Thinking Space: Promoting Thinking About Race, Culture and Diversity in Psychotherapy and Beyond

'Thinking Space' was set up to develop the capacity of staff and trainees at the Tavistock Clinic to think about racism, and other forms of hatred toward difference in ourselves and others. Drawing on Bion’s (1962) distinction between “knowing” and “knowing about”, the latter of which can be a defence against knowing a subject in a deeper and emotionally real way, Thinking Space sought to promote curiosity, exploration and learning about difference, by paying as much attention as to how we learn (process) as to what we learn (content).

This book is a celebration of ten years of Thinking Space at the Tavistock Clinic and a way of sharing the thinking, experience and learning gained over these years. Thinking Space functions, among other things, as a test-bed for ideas and many of the papers included here began as presentations, and were encouraged and developed by the experience. These papers do not seek to provide a coherent theory or set of views. On the contrary they are very diverse and decidedly so, as finding, expressing and developing one’s own personal idiom involves emotional truthfulness and is an important part of getting to know oneself: both of which are important prerequisites to getting to know the other.