that the death instinct is inherent within each of us, working to shut the subject off from its own unconscious other. This is important. Within ego formation, or identity formation, the subject unconsciously, but

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quite actively, destroys that which it is not, in favour of that which formulates its own identity. An interesting link between the ego and death comes with the Jungian idea of Complexes. Derived to take the idea of Repetition Compulsion further, Jung (1990) felt that complexes were the means of the psyche to reintegrate its own shadow. The complex, and the unconscious, or shadow material or experience residing just outside of the egoic self, was an aspect of the self which wanted to be incorporated. Complexes therefore become the repeated patterns which remind the self of the existence of the unconscious other, and that unless acknowledged or expressed appropriately lead to the linking this separation of the ego and the shadow to death. Stanton’s ideas are also useful, for example as he expresses ‘when the psyche loses its natural rhythm and fixates into complexes, the unconscious becomes destructive’ (2005, p. 37). In the context of this book, he is clearly talking about the death drive which resides in the space between the ego and the shadow. Yet how does this death drive against the other present itself within the realm of psychotherapy? At this point it is most probably prudent to explore an example from my own research, thereby further tying these ideas together with their practical implications for our clients. To do this I will begin with the story of Alejandra. Born and raised in Venezuela as part of a small Jewish community there, Alejandra was educated at a non-Jewish school. For the purpose of this exercise, she chose an experience which emerged out of a family trip to Argentina. Recalling her time there she stated: ‘I don’t know if you remember, it was quite a few, probably 15 years ago, I was visiting Buenos Aires and there was this bomb in a Jewish centre which was in a very central place so the whole building came down and lots of people died, and people who worked there and who were visiting there, and also people from all the shops as it was very commercial. Jewish commercial, so that was a big thing. And I remember I was in a taxi going somewhere and a guy was talking about that, and he made a comment something like, what was it he said? “The bomb killed a lot of Jewish people.” In a way, I can’t remember how he said it, but in the way he said it he made a difference between Jewish people and Argentinian people. Like Jewish people are not Argentinian. And that really enraged me, and I did say something like “Jewish people are also Argentinian!” It’s not a separate thing like catholic and not Argentinian. And that was, but I felt I should have said something more, I just made a comment then I shut up. And then I felt bad about it. Here the process of othering by the taxi driver could also be seen as an attempt to kill off Alejandra’s cultural identity through the use of a microaggression designed to shame her into silence and compliance, aspects

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presented by her feeling bad about speaking up about such an obviously racist remark. Her anger is also repressed here, as she does say something to the taxi driver, she speaks up. It is also present all these years later in the anger presented during our interview as she continued: It was excluding Jewish people from being, if you’re Jewish you’re Jewish, it was like saying why I don’t go and live in Israel. A bit like saying why don’t all catholic people go live in the Vatican. Alejandra’s words speak here of her resistance to being othered. Although not Argentinian, there is strength in her words as she resists the racism held in the words of the taxi driver that Argentinians cannot be Jewish. The force of the words ‘Jewish people are not Argentinian’ too is also important in Alejandra’s fight to return the identity of those murdered within such a tragedy. Yet, also interestingly, her expression to the driver also leads to her censoring herself, and then to her feeling bad about even speaking up in the first place. What this speaks of is that the other gets angry when they are othered, perhaps more obviously in Alejandra’s experience. Yet, in her case this suppression of her anger, and almost an acceptance of the position of the other, is where the deeper psychological damage resides. Returning to Alejandra story, there is a strength apparent in Alejandra’s words. Already coming from a small community, this experience clearly impacted upon her, both of the bombing she was present in Argentina for and the prejudice of the taxi driver. On working with the visualisation of the experience, Alejandra also experience a sensation in her throat area, with her ambivalence about speaking up apparent in following interesting memory: well I remember this in a film. I couldn’t watch. I had to switch it off after the scene. Have you seen the Pianist? DT: I haven’t, but I know of the movie ALEJ: Well it’s in the film. It’s this family, they’re in the house on the top floor, and the SS uniform and people (inaudible) and it was so they so they knock and they open and they found these people there and they start treating people badly. There is a grandfather in a wheelchair and they just literally throw him out of the window in the winter. DT: And that’s the image that comes up, them throwing him out of the window. ALEJ: A totally defenceless person. DT: how are you feeling as you talk about this? It’s quite a graphic sort of image. ALEJ: I’m just, it makes me tearful as I couldn’t watch the film after that. (inaudible) I couldn’t stand it. DT: how are you feeling at the moment? ALEJ: sad. ALEJ:

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Within this passage Alejandra talks of the same annihilation she witnessed in Argentina, and also that she experienced in the back of the taxicab. Her ambivalence is also apparent here in the struggle to both watch and avoid the harrowing scenes held in the film, her rejection of the chance to sit with her partner and watch the film matching her inability to speak up (Figure 4.1). The sense of sadness and death also hangs heavy over this experience for Alejandra. It is as if in not speaking up for her culture in the taxi she has unconsciously internalised the ‘murder’ of her Jewish sense of self. This encounter holds an obvious link to death, in the unconscious destruction of that which symbolically made her the other. Her tears during our meeting also resonated with the pain of this story, the pain of this act of psychological self-harm. What is less apparent is the internalised abuser within this scene, the aspect that does the murdering, that strives for something more privileged. I would state though that it is not that Alejandra is an abusive person. My sense is that given her being raised in a smaller community, already marginalised from their cultural home because of war and prejudice, this internalised abuser already resides within her, like a sub-personality. The

Figure 4.1 Alejandra’s image – The Pianist.

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micro-aggressive ‘throwaway’ response of the taxi driver though reactivated the internalised transgenerational wounds which she unconsciously carried within her. This alternative perspective on her unconscious, internalised sense of superiority and its destruction of that which makes her culturally different, could also be seen to be driven by the same envy discussed previously; a deeply internalised envy that is driven to self-destroy. It is the envy of the taxi driver, I would argue, his envy at whatever aspects of Jewish culture he had unconsciously deemed himself unworthy for, his anger then being projected outwards onto his unwitting passenger. Yet, whilst this might all seem strange, what I am highlighting here is the factor where the aggressiveness, in fact that and the hatred, of the taxi driver has become implanted within Alejandra to such an extent that this event, an event which occurred many years ago now, still brought up such a vivid image of self-hatred and self-destruction. The unconscious death of her cultural identity therefore becomes something that the taxi driver no longer has to hate. Much like when those of colour begin to hate their own shade, or when those who are other then repress and denigrate their own type, there is not only the envy of those who are not able to be women, who do not have darker skin, but there is the internalised hatred at that which is an internal hatred about themself (Appiah, 2016). An encounter with Thanatos, as prompted by the actions of a subject be they microaggressions or objectification, is therefore an encounter with the internalised shadow hatred of oneself. It is the reawakening or a reencounter with one’s own shadow, and a simultaneous reengagement with, or a reactivation, of the death instinct preceding said separation. The danger for the other though is that in the holding of an aspect of the subject which is unwanted by said subject, that they repress this death drive, as much as they internalise that which is itself projected by the same subject. Exploring the theme of death further, an existential perspective builds this into the narrative as to how death relates to our intersectional ideas of privilege and otherness. An obvious, yet simultaneously problematic place to start given his own crimes against the other in Nazi Germany is with Heidegger. Existentially, for Heidegger ‘the “here” of an “I-here” is always understood in terms of an “over there” at hand in the sense of being toward it which de-distances, is directional, and takes care,’ (2010, p. 129). In his uniquely complex fashion, Heidegger goes on to explore ideas of Dasein, or Being, as being inextricably linked spatially to the ‘over there’ or the other, recognising the intimate relationship between subject and other. What he does not do though is recognise the undercurrent of power residing within this relationship, where the ‘I-here’ holds identifying power over itself through what it existentially is not, this dominance literally

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resonating down to the spatial core being of the “over there/other” with a type of existential supremacy at its core. This existential perspective though is important, in that it holds echoes of the stance of the ego’s dominance of the shadow mentioned previously. It also helps to tie the existential vision of the other in with the more Freudian views of narcissism and otherness. The idea of the ‘I-here’s’ existential dominance over the ‘over there/other’ then bring up two interesting points. First, as hinted at previously, the use of power to maintain such dominance over the ‘over there/other’ and the ways this might be enforced, many of which we have already discussed, then come more in to focus. Second, there is an inherent anxiety provoked by the ‘over there’ should it resist said positioning outside of the ‘I-here’. Ideas of the other as promoting anxiety in the subject from within an existential framework are not new. In a brief paper written about conflict, and I would add showing a level of prescience about cultural supremacy, Camus (2011) explored the murderous instinct within us in his work, seeing this as a major facet in the atrocities against the other. Kaufman also recognised this, but bringing back into focus the work of Heidegger suggests that, Heidegger’s discussion of anxiety ends with the claim that anxiety, by making man feel single or … completely alone tears him out of the everyday world, dominated by the anonymous one, and reveals to him authenticity and inauthenticity as possibilities of his Being. (1976, p. 197) The existential angst provoked by the mere presence of the other should not be underestimated. From an existential perspective the mere idea of their being an other object not of the subject it raises within the said subject questions about their own sense of omnipotence and narcissism. Yet, as Sartre says, the Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and me. I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other. By the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of passing judgement on myself as an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other, and ‘thus the Other has not only revealed to me what I was; he has established me in a new type of being which can support new qualifications,’ (1943, p. 222). For Sartre, otherness therefore raises the anxiety provoking shadow idea of nothingness. Yet, this need not lead to a destruction as such. As Rowlands states about Sartre’s work, ‘to nihilate nothingness is to produce and sustain nothingness. Humans can do this because nothingness is part of what they are,’ (Rowlands, 2011, p. 175). Here Rowlands recognises Sartre’s ability

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to see the co-created relationship between subject and other, between being and nonexistence, their mutual attraction and mutual identification. The dehumanisation of the other is therefore a means for the subject to rid itself of the anxiety created by the presence of an alien, misunderstood, shadow other aspect of themself, be they a differing gender, sexuality, or class. A means of managing this interaction though emerges out of said dehumanisation, which ties us back to the work of Buber (2010) who recognised the simplistic vision of a subject’s use of an It as an object for its own narcissistic needs. Buber’s compatriot Emmanuel Levinas (2006), who although agreeing with much of Buber’s work saw his friend’s ideas as too idealised, his own experiences during the Second World War having significantly coloured his perspective upon the abilities of men to be anything other than human to each other. Through Levinas’ own work on how we relate to each other existentially, the idea of there being a more malevolent angle to the interconnectedness of the I and Thou, or to that process which creates an It out of the other, then becomes more apparent. Exploring the theme of death further, Kierkegaard’s often depressing death laden work speaks of this experience of othering where he says ‘thus the self co-here’s immediately with the Other, desiring craving, enjoying etc.’ (Kierkegaard, 1989, p. 81). What that means in this context is that for the self to exist it needs the other, and vice versa, echoing ideas put forward from a post-colonial perspective. What is different though is Fanon’s (2005) idea that there is a psychological cost to this process of being the other for the subject where the other sacrifices its own identity in order to comply with the mirroring needs of the subject. My participant’s images here speak of the cost for the other in ‘co-hereing’ with that subject, and the murdering of that within them that makes them separate and therefore different. There is a killing off, or a shutting away into the unconscious, of difference here for the other, but it never totally dies, it just sits within the unconscious waiting to be known. The theme of death and the destruction of that which makes us the other also emerged out of Eddy’s story. Being different for Eddy was emergent of being one of twin boys raised in Sweden. During our interview he regularly spoke of everything being a competition, meaning that if he got something then his brother had to have something as well. This competition was something that was to run throughout his interview, and a theme that he traced through his early life, to a point pre-teens when he noted that “we could have literally killed each other, and one during one particular fight at about 10 or 11, I broke his arm and he broke my nose.” Eddy noted that the conflict between himself and the other was something that even now as an adult sits in between them in their relationship. For his drawing, Eddy drew the following image (Figure 4.2).

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Figure 4.2 Eddy’s image – Eddy kills ‘his brother’.

you look like your enjoying yourself. Would you like to, ah ah, ok do you have anything you would like to say about the image you’ve drawn. EDDY: I don’t like it, I’m not particularly enamoured with the content thinking ‘where the fuck did that come from’ I’m sort of wishing it was a little bit more, more like healthy. DT: it’s like its touched something quite deep in you, your core, bubbles coming up from the depths, life and death. EDDY: these are hands crushing down onto this, something pushing down, there’s a sense of feeling crushed downwards and that thing there is like a stone or weight, but the bubbles are full of life and that orange you get in the right hand corner suggest health or life or er okayness if you like. DT: sure. You’re not so enamoured then. EDDY: well pinning somebody under water, you know, is and to think this is something happening to you? Am I doing it to myself? Could I do it? No, I couldn’t do it to myself. There is a lot of tension in it. Existing, not existing. The face is purposefully blank. DT:

Death of the other  93 DT: so, no EDDY: not

expression. How do you feel as you say that? a feeling but I have sense I’ve sort of resisted seeing this, not proud of it. DT: it sounds like it’s difficult. Um, ok. Am I ok to take some photographs of this, and do you want to take the picture with you or…? EDDY: no, you have it. DT: ok. (DT takes pictures) EDDY: there is something about this too… DT: the pattern on the floor. There is one route down. EDDY: its connected somehow. DT: no problem at all. EDDY: there is something about surrender in it, there’s surrender but also life a certain tension. DT: surrender or life… EDDY: the life force fights to live DT: so, one has to surrender in order for that to happen, or…? The forcing down, the struggle itself is like, a part of surrender of allowing yourself to be there. EDDY: there is an inevitability in this, but yet er that life force wants to live or something. DT: something about this one is quite interesting. If you have any other thoughts or realisations and you want to share them do feel to do so. There is a lot there and a lot of conflict between living and dying, forced down and yet something wants to come up. EDDY: and what do I have to kill off in myself or my twin in order to live? Or what do I have to kill off in there? DT: or what is your brother trying to kill off in you? EDDY: yeah, I think he is trying to kill me off, and I’m not having it. (both laugh) EDDY: if it comes to it, I would kill him first. DT: metaphorically… EDDY: I might have once, but not now. For Eddy, dealing with a difference arising out of his having a twin meant he stood out more than he would have wished. His unconscious experience of being a twin though led to his internalising the death in the metaphorical attempts to destroy that which made him an outsider, or unique. This was also re-enacted in the repeated attempts by his brother to destroy him and vice versa. Whereas for Alexandra the drive towards Thanatos was a hidden one, here the same drive is very much externally driven. Death is at play, literally in Eddy’s world, and his need to protect himself from it could also be seen as an attempt to protect his otherness from this externalised form of self-destruction.

