Unmasking Race, Culture, and Attachment in the Psychoanalytic Space

Kate White is a training therapist, supervisor and teacher at The Bowlby Centre. Formerly senior lecturer at South Bank University in the Department of Nursing and Community Health Studies, she has used her extensive experience in adult education to contribute to the innovative psychotherapy curriculum developed at The Bowlby Centre. In addition to working as an individual psychotherapist, Kate runs workshops on the themes of attachment and trauma in clinical practice.

'The value of the monograph lies not only in the development of ideas around the notion of "racial" difference but different routes to exploring better clinical understanding of racial enactments. The absence of relational thinking has for too long located these concerns outside the consulting room, therefore outside the scope of thinking. Whilst the term "race" has lost much of its potency as a biological concept, "racial difference" nevertheless organises many social relationships and for many of us is laden with emotion.'- Lennox K. Thomas, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist'This new collection of essays by practicing clinicians confronts the dilemmas posed by acknowledging racial fantasies on the part of both the analyst and the analysand in any psychotherapeutic encounter-fantasies that are profoundly constitutive of interior realities and social experiences. These essays offer a sustained meditation on the ethical challenges of bringing attachment theory into intimate, and at times uncomfortable, contact with socio-political considerations and provide a crucial foundation from which future thinking about psychotherapy must take place.'- Professor Anne Anlin Cheng, Author of The Melancholy of Race

• Introduction to the monograph of the 12th John Bowlby Memorial Conference 2005 -- Attachment theory and the John Bowlby Memorial Lecture -- Racism -- Revisiting the concepts of racism and culture: Some thoughts on the clinical implications -- Difference -- Invisibility -- Unmasking difference, culture, and attachment in the psychoanalytic space -- The John Bowlby Memorial Lecture 2005 -- Response to Kimberlyn Leary's paper -- Introduction to the Centre for Attachment-Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy