Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy

Mockingbird

Dwight Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000340396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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.

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.

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 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.

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 post-graduate 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 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abstract
• 1 Why another book on difference?
• 2 Intersectional privilege and the other
• 3 Hatred, shame, and the unconscious other
• 4 Death of the other
• 5 Individuation, privilege, and otherness
• 6 Afterword
• Index