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This stark imagery presented in Eddy’s picture holds the same shocking nature as Alejandra’s, whereby they both have internalised the death of that which makes them different. For Eddy, he is literally trying to drown his brother/himself underwater, whilst for Alejandra, her recollection of the scene from the film The Piano, led to her reimagining her Jewish self being thrown out of the window. For them both, the drive to kill something off within our self is also driven by the envy projected upon them by others around. As Eddy states, the teachers in his school often singled them out mixing them up, getting their names wrong, and generally making them stand out in ways they were not at all used to. The attempt to destroy that which lay within him could also be seen as another attempt to achieve the type of privilege and perceived normality denied him by his otherness. The other important factor here is the acknowledgement that he was a child when this occurred, and that this type of difference is not transgenerational. His is an aspect of his identity that he was born into, which whilst the same as Alejandra’s, differs in other obvious ways as well. Considered through the lens of intersectional theory these aspects of identity are vastly different, yet they still attract elements of envy, projection, and hatred, which lead us to want to unconsciously destroy that which makes us who we are. Another important factor involves the fact that these internalisations exist so deeply for such a long period of time. For both participants in my research, these stories were from decades ago, yet the painful vibrancy of said experiences moved both when interviewed, the power of the internalised projections sitting prominently upon the pages of this book. So, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the primal need to destroy, whilst ridiculed by many post-Freudians because of its unfortunate wedding to the sexual drive, does though hold within it an important factor about our primal nature, and our ability to destroy. The fear though of death, as discussed previously, is an aspect of the life of the other which we all endure. Our adaptations protect us from the destructive influences of the privileged and allow us to endure the regular microaggressions or overt attacks which threaten either our sanity or our very physical existence.

Intersectional identity and death When we expand upon these previous ideas and incorporate an intersectional approach to identity, the idea of death becomes more obvious, and especially more universal. Given that we hold multiple aspects of identity at any point of time, we also simultaneously die every day, multiple times a day, in a variety of ways. From the changes to how we behave when we leave home to go to work in order that we are not verbally or physically assaulted, to how we alter our appearance on a night out with our partner in order for them to appreciate us, to how we adjust our self when sitting

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in a room for a job interview, these are all examples of the mini-deaths we put ourselves through in order to manage in a world that struggles with our authentic otherness (Butler, 1990; Fanon, 2005). Therefore when we combine our intersectional identity to the frameworks provided within psychotherapy in order to understand ourselves, what we continually see is the complex unconscious nature of death, and how death is used to formulate our persona identity, how it impacts upon us, and how we dance with death as we progress through life, living with the complex nature of the varying emotional impacts of its presence. As already discussed, from a psychodynamic perspective as we enter life we conform to a set of rules and structures. These might be familial, gendered, societal or others, enforced from without and with the underlying message that we will only be accepted should we conform, or essentially perform. This is the masquerade Butler (1988) discusses in her work around gender, or the double consciousness du Bois observed in his work around race (Akom, 2008). These ideas though are not just limited to these two categories. We always use them, be they women performing for men, persons of colour ingratiating themselves to be accepted by those who are white or hiding a disability when around those who are able-bodied. We perform to hide our difference, or to make our difference palatable for said subject. We defer to their image, imaginal and or real, of who we are supposed to be. Yet, whilst we perform such a task, we doubly repress, we doubly kill off, the aspect of our uniqueness so supposedly threatening to the subject. Conversely, the privilege of early life then could be seen as being positioned to lead, to dominate, to control, and to contain the others beneath us. It is the promotion of an ideal way of being, one separate from any sense of struggle. Early life privilege is therefore culturally, or societally, constructed. It is a paper bag of ideals that the child finds it difficult to fight its way out of because of the opposition meted against it. This contrasts with the existential where the death of the other involves an exploration of our foreboding sense of otherness, with this being a constant factor as we negotiate our cultural sense of being. An intersectional approach then recognises that we constantly endure the depression and the anxiety embedded within our numerous experiences as the other. The privilege here though involves the manufactured means we employ to avoid such a trauma. It is being free of any awareness that we have lost so much to endure so much more, or the tussle to remain separate from any deeper sadder sense of said struggle. I would call it the privilege of the ignorant, echoing an idea posited by de la Boetie (2015), whereby he viewed certain sectors of society of being wilfully mendacious of their complicity with their own oppression. There is a resistance here to the struggles, to the complexities, inherent within life. Death becomes the realm of other people; of those we marginalise for not following our rules or structures. The privilege here means we become a slave to said mendacity.

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From an intersectional angle though, supremacy therefore means that we perceive our self as whole, as unchangeable, as perfect in our narcissistic vision of our self. In this position, we tread a fine line between being tempted to change by the mere presence of the other and our egoic sense of self-importance and identity which fights to remain static in relation to said temptation. Supremacy sees this static self-identity as unchallenged by the other, and unwilling to be challenged by such a sub-human aspect of otherness, no matter their difference, its fear of this change being experienced as the annihilation of said aspect of self when it encounters the other. Examples which highlight this fear emerged out of the Charlottesville riots in 2016, where White Supremacists marched through the city shouting ‘Jews shall not replace us!’ whilst carrying tiki torches (Turner, 2018; Vice News Tonight on HBO, 2017). Other, more subtle, examples from the political sphere emerge out of the politics of assimilation used here in the United Kingdom, where foreign nationals are often legally forced to adhere to a set of British values, ways, and morals (Brubaker, 2001). In all these examples, the fear of death involves the fear of the death of an identity, a cultural identity, or a racial identity. This fear of death though provokes intersectional reactions within the subject which are also important to notice, in particular the retreat into fantasy. This retreat, and interestingly its subsequent weaponisation, formed the backbone to the politics of Trump and of Brexit. Another type of death, this time with the loss of the purity of white women in the face of the black masculine other, led to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan and was presented in the film Birth of a Nation (Griffiths, 1915). Here, the purity of whiteness is threatened by the other, the maintaining of White Supremacy being paramount in the face of this potential cultural annihilation, the only means of mitigating against this being the destruction of the black other. Given the intersectional nature of identity, this movement from privilege to supremacy out of a fear of death is fixed within one or maybe two aspects of the subject’s identity which are upwardly projected to become paramount. The subject then idealises this upward projection, it becomes fixated upon this split off aspect of its own identity, rejecting huge swathes of other intersecting areas where it might identify as other. Supremacy is therefore a pinpoint, individual, aspect of identity raised up to become an ideal. It is held like a pinnacle of perfection, against which all other aspects of identity do not even exist. It is projected into an eternal space. Interestingly, psychodynamically, from this space, supremacy is also another form of psychological self othering, driven by an inability to contain the anxiety of a co-here-d identity, leading to the destruction of an externalised version of that which makes us unique. This defence is therefore built around the self-creation of one’s own sense of specialness. Brilliant examples include strange stories of homophobes who are vehemently against homosexuality, yet ultimately turn out to be gay themselves,

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or black conservatives who reject the victimisation of black people stating that such a position is a choice (Allen, 2017). In both these example cases there is the valorisation of whiteness and of heterosexuality as an ideal, as that singular supreme point of identity against which no other should exist, even within themselves. These flights into the fantasy of the supremacist and subsequent escape from the reality that is the presence of the other involves the promotion of privilege toward the realm of said specialness, together with the marginalisation of anything representing the death of such an ideal in this instance leads to a type of cultural splitting. The use of psychotherapy and its tools to understand the psychology of supremacy is therefore an important aspect of recognising the darker, unprocessed, psychological nature of supremacy. The fact that we all split at some point, be it as children marking ourselves as special in relation to our peers, as teens trying to establish our own sense of uniqueness as a means of separating from our parents or family, or as adults who believe that our job, our partner, or our looks, gives us a class distinction that raises us above said other. We split towards supremacy often, we split towards supremacy throughout life, and it is only when we come back down to the reality of our mundane existences that we stop. This process of splitting and creating and then destroying the other has even occurred within psychotherapy. Freud, for example, initially saw talking therapies as the realm of the middle and upper, more educated classes, with the working classes being too simple, too uneducated, to understand the nuances of the therapeutic environments, perspectives posited by many theorists, including Said (2001). Where Said’s views are incorrect though are they fail to take into account Freud’s efforts to have therapy accepted by the medical elite of his time, and how these efforts most probably led to a compromise of Freud’s position as an outsider in a Central European world that was gearing towards hatred and xenophobia. The fear of death, as already discussed in this chapter, especially in this instance when it is implied and literal, leads to a compromising of one’s self to meet the supremacist ideal. The draw towards supremacy as a defence, also occurs in our psychotherapy trainings, where this death instinct has been projected outwards onto the other, meaning they were often invisible or unheard during such trainings. Yet, where said trainings struggle is in their compliance with the invisibility of the other. Brought on by many types of manipulation, be they the fake tears of white women in the face of discussions about race, to the mansplaining of men when challenged by discussions around gender difference, the acting out of those unaware of, or plainly unwilling to see the other, is often left unchallenged by those running said workshops, quite often out of an inexperience when faced with working with issues of difference in counselling and psychotherapy. This is an aspect of the white fragility prevalent in workshops or studies around race, or that an awakening within the other, or an authentic

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expression of otherness then unconsciously brings with it the death instinct within the ego of the subject (Diangelo, 2018; Morland & Willox, 2005). Conversely, from those who are immersed within their privilege, expanding the ideas of fragility then brings into focus the idea that the subject, the privileged aspect of one’s identity, is threatened by the presence of the other. Said subject fears that its own egoic self will die, hence its need to control, to dominate, to scare away the other. Essentially, privilege and the other are two sides of the same archetypal coin. Driven by the intersectional approach taken in this text, the ideas of seeing any one of these forms of difference without its co-companion of privilege, or vice versa, therefore risks an unconscious acting out of that other poll, and the deadening of the exploration of said form of difference. So, instead of actually challenging the psychological traumas experienced by those who are the other, because of these deficiencies and a compliance with the political narrative of touching lightly on issues of difference and diversity counselling and psychotherapy trainings therefore overtly re-enact the annihilation of the other by not more actively including explorations of otherness and privilege in their curriculums; both overtly in the marginalisation, or the tokenism of the exploration of said subject, or more covertly, by the conscious lack of interest in the experiences of their nonwhite, non-heterosexual, non-able-bodied students. Actively working with these poles in order not to split or kill off the other aspect of otherness or privilege in the individual or group should be an essential consideration in any training around psychological difference and diversity. This is also important within the therapy room itself, as the twins of privilege and otherness will both be in play with our clients. For example, sometimes, as a psychotherapist working with clients of a higher class or who are white or western, within the counter transference the sense that I no longer exist can feel like an absence of self, that I have disappeared, or that I have died. So, it is important to recognise that it is only by understanding the process of the other when holding said projections that we begin to witness Thanatos at play, that we begin to see the death instinct. So, for therapists, the ability to hold and reflect upon said unconscious communications is a core component within our practice, no matter the modality. It is in fact an essential aspect of the work which if conducted poorly may lead to a rupture within the relationship between therapist and client (Winnicott, 1969). In a well held relationship, where the therapeutic container is secure enough to hold the unconscious material of the client, there is also less of a need for the client to control said therapist as they avoid those aspects of self they have distanced themselves from. Obviously though, the majority of the population of the planet are not psychotherapists or counsellors. So the impact upon the other of receiving the unconscious material of the subject is more challenging and has a more detrimental impact, together with the fact that given the difference within the relationship

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to that of therapy, the subject feels unsafe that their split bad parts are not being securely enough held, so they must employ other means, both covert ones and more overtly aggressive ones, of maintaining the psychological status quo. Working to bring said poles into the room within the potential safety of the training environment, recognising their own sense of shame or pride around their privilege or otherness or both.

