Structural Racism Considered: The Women’s Therapy Centre

Abstract

Psychoanalytic training institutes are not exempt from being part of structural racism, that is, the ways society at large has been developed to uphold and maintain White supremacy using social, cultural, and political institutions. Ibrahim X. Kendi’s tome, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, outlines how racist ideas have proliferated throughout the history of the United States to ensure structural inequality. Psychoanalytic training institutes are not exempt from being part of this structural racism. Such racism can be seen in a number of ways, including who originated and runs the institute, the location, tuition, supervision, and other ways in which exclusivity is systemic. I will examine these areas as they are reflected at The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute in New York City.

Keywords:

• institutional racism
• psychoanalytic training
• Whiteness
• anti-racism
• analytic exclusivity

Notes

1 This reminds me of the historical shameful role that psychiatry played in maintaining and justifying slavery. In 1851, Dr. Samuel Cartwright, in The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Review, coined the ‘diagnosis’ “drapetomania” to describe a “disease of the mind” (p. 707) in which runaway slaves had an irresistible urge to run away from their owners. Cartwright wrote: “…awe and reverence must be extracted from them” (Negro slaves), or they will despise their master, become rude and ungovernable and run away (p. 708).” See this document for a particularly egregious piece of this country’s racist history.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joanne Clark

Joanne Clark, LCSW, did her postgraduate training in feminist relational psychoanalytic psychotherapy at The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute (WTCI). She pursued a specialty in Eating and Body Image Issues with the WTCI. She has been on the diversity committee for 15 years and was on the board of the WTCI for 6 years. She is a clinical supervisor and maintains a private practice in New York City.