Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 30:604–612, 2020

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1048-1885 print / 1940-9222 online
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2020.1797398

A Discussion of “‘When Reparation Is Felt to Be

Impossible’: Persecutory Guilt and Breakdowns in
Thinking and Dialogue about Race”
M. Fakhry Davids, M.Sc. (Clin Psych)
Institute of Psychoanalysis, London

Jane Caflisch’s discussion (this issue) of white liberal guilt is recognized as a bold and ground-
breaking exploration of how the Kleinian concepts of paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions
may shed light on the question of reparation for racial injustice. I suggest that, in addition to
persecutory and depressive guilt, melancholic guilt also operates in racist mind-sets, and constitutes
the more serious obstacle to reparation. Guilt of this sort prompts defensive repetition, thereby
perpetuating racist mind-sets and acts and taking one further and further from the possibility of
reparation. On the other hand, the more normal interplay between persecutory and depressive guilt,
which is illustrated through a clinical vignette, is seen as opening up a path to reparation. Brief
vignettes are offered illustrating points about melancholic guilt and how a culture of facing rather
than evading persecutory guilt enabled an opportunity for reparation to be recognized and used.

Racist mind-sets often target members of an out-group with the intention of doing things to them.
Thoughtfulness, the antithesis of doing, is therefore the rightful antidote to the racist mind-set.
Given the proliferation of the flames of ethnic hatred, hostility and conflict in our world today, the
need to bring psychoanalytic thinking to bear on the topic of racism is especially urgent. I, therefore,
welcome Dr. Caflisch’s (this issue) bold, honest and nuanced handling of the topic of white liberal
guilt, which confirms just how difficult any conversation connected with race and racism is.
There is a long history of this particular conversation in psychoanalysis. It begins with Black
patients’ assertion that they have to leave an aspect of their subjectivity, namely the experience
of racism, at the gate of the consulting room, as Forrest Hamer (2002) evocatively puts it. It
continues with an observation that our profession remaining so stubbornly white may contribute
to this difficulty, and culminates in a band of colleagues going on to examine whiteness –
a parallel to Frantz Fanon’s seminal interrogation of Blackness (Fanon, 1952, Chapter 6) – in
order to illuminate this situation. Caflisch brings the conversation up to date, emphasizing how
hard it is to face the guilt attached to being white, and turns to the Kleinian concepts of
persecutory and depressive guilt to shed light on this difficulty. When she links these with the
idea of reparation one can also sense a hope that these clinically derived ideas may point to
a way forward in this conversation, opening up the possibility of putting things right, thereby

Correspondence should be addressed to M. Fakhry Davids, M.Sc. (Clin Psych), 4 Primrose Gardens, London NW3
4TJ, UK. E-mail: fakhrydavids@gmail.com
 A DISCUSSION OF “‘WHEN REPARATION IS FELT TO BE IMPOSSIBLE’” 605