Summary Returning to famous story of Icarus, as written by Ovid (2015), for this summary, the part I am most interested in with regards to this book involves the role of Minos, who in his ire with Daedalus traps him and his son Icarus in a labyrinth. In order to escape the labyrinth, Daedalus fashions a set of wings made out of feathers and wax in order that they may both escape the clutches of Minos. The fact they were both in the labyrinth though is important here as it speaks of the shadow, which as already discussed is that unconscious aspect of the self we all have, and which when we are in a position of privilege we suppress and project on to an objectified other. There is a major difference though between leaving the labyrinth and living one’s life constantly integrating the aspects of shadow one has rediscovered, and distancing oneself from these said same aspects, flying so close to godhood that one risks the ire of the gods and crashes back down to earth to one’s death. For Marlan (2005) the problem of Icarus is not that he wishes to soar up towards the gods, but that he does so whilst ignoring the needs of his bodily, grounded self. It can also be seen as the needs of an ego to transcend the timelessness of the Gods themselves and a denial of one’s own mortality. For the purpose of this book I see this parable as being about the needs of the self to grow, to achieve its own worth and potential. I also though recognise this as a parable where the striving for godhood actually leads to a return to death, thereby showing the intimate relationship between this attempted attainment and its flipside, which is mortality. This is the separation between finding one’s humility in privilege and shifting one’s ego into a position of supremacy. This is the rejection of one’s own otherness in symbolic form. As we explored in the previous chapter, stories about the shame and hatred of one’s own otherness are a common theme in experiences as the other. We have already discussed so many intersecting versions of this, but there are obvious so many more. From the whitening of black skin, and the process of shadism which sits like an epidemic worldwide, where the drive towards a lighter skin tone motivates involves everything from skin whitening creams, or bleaching, to even forms of plastic surgery; to the adoption of more westernised names in order to suppress, or hide one’s own cultural difference from the fears or hatred of those who are anti said culture; to

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the numerous attempts made to hide one’s disability out of a fear or sense of shame of said difference. The issue with all of these adaptations is they involve for something quite fundamental to happen; and that is the murdering of that which makes us uniquely the other. This self-hatred, this shame of one’s own sense of otherness, though is different to the personal destruction meted out upon the other because of their difference. We have considered hate crimes previously, but here we look at the actual murder of that which is different, the destruction of that which is uniquely other and therefore of a perceived threat to the supremacy of the subject’s ego. The presence of the other, as we have discussed, is a constant threat to the subject, and said subject employs a number of unconscious methods to contain, disrupt, or rid itself of any alien type of otherness. Yet, out of existential death it is also possible to awaken. This though brings with it a plethora of problems. First of all, as we have already discussed, for the other who refuses to be othered, or who sheds the narrow shackles of the identity imposed upon them by the subject, the risk is one of conflict, the risk is also quite often one of death, be it psychological or actual. The drive to self-actualise is an innate one which many authors have written about since the dawn of time. It is an aspect of the human condition to want to learn, to want to develop, to be more than the structures enforced upon oneself by culture, genders, sexualities, or religions our own and or not. For example, as we have already stated, Jung (1990) recognised that the other is shadow. Whilst this was most probably written for those who already held some type of privilege, he did not recognise that if privilege and the other are twins, then for us all we will force one or the other polarity into the unconscious as a means of self-directed survival or self-imposed superiority. If this is true, and if the goal of psychotherapy is to uncover that which has been repressed by the client, then working with this aspect of the shadow, understanding how and why we have forced either our sense of privilege or otherness into the unconscious, and how they might be speaking to us, then becomes a possible route towards psychological reintegration. This chapter has therefore explored this relationship with our own sense of otherness, and the deaths we endure on such a regular basis that we are often unaware that it is happening to ourselves. From the death of our potential as we conform to social, gendered, and other socially constructed visions of how we are supposed to be, to the existential meaning of death and how this is then unconsciously maintained and reproduced leading to periods of anxiety and depression, the death of our sense of self is an important aspect of life. The next chapter though takes this exploration of otherness and privilege a stage further. Here, instead of considering the negatives of being the outsider, or of having privilege, we take a more nuanced look at just what

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happens when we consciously engage with our own sense of intersectional privilege and otherness. Here we look at just how working with these painful experiences could actually be a means of reintegrating said shadow, or realigning these unconscious splits within the psyche, and may actually act as a route towards individuation and psychological wholeness.

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Death of the other  103 Marlan, S. (2005). The black sun: The alchemy and art of darkness. Texas A&M University Press. Meissner, W. W. (1986). Can psychoanalysis find itself? Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 34(2). doi:10.1177%2F000306518603400207 Morland, I., & Willox, A. (Eds.). (2005). Queer theory: Readers in cultural criticism. Palgrave. Newcomb, M. E., & Mustanski, B. (2010). Internalized homophobia and internalizing mental health problems: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(8), 1019–1029. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2010.07.003 Ogden, T. H. (1979). On projective identification. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 60, 357–373. Ovid. (2015). The metamorphoses. Xist Publishing. Paczkowski, P. (2013). Ancient philosophy on the issue of death. Przeglad Religioznawczy, 3–12. Perera, S. B. (1986). The Scapegoat Complex: Toward a mythology of shadow and guilt. Inner City Books. Rabin, R. C. (2019). Huge racial disparities found in deaths linked to pregnancy. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/health/pregnancydeaths-.html Raissa, D., Chaves, L., & Rodrigues De Souza, M. (2016). Bullying, prejudice and barbarism. Creative Education, 7(7), 11811188. doi: 10.4236/ce.2016.79123 Rowlands, M. (2011). Jean-Paul Sartre’s being and nothingness. Topoi, 30(2), 175– 180. doi: 10.1007/s11245-011-9099-2 Russac, R. J., Gatliff, C., Reece, M., & Spottswood, D. (2007). Death anxiety across the adult years: An examination of age and gender effects. Death Studies, 31(6), 549–561. doi: 10.1080/07481180701356936 Said, E. (2001). Freud Museum London: Events archive. Freud and the Non-Europeans. http://www.freud.org.uk /events/73523/edward-said-freud-and-the-noneuropean/ Sartre, J. (1943). Being and nothingness. Routledge. Schaverien, J. (2004). Boarding school: The trauma of the privileged child. The Journal of Analytical Psychology, 49(5), 683–705. doi: 10.1111/j.00218774.2004.00495.x Scott, J. W., Butler, J., Chaitin, G., Engelstein, L., Riley, D., Roberts, M. L., & Schafer, S. (2001). Fantasy Echo: History and the construction of identity. Critical Inquiry, 27(2), 284–304. Solesbury, M. (2018). Disability hate crimes in England and Wales. United Response. https://www.unitedresponse.org.uk/news/disability-hate-crimes-england-walesincrease-new-police-figures Sue, D. W., Capodilupo, C. M., Torino, G. C., Bucceri, J. M., Holder, A. M. B., Nadal, K. L., & Esquilin, M. (2007). Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice. American Psychologist, 62(4), 271–286. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.62.4.271 Sulis, E., Irazú Hernández Farías, D., Rosso, P., Patti, V., & Ruffo, G. (2016). Figurative messages and affect in Twitter: Differences between #irony, #sarcasm and #not. Knowledge-Based Systems, 108, 132–143. doi: 10.1016/j.knosys.2016.05.035 Toner, P. (2010). St. Thomas Aquinas on death and the separated soul. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 91(4), 587–599. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0114.2010.01379.x

104  Death of the other Turner, D. D. L. (2018). You shall not replace us! White supremacy, psychotherapy and decolonisation. Journal of Critical Psychology Counselling and Psychotherapy, 18(1), 1–12. Veenstra, G. (2011). Mismatched racial identities, colourism, and health in Toronto and Vancouver. Social Science and Medicine, 73(8), 1152–1162. doi: 10.1016/j. socscimed.2011.07.030 Vice News Tonight on HBO. (2017). Charlottesville: Race and terror. HBO. https://youtu.be/RIrcB1sAN8I Wilson, J. (2017). I was in Charlottesville. Trump was wrong about violence on the left. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/ charlottesville-violence-right-left-trump Winnicott, D. W. (1969). The use of an object. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 50, 711–716.

Chapter 5

Individuation, privilege, and otherness

It was Freire who importantly stated that to the extent that man loses his ability to make choices and is subjected to the choices of others, to the extent that his decisions are no longer his own because they result from external perceptions, he is no longer integrated. He is adapted. (Freire, 1973, p. 4) In the context of this book, his words speak clearly of the experiences of the other within us all as we attempt to negotiate an environment of systemic oppressions that mark us as the other, or as different. Adaptation, as we have seen is means of surviving this system, and adaptation as we have also seen leads to a sense of death of our innate authenticity, a killing off that that which is deemed wrong by the system, or by the subject. We also selfother as part of the process of adaptation. Conversely, we live in cultures, or groups, which regularly claim some greater sense of superiority over an opposite, be it through a sense of class superiority, superiority based upon wealth, greater level of education, a perceived closer relationship to God, or something else, we all compare ourselves to the other, claiming that only we, only our group, hold that greater sense of humanity. The adaptation here is one of imagined superiority, built upon the fragile wings of fantasy, often reinforced by power’s powerful fists. For example, as a black man, the pressure to adapt is something I know from my daily existence in a world which can at times be threatening. The adoption of du Bois’ (1903) double consciousness speaks of this essential, survivalist, aspect of existence as I manoeuvre my way through predominantly white environments. Yet, even within black environments the layers of privileging, of determining who is better than, who is blacker, more civilised, more English, less African, hold similar spectres of adapted grandiosity. Adaptation into privilege or otherness is therefore a constant, a dyad designed to aid us as we survive our own individual and collective projected realities.

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So, the reality is we are all adapted in some sense. Even the most macho of heterosexual men is adapted to some form of masculinity not self-designated. We fit in, we pretend, we camp it up, we masquerade, and we shuck and jive. As previously expressed, systemic oppression leads to a deadening of that which is richest within us, yet this destruction is essential to our survival. Freire’s idea of adaptation is a psychological route away from who we are, and from our own sense of privilege. Given, therefore, the intersectional nature of identity, and the need for adaptation as a means of survival, amongst many other means, the painful, yet true fact is that we are all living within the animal sphere, as rightly presented by Freire. Yet, as Freire also states, ‘adaptation is behaviour characteristic of the animal sphere; exhibited by man, it is symptomatic of his dehumanisation,’ (1973, p. 4). This important statement recognises that in order for us to regain our humanity that we must in some fashion unshackle ourselves, or our self, from the adaptation’s silky binding, and take our self-identified, self-defined place in the world. So as much as this involves the obvious external challenges of defying or challenging the systemic oppressions of racism, sexism, homophobia, and many others, what this also involves is a listening into the internal challenges of the unconscious, to our shadow natures, as our own other rises from the adaptations placed around it by the punitiveness of our own intersectional egos. A route out of this adaptation though comes with the idea of individuation. Originally coined by Jung (1968) individuation involves the realignment of the splits we all create within our psyche, divisions which as we have seen are necessary for either our ego formation or our survival. As Kalff expressed, ‘Jung designated as the process of individuation, can be understood as the process of becoming conscious of human wholeness. By wholeness is meant an attitude that goes beyond mutually exclusive opposites and strives for an integration of these opposites,’ (1991, p. 1). Supremacy though seeks to present itself as the already un-adapted pinnacles of said groups, be they through ideals of whiteness, ableness, masculinity, or feminist femininity. The drive to present oneself as the peak of the said self-designated group though involves the denial of the humanity of those groups it has chosen to dominate, or in other words, the supremacist not only denies its responsibility for the other but it denies its humanity as well in order to avoid feelings of guilt or shame at doing such. What supremacy also does in this self-designated drive towards perfection, is to consider itself already perfect and therefore fully individuated. Its mirrored projection of specialness by a collective ego is a means to deny the reality of its non-individuality and by presenting itself as exactly that, but in a distorted format. This last chapter therefore considers how individuation works for those who have become adapted, and looks at how we might move away from the adaptations imposed from without of specialness or an overt reliance upon one’s otherness, and looks at the dreams and in

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depth process, which highlight the route one might follow in order to move through this process of psychological decolonization.

Psychological supremacy versus individuation Given the intersectional nature of identity then it could appear that any route towards a true sense of self and authenticity is an impossible goal. This is why so many reject the call to action as posited in myths such as the hero’s journey (Edinger, 1995). The complexity and the near impossibility of the task of individuation make it seem a most daunting route to follow. Yet, as many may question, does this mean that such a route towards individuation should not be undertaken? My answer is that we do not actually have a choice in the matter, that any question of this type is actually flawed. The self, and its libidinous drives, forces us to constantly move towards being more real, and that process will inevitably result in us exploring our shadows, and encountering the projections we have upon the external other. Yet, within mainstream counselling and psychotherapy, individuation is presented as the re-emergence of a true sense of self where much of the authenticity of self has been repressed down into the shadow. Whilst I agree with this most basic of assumptions about this process, that which is oppressed will be different based upon a person’s predilection towards privilege or otherness. For the person who has taken on their privilege and has adopted a supremacist position in order to defend against any sense of otherness, it is this otherness which will be in the shadow. Yet, for those who are seen as other, and who over identify as such, their own power and privilege and their awareness of the power they actually do have access to, will very much be repressed and projected outwards on to the subject-object. The importance of this should not be underestimated in terms of the dyadic creation, and maintenance of, any relationship between, say, the subject and object, or the master and slave, as presented by the likes of Fanon (1959) and Hegel (Villet, 2011). We see here how this mutual recognition ties the subject and the object in an eternal relationship. So as much as the coloniser and the colonised may detest each other, or like the scapegoated individual or group needs its family or culture, there is an underlying unconscious tie which binds them into a relationship of eternal bondage (Memmi, 1974; Perera, 1986). Individuation therefore becomes means by which the other aspect of this dyad is first feared, then uncovered, and then reincorporated into the psyche. There is though a final stage of this development. As Jung (1963) stated, when we individuate the world comes towards us. His expression here is that as we become more integrated into the world the political approaches us and that we are more personally ethically driven to help the fellows we inhabit this planet with. The crossover between his ideas though and those of

