CGAS Quarterly Lecture on Zoom by Dick Blackwell

ABOUT

The Tyranny of 'Normality' in the Post-Colonial Context

All diagnoses and descriptions of psychopathology imply a state of health and ‘normality’, e.g. 'Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ implies a ‘disorder' that is deviant from some assumed normal state of ‘order’. But the implied concepts of ‘health' and ‘normality' are seldom interrogated or deconstructed. Yet, as one placard at a demonstration a couple of years ago pointed out, ‘To be well adjusted to a sick society is hardly a great achievement!’ In the colonial world, reality was always what the coloniser said it was. In the post-colonial world that legacy is still alive and well in the social unconscious of clinical theory and practice. Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis tend to assume a position of scientific neutrality and objectivity. But the world view that emerges is inevitably that of the world viewed from the position of a privileged, white, western, professional, middle-class, and it is permeated by an ideology that is simultaneously denied. Discourses on difference and diversity frequently locate ‘difference’ in the ‘other’. Deviancy from the (ideological) norm is routinely pathologised and psychotherapy becomes a technology of social management and control. Movements like Black Lives Matter and attempts to decolonise group analysis bring this situation ever more clearly into focus.

Dick Blackwell is a psychotherapist, group analyst, organisational consultant and family therapist based in the UK. Dick graduated in business management before training as a teacher of physical education and social studies. He was a sociological researcher on a youth and community work project with black communities in the inner cities of England, and concurrently began training in group analysis and later in family therapy. He was founder and director of the Centre for Psychotherapy and Human Rights and is now Consultant in Group and Family Psychotherapy at the Baobab Centre for Young Survivors in Exile. He supervises at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, where he has worked for two decades. He has written numerous articles and books on working with refugees and on the political and social contexts of psychotherapy. He is Associate Editor of Group Analysis, former Chair of Council of the IGA London, co-founder of its Organisational Consultancy Section, and a founder member of the Psychotherapy and Counselling Union.