easing the burden of guilt. In my view, however, the gains to be had from extrapolating so
directly from clinical work are limited, and I appreciate very much the opportunity of
contributing to the discussion opened up by this important and timely paper.
I would like to begin with an observation. I have just suggested that Caflisch’s contribution
is both timely and welcome, but she herself proceeds more cautiously, anticipating criticism not
of her argument, but on account of the supposed motivation for it. For example, Black people
might attack her for privileging white experience; white critics, on the other hand, might see her
as either indulging, or of wishing to expiate, her liberal guilt by writing about it. These
concerns emphasize how difficult it is to invite thinking about racism without one being seen
as doing something, which is then seen as enjoying primacy. Doing belongs to the concreteness
of paranoid-schizoid mind-set whilst thinking, which relies on symbolic functioning, is asso­
ciated with the depressive position. I am suggesting therefore that even as one tries to bring
thinking to bear on racism there seems to be a regressive pull toward the concreteness of the
paranoid-schizoid position. I think that this reflects the operation of internal opposition to
thinking about matters racial, which I think exists in us all, and which I have loosely termed
internal racism.1
First I would like to add to Caflisch’s description of paranoid-schizoid and depressive guilt
with a third category, namely, guilt that is completely disavowed and usually dealt with through
enactment. Let me give an example of this. At a psychoanalytic conference in South Africa on
mourning and melancholia in relation to othering, a distinguished Black American psycho­
analyst gave a compelling keynote paper arguing that our profession’s neglect of the topic of
whiteness, including white guilt, made it difficult for the profession to work with issues
involving white-Black racism, of which apartheid was a case in point (Holmes, 2020). In the
discussion, the question of Black rage was immediately raised, and in a later panel, an
experienced white psychoanalyst suggested that, given its expertise in working with aggression
generally, the discipline was, in fact, well equipped to address Black rage. A carefully con­
structed argument that there was a collective psychoanalytic failure to address the experience of
Blackness or racism and that clinicians’ whiteness was implicated in this was thus deftly swept
aside.
I do not think the panel member recognized the extent to which his comment undermined the
keynote speaker’s argument. To disagree with a speaker could, of course, open up a discussion
or debate. However, the panelist did not bring his disagreement into the open but instead relied
on innuendo: in the hands of experts like himself, there was, really, no problem. Given that he
was addressing a colleague with a long track record of drawing psychoanalysts’ attention to the
need to address race in their work, her awareness of the mainstream’s obliviousness to this call,
and her reasoned argument that this was down to the profession’s unwillingness to examine its
whiteness at the depth reserved for other topics, his response was, at the very least, patronizing.
Unsurprisingly, it served only to polarize opinion.

1
I say loosely because, although its depiction as racism works readily when discussing white guilt as an aspect of
white-on-Black racism, the model of internal racism attempts to account more generally for the inner dynamics between
members of any in-group and its corresponding out-group. In some instances of this dyad, the term may be misleading
(e.g., when the out-group is of a different social class or gender orientation), but I retain it because I think the term
racist interchange captures a range of object relationships, which we are familiar with in its incarnation as racism, that
characterizes the range of relationships involved.
606 DAVIDS

He had prefaced his remarks with a description of how he, a Jew, had for this visit chosen
a hotel that displayed prominently photographs of the symbols of Afrikaner Nationalism.2 The
fact that he could sleep peacefully in this setting indicated, to him, that analysis had equipped
him to contain his aggression at the hated Afrikaner out-group of his school years and thus to
repair his fractured inner relationship with them. A Jewish speaker reminded him that the
Afrikaners’ political party advocated the internment of Jews during the Second World War.3
How then could a Jew be at peace with the hotel’s uncritical display of these aspects of
Afrikaner identity? To claim to be able to do so surely scotomised the destructive brutality
carried out in its name?
Why did the panelist proceed in this way? I think that, in naming whiteness as a problem, the
keynote speaker succeeded in stirring up white guilt – Caflisch’s topic. In response, the panelist
repositioned himself, so that instead of being a white perpetrator – part of a white-majority
profession that does not “see” Black people’s struggles – he recast himself as a victim in the
Afrikaner-Jew dyad. From here he claimed to have repaired an inner racist relationship, but in
a way that completely bypassed the conference topic of white-Black racism. In my thinking,
therefore, unconscious guilt contributed to the breakdown in dialogue and debate.
The guilt I am drawing attention to here is neither paranoid-schizoid nor depressive; it is closer to
the unconscious sense of guilt Freud postulates in melancholia (Freud, 1917). He suggests that
while the melancholic’s conscious self-reproaches can at first glance appear as guilt closer scrutiny
reveals their affect to involve masochistic surrender; this in turn represents, in reverse, unconscious
accusations directed at the lost object, usually for visiting the pain of abandonment on the subject.
The latter does not ordinarily enter consciousness, and when brought to the surface via analysis, the
true problem with guilt stands revealed as an unconscious belief or fear that hatred toward the object
is implicated in its damage or loss. Once these elements are in the open it becomes evident that the
masochistic suffering functioned as a defensive enactment that served to constantly dissipate the
underlying guilt, thus obviating the possibility of experiencing it consciously. The guilt thus
remains completely opaque to the subject.
I think that matters of racism often involve guilt of this sort that does not get close to consciousness
and is instead dealt with through enactments that serve to dissipate, rather than to address, it. The
panelist mentioned above did not feel this guilt at all but moved instinctively to dissipate it by
“forgiving” the racist Afrikaners. This way of dealing with a psychic situation, however, is doomed to
failure, in line with Freud’s (1914) observations that what is not psychically acknowledged (“remem­
bered”) and worked through is bound to be repeated. Thus, despite his belief that he had resolved the
difficulty of racism the panelist in fact went on to enact, in passing, a patronizing racist stance toward
the Black presenter, as I argued above.
If we add guilt of this type to the two mentioned by Caflisch we can see that guilt exists on
a continuum, ranging from the unconscious sense of guilt, which is not borne at all and is solved
through enactments; persecutory guilt, which is bearable but as powerful and painful accusations;
and depressive guilt, which is felt as guilt per se. As far as matters of race are concerned it is the
unconscious sense of guilt that is most dangerous as the guilt remains unavailable to consciousness
and is dealt with through enactments – in the case of the panelist above, by making a racist attack on
someone trying to bring matters of race into an open conversation. These enactments not only fail to