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Freire is that individuation is also a process of us increasing our connection to our own humanity. This is not just the re-humanising of the other, the reclamation of one’s humanity from the system which shaved it away over time, but it is also the recognising of the humanity within the parts of us which hold privilege and the responsibility we have towards the other, be it externally or internally. Individuation is therefore the realignment of this conflict, this disconnect, within the structure of the psyche, and thereby begins to take us along the road to countering the internalised supremacy of an ego which is dominant and oppressive over our own shadow self. This can be approached by a closer consideration of the complexes which we all hold, and which act upon us all the time, aspects of the unconscious which arise out of the shadow wanting to be known and reincorporated into the psyche. Often these aspects are considered to be things like the qualities we wish to have to deal with challenging situations, the activities we were drawn to as children but had to push away when growing up, or other such adaptations to our behaviours. When considered from an intersectional perspective though this becomes more complex. For example, the idea that one has to repress ones gendered identity in order to fit into a patriarchal world, or the changing of one’s name and therefore ones cultural identity to feel safe or accepted in an otherwise threatening environment, leads to multiple intersectional complexes of repressed identity which have to be worked through. In her discussion on complexes, for example, Brewster (2020) explores how we are often in the grip of multiple complexes all working upon us at the same time, all attempting to move out of the shadow, challenging our conscious adaptations forcing us to be our most authentic sense of self. This particular quoted text though considers the importance of working through our racial complex, recognising the difficulties inherent for those from any side of a racial divide in their attempts to shake off the shackles of systemic oppression, which has led to their sense of racial identity being shaped, being repressed, or being denigrated and attacked. An intersectional approach to individuation therefore involves engaging in the challenges of humanising all of those converging adaptations. It involves reclaiming our own senses of otherness, together with the reintegration of the power and responsibility held with said positions of privilege. Any process of de-scapegoating oneself will therefore involve the movement into the light and out of the darkness of those adaptations which were necessary in order to survive the systemic and individual oppressions inherent in being part of an alien group or culture. It should also be noted that any process of personal individuation of this type will inevitably have a reaction against those whose shadow has fallen upon the other. Be they partners, family members, one’s culture, religion, or other group, to be scapegoated is essentially the means by which the said group maintains not only its position of superiority but also its position of personal ignorance. Any challenge to this, will always be encountered by resistance, be it the

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ostracisation of the other, reinforced power plays to make it conform once again, or ultimately the other’s destruction (Perera, 1986). Part of the struggle for the other is the cost not only to itself but to the wider world should it chose to change. Yet, individuation is a construct of the self, where the self is built out of ideas of ethics, morals, and morality, both personal and collective. Resisting change and remaining in such a personally ignorant space is at best an impossibility meaning the journey has to be taken, at worst involves the wilful psychological destruction of oneself which I have often described in this book. This personal and collective morality doesn’t always have to mean one is always good in the most basic sense of the word. It means one strips out the narcissistic belief in self-righteousness, replacing it instead with the eternal struggle to do right by our fellow human being, by the planet, by that which we have designated as the other. Within this place we have to be with the moral ambiguity of every decision that we take, with the cost of each decision reached that may harm or benefit self or the other. We stay with the internal struggle to not harm another knowing full well that we occasionally will. We engage with this pain and make the best of each human deed as we can, sometimes turning these into rituals of type, other times reaching out to our cultural, religious, or spiritual leaders as a means of helping us with said emotional and psychological struggle. Supremacy is therefore more than just the privileging of a certain race, gender, sexuality or age. It is the psychological resistance inherent within the ego’s fight against its own shadow. As Lacan (Homer 2007) recognised, in his exploration of our own shadow as the other, there is a natural psychological order of the ego over the shadow, which the ego fights to maintain. This violence though is not without previous, external, form it should be noted. Hegel (1976) noted that in societies any type of progress was not a straight line, that for any seemingly forward movement, there would often confusingly be a return to form, or a previous state before change began anew. Much like the British return to the populism which fuelled the drive towards Brexit, and its leaving of the European Union, the major selling point was around a quest to reobtain a previous, yet now idealised, state of cultural superiority (Boffey, 2018). It is the idealisation of the said state which holds the echoes of systemic superiority I will argue here, as only through the weaponisation of this fantasy projection of perfection can there be a complete rejection of that which is other, which is different. This is no different from our psychological understanding of defences, and in particular the Freudian concept of a repetition compulsion (Jacobs, 2003). This concept involves the unconscious need within most of us to repeat certain behaviour over and over, be it dating the same types of difficult or abusive people, to finding ourselves involved within the same types of destructive situations. The compulsion is driven by an unconscious desire to fully experience the emotional impact of said repetitions, but this drive is

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tempered by our defences. Simplistically put, defences in therapy are built around the idea that we all manage our adaptations in varying ways, ways that have been constructed in childhood, yet means which as adults we often find we have outlived, or that no longer serve us, hence we are in psychological distress (Perry & Bond, 2017). They appear most commonly in therapy through the varying means which the ego employs to resist the change that is coming when said client decides to venture into the consulting room. Systemic superiority here presents as a corruption of the type of narcissism which sits central to the core of any group, culture, or gender. Like the nuclei which sits within the millions of cells within the body, these central points of being all speak to the multiple points of specialness which sit within each aspect of our intersectional identities. Psychological superiority, when driven by a sense of systemic superiority, is the weight of bricks upon the egoic tarpaulin that keeps the ground of our true self in the darkness underneath. It is therefore only by considering these different intersectional bricks, that we begin to release the pressure, and hold, that the ego has upon us in its constant battle against individuation and any sense of personal, and collective, moral authenticity.

Case presentation In previous chapters, whilst it was more pertinent to give voice to the experiences of the others who engaged in my own research, thereby allowing their voices to be heard on these pages, here it was logistically more challenging to ask them to explore their experiences as the other over a longer period of time. This is what led to my undertaking the more heuristic exploration of otherness, as discussed in the introduction to this book. As stated, over several months I explored my own experiences as the other, looking at my dreams, making diary entries, and being interviewed by a colleague (also a psychotherapist) about my experiences as the other. Heuristic work as a research method is designed to use the personal as a gateway into exploring the collective experiences of a phenomenon. It is important here to outline the various stages of a heuristic process (Moustakas 1990) before going into more depth as to how I covered each of these stages in turn for my own particular project. Briefly, these are; • • •

Initial Engagement – which occurs when one formulates one’s question, inviting forward any and all material that relates to it; Immersion – where one is enveloped by the material pertaining to the research question; Incubation – the subtle letting go into the unconscious of all that has been discovered;

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• • •

Illumination – the sudden moments, or the rising up to consciousness, of an understanding of the phenomena; Explication – the refining and re-refining process of that previous understanding; Creative Synthesis – which is the bringing together of all that has been discovered so it can be disseminated.

It should be added that this process of indwelling is no different to the processes philosophers such as Socrates went through whilst exploring his ideas of the world he chose to write about (White, 2006). As well as Jung, who considered exploring the internal world to be an essential component of individuation, Carl Rogers also went on retreat, as did R.D Laing. So, many psychotherapists have used a type of indwelling, or a kind of heuristic exploration of themselves, as a means of exploring and enhancing the skills, techniques, and knowledge within counselling and psychotherapy. The stages of the process of my own march towards individuation presented here are not definitive, but they are designed to both present the difficulties in, in this case, decolonising the self from the strictures of systemic oppression. They are also designed to cross-reference with the intersectional impacts of oppression already presented within this book. Issues of shame, hatred, and guilt, will be explored, as will the death and rebirth of my own humanity, together with the psychological cost and or paybacks hidden within both. The multilayers of my privileges, together with their benefits and hindrances, are herein weighed against aspects of my otherness. These form the complex nature of intersectional identity, casting a bright light on the levels of internalised systemic oppression that processes of self-exploration on our counselling and psychotherapy trainings do little to consider, in particular when issues of diversity and otherness are raised within our field. For this exploration, there will be five themes discussed. These are: 1 2 3 4 5

Fear and Death The Acculturated Psyche Unconscious Truth to Power The Union of Opposites Rise of the Ethical Self

The exploration will therefore open with the first of these themes, Fear and Death.

Fear and death Fear of the other basically involves a fear of that which is in our own shadow. For example, as discussed by Marlin (2005) in his exploration of

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the existence of a shadow in his Eurocentric perspective on the transpersonal, his view in his book acting as a gateway to the alchemical exploration of the nigredo stage of alchemy, the first and often most difficult stage in working with an experience of otherness. His idea is key to understanding this first theme. In my going back into my past and considering my experiences as the other, I was always going to encounter difficult, suppressed feelings, emotions that if reconnected with could bring up large amounts of pain or resistance, yet if reintegrated could possibly provide a path towards individuation. It was therefore important to consider a variety of experiences as other, and to be brave enough to dredge up these powerful unconscious feelings. This diary extract was one of my earliest attempts to engage with this difficult material: Diary Extract 1: Saw myself in a meeting today, the only man surrounded by female colleagues. I didn’t feel intimidated, as I might have done in the past, I just felt separate. This time it was a less isolating experience for two reasons; a. I was very intrigued/interested in the topic presented, and b. I feel more confident in this (academic) space (I’m still finding my feet). Time and working out how to be are important as the other. Working out which qualities are needed/acceptable/important given the current situation. As Said (1993) discussed the outsider as an intellectual can be a positive influence on the culture it is excluded from, and negatively because as Benjamin (1998) discusses the outsider often finds it difficult to be with the aloneness of solitude. What is also important here within this statement are my efforts to find a way not to feel in deficit to the majority within that academic space, a perspective the other can often be cast into via the power struggle between the privilege and the other. This is a common theme for the other, this sense that as other they perceive themselves as less than, and talks of a covertly narcissistic element within the other, where there is a comparison with the external to give itself validation, this being a form of centrifugal narcissism as posited by Zondag (2004) where privilege sees itself as having power over others whilst also needing the other to validate its own sense of self. There are also other factors which are important here. First, I am the only black man, in the room, a difference created by my colour, yet it is my interest in the topic being discussed, that keeps me almost at the same level as my peers in my own perception, as if I am resisting this difference. From this diary entry, it is important here to notice two things; first, that the subject/other dyad involves a splitting off of power initially and a projecting of this power onto the majority, and second, that even in these early stages there is a growing sense of awareness that something needs to be regained

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in order for personal growth to occur, with both of these highlighted by my statement, ‘I didn’t feel intimidated, as I might have done in the past, I just felt separate.’ Yet, in other diary entries, there were more obvious occasions where I did feel intimidated. Presenting this example from around the same time brought up a good amount of emotion-based around the idea of being an outsider and what that meant from a shadow perspective: Diary Extract 2: Experienced a real power struggle this week over a difference of opinion to do with a student’s grade. I felt under pressure to submit as I discussed the issue with a white, upper class, woman. Did I feel intimidated? Yes, but only a little, or so I initially thought. Yet, that intimidation and submission led to a sleepless night, and to feeling angry with myself the next day as if I had let myself down – that anger initially went towards my wife before I realised what it was all about really. I displaced it. I then took it to my Supervisor to work out my part in this. I connected to feelings of disempowerment around my father who would always need to win an argument making me submit in the process. Perhaps his anger at being made to submit out in the world led to his need to assert himself at home, making his own son submit beneath him. It reminded me of the dealing with egocentric people who are very anxious really of their own ‘world being destroyed’ if they’re not right or not seen. There is a class difference that has had me come out fighting for this student and it’s bringing out the ‘Warrior’ in me. To submit, one has to suppress something some anger, some natural fire. The cost to me is low mood, depression, anger. The difference with the last topic is there was not an implicit requirement for me to submit. Yet here there is the fear of my being the other, my own otherness provoked by an external experience with a white colleague. My own internalised fear, nay internalised lesson learnt that I should fear the systemic violence of white supremacy, is here driven by a fear that I will be annihilated by the process were I to speak up. This theme then begins to hold echoes of the previous chapter, where silencing therefore becomes the death of an internal sense of self, where it becomes a form of violence against the self, or as Kinouani correctly states, ‘silence thus prolongs harm and extends the initial violence internally and externally by seeking to hide or disappear the violence,’ (2020, p. 1). Symptoms of the cost of this silencing are also emergent out of this second of the two diary entries, as there is a self-awareness of the cost of said submission though, of the low mood and depressive feelings which would result as a consequence. The unconscious anger is also important to note as it is this more instinctual aspect which would have to be suppressed in order for the voice to be silenced. Yet, it is not totally. Instead, it arises out of the

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unconscious during the night, where the ego wakes the writer up in order to prevent or protect himself from the unconscious reality of said experience. As presented in another dream from around this period though, this separation is not just an interpersonal one, it is also intrapersonal, as the early synchronicity of a dream on the same day also suggests: Dream Entry 1: Scene from a dream where I’m in my parent’s house and I’m walking through the corridors on the ground floor. It’s night-time and the lights are on, but as I stand by the stairs to the basement, I see that downstairs is plunged into darkness, so I hesitate to go down. The dream ends with me still at the top of the stairs. The fear here is presented in my reluctance to descend towards my internal other, or my shadow. My hesitation is only fleeting, but the fear of my own ‘inner other’, or that which I do not know about myself, is actually quite powerful, so much so that the dream ends before I go any further. This is a form of resistance to the inner change that is coming and is part of what Jung (1963) speaks of as the initial alchemical stage of the nigredo where there is a moral standstill where all decisions are hampered by indecision. For myself, there was an acknowledgement that change was emergent, and in conjunction with this realisation emerged egoic fear and resistance. There is an approach towards the unknown represented by what might be ‘downstairs’. But it is the last dream of this stage when viewed through an alchemical lens that in its simplicity underlines just how challenging this process was: Dream entry 2: Part of a larger dream where I’m wandering around a block/building with lots of other people. I’m staying in a single room. I come to my room and the middle-aged white man next door helps me to arrange my washing, my clothes, in my room before I honourably decide to help him with his and I have to go next door to do so. In Jungian alchemy, this is a solution dream (Hamilton, 2014). In dreams, within each alchemical process, there will be certain alchemical operations that need to occur as a means of forging, or whittling down, the egoic sense of self in order to facilitate change. One of these is termed solution as it is an operation that occurs with water. In the dream’s selection of a ‘middle-aged white man’ the dream is also highlighting my inauthenticity as I am tied to privilege as presented by the white man, together with the metaphor of rinsing and washing of my dirty clothes suggesting change is coming. Another interesting aspect of the dream is that I am initially residing in a single room, on my own. A third aspect involves the clothes themselves.

