A personal journey towards anti- ractice
fi rst person in my family to go to university. Whilst completing a postgraduate degree in accounting, I decided against pursuing a career in this fi eld. After much soul searching, I started studying psychology and eventually successfully applied for clinical psychology training at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. The theoretical orientation adhered to within the training programme at this university went through several stages since its inception in 1974, but at the time I trained (1989 – 1991) it was fi rmly located within a systemic orientation. The process of being inducted into a diff erent belief system was at times disorientating and very diffi cult to comprehend, but the experience ultimately transformed my understanding of psychological distress as something to be understood in a social context, rather than as something to be located and treated in an individual. I carried this knowledge with me when I migrated to the UK in 1995, and still do.
Learning that the professional is political
At the time I was training as a clinical
psychologist, some in the profession were raising serious concerns about the role of psychology in a socially unjust society. How has [South African] psychology
with such apparent facility come to serve (in the mines, the schools, the hospitals, the prisons, the homelands), the interests of the apartheid system? How is it that psychology as a discipline, a body of knowledge and as a profession, has been so compatible with a system of social control based on racism, coercion and brutality? (Cooper et al., 1990, p. 1).
In this context, one of my trainers (Nell,
1992) argued powerfully that psychologists should look beyond the trivial content that preoccupied psychology at the time (and to a large extent still does). Psychologists shy away from the big
words like suff ering, evil, a just society or human liberation. But these big words are unavoidable and necessary if psychology
Context 164, August 2019
is to achieve its full potential and make a signifi cant contribution to human welfare and progress toward a just society (p. 228). Drawing on the work of the French
philosopher Michel Foucault, Nell (1992) went on to discuss the relationship between knowledge and power. In particular, Foucault (1980, pp. 93-94) argued that, We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth… It is truth that makes the laws, that produces the true discourse which…decides, transmits and itself extends upon the eff ects of power. In the end, we are judged, condemned, classifi ed, determined in our undertakings, destined to a certain mode of living or dying, as a function of the true discourses which are the bearers of these specifi c eff ects of power.
According to Nell (1992), it is knowledge
that writes the laws…and that decides on the correct ranking of the professions in a hierarchy of power and subordination. But for Nell, knowledge alone is not enough; knowledge without social power lies dormant. In other words, one can argue that, without social power, psychologists’ and family therapists’ potential to contribute to establishing a more socially- just society remains underdeveloped. He posits that, for the non-medical health care professions, the obvious route to achieving social power within the health care system is by forging an alliance with the profession that controls health care and has the most direct access to state power; that is, the medical profession. According to Nell, non-medical health care professions make themselves an attractive partner to
11
Privilege and struggle: A personal journey towards anti-oppressive and anti-racist practice
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