2
The Afrikaner Nationalist Party conceived of, implemented and enforced the apartheid system in South Africa.
3
The National Party was not in power then.
 A DISCUSSION OF “‘WHEN REPARATION IS FELT TO BE IMPOSSIBLE’” 607

address the problem of guilt; they also exacerbate it because they are in fact micro-aggressions and
so produce ever more guilt that generates more and more enactments. All of this takes one further
and further from one’s guilt.
The instances of white guilt discussed by Caflisch are clearly not in this category since guilt
is openly acknowledged and then engaged with in a direct and honest way. This is admirable as
it requires courage to face thoughts and feelings that are, at times, painfully persecuting and
deeply shaming, humiliating and, as she says, cringeworthy. At these times there is nothing to
do but to face one’s inner sense of wretchedness and misery, and it is the ability to persevere
with this without denying its awfulness and how desperate it leaves one that, in my view,
facilitates the move toward the depressive position. Once in the latter state of mind, more
possibilities for repair present themselves than when one is in the former – it is very hard to be
creative under fire. In linking these accounts of the way in which white guilt is experienced
with Klein’s two positions Caflisch has, I think, made an original contribution that shows what
a meaningful academic and public conversation about racial guilt in our world involves and
what one must be willing to suffer in order to navigate it. Because such guilt is shared by one’s
in-group the conversation does indeed belong in the public domain, although working it
through must remain a private matter. She maps this terrain expertly as she proceeds to
chart, with sensitivity, compassion and intelligence, the painful process by which white guilt
can be brought to the surface, highlighting the conflicts, contradictions, and pitfalls in trying to
do so. It is worth noting that there is something paradoxical about this process: what, at times,
can feel like an unbearable burden, in the end, becomes bearable. In one example, involving
artifacts originally appropriated from Canada’s native Haida tribe, awareness of being in
possession of stolen goods persecutes Adrienne Harris (2012), who considers returning them
in an act of reparation. However, she eventually decides against doing so, presumably because
she judges such reparation to be manic: better to live with the guilt. As described, the decision
clearly reflects an inner ability to bear the guilt associated with her ownership of the objects in
question. This is the outcome of the struggle described and is a far cry from the denial of guilt
I described in the panelist above. While racialized guilt may be an inevitable feature of the
mind in our post-colonial world (Treacher, 2005), what it involves for each of us will differ, and
thus how we choose to repair the situation is a complex matter that each of us will resolve in
our own way. I will give an example of this at the end.
Caflisch’s contribution here is to flesh out what is involved, psychically, in making white
guilt bearable. Her nuanced understanding of the process leads her to identify moments of
breakdown, when the paranoid-schizoid mode prevails and the possibility of reparation seems
more and more remote. She draws on the observations of Kleinian clinicians to shed light on
these moments of breakdown, noting their finding that in patients who function predominantly
in paranoid-schizoid mode guilt is persecutory and “catalyzed by a sense of harm as beyond
repair” (p. 585). However, turning to the clinical domain in this way is, I think, unhelpful as it
implies that the breakdowns Caflisch observes not only mobilize the paranoid-schizoid mode,
but that they reflect a regression to that structure, thus placing reparation beyond reach. This
obscures the fact that Caflisch’s original exploration of racial guilt takes us beyond what has
been studied clinically in the Kleinian tradition.
Perhaps it would be helpful for me to bring forward a case example that brings out the
considerations that come into play when one makes a clinical judgment as to whether guilt is
608 DAVIDS