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This is the in-between discussed by Buber (2002) where he argued that the potential for change resided in the interaction between the I and the Thou. For Fanon (2005) though, a process of individuation involves the recognition of how the internalised co-dependent relationship between both aspects of the racial divide function, and how scary it can be to even consider moving beyond this relationship of incomplete opposites. It explores here how the masculinity of the two aspects of myself differ, how they overlap, and the role of power in the relationship. Finally, intersectional theory offers an angle on individuation where the subtlety of the ‘saviourism’ of the white man looking out for my black masculinity actually then opens the doorway towards the next theme in this exploration, The Acculturated Psyche.

The acculturated psyche As stated, the earlier chapters have led us to understand there is a deep unconscious impact to being made the other. Yet given that we simultaneously hold aspects of difference and privilege, we are constantly held within a conflict of opposites, where privilege or otherness battle for supremacy at one time or the other dependent upon the social, familial, cultural, or any other context we are engaged within at said time. Living in an environment of systemic oppression though means one will inevitably be inculcated into a position higher than that of merely holding privilege, or lower than that of just the other. For the other, this internalisation has no other option but to lead towards the submission of self as discussed by Lacan (2003) previously, whilst for those with privilege said internalisation creates a false sense of superiority which is then bolstered into an almost immovable position. It is possible to meander through life unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, the adaptations which keep us in these positions of superiority or inferiority. Yet, for one to grow this externalised experience of oppression has to be recognised internally also, otherwise one is left with the psychological task of pushing Sisyphus’ rock up a hill which doesn’t wish to be conquered. This self-oppression is often only recognised when one wakes up from this enforced slumber, or when the dreams of otherness and oppression become too unbearable to contain any longer. It should also be noted that the previous dream held obvious hints of the saviour, and of internalised supremacy, my dreams and diary entries also spoke of the struggle to acknowledge the levels of inauthenticity which he had slipped dreamlike into. For example, the following diary entry began to say a lot about the impact upon him of being such an outsider, and of noticing the cost of such a submission: Diary Entry 3: What my difference has taught me this week is to be less ‘me’ to some others, less cow-tow-ey, as a means of keeping some happy. I feel like the black slave that has to bow its head to keep ‘massa’ happy

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sometimes. Yet this week my anger has led me to break that shackle, that painful tie. The issue of power has been major this week around difference. It came up in my Heuristic exploration last Friday, where I need to learn to hold a more dignified, separate position of authority at times. Independence and indifference came up during the week as well. I’m thinking that for a person in a power struggle to step back and be indifferent to the other person then shifts the struggle slightly. If I fight for power over you, then I don’t have to feel envy at you, or be jealous of you. The struggle maintains the absence, or distance, from other emotions. Post-structuralists speaks of the ability of the signified to be identified by its relationship to the signifier, yet here we see the marriage of privilege and otherness presented in my words (Belsey, 2002; Carter, 2013; Villet, 2011). Yet whereas there is also a speaking towards the interpersonal otherness, and with it a growing awareness of my resistance towards engaging on a deeper level with my intrapersonal other, this passage also brings with it my intrapersonal other into focus for the first time, and with it an understanding of the inauthenticity that goes with being the compliant other. This idea is important as heuristic work should challenge the researcher to change themselves in the service of science, but as is often the case with heuristic research there is often resistance to such deep change (Johnson, 1993; Sela-Smith, 2002). To complement the diary entries, and as previously hinted at, it was therefore important that I be interviewed every six weeks by an experienced fellow psychotherapist who would challenge my resistances against going deeper, challenging any resistances he may have had to going deeper in understanding this disjointed relationship between privilege and otherness. The first interview was important as it brought visual form to the repressed anger that sat inside of me, a power mentioned in the previous theme as an aspect which had helped him to fit in. As stated in the Methodology chapter, visualisations and drawings were used to facilitate the emergence and understanding of my unconscious other. Out of a visualisation I discovered the image of a Rottweiler which I subsequently drew. I discussed this image, which is a figure 5.1, in the following exchange with my interviewer: It doesn’t look like you are angry. There’s something like an incongruence between the Rottweiler who wants to burst out. Well maybe that’s part of the submission. Because that reminds me of you know, being a bit of a boy when I was a kid and you know, we always got comments on how well presented, how well behaved we were, and all that sort of stuff. Play the role to some degree. But that’s not always how, you know, how I felt underneath that.

INTERVIEWER: DT:

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This inauthenticity the interviewer has picked up here is important as it connects with ideas previously discussed, in order for the other to feel safe, it takes on the role cast upon it. The other therefore plays the echo for the supremacist, reflecting back self-designated superiority. My own extract is of interest as it presents a more historical perspective of this submission, of the child who had been encouraged by his parents to be a certain way in order to not appear at all threatening to the majority. The playing of the role here belies what lay underneath, so it is appropriate here for me to surmise that the Rottweiler was that which was suppressed here in order for the boy to comply with the wishes of his own parents and fit in. Returning to the interview I was then encouraged to pick up a symbol that would represent how I might like to express the power of the Rottweiler, choosing Batman. My experience with Batman was expressed in the following paragraph: It is the darkness of the character that attracts me to it. There is a courage, a courageousness there to put himself out time and time again for the betterment of others. He doesn’t always get it right. I feel quite emotional as I say it. I: For me what I see is the Rottweiler is the raw almost primitive emotion that is a response to being put down, being rendered powerless. It is like fire energy that’s roaring. Whereas it becomes humanised and somehow in the superhero it becomes harnessed for a purpose. DT: Ok which then becomes something which is harnessed by the humanity, by one’s humanity and focused in that. To right wrongs. DT:

The image of the man smiling, and the Rottweiler vibrating speak strongly of the dualistic split that sits central to this theme. The positioning of the image and the symbol here in Figure 5.1 displays my angry desire to devour the Batman, to swallow or suppress him. This is what the other does in order to remain submissive, it suppresses its own power, turning it against that which might be more authentic within itself. The Batman image could also be seen as something narcissistic on my part, a narcissistic fantasy that I can save others, or post colonially via a Freirean lens my adopting the grandiose position of the white saviour is my attempt not to feel in deficit within myself (Straubhaar, 2015). Given that it was my family who forced me to suppress my Rottweiler initially because of their own desire to fit in, all of these positions would make sense. Alternatively, a more alchemical approach to the symbol of the hero suggests that it is necessary to access the qualities within this archetype in order to achieve what the alchemists would term as the ‘unio mentalis’ or the union of the mind and the body (Jung, 1963). For now, though this display of the opposites is an excellent example of how my words, images and symbols highlight my own false humility, an idea echoed from a transpersonal perspective by Walach (2008) who termed this the Moses complex, or the underside of transpersonal

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Figure 5.1 Batman and the Rotweiller.

narcissism, where one sacrifices oneself for the majority. The reverse of this would be where the guru is all-knowing, or where the transpersonal narcissist becomes inebriated on their own grandiosity and tries to negate that which might be deemed the spiritual other; for example, the attempt of religions in the Global North to negate the importance of spiritual beliefs from say more indigenous cultures. The narcissist though is not interested in this creation of meaning but instead brings meaning themselves to any problem or situation. The majority hold meaning for everything, and the other, as presented by this exchange, suppresses that which makes him other, and thereby might lead to the creation of an intersubjective space, and attempts to become the same as the majority in order to fit in. In this context, my reticence to admit to my own inner Rottweiler led to me feeling powerless in the face of the subject, hence the interchange at the meeting in the theme ‘Fear and Death.’ Yet, by admitting to its existence in

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my shadow-other, and seeing how it could be transformed into something positive that could be used for the benefit of others, a roadmap appears where I might now integrate this aspect of my internalised other. The importance of this imagery ties itself back to the earlier chapter, recognising the internalised sense of death that, in this case, black people can often experience when inhabiting a world not their own, or more importantly where they do not feel safe. For many minorities sacrificing of one’s blackness, hiding one’s femininity, changing an ethnic sounding name, covering up one’s disability, are all means of survival. Through the killing off of that which makes us the other, we go through intersecting layers of death daily, weekly, constantly, as we make our way, or manage our way, through the world. Dream entry 3: The scene begins with me driving my car to a hotel. I park up in a space near the entrance and go inside. After I have looked around a bit, I look out of the large window to see that I have left my dog, a brown Labrador, tied to the car. As it is a grey day the dog is laying down underneath lest it rains. A white woman in her 40s with curly hair appears along with two burly white bald men. The woman squats over the car and urinates onto the dog. I am furious and rush outside to rescue the dog, but the two men get in the way, manhandling me roughly. I know they are bigger than me and that I am outnumbered but I fight for my dog as I suddenly wake up. Here the death involves that which is left outside, my instinctual self, self-designated as unsafe to have in a hotel as I travel across whatever land I am travelling through. We also see the adaptation inherent, yet we also see the echoes of the interview where the Rottweiler is swapped for the Labrador. The instinctual though is left abandoned tied to a car, to then be abused by the internalised whiteness in the form of the white woman and the two white male bouncers. Brewster (2020) would see this as symptomatic of the Racial Complex. The difference here in this dream is we see the struggle for authenticity, the fight back, and the powerlessness of unconscious blackness in the face of the dominance of whiteness. These types of intersectional deaths also draw in the idea that there is some type of ideal identity which we all strive towards or are enticed towards. Even the politics of equality is designed to be mean becoming equal with white, middle/upper class, heterosexual, able bodied, men. This is a hugely problematic perspective to hold on equality, and I will argue here is actually the wrong route to follow. Equality should be the right to self-identify, the right to be seen and respected in one’s fullness, without having to hold the projections of the subject, without having to repress that which makes one different as a result. Systemically, equality is not about

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closing the attainment gaps which will be inherent in any grouping be they a culture, gender, or civilisation. At this stage, there were many dreams of this nature, dreams that involved my searching around the basement of my ‘home’ for either another black man, or dreams of my being angry at the repression of others. What these dreams tell me is that my search for understanding the other is a quest to understand myself. This is the beginning of the power of the shadow, as it starts to alert me of its presence. The dreams also alert me to another problem; that in order for there to be any kind of re-integration of the shadow, the ego which is keeping me away therefore has to succumb, or to die. Again, one of the most interesting things about the shadow work presented here is the unconscious’ means of presenting a dream involving difference which encapsulates this death perfectly, like this following dream: Dream entry 4: Scene where I’m out food shopping and I enter a market/grocery store where lots of fruit and veg is on sale. Whilst there I stand on a forklift-trolley and I start to play doing all kinds of tricks with the handle like an acrobat dancing, balancing, bending sliding this way and that. I even see one of my students and we greet each other. As I slide out of the shop though I bump into two oriental men, one slightly plumper, who distracts me whilst his skinnier friend suddenly stabs me in the back of the head with a knife. As I fall to the ground they run off. The first section of the dream, where I am dancing and balancing and showing off is a very grandiose part of myself that desires to be seen and witnessed; an aspect of my narcissistic other. It is important to also consider that this is a nigredo dream, with the underlying alchemical operations of mortification, represented by images and symbols around death, and separation, where the symbols show a separation of some type (Marlan, 2005). Mortification and separation often go together as alchemical operations in this Jungian stage of alchemy, so tying this together with my exploration of difference, in this the dream there is a death by the other, or that which is deemed different or separate. Ultimately, I have to die in order to be reborn, or as Hamilton states, ‘anger in a dream such as this could be our fire nature acting positively in protecting the self and helping us to individuate’ (2014, p. 85). The mind, or the ego, has been split here in order for something new to emerge, and it is also interesting that it is that which I deem different in the dream, the two oriental men, who kill me in order for this process to happen.

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The performance has been termed many ways in varying discourses. For example, the masquerade as discussed by Lacan, Butler, and others denotes the performativity of women designed to meet the fantasies of men, whilst men themselves have been known to find safety in performing or pretending to be certain types of men to meet the ideals of their peers, or the performance of black people when in the realm of those who are white (Brown, 1999; Durkee & Williams, 2013; Grosz, 1993). All of these examples though point to the negative psychological impact of engaging in such environments, and the dream does the same. The violence meted out against my own ego, or my own mind, by those seen as other in the dream, talks of the struggle of the self as it engages in a battle towards reintegration and individuation from the systemic oppression both meted out against it and also internalised as a consequence of living in any such environment. Dream Entry 5: Scene from a longer dream where I’m wandering through some tunnels and as I walk, I’m being followed by a mysterious white man. He’s sort of threatening but is also quite charming with it. At some point I’m aware of something threatening up ahead and as it gets darker, so I slow down, and the other guy overtakes me and is then consumed by this ‘thing.’ He cries out as I overtake him, and the thing takes him over. Systemic oppression by its very nature is seductive. The use of powerplays, the idea of promise, and in this case, the sense of the erotic, all play more subtle parts in enticing the other into a space of submission. Politically, this where the promise of hope lies, where safety, for example, becomes the cost for believing in the hope proffered as a trade-off for obedience (Davids, 2006). Here the internalised power of white over black reveals my own self-oppression. As before though, although based around race, the unconscious oppression of self here uncovers the ease with which systemic oppression works to depress that which is different within all of us, even if it is within varying ways, means, and presentations. It is a rock already rolling down a snowy hillside, almost impossible to stop, and easier just to get out of the way of. Yet, there is hope here in the third entity which devours that which is killing it, and although I might be afraid of it in this dream, its presence is important when moving forward to consider how we might then challenge that which is unconsciously oppressive within us.

