Psychoanalytic bracketing of external reality can pathologize valid black patient experience

Evidence

The analytic epoche is an essential device of clinical treatment, but it can also lead to abusive interpretations. A frequent example is the way transference resistance on the part of black patients towards white analysts (which frequently focuses on differences of color or culture) is regarded by the analyst as arising from purely internal instinctual sources, rather than as a carryover, maybe inappropriate, from valid external social experience. Clearly such an approach may do great damage and jeopardize the therapeutic outcome; but the epoche has even more dire consequences when it is extrapolated from the consulting room and applied as an epistemological principle for explaining racism in the society outside. Yet this is just what Freudian metapsychology attempts to do. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1269

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: how a clinical technique — bracketing external reality to isolate internal dynamics — becomes an epistemological weapon when extrapolated to explain social racism.