bearable, and is being borne. Although an erotized transference to her Black analyst was indeed
an aspect of the analysis, her whiteness does not in fact feature in the material I will present.
The patient was desperate for a stable relationship with a man, yet could manage only very
occasional sexual encounters – usually with an unavailable man, older or in a position of
authority – that left her immobilized with guilt. She thought this pointed to something
unresolved with her father, a problem that emerged in the form of an erotic transference,
including a wish that we should marry and have a family together. In time, this aspect of the
transference was revealed to contain infantile longings toward a mother unavailable on account
of post-puerperal depression, all of which proved amenable to 5xweek analysis. After some six
years, she began to venture out into the world of dating once more.
In the week before a scheduled 10-day break, she met up with a man she had been chatting to on
social media, and “really fancied” him. Her feelings were reciprocated, making for an unusually
promising start. She used her sessions to think through doubts about him, and was in a positive frame
of mind for their second date, in the evening after her last session before the break. That went well,
which she described in detail on my return, saying she could observe how, whenever she felt more
positively, doubts would arise in her mind. My interpretation that these doubts were intended to nip in
the bud the possibility of a relationship with anyone other than me helped her to maintain perspective,
putting her in touch with anxieties about him, which he sensed anyway, so that they could then talk
about them. It turned out they were both anxious, and being able to share this left her really keen to see
whether things could work out between them.
As she got up from the couch at the end of that first session back she smiled warmly at me and said
she hoped I do not have the coronavirus. The following day she was still preoccupied with her date, but
the hopefulness had given way to a more pessimistic atmosphere. I saw this as unconscious punish­
ment for death wishes toward me for abandoning her during the break, which had been split off and
projected into the virus, a defense that broke down when she realized that I might actually be in danger.
All of this spoke of an inability to bear the guilt associated with those murderous impulses. However,
I kept this understanding to myself and, at an opportune moment, drew her attention to how
perfunctorily she had mentioned the virus, leaving no time for us to consider its meaning. She
explained that when the virus was in the news during my break she worried that I may pick it up.
However, yesterday she only remembered this as she got up from the couch.
She said that she imagined I had taken a break from the long, cold winter to holiday in the sun with
my wife, and I suggested that her anxiety about the virus concealed a wish that I should get it – a curse
for abandoning her for a lovely holiday with someone else. That anxiety would then cover up
murderous hatred, she said, acknowledging that she could at times feel visceral hatred toward me
for rejecting her. Mention of hatred now set her off and she became consumed with how much she
hated me and, come to think of it, all men for making her aware of wanting a relationship. This went on
until the session ended, and afterward I realized it had an as-if quality – the emotional truth of her
hatred, which she glimpsed momentarily, had been buried in a dance so all-consuming that it
effectively distanced her from the feeling (Riesenberg-Malcolm, 1996).
She returned in a gloomy state having realized that a promotion at work that she wanted was
unlikely to materialize – if she wanted a better position she would have to look elsewhere.
I thought her gloomy state of mind had two meanings: first, pain at taking in that I was spoken
for and that she would have to look – indeed, was looking – elsewhere; and second,
a persecuted state that her murderous hatred, glimpsed the previous day, makes her unlovable
and unwanted. Based on this understanding, I returned to how she had dealt with her hatred the
 A DISCUSSION OF “‘WHEN REPARATION IS FELT TO BE IMPOSSIBLE’” 609