Unconscious’ truth to power There are numerous theories which discuss how identity is formed out of the dyad of the subject and other, master and slave, from poststructuralism to mirror stages of psychotherapy, but as discussed in the previous theme,

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this research has led me to ascertain that there is a third force at play for the other, and taking a more Buberian fashion I would term this the Unconscious Thou, which when reintegrated into the other allows it to be more authentic and real, echoing Li’s (2006) more Buddhist perspective where meaning making is dependent upon the thou of the dyad. The dreams and diary entries within this theme held everything from a conflict between myself and other, to a growing awareness of the tension of trying to fit in when in situations where I might have been an outsider. The following diary entry is an excellent example of the growing tension I am discussing here: Diary extract 4: Difference for me has meant ‘compulsion’ this week. Not addiction, just an obsessive and compulsive side that comes up whenever I try to sit with this topic. The compulsion is the empty feeling at the pit of my stomach when I have to engage with the topic of difference, and my own difference. At the Anglo-Brazilian Society tour of the Houses of Parliament on Monday I was again the only black man there, although there were lots of Brazilians and English people there as well, as always. I recall the nod I gave a black security guard, a sign of acknowledgement that we were the only black people present, and also to alleviate my anxiety about being the ‘Other(s)’ in that situation. I feel sad talking about it now from this angle as the nod, the coming together in/for a moment, is a common theme in the black community. First, in this diary entry, I am in the seat of majority power, the Houses of Parliament, and I find myself drawn to the only other black face present. Second, this sense of compulsion I feel is important to acknowledge it is another aspect of being the other that is often overlooked, that of the struggle to hold an identity formed out of two cultures, the tension leading to addictive or compulsive behaviours. It is this type of argument put forward by Moloney et al. (2008) in their study linking acculturation theory to addiction. The tensions are many in this entry though. First, there is my being a part of the Anglo-Brazilian Society, which as a black British man means I am automatically an outsider. Then there is the Society’s visit to the Houses of Parliament, where we are all outsiders paying court to a colonial seat of power and privilege. The last is my own separateness from both groups as the only black man of African descent there in a group of South Americans and Europeans. These intersectional layers of difference, together with my exploration of this topic, left me very much aware of my sense of otherness. This entry is therefore my own acculturated struggle to find an identity within both cultures. It also underlines just how difficult the acculturation process actually is for an individual or a group, why there may well be such a draw to addictive behaviours as a consequence of this reintegration, and how this theme of the tension of opposites is relevant here, suggesting a

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possible route to also understand acculturation as an unconscious struggle to bridge between an egoic identity and a more authentic one. Although this tension in the diary entry is presented from an interpersonal perspective, intrapersonally the tension of opposites is an important rite of passage. As Jung suggests about human beings that it is the ‘tension of the opposites in him, which in its turn tempers and intensifies his personality’ (1954, p. 144), his idea being that through the tension of ego and shadow who we are is developed and forged into something new. I agree with his idea here that this tension, this struggle, was something for me to endure under this theme, as difficult as it may have been here the tension is created between the privilege of the House of Commons, the seat of colonial power, and my own sense of cultural otherness. What was most difficult for me in this theme was to maintain this tension. Ambivalences, avoidances, compulsions, can all seek to sabotage the ability of the other to maintain this position of opposites betwixt which sits the creativity Buber (2002) and Kitaro (1989) speak of in their works. What perhaps gets lost in Jung’s idea about this tension is the difficulty and the pain attached to this process, a perspective acculturation recognises in its numerous studies from cultural perspectives. This struggle of the opposites was therefore not only an interpersonal one, as this following dream highlights: Dream Entry 6: Can’t recall the rest of this dream, but it involves me being attacked by a pack of black dogs who tear the skin off my back as I try to fend them off. I woke up feeling quite low and depressed. The scene reminded me of Churchill’s ‘Black Dog,’ depression. This dream here has many factors. The depressive element speaks of the rising tide within myself that I am resisting waking up to reality. Defences which have been in place for decades and were designed to maintain the acculturated ego structure that has kept me safe within an environment not my own, are being challenged the deeper I delve into this process. Whereas the whiteness of previous dreams has cried out at the internalisation of systemic patriarchal whiteness, the fact that it is my own blackness which attacks me means I can no longer suppress it, that it wishes to be known by myself. Combining their blackness with the fact these are dogs is also relevant, in the combination of their hue as well as in their primitive expression through my unconscious. Dream Entry 7: I’m watching as a young boy in a ‘Middle Eastern’ war zone as he runs along a road and then throws a grenade into a builder’s hut as we run away from it. The scene changes to me on my bunk bed in my parent’s house, my old bedroom. I’m with two young women and I’m talking about my father having bought the house in the 1950s before

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he kept it as it is and how it is too expensive to change now. The other woman has rescued a stray puppy and placed it in a box on the floor. It starts to panic scratching at the sides of the box. It then escapes and attacks the girl, before throwing her aside. Then it drags the other girl off the bed. She is screaming so I grab a long window hook (from work) and beat the dog as it grows, and its nails become unbelievably long. It then rugby tackles me, and I wake up! This dream aggressively presents the internal unconscious conflict ensuing in this process of reintegration; from the conflict in the warzone in the first section of the dream, where I am/with the other at war, to the conflict to keep the puppy (otherwise known as my shadow) at bay with a long staff, a very phallic symbol representing my ego. Yet again though, this shadow/ puppy wants to be known so it grows and attacks me, my ego’s only defence being to wake me up. This is the unconscious’ attempt to re-integrate projected shadow aspects discussed by von Franz (1980) in her book on the topic, where she clearly states that whole cultures would need to undergo this same process of shadow recollection in order for them to grow and proceed. The diary entry and the dreams together are excellent examples of the tensions and conflicts present in this theme and speak clearly of the unconscious rising from my efforts to reintegrate my own shadow parts in order to rediscover my authenticity. After a fashion, the rage of the shadow in the instances needs to be considered as an important factor in any intersectional individuation process of separation from one adaptation to oppression. The pushing to one side of the primitive within myself here when growing up most probably has now led to a gradual coming back together of this aspect, these invaluable cultural, racial, gendered, and other aspects of self which would enable me to function more fully within a world of systems of oppression. Yet to do this there has to be a process of conjuntio, the opposites now known must collide. In Jungian terms, it is my contra-sexual other, which brings in the lost part of myself, the puppy. Many theorists would assume that the symbolic nature of it fighting with me and making me wake up could be best understood as my conscious mind resisting said awakening, employing my unconscious defences to keep me acculturated and small. My own perspective is that this dream, and the shadow, the instinctual aspect which is so prominent within it is actually forcing me to wake up from my acculturated slumber. It is this second option which is therefore explored further in the next theme, Union of Opposites.

Union of the opposites This important theme actually started to emerge during the third month of this study into my own process as the other. During the last three months of

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this study, I recorded 18 conjuntio dreams of varying types. Conjuntio in this context involves the union of contrasexual opposites as a symbol for the intrapersonal reintegration of aspects of the self, which have emerged out of the unconscious. From a more Jungian perspective, the idea behind the anima is that only by working with the shadow material of a client could there then be any opportunity for the client to reconnect with their true sense of self (Jung, 1957, 1990). Although ideas about the anima and animus have been criticised for years as being anything from sexist to outmoded (von Raffay, 2000), what is important here though is to notice the symbolic nature of this theme; that I, as a man, am reconnecting with that which is my first, and therefore unconscious other, presented symbolically by the feminine. To offer an example of the types of dreams during this stage, they were simple and said extraordinarily little, their frequency being the important aspect here: Dream Entry 8: Scene where I’m with two Indian ladies. They are taking me somewhere and I get into the back of a car with them one whilst the other drives. We then stop by the wall somewhere and all get out. We then start to walk to our next venue. (Note: there is an erotic feel to this dream, but I’m also quite relaxed in the back of the car) Dream Entry 9: Scene where I’m in a room with X and we have just made love. She is stood beside a red wardrobe, so I go to hug/embrace her. I feel as if we won’t have sex again for a while although I want to tomorrow (?). Although, these dreams are hugely important they were not the only means by which this union was achieved during this theme as dreams of celebration were also apparent. It is also important to notice that within this theme there are fewer presentations of the themes from the other chapters, as there is less of an avoidance of being the other and there is an acceptance of the shadow side of being the outsider. The major symbolic reference point for this theme though emerged out of the third self-interview, where not only did we identify the split between my unconscious other and the other, but I was gifted a momentary experience of the union of these opposites. As the actual extract is too long to present here, the interview presented a progression through some of the earlier themes explored. First, there was a progression from my egoic need to separate myself from the enormous star before me into the form of a spaceman watching from afar, echoing the very first theme of ‘descent’ and the reluctance to engage with my own sense of otherness. Then second, that in confirmation of one of the ideas presented in the methodology, it is only via an investigation of the bodily experience of being the other that one can bypass the restrictions placed upon oneself

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by the mind (Lowen, 2013). Lastly, the other is presented as being one part of a greater whole, with its own section containing nothing, emptiness, and solitude. For this exercise though, this split was presented as a star in two, presented below (Figure 5.2). The interview continued with an exploration of each of these pieces of the star, the first being the ‘Empty’ side: Hmmm my teeth just momentarily shook, and my blood starts to race. My right hand is tingling, part of my right hand is tingling and …. How very odd. There’s nothing here. It is like a big white space with nothing in it. All the possibilities were over here in this space. Oh, that’s very tricky. It is an empty space. I do not like this. It could be a room, it could be whatever, something like a hangar if you like, an aircraft hangar, but it is just empty. And I am walking through it. All the lights are on. INTERVIEWER: What’s the feeling? DT: It is odd, it is lonely. Small. I’m in this enormous space. DT:

Here I am experiencing my otherness. I sit in isolation, but opposite me on the other side of the ‘star’ is a world full of ‘things’. This is therefore another exploration of the other discussed throughout this chapter with

Figure 5.2 The dualistic split.

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its absence of anything; it is a void space. There is a physical discomfort in the ‘shaking of the teeth’ that comes with having to acknowledge this space within myself. This is a key part to an exploration of one’s experience as the other, that the other has to acknowledge its own otherness and recognise that an avoidance of this is a means of avoiding the unconscious absence of a single fixed identity, and an acceptance of the never-ending sense of potential. Any combining of privilege and otherness involves the psychic union of all that is and all that one is not. The everything is the part of me which holds the privilege, whilst the warehouse is that space where I am most comfortable, where I exist least of all, where there is an absence of self. The ships on the busier side of the image also speak of power, richness, a destination, travel, journeys, everything that I would have forced to one side, all the potential I would have repressed, in order to allow myself the safety of acculturation. The other important aspect here, although not directly presented in this image, is the use of colours to the left, emphasising the vibrant nature of my own unconscious privilege, versus the barren tonality of the empty warehouse to the right. The interviewer took me further into my exploration of this empty space by becoming it, by sitting within this enormous space, before encouraging me to do the same with the space full of things. Together, these spaces transformed themselves into an endless ocean, presented as Figure 5.3:

Figure 5.3 The endless sea.

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The importance of this intrapersonal transformation from the duality of just being one side of the star to being both parts in an interconnected sea should not be underestimated. It is at this point, for the first time, that a sense of Unity is achieved in this process. With it came a sense of peace and a recognition of the emotional, and experiential, differences between unity and duality as I state: It is wonderful to look at. It is really quite powerful, but it is based on, yeah, the struggle to be witnessed. To feel… to feel alive, is the best way I can put it. Whereas in my space at the centre of this ocean, this endless ocean, it is different. I am alive because I am everything in this space. There is no trying, it just is. In a way, yeah. I think that’s what drives the struggle. That’s what drives them from that earliest experience we talked about of not being seen. And yet if you are everything, then you don’t need to be seen, because you automatically are. It is that paradoxical I guess. The paradoxical relationship between being privilege and otherness is wonderfully put here in my momentary experience of unity. The endlessness of everything and the combining of the two spaces which beforehand were separate have led to a temporary end to the struggle. The statement, ‘if you are everything, then you don’t need to be seen, because you automatically are’, is hugely important here as it speaks of what life might be like without the very human struggle to be witnessed by privilege. Theoretically, in some of his later writings, Kitaro (1989) discusses the paradoxical position of privilege/otherness, where everything and nothing collide and creativity springs from the tension in-between, echoing similar ideas presented by Buber (2002) and within psychotherapy by Winnicott (Praglin, 2006). Where the ‘endless sea’ here is different is that there is no paradox, there is no nothing against which the everything collides. There is only the oneness of everything in that moment. Alchemically, this could also be called the Citrinitas stage, or ‘the marriage of soul with spirit’ (Hamilton, 2014, p. 11), where there is no separate sense of self, where there is only oneness or Unity. At this point, this book begins to meet its aim of proving that a relational perspective towards understanding one’s sense of otherness and privilege as a route towards individuation.

