Drawing on Gestalt concepts to cast light on structural racism in psychotherapy training centres and its enactment in the shared spaces between us

Abstract

In the current, highly-charged climate of institutionalised racial inequity, this paper is a response to frequent misunderstandings of how structural racism operates within our profession and spawns hindrances to dialogue. The paper illuminates some of the deep-rooted characteristics of structural racism and exemplifies the ways in which it manifests within the psychotherapy field, with reference to the Gestalt modality. Several Gestalt concepts will be drawn on to explicate enacted racism. The paper highlights the need for racial-oppression awareness and phenomenologicalcentred dialogue; for a reshaping of the very structures of our training institutes, by way of long-overdue policy change that integrates these themes into curriculums, along with proactive delivery of this in training. It feels important for me to emphasize that this paper is not a criticism of Gestalt theory itself, but rather it is an exploration of what happens in the application of that theory when it comes to the race-relational space. Keywords structural racism, white privilege and supremacy, aggression, receptiveness to the unknown, time, intergenerationality, racialised-body process, trauma, resilience, healing, figure/ground perception, gaffes, context