African American Patients in Psychotherapy: Understanding the Psychological Effects of Racism and Oppression [Hardcover]

African American Patients in Psychotherapy integrates history, current events, arts, psychoanalytic thinking, and case studies to provide a model for understanding the social and historical dimensions of psychological development. Among the topics included are psychological consequences of slavery and Jim Crow, the black patient and the white therapist, the toll of even small racist enactments, the black patients uneasy relationship with health care providers, and a revisiting of the idea of black rage. Author Ruth Fallenbaum also examines the psychological potential of reparation for centuries of slave labor and legalized wage and property theft.

Acknowledgments  1. The Psyche in History & Dramatis Personae  2. Chains  3. From Lash to Backlash: Invisible Chains  4. Identity and the Discovery of Race   5. Black Rage Revisited  6. The Color of Psychotherapy  7. In Session  8. Reparations

African American Patients in Psychotherapy integrates history, current events, arts, psychoanalytic thinking, and case studies to provide a model for understanding the social and historical dimensions of psychological development.

Ruth Fallenbaum, PhD, is a psychoanalytically oriented clinical psychologist in private practice in Berkeley, California.

Dr. Fallenbaum approaches her work with African American patients with humility, as well as a deep awareness of their racialized histories and ongoing traumatic stress and her positionality as a white therapist. Her poignant clinical examples make it clear that engaging with history and sociopolitical contexts is essential to psychoanalytic psychotherapy. This book is an outstanding resource with an important call for all therapists to recognize racial injustice and bear witness to racial trauma as nel³¸