Rise of the ethical self Dream Entry 10: Scene from a long dream I think where I’m in the middle of Talgarth Rd and I’m watching as a group of people and cars come past me in celebration. I’m with several friends, including one guy who is

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cross-dressing, and my brother is to my right. We all wave and cheer the procession onwards as the traffic jam heads West out of the city. The guy in the sky-blue dress behind me asks if he can give me a kiss. I say yes, but with no tongue (dryly), so he kisses me excitedly, smudging his lipstick on me. My brother sighs dryly next to me so we all just continue to watch the procession. The importance of dreams during this final stage should not be understated. Like this dream, there is an unconscious celebration of the completion of a cycle of reintegration. The dream here speaks of this not only in my embracing a trans other in the car but also in the situating of the dream on a specific road I know well from my childhood. Three more linked areas are worth noting within this dream. First, from a more Buddhist perspective the union of opposites is believed to be the goal of Tibetan mysticism (Peters, 1990), but it is important to notice a subtle change in the unconscious material presented within the dreams; that of the man in the dress who I want to embrace whilst I’m sitting in a car during a procession. For Hamilton, this would be ‘the balancing of masculine and feminine aspects in the dreamer – a physical embodiment of the conjunction of masculine and feminine. This is a first step towards the ultimate alchemical goal of the union of soul and spirit’ (2014, p. 212), thereby showing a progression out of the dreams of the last theme where there was more tension as my ego resisted changed. Next, the feminine/contra-sexual other in the dream is actually a symbolic representation of the other, but whilst it is present in the dream, the transsexual fear, or the fear of my more transsexual aspect of my intersectional self, strongly suggests there is still psychological work for me to undertake. This intersectional complex is never complete, it doesn’t end. This is also important as it removes it from the rationalised misunderstanding that this symbol is purely about the socially constructed qualities allocated by psychologists and psychotherapists in their attempt to understand the anima. Thirdly, it is worth noting that I am in a car with all black men, a major contrast to the early dreams of this research where my own colour/difference was often in conflict with, or desiring connection to, the subject. Where this theme is important is in the intrapsychic pushing through of an ego defence against acknowledging my own interpersonal other, to a point where I come into contact with my own intrapersonal other, experiencing a moment of unity as a reward. At this point though, this is not an experience to be repeated in the wider world. It is the interpersonal translation of this experience that fits with the citrinitas, or also an alchemical marriage of matter and spirit, but which then needs to be grounded in the alchemical operation of rubedo, or the coming back

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down to earth. This means a risk for the other though, and it is this risk which is explored in the next dream where in its newfound authenticity the other risks being seen. Dream Entry 11: Scene where I’m in my parent’s house, the lower two floors. It’s night-time and I am about to go to the ground floor and walk outside. But I notice that there are people upon the landing of the 1st floor etc, homeless people who I know all seem to be paying money to the landlord, my father, to sleep there. They’re on park benches, old men and women with children. I’m so angry that I go back downstairs to my parent’s room and I see my father and a whole bunch of other people in his room. I have a real go at him for exploiting these people. I then turn to my mother and brother who look ashamed as I chastise them for not stopping my father from exploiting all of these homeless people from all over the world, especially Eastern Europe. I’m so angry. The scene changes to me sleeping in a bed and a doe/ female deer wants to get in the room and sleep with me, but I try as hard as I can to keep the doe away from me. She then turns into a beautiful woman and I still refuse her, telling her that I don’t want to exploit her. She eventually accepts what I say to her. She’s a nice pretty lady. The colonised self here is the part of me that finds another other to oppress, the Eastern Europeans in this case. My father, the man of the house, the patriarchal figure, most probably symbolically represents the internalised, systemic, oppression, his authority being of primary importance. Yet again though I am angry, and I challenge a non-racial other directly. I am not held back; I go down to meet him. The shift in the scene is also important, as the more instinctual aspect of myself becomes more human in the form of the doe. It becomes an anima figure, a contrasexual other, a figure I can then relate to. It is her humanity in the dream that I am drawn towards, and here in this scene, my morality leads me to reject any sense of exploiting her or objectifying her. This intersectional layering of morality, both for the cultural other, the racial other, my own gendered other, are all interlayered, and removes me from the coloniser, supremacist, patriarchal figures which could dominate, if only in these instances. Also, of interest here, and somewhat paradoxically, the removing of the projections seems to have increased my own anxiety around holding the duality internally. It is as if the purpose of projection is to provide a settled space for the ego, and the return of these projections means the constant questioning and re-questioning of the egoic positioning that has been adopted during a period of sameness.

Individuation, privilege, and otherness  131

In being seen, I am risking of a new type of relationship with the interpersonal other. The other here risks a different type of intimacy, where it is not about myself and my own world, or my defences, but about the other. The other here is not invisible; it is out of the shadows and is being seen, something akin to emerging out of a darkened room and shielding one’s eyes. My research though discusses the difficulties of being only the other, and how when one exits that lonely position one then has to learn how to actually relate to alternative others without the mirrored glasses of a narcissistic projection. The ethical self is therefore the aspect of the dream which brings awareness of the wrongdoing in my unconscious. It recognises and challenges the privilege of my internalized parents and stands up for the oppression of the internalized others. It is there to wake me up to my responsibilities to myself, to shift me from any part which feigns ignorance of the responsibilities I have to my own unconscious other. It is a humanist, marrying the unconscious intersectional opposites of privilege and otherness. This change though is one that would then need to be continually grounded in external experience, answering questions of how do I take up my power in the world? How can I recover these aspects of myself in relationships with other subjects? And how can I continually maintain this quest for a deeper sense of knowing myself accordingly? These questions meaning that the desire to be seen is not over, but is ongoing, is intersectional, and repeats itself time and time again.

Summary Whilst this exploration of my own experiential process has involved the exploration of my own prejudices, together with how I have been influenced, and am an influence upon, the systemic oppressive environment we all exist within, there is one aspect of this exploration which I need to acknowledge here. In using Jungian ideas, and referencing the works of Carl Jung himself, it would be hugely problematic of me not to acknowledge his prejudices sexism and racism. From the problematic ideas of anima and animus archetypes being the contrasexual other of men, to his views on the natives in Africa whilst he was gathering ideas around archetypes and myths, Jung the man, and therefore his ideas, have shown themselves to be riddled with the same systemic problems of any other theorist within the realm of psychotherapy (Vaughan, 2019; von Raffay, 2000). This though is an unavoidable result of research. Yet, as one of a new wave of intersectional researchers challenged to utilise and develop methodologies which match the experiences of other communities, be they indigenous methods, creative methods, or method which encourage from the unconscious alternative ideas, results and standpoints will then

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reflect the complex multi-layered environments we all live within both internally and externally (Botha, 2011; Chambers et al., 1903; De Villiers & Linder 2017; Harding, 2004). This chapter is reflective of this process. Although from one perspective the overlap with the ideas of my participants is an essential means in understanding the relevance and difference of the unconscious processes that otherness, and privilege, go through in their parallel paths towards individuation and reunion. The shame and humiliation of my dog being urinated on, for example, to the inner ethnic aspect of my Self which arose out of recognising my own internalised dehumanisation at the hands of internalised whiteness and patriarchy, and others. Understanding and containing this intersectional complex is the only means of finally helping those who feel disadvantaged, or those with privilege who wish to challenge their unconscious superiority, to move beyond this unconscious power the opposing aspects have upon our psyche. This internal resolution alters our external experience. Without this knowledge, we are truly no more than Sisyphus pushing an intersectional rock up the hill of supremacy towards a mirage of equality.

References Belsey, C. (2002). Poststructuralism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Benjamin, J. (1998). Shadow of the other. Routledge. Boffey, D. (2018). Empire 2.0: The fantasy that’s fuelling Tory divisions on Brexit. Guardian Online. November 1. Botha, L. (2011). Mixing methods as a process towards indigenous methodologies. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 14(4), 313–325. Brewster, F. (2020). The racial complex: A Jungian perspective on culture and race. Routledge. Brown, J. A. (1999). Comic book masculinity and the new black superhero. African American Review, 33(1), 25–42. Buber, M. (2002). Between man and man. Routledge. Carter, R. E. (2013). The Kyoto school: An introduction. Suny Press Ltd. Chambers, L. A., Jackson, R., Worthington, C., Wilson, C. L., Tharao, W., Greenspan, N. R., Masching, R. Pierre-Pierre, V., Mbulaheni, T., Amirault, M., & Brownlee, P. (2017). Decolonizing scoping review methodologies for literature with, for, and by indigenous peoples and the african diaspora: Dialoguing with the tensions. Qualitative Health Research, 28(2) 175–188. Davids, M. F. (2006). Internal racis, anxiety and the outside world: Islamophobia. Organizational and Social Dynamics, 6, 63–85. De Villiers, M., & Linder, J. (2017). Narrative inquiry and the process of individuation: Bring spirit into matter. Transpersonal Research Colloquium. Prague, Czech Republic: EUROTAS. Du Bois, W. E. (1903). The souls of black folk. Amazon Classics.

Individuation, privilege, and otherness  133 Durkee, M. I., & Williams, J. L. (2013). Accusations of acting white: Links to black students’ racial identity and mental health. Journal of Black Psychology, 41(1), 26–48. Edinger, E. F. (1995). The mysterium lectures: A journey through C.G.Jung’s mysterium coniunctionis. (J. D. Blackmer (Ed.)). Inner City Books. Fanon, F. (1959). A dying colonialism. Penguin Limited. Fanon, F. (2005). Black skin, white mask. (M. Silverman (Ed.)). Manchester University Press. Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness. Sheed and Ward. Grosz, E. (1993). Merleau-Ponty and irigaray in the flesh. Thesis Eleven, 36(1), 37–59. Hamilton, N. (2014). Awakening through dreams: The journey through the inner landscape. Karnac Books Ltd. Harding, S. (2004). The feminist standpoint theory reader. Routledge. Hegel, G. (1976). Phenomenology of spirit. Oxford University Press. Homer, S. (2007). Jacques Lacan: Routledge critical thinkers (Kindle Edition). Routledge. Jacobs, M. (2003). Sigmund Freud - Key figures in counselling and psychotherapy. (2nd ed.) Sage Publications. Johnson, R. A. (1993). Owning your own shadow: Understanding the dark side of the psyche. Harper Collins Publishers. Jung, C. G. (1954). The development of personality: Papers on child psychology, education, and related subjects. Princeton University Press. Jung, C. G. (1963). Mysterium coniuntionis. (2nd ed 1977). Princeton University Press. Jung, C. G. (1968). Analytical psychology: Its theory and practice. Vintage Books. Jung, C. G. (1990). The undiscovered self. Princeton University Press. Jung, E. (1957). Anima and animus. Spring Publications Ltd. Kalff, D. M. (1991). Introduction to sandplay therapy. Journal of Sandplay Therapy, 1(1), 1–4. Kinouani, G. (2020). Racial trauma, silence and meaning. Race Reflections, 1. February 7, 2020 https://racereflections.co.uk/2019/04/20/racial-trauma-silenceand-meaning/. Kitaro, N. (1989). Last writings: Nothingness and the religious worldview. (D. A. Dilworth (Ed.)). University of Hawaii Press. Lacan, J. (2003). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. (J.-M. Rabate (Ed.)). Cambridge University Press. Li, X. (2006). Becoming Taoist I and Thou: Identity-making of opposites. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 3(2), 193–216. Lowen, A. (2013). The language of the body. The Alexander Lowen Foundation. Marlan, S. (2005). The black sun: The alchemy and art of darkness. Texas A&M University Press. Memmi, A. (1974). The colonizer and the colonized. Souvenir Press. Moloney, M., Hunt, G., & Evans, K. (2008). Asian American identity and drug consumption: From acculturation to normalization. Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse, 7(4), 37–41. Moustakas, C. (1990). Heuristic research design, methodology and applications. Sage Publications.

134  Individuation, privilege, and otherness Perera, S. B. (1986). The scapegoat complex: Toward a mythology of shadow and guilt. Inner City Books. Perry, J. C., & Bond, M. (2017). Addressing defenses in psychotherapy to improve adaptation. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 37(3), 153–166. Peters, L. G. (1990). Shamanism: Phenomenology of a spiritual discipline. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 21(2), 115–137. Praglin, L. (2006). The nature of the ‘in-between’ in D. W. Winnicott’s concept of transitional space in Martin Buber’s Das Zwischenmenschliche. Universitas, 2(2), 81–89. Said, E. (1993). Representations of an intellectual lecture 2: Holding nations and traditions at bay. Reith Lectures (pp. 1–8). BBC. Sela-Smith, S. (2002). Heuristic research: A review and critique of Moustakas’s method. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 42(3), 53–88. Straubhaar, R. (2015). The stark reality of the ‘white saviour’ complex and the need for critical consciousness: A document analysis of the early journals of a Freirean educator. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 45(3), 381–400. Vaughan, A. G. (2019). African American cultural history and reflections on Jung in the african diaspora. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 64(3), 320–348. Villet, C. (2011). Hegel and Fanon on the question of mutual recognition: A comparative analysis by. The Journal of Pan African Studies, 4(7), 39–51. von Franz, M. L. (1980). Projection and re-collection in Jungian psychology. Open Court Publications. von Raffay, A. (2000). Why it is difficult to see the anima as a helpful object: Critique and clinical relevance of the theory of archetypes. The Journal of Analytical Psychology, 45(4), 541–160; discussion 561–575. Walach, H. (2008). Narciassism - The shadow of transpersonal psychology. Transpersonal Psychological Review, 12(2), 47–59. White, F. C. (2006). Socrates, philosophers and death: Two contrasting arguments in Plato’s Phaedo. Classical Quarterly, 56(2), 445–458. Zondag, H. J. (2004). Just like other people: Narcissism among pastors. Pastoral Psychology, 52(5), 423–437.

