What are trainee Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists’ experiences of working with patients they identify as of a different race to themselves?

This study explores the experiences of trainee child and adolescent psychotherapists working with patients they identify as of a different race to themselves. It begins with a literature review the findings of which establish that race, and more broadly difference, has been marginalised within the psychoanalytic profession. In this study five students enrolled on the Tavistock and Portman’s child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapy training were interviewed using semi-structured interviews. Alongside a field diary, the interviews comprised the phenomenological data for the project. These interviews were transcribed and analysed using the qualitative method of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). This analysis produced four superordinate themes scaffolded by a number of subordinate themes. The first superordinate theme ‘Emotional responses to talking about race’ was made up of three subordinate themes: ‘Fear & Anxiety’, ‘Danger/breakdown and primitive feelings’ and ‘Hard to think’. The second superordinate theme ‘Location of the difference’ consisted of three subordinate themes: ‘In the patient’, ‘In the therapist’, and ‘Both/avoided’. The third superordinate theme ‘Clinical Technique’ produced two subordinate themes ‘Whose responsibility is it?’ and ‘Bringing race into the transference’. The final superordinate theme examined ‘The role of the training, service supervision and analysis’. The study highlights how alive race is in the minds of the therapists interviewed and yet how often it can be absent or avoided in their work. Clear distinctions are made between the participants identifying as white and black in both their emotional responses to talking about race and clinical technique. The need for greater amounts of support for trainees to enable them to engage more openly with their patients is highlighted. Finally, a number of implications for practice are discussed. My role as a white, male researcher and its impact on the research is considered throughout the thesis.