Speaker:  Sunil Bhatia, MEd, PhD 

Case Presentation:  Margy Sperry, PsyD, MFT 

Discussant:  Roger Frie, PhD, PsyD, RPsych 

Moderator and Interlocutor:  Annette Richard, MPs 

Despite our best intentions to own and reflect on the role that the therapist’s subjectivity plays in the therapeutic process, recognizing the values and assumptions that are part and parcel of our embeddedness in particular socio-cultural-political contexts is inherently difficult. This panel examined the ways that both members of the therapeutic dyad may be blind to these assumptions and values including those that are also associated with the culture of psychoanalysis, and Self Psychology in particular.

Our distinguished guest speaker in Plenary II, Sunil Bhatia, tells us how his personal and professional history led him to challenge “psychology’s claims of universalism and its refusal to acknowledge history, culture, and politics”. He organizes his talk around three very ambitious questions while warning us of the necessary partialness and incompleteness of his answers. The questions are the following: 1) How has Euro-American psychology as a dominant force supported colonization and racialized models of self and human development? 2) How do we “decolonize” and decenter particular language, ideas, symbols, and “acculturation” narratives that reflect and perpetuate dominant Euro-American values? 3) How can we co-create, share, imagine a “decolonized” therapeutic/clinical context?

Bhatia’s effort towards a decolonization of psychology focuses on “examining our own power and shedding light on the ways we are complicit in creating the very systems we seek to change”. It involves understanding and documenting the process of colonization and how it impacted people, an attempt to reframe the damaging colonial discourses of selfhood. He shows us that even though colonialism may be long gone, coloniality is still very much alive in the Euro-American ideologies, power and value systems that shape psychological knowledge and the cultural and interpersonal therapeutic encounter.

Addressing the Conference theme, Bhatia asks how we can engage across differences when we have no patterns for relating across differences as equals. He calls us to a “radical orientation of our consciousness” (Kendi, 2019, p. 23) by facing our discipline’s racialized history whereby Euro-American psychology has essentially provided the raw material from which the psychological portraits of the non-Western “Other” have been drawn. He gives us an impressive glimpse at this history through the writings of Stanley Hall, Spencer, and Darwin, but also to one of our main psychoanalytic forebearer, Erik Erikson.

The main body of his presentation focuses on our understanding of migrant selfhood and the acculturation process, and how this term needs to be decolonized. Most of the theories in psychology does not speak about how structural factors such as whiteness and racist American migration laws shapes the acculturation process of migrants of color. He gives us a specific example drawn from his research on the Sikh Diaspora and analyzes how acculturation trajectories and personhood are deeply tied to cultural power and politics of our times. He argues that both psychology and psychoanalysis have largely ignored the explicit ways in which whiteness as privilege, power, and norm shapes the identities of both white people and non-white migrants.

Bhatia concludes by putting forth his vision, drawn from his book, of a transnational cultural/critical psychology which is highly attuned to how human development is shaped by contexts of power, racism, citizenship, coloniality of psychology, whiteness, and marginality. He gives us the example of how psychology’s embrace of colorblind ideology brings about an unbridgeable cleavage between psychology and principles of social justice. He quotes Ibram Kendi (2019) in hoping that decolonization and liberation is possible in our practice and in society, when “the white body no longer presents itself as the American body, the black body no longer strives to be the American body, knowing there is no such thing as American body, only American bodies, racialized by power”.

(Summarized by Annette Richard)

In her clinical presentation, Margy Sperry applies Cushman’s hermeneutic sensibility to demonstrate the ways that therapists’ sociopolitical and economic histories shape the therapeutic process. Taking up Sucharov’s (2019) challenge to “actively engage our histories” in order to see the implications of our situatedness in a particular time and place, she explores aspects of her history that were previously unexamined, including the origins of her family’s socio-economic privilege. Born and raised in Southern California, Sperry details the links between her family’s current economic privilege and their early land acquisition and farming history. Sperry describes the complicated relationship between Mexico and California, including the ways that family benefitted from the Bracero Program (1942-1964), which allowed Mexican men to work as agricultural laborers in the United State. As US Farm owners benefitted from “cheap labor,” Mexican and US workers suffered from sub-adequate working conditions.

Sperry then explores the ways that her history intersected with Rosa’s, an immigrant to the US from Mexico. Although Rosa’s cultural background was always part of their dialogue, Sperry retrospectively reflects on the complexity of their lived histories, their similar and different socio-political and economic histories, as well as the ways that their mutual blindness to their histories dynamically influenced the understandings that they reached.

Although Rosa’s mother’s family was economically privileged, her father had struggled to find his professional footing as the Mexican economy was collapsing. Rosa’s troubled relationship with her father was a major focus of her work with Sperry, and the treatment addressed Rosa’s tendency to pathologically accommodate her father, thus supporting her efforts to emancipate herself from her father’s financial expectations and “manipulation.” Despite the success of their work, Sperry raises questions about the understandings they reached. Were they each invested in seeing her father’s difficulties through a sociopolitical lens that paints him as a perpetrator of oppressive traditions, while obscuring the ways that he is also a victim of them? Sperry concludes that engaging history involves confronting the complex historical currents that influenced our understanding of the world, finding ourselves in that complex story even as we confront the inherent contradictions, and helping our patients to do the same.

Canada is often perceived as a nation uniquely defined by its multiculturalism. There is some truth in this, but there are also undeniable cracks in the narrative. Majority white Canadians tend to associate racism with what happens south of the border and, like their US neighbours to the south, they attend to narratives and versions of history that match how they would like to be seen and think about ourselves. Racism in Canada can be perceived as inconvenient truth. But if we look a little closer, the legacy of Canada’s colonial and settler past and its effects into the present is there for all to see.

Majority white psychotherapists are susceptible to presumptions of innocence, because they like to believe that their psychological awareness makes them immune to racial discrimination. We need to ask ourselves how we are participating in discriminatory racial discourses, be it in our theories, research or practice. It’s especially easy for majority white therapists to neglect their role in systemic racism.

Being asked to acknowledge our implication can give rise to powerful counter-reactions. We experience shame and guilt; we feel vulnerable and uncomfortable. Feeling discomfort is important because it is precisely when we begin to feel comfortable in the face of racial injustice that we should be most concerned. If we are going to engage in meaningful dialogue about racism, then embracing our discomfort is a necessary first step.