Chapter 6

Afterword

Recently, I read a book on Carl Rogers’ work with a client who was recovering from leukaemia. One of the papers within the book, which was designed to explore how Rogerian therapist might better work with race and culture, openly stated that psychotherapists should not get involved with the world of politics. My issue with a statement like this is that this is not a choice gifted to those who are designated as the other by any majority. A vast number of my clients fit into this category, be they men or women of colour or black, their experience often rooted within systemic oppression, a movement often reinforced by the politics and laws of the state. They have often felt silenced, unseen, told to know their lane, to watch their tone, to cut and shape their hair, to not be too angry, to conform, to integrate, and to be what the centre wants them to be. For example, when David Cameron spoke about the swarms of migrants crossing the Mediterranean he did so in an attempt to mobilise his political base against the immigrant other (2015). The political fallout for those who would have made it into the United Kingdom would have been that they would have been vilified, ostracised, stereotyped, hated, attacked, murdered, or many more things derived out of the need for a political other. In this example, and in many others which we all know, the political is used as a rod to beat, or cajole, the other. What is often misunderstood, is that for the other this political rod then becomes internalised. Yet, the last days of writing this very volume have coincided with a political shift unlike any other during my lifetime. First, there was the Covid-19 crisis, which quickly uncovered the disparate impact of the worldwide pandemic upon minorities across the world (Phe, 2020). A close second came the murder of George Floyd by policemen in Minneapolis, his death leading to protests not only in the United States but across the world including here in the United Kingdom (BBC News, 2020). Although rooted within the realm of counselling and psychotherapist, this book is therefore a counter to this conscious and unconscious abuse of the psyche and the self and is very much the first salvo in the war for the words of the other. This book is as much driven by the social sciences as it

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is by its recognition of the impact of the political upon the other within society. This is emphasised by the more recent writings of important intersectional theorists. In her immensely important work on the topic, Hill Collins (2019) saw intersectionality as a metaphor most beneficial when exploring the complexity of power dynamics within socially unequal environments. As Hill Collins also argues, intersectionality is also an important heuristic language, built out of the experiences of those who sit on the outside, in the margins, whose voices are often silenced by those who sit in the middle of any discourse around difference, diversity, privilege, and otherness. This important distinction brings intersectionality into the realm of Standpoint theory (Harding, 2004) with the idea being to present a more nuanced understanding of human experience. An intersectional approach could also be seen as being phenomenological in that it provides social sciences, and therefore counselling and psychotherapy, with another perspective from within which one can understand the complexities of human interactions and experiences. As explored within this book, this metaphor goes a stage further. The experiences of my participants, and my own dreams, explore the complex nature of this intersectional metaphor through a language closest to its origin. This language is not literal, it is not confined by the limitations of words; it is one utilising the unconscious nuanced complexities of a language which moves us beyond the mental and into the symbolic, a more powerful language. These repressed, unconscious experiences of oppression, and of our own oppressiveness, which we alternate through whilst enduring and living within systemic oppression when presented through the lens of metaphor and creativity, show how deeply rooted they are within our psyche. They show how powerful the influence is of systemic oppression upon us; they show how violent we are against those we deem to be the other and our own shadow sense of otherness; and they show how aggressively we hang on to our privilege for ourselves and for our egoic sense of self as we attempt to fix our identity into some type of rigid position. This book has therefore unpacked a great deal around the experience of being the other, and of holding privilege. Yet, whilst the aim of this book has offered an exploration of privilege and otherness through an intersectional lens, this book is not an attempt to offer definitive definitions of how to approach and work with difference, diversity, privilege, and otherness. This book is designed to be as much of a starter point for a deeper, more wide ranging exploration of the importance of recognising and understanding power dynamics in counselling and psychotherapy, as it is to present the first embers in recognising the Janus’ faced marriage between privilege and otherness. It is also important to recognise that whilst I have done my utmost to remain fully intersectional in my explorations of privilege and otherness, there is an obvious leaning towards issues of race, culture, and to a lesser extent gender, within these writings. On pondering this point, what I have

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realised is that whilst many will see this as a flaw in my writing here, what I believe it speaks towards is the unconscious difficulty, the ripe tension, between being fully intersectional and holding power and its web of complexities in the palm of one’s hand, and an egoic attempt to understand and see these complexities from within just a few strands of this immense web. This is one of the major practical issues with any intersectional approach, in that practitioners will unconsciously gravitate back towards their own primary, and/or secondary, forms of otherness, offering any exploration from their own particular lens. This though is not a flaw in the metaphorical idea of intersectionality, rather it allows for more than just a singular voice to explore this web, opening the doorways for counsellors and psychotherapists who are feminists, LGBTQ, disabled theorists, or hold some other type of minority position the chance to fill out this tapestry. The hope is that one day, far down the long roads of time, we have a complete understanding of how an intersectional approach aids counsellors and psychotherapist in fully understanding the power dynamics when understanding issues of privilege and otherness. Only with a broader range of intersectional counsellors and psychotherapists, and of those who are actively interested and engaged with the politics of systemic oppression and how they relate to the power dynamics in our consulting rooms, do we have any chance of addressing and working with a wider range of clients some of whom already feel unable to access the work we do because of said power imbalances. For example, this opening chapter could be, in fact should be, followed up by works on the role that supremacy plays in the world of psychotherapy. Whilst I have touched upon this subject in this volume, and as it is a subject I have written out elsewhere linking this to narcissism, it is essential that counselling and psychotherapy consider the systems of supremacy and their link to the constructions of the collective and individual ego (D.  Turner, 2018; D. D. L. Turner, 2018). This would be especially important to observe as it would allow majority and minority counsellors and psychotherapists the opportunity to understand how supremacy leaves many clients feeling unheard, unseen, dismissed, manipulated, disagreed with, or feeling they have to adapt to the unprocessed supreme will of the therapist. I have already shown here that this adaptation can be painful for clients when we look at privilege and otherness. My fear is a failure to add into the mix the intersectional layers of supremacy and domination leads to an avoidance of the true horror of human existence; where leaders lead, and followers follow in chains, both literally, symbolically, and unconsciously.

References Collins, P. H. (2019). Intersectionality as critical social theory. Duke University Press. Harding, S. (2004). The feminist standpoint theory reader. Routledge.

138 Afterword Public Health England. (2020). Disparities in the risk and outcomes from COVID-19. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-review-ofdisparities-in-risks-and-outcomes Turner, D. (2018). Privilege, shame and supremacy. Therapy Today, June, 30–33. Turner, D. D. L. (2018). You shall not replace us! White supremacy, psychotherapy and decolonisation. Journal of Critical Psychology Counselling and Psychotherapy, 18(1), 1–12. Unknown. (2015). David Cameron: “Swarm” of migrants crossing Mediterranean. BBC News. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33714282 Various. (2020). George Floyd death. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ topics/cv7wlylxzg1t/george-floyd-death

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures. Abberley, P. 56 ableism 21 acculturated psyche 115–121 Adams, R. 36 adaptation 105 Afrocentric cultures 26 Alexandrowicz, C. 79 ‘American Dream’ 28 Anderson, S. K. 41 Andrews, K. 23 Angelou, Maya 67 anti-otherness 80 Aquinas, Thomas 73 Beauvoir, S. de 33, 49 Benjamin, J. 75, 112 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 84 Bhopal, K. 23, 24, 32, 80 Biewen, J. 23, 24 black identity 1, 2 Black Issues in the Therapeutic Process 6 Black Lives Matter movements 5 blackness 1 Blytheway, B. 73 Boffey, D. 76 Bradshaw, J. 55 Brewster, F. 108, 119 Buber, M. 29, 59, 63, 115, 123, 128 bullying 81–82 Butler, J. 27, 33, 95 Cameron, David 135 Camus, A. 90 Capodilupo 10 Carbado, D. W. 20 Case, K. A. 40

case presentation 110–111 centrifugal narcissism 60 Chakrabarti, N. 48 Chapman, T. K. 80 collective ego 106 Collins, Hill 136 Conran, M. B. 51 Corder, D. 81 countertransference 52 Cox, M. 13 Cratsley, K. 78 Crenshaw, Kimberle 4, 19, 38 cross-cultural awareness 26 cultural annihilation 96 cultural awareness: of difference, diversity, and otherness 6 cultural identity 52, 86; unconscious death of 89 cultural psychological inflation 34 Damaskos, P. 21 Davies, Dominic 7 Davis, K. 19 death 84, 93, 119; and fear 111–115; and intersectional identity 94–99; theorising 84–94 dehumanisation 9, 10, 91 de la Boetie, E. 28, 52, 95 Deleuze, G. 63 de-scapegoating oneself 108 DiAngelo, Robin 7 difference 1–14, 21, 93; bullying of 81; cultural awareness of 6 disability hate crime 56 discrimination 49 diversity 1, 2, 5, 8, 14, 19, 20, 22, 38, 41, 98, 111; cultural awareness of 6

140 Index Dottolo, Andrea L. 7 double consciousness 95, 105 Du Bois, W. E. 51, 95, 105 Duffell, N. 35 effemiphobia 79 egoic self 86 Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) 18 emotions 66 Eros 84, 85 ethical self 128–131 existentialist thinking 30 Fanon, F. 27, 39, 91, 107, 115 fear: and death 111–115; of death 96 Femicide Census of 2018 72 Few-Demo, A. L. 20 von Franz, M.-L. 12, 29, 124 Fredrickson, B. L. 79 Freire, P. 106, 108 Freud, S. 24, 54, 58, 84, 85 gay conversion therapy (GCT) 18 Gay shame 54 Gerhardt, J. 85 Gilligan, C. 27 Global North 23, 32, 40, 42, 71, 73, 76, 118 Goltz, D. B. 21 grandiosity 61 Hall, S. 57 Harrison, K. 79 hate crimes 48, 51, 65 hatred 47; internalisation of 64; and the other 47–52; in therapy 63–67 Hegel, G. 27, 39, 107, 109 Heidegger, M. 90 Herk, K. A. 40 heteronormativity 27 heuristic epistemology 13 heuristic methodology 14 heuristic work 110 homophobia 10 Hunter, S. 54 identity politics 2 indirect bullying 82 individuation 106; versus psychological supremacy 107–110 institutional racism 10 interconnectedness 5 interpersonal otherness 116

interpersonal prejudices 10 intersectional identity 65; and death 94–99 intersectionality, defining 18–23 intersectional marriage 38–41 intersectional privilege 17–42, 63, 64 intersectional theory 20, 94, 115 Islamophobia 64 Jean, E. 25 Jung, C. G. 12, 14, 34, 60, 67, 86, 100, 106, 107, 114, 123, 131 Kalff, D. M. 106 Kaschak, Ellyn 7 Kaufman, W. 90 Keaney, M. 34 Kierkegaard, S. 91 King, Martin Luther 22, 47 Kinouani, G. 113 Kitaro, N. 123, 128 Klein, Melanie 49, 50 Kristeva, J. 75 Lacan, J. 85, 109, 115 Lacanian approach 58, 62 Laing, R.D. 111 Lee, Spike 4 Lershnerr, Eric 47 Levinas, E. 29, 91 LGBTQ communities 5–8, 18, 21, 32, 33, 54, 79, 81 Li, X. 122 Lorde, A. 76 Lowen, A. 12 MacNicol, J. 73, 74 Malcolm X 4, 22, 47 Marlan, S. 99 Maxwell 64 McKenzie-Mavinga, Isha 7 Memmi, A. 27 Mereish, E. H. 21 Merleau-ponty, M. 12 #MeToo movement 5, 24 microaggressions 80–83, 89, 94 Middleton, V. A. 41 modern political ideas 58 Moloney, M. 122 morality 109 narcissism 54, 60, 78; and othering 57–62 narratives 4

Index 141 Nash, J. C. 20 Neal, Charles 7 oppressions 5, 12, 79; of disability 56; psychotherapy of 8–12; understanding 9 otherness (the other)/othering 1, 17, 47–57, 90, 100, 107, 111, 127, 136; cultural awareness of 6; intersectional marriage of 38–41; and narcissism 57–62 ‘Other Persona’ 67 Ovid 99 Owen, David 34 Parks, Rosa 5 perfectionism 55 personal afterlife 72 Pines, M. 54 political correctness 22 political weaponisation 76 power 9–12, 21–23, 33–36, 61–64, 108–114, 116–118 prejudices 1, 7–10, 24, 36, 51, 52, 62, 64, 73, 131 privilege 2–5, 37, 127; and death 72–78; defining 23–26; gift of 26–31; intersectional marriage of 38–41; in psychotherapy 84–94; and supremacy 31–37 Privilege, Shame and Supremacy 8 psychic opposition 13 psychological superiority 110 psychological supremacy: versus individuation 107–110 psychological traumas 98 racial disparity 17 racial identity 108 racial privilege 26 racism 21 Radley, Boo 17 repetition compulsion 109 Richardson, L. 56 Rogers, Carl 111, 135 Rowlands, M. 91 Runnymeade Trust report 10 Said, E. 97, 112 Samuels, E. 25 sarcasm 81, 82 Sartre, J. 90 Scarman Report 53 Schore, A. N. 53

Schrenk-Notzing, Albert von 18 Second Sex 33 self-destruction 94 self-hatred 55, 57, 100 self-identification 4 self-identity 96 self-objectification 79 self-oppression 115 self-othering process 58, 63, 67, 79 self-righteousness 109 self-shame 55, 57 sense of sadness 88 Shamans 30 shame 47, 61; and the other 52–57; in therapy 63–67 Spivak, G. 61 stereotypes 2, 3 Sue, D. W. 80–81 superego 67 superiority 63–67 supremacy 31–37, 67, 96, 97, 106, 109 systemic oppression 11, 12, 121, 136 systemic superiority 110 Thanatos 84, 85, 89, 93 Therapeutic Perspectives on working with Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Clients 7 Thielgaard, A. 13 Tibetan mysticism 128 ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ 17 Trump, Donald 5, 35 U-Mackey, A. 81 unconscious privilege and otherness (in dreams) 112, 116, 120–129 unconscious reality 114 unconscious truth, power 121–124 union of opposites 124–128 visualisation 12, 13 Walach, H. 117 whiteness 62, 63, 80, 97 Whiteness and White Privilege in Psychotherapy 7 White Supremacy 96 Winnicott, D. W. 49, 66, 128 Wurmser, L. 54 Xavier, Charles 47 Zingsheim, J. 21 Zondag, H. J. 60, 112