previous day, noting that this was to not take it seriously. A more sober discussion followed,
which left me feeling that she now trying to give it due consideration. The following Monday
she reported that she had on another date with the man, and gave a convincing account of
continuing to be more open to him. In subsequent weeks this feeling was consolidated, and at
the time of writing the relationship seems to be developing steadily – the first time in the
analysis that she has persevered with a man.
My formulation in the above piece of work was that murderous feelings toward me for
rebuffing her desire produced guilt that felt unbearable. The patient, therefore, tried to obviate it
by either projecting the murderousness responsible for it, or making it disappear through
a “dance.” However, I thought that she did now have the capacity to bear guilt. My interven­
tions were thus intended to keep the hatred underpinning it in focus. In doing so I was aware of
the many ways she had at her disposal for evading this, so when, in the third session, there was
a reflective silence in response to an interpretation about her hatred, this signaled a very
different attitude to it. I thought she was opening her mind to it, and felt confident that if she
maintained this attitude things would indeed free up.
Kleinian work assumes that we live our emotional life in unconscious phantasy where, if things go
well, the foundation for our sense of well-being, creativity, and hopefulness lies. It is also where the
emotional reality of loving and destructive impulses is lived out. In the above work, I noticed that the
patient abandoned her usual defensiveness in relation to her hatred, and took the fact that she went on to
consolidate things with the man to mean that further developments had taken place in her inner world,
in unconscious phantasy. Hatred, now dwelled on, was linked with impulses felt to have damaged her
internal object (men seen as deficient), guilt (oscillating between paranoid-schizoid and depressive)
had been in play, prompting attempts to make good the damage to her object (the man with potential).
A full narrative of such phantasy developments does not usually enter consciousness – the closest
coherent access to them is through literary works (Sodre, whom Caflisch cites, offers especially
creative links between patients’ intrapsychic dilemmas and literary narratives) – but derivatives do
appear in clinical material4 and in dreams. Some weeks later, for example, the patient dreamed that she
was in her bed with an older man who clearly desired her. This was a repetitive sexual dream, but two
elements were new: she actively wanted him (usually she is passive), and she was free of guilt. This
speaks to the reparation that I am suggesting was under way internally.
This material illustrates the wealth of detail available clinically when considering whether
guilt is bearable and how this relates to reparation. For example, as I worked in these sessions,
I was aware of my patient’s earlier inability to bear the guilt and the steps taken in the analysis
to try and develop a capacity to do so. This informed my judgment that she was now better
equipped to bear her guilt, which in turn determined how I addressed her in the sessions. The
clinical literature describes in detail the struggles of such troubled patients, whose object
relationships are enmired in paranoid-schizoid functioning (and defenses against it), but at
earlier stages in the treatment. The danger of focusing on these dug-in years of analysis is that it
can give rise to an impression that when patients do eventually move on they arrive at the
uplands of the depressive position, leaving such states behind; and that when a more persecuted
state arises it constitutes a regression to the paranoid-schizoid position. Klein was in fact clear
that her formulation of the two positions is not to be seen in this way – they are two stances

