A well-meaning analyst’s politics can itself produce ethnocentric clinical practice

Evidence

Ironically it may have been Sachs’s own political identification with the cause of Black Liberation, his desire to free his patient from his neurotic entanglements so he could fully participate in the struggle to emancipate his own people, that led him to both assimilate the distinctive features of African Oedipus, as described by Ortigues, to a Eurocentric model and to foreclose that space of uncertainty and unknowing where a proper working through of cultural differences might proceed in the conduct of the As these examples show, there are “family resemblances” between different Oedipal forms but also crucial differences. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1366

Categorization

• XREF: A striking reversal — progressive political commitment driving the very Eurocentrism it sought to dismantle — connects to the reader’s interest in how well-intentioned frameworks disguise their own biases (cf. the Islamophobia/silence material).