In this presentation, M. Fakhry Davids will describe the model of internal racism, which is a clinically based account of the othering mechanisms employed in relation to the out-group.  These mechanisms are structurally different from the processes that set us apart from others in general (the self-other distinction) and those involved in the Oedipal configuration (the gender distinction).  Davids argues that our relationship with the out-group is embedded in a paranoid, us-them, defensive structure that produces fantasies about the out-group, based on projections onto them.  He suggests that this same structure is mobilized in the difficulty that psychoanalysis, as a profession, faces in engaging racial/cultural difference in the consulting room.    

M. Fakhry Davids, M.Sc. (Clin Psych), is a psychoanalyst in full-time clinical practice.  He is a Fellow and Training Analyst of the British Psychoanalytic Society and a Member of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists.  He is Honorary Associate Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London, and Honorary Fellow of the Centre for Trauma and Refugees in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex.  He has previously held clinical positions at the Nafsiyat Intercultural Therapy Centre in London, the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis, and the Tavistock Clinic, where he is now a Visiting Lecturer.  He is a founding Board Member of Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities, PCCA (www.p-cca.org), which utilizes the Group Relations method to work with the psychic impact of atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba.  He has published a book, Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference, and papers on a number of topics. 

Practitioners and General Public: $40; Students: Free