4
The themes of persecution and despair both appeared in Wednesday’s session.
610 DAVIDS

toward object relating that both continue throughout life. This has led to a reformulation of how
we see normal functioning, which involves free movement between the positions rather than
being stuck in one (Britton, 1998, Chapter 6). Applied to the question of guilt, normal
engagement would thus involve movement between persecutory and depressive guilt. I drew
attention to this in the clinical material where the patient, now much closer to normal
functioning, simultaneously had a depressive realization that she would have to look elsewhere
and felt persecuted by the idea that she is unwanted. Caflisch’s descriptions of the struggle with
white guilt are much closer to this situation than the ones she draws on in the Kleinian
literature. In white guilt, such as that in the case of the panelist above, the failure to engage
is not down to an inability to feel guilt; it is a failure to mobilize it in relation to these issues.
I am therefore raising the possibility that the inner situation underpinning white guilt may be
different from what we meet and study clinically. When I first began my inquiries into the
psychology of racism, I encountered a similar problem in the form of an assumption that proble­
matic racist interchanges could be reduced to the pathological forms of object relating that we know
clinically. However, this proved to be an a priori assumption that I could not find evidence to back
up. The way to overcome this difficulty, then, was to investigate racist interchanges in the
consulting room in order to access the detail that could illuminate fully the dynamics involved.
This approach yielded a surprising finding, namely that, although racism does indeed employ
primitive mechanisms, it exists within the normal mind’s range of object relating, rather than the
disturbed part of the patient (which is the focus of psychoanalytic treatment). Our difficulty as
a discipline was that we had not theorized how the primitive, disturbed object relationships
implicated in racism had come to be installed internally as part of normal development. This is
what the model of internal racism tries to do (Davids, 2011).
I am not aware of such clinical explorations in relation to white guilt, and therefore of where
it might lead. However, there are two further observations I would like to make. First, the guilt
we observe clinically concerns guilt over the harm done to objects in phantasy, whilst the guilt
that persecutes us in racism involves actual harm done to others, which we continue to benefit
from. Second, unlike the guilt encountered clinically, which involves individual responsibility,
white guilt is mostly guilt by association – white people are held responsible for atrocities or
injustices that they themselves may not have had a direct, personal hand in. The guilt is shared
through our in-group identification. Halberstadt-Freud (2011),5 considering German guilt over
the Holocaust, suggests that guilt through identification be thought of as deferred guilt, which
he distinguishes from guilt flowing from ideas, acts, omissions or phantasies for which we
ourselves are individually responsible. He goes on to suggest that what may appear as deferred
guilt, such as the guilt that Germans readily feel over the Holocaust, is actually guilt associated
with an omission on their part – to know the details of their own, their loved ones’ or their
predecessors’ role in the Holocaust. That is, it is guilt over a failure to interrogate our love
objects, to mourn our idealized constructions of them, and thus to see them more as they really
are. This is in fact the work that Caflisch reviews and describes so well in her paper.
It seems to me that in the non-clinical settings where white guilt arises the real contrast is between
paranoid-schizoid and depressive guilt, on the one hand, and the unconscious sense of guilt that I drew
attention to earlier, on the other. Bearing the guilt associated with racism involves the former (both

5
I am grateful to my German colleague, Dr Veronika Grüneisen, for introducing me to Halberstadt-Freud’s ideas.
 A DISCUSSION OF “‘WHEN REPARATION IS FELT TO BE IMPOSSIBLE’” 611

