“How have child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapists experienced and understood the role of social identity in training, and how might this relate to their practice?”

References to social identity feature prominently in the psychoanalytic canon but generally receive little attention or discussion. This qualitative research study aims to examine the role of social identity in the training of child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapists by exploring how it has been experienced and understood, and how this role relates to therapeutic practice. It investigates this topic via a literature review and 12 interviews with psychotherapist members of the Association of Child Psychotherapy (ACP). The literature shows how the exclusion of critical or reflexive approaches to learning about healing creates tension when encountering social identity references harmful to non-normative or non-conforming people. Of the most prominent of these references, females, 'negroes', 'homosexuals', and the religious are all designated as inferior and labelled 'primitive' – terminology still habitually used in UK psychoanalytic contexts. I draw on Black Feminist Care Ethics, Social Anthropological and Sociological epistemologies attentive to forms of symbolic violence and the need for ‘participant objectivation’. This provides a historically contextualised, cross-disciplinary review of the above terminology, its accompanying ideologies and existing research. This explores how individuals make sense of particular aspects of identity, accompanied by psychoanalytically focused studies considering the dynamic between trainees’ social identities and the task of developing a professional/psychoanalytic identity. The results of Thematic Analysis represented social identity as holding 3 distinct roles: insufficient, sufficient and ambivalent. The first two roles are opposed, correlating distinctly with the degrees that participants’ social identifications were normative and conforming. The ambivalent role involved more complexity in that it was experienced across all participants’ trainings. This, highlights variation within identity groups and within individuals’ understandings and experiences of navigating training, on account of their social identities. These findings suggest that psychoanalytic training and psychotherapeutic practice would benefit, ethically and epistemically, from an authentic reckoning with the legacy of the very particular relation to social identity that has prevailed until now. Such a 'turn' may foster a new relation, less beholden to the uncritical embrace of normative ideologies and disavowal of vulnerability.