persecutory and depressive states of mind) whilst the denial of this guilt involves the latter, as I showed
in the example of the conference panelist earlier. This is most dangerous since it leads inevitably to the
repetition of the original racist constructions and interchanges, including inequalities that we are
implicated in and may, consciously, want to put right. In my view, its mobilization is down to an
internal racist structure, which exists in all our minds, that obstructs our attempts to engage with these
matters. In the panelist I mentioned at the beginning it produced the enactment that I described. I think
it is also implicated in the breakdowns and ruptures that produce an alarm when persecuted states of
mind appear along the way, as well as in Caflisch’s caveats about her work as I discussed at the
beginning of this piece. It seems to me a constant presence in the background, ready to seize on
moments of doubt, awkwardness, or difficulty in order to undermine and discredit this vital work, work
that is in itself reparative.
I would like to end by describing a further conference presentation in South Africa where a group
of Black and white psychotherapists, who met regularly to reflect on the meaning of being Black or
white in post-apartheid South Africa, shared their experiences. This included many of the themes
touched on by Caflisch, including persecutory guilt flowing from being the inheritors of white
privilege in the face of ongoing Black poverty and disadvantage. One of the most moving accounts
came from a young white colleague who, in common with many South Africans, had practically been
raised by a live-in Black nanny. As a very young child, she thought her nanny was childless and
remained unaware for years of the fact that the country’s race laws meant that the children she did, in
fact, have were confined to a township several miles away. She could see them only during weekends.
She described moving conversations with her mother, once she found out, pleading for the nanny’s
children to be brought to live with them, and went on to speak of how she could not bear her guilt that
the warm, loving care so selflessly extended to her came at the expense of those children. She felt this
to be unforgivable. More recently, when she heard that the ex-nanny had died she felt that the least she
could do was to pay her respects in person. Then, she had second thoughts. How dare she, who had
stolen from that family, appear among them as a mourner? This would surely compound the wound of
the loss of their mother to her, in childhood, reigniting the old injustices of the apartheid system? She
agonized over this and eventually contacted the family to express her sympathy, but once on the phone
the conversation shifted to the funeral arrangements. These were willingly shared, and when she
indicated tentatively that she might come they seemed to welcome the idea. She felt they were not just
being polite but actually wanted her there. This emboldened her to go. There, she was indeed received
warmly and in one funeral address was mentioned, alongside the nanny’s own children, as a child
their mother had raised and loved. This was unexpected and touched her deeply. Afterward, she was
warmly thanked for coming to the funeral in a township, a place where white persons rarely venture.
In one way of looking at it, this is a straightforward account of a woman persevering with the
struggle over white privilege and finding a way through. However, it is worth considering what
made it such a moving account. I think this goes beyond the narrative itself; it is connected with
the emotional depth at which issues resonating with the audience had been made space for and
engaged with (rather than evaded or solved). These include, of course, shared white guilt and
Black rage/hatred, having to live with the reality of past injustices that cannot be undone, with
some actually ongoing, and the sense of helplessness and futility that flows from this. Alongside
this, there is also a very personal story of love and being loved. There is the early infantile feeling
of being the only one, and the inner drama that follows from disillusionment – a situation familiar
to us all. It is clear that the range of these deeper resonances, in unconscious phantasy, was alive in
the speaker, and this touched similar ones in the audience.
612 DAVIDS

I think it is the authentic way in which these resonances were alive in the presenter that enabled
her to link with the audience, and that having an ongoing “race group” in which these themes were
grappled with played a key part in keeping the door open to these painful aspects of her inner
world. This openness, in turn, allowed her to recognize the funeral as an opportunity to put
something right, which it so clearly did. It is clear that such small gestures, so ordinary in one way,
also have a wider meaning that accounts for the warmth of its reception in the township.
In conclusion, I would like to pay tribute to Dr. Caflisch for a thoughtful, insightful, and
compassionate account of where our profession stands today in relation to the subject of white
guilt. Although she does not draw specific attention to it, this is also a courageous piece as the
topic inevitably mobilizes painful inner resonances even as one works. Voices like hers, though
marginalized, are making a difference.

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CONTRIBUTOR

M. Fakhry Davids, M.Sc. (Clin Psych), is a psychoanalyst in full-time clinical practice. He is

a Fellow and Training Analyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society, Honorary Senior
Lecturer in the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London, Visiting Fellow in the
Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, and Visiting
Lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic. He is the author of Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic
Approach to Race and Difference (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)