Basch-Kahre's Argumentative Analysis

Basch-Kahre (1984) talks about feelings of aversion that arise when client and counsellor have different backgrounds. He outlines that a baby hates the father and makes him a stranger by not recognizing him, as a father's face punctures endless symbiosis with the mother. Perhaps this triggers infantile stranger-anxiety that gets triggered with people of different cultures, and might do with every such obvious difference. However some of such differences like that of race and religion, which in the external socio-political world are portrayed as having a concrete image based on the "minority of the worst”, facilitate the process of othering in the world. Elias and Scotson (1994) outline that the image of the outsiders is modelled on a "minority of the worst" of them, while the image of the established is modelled on a "minority of the best ", called as emotional generalization. This …show more content…
My argument is that within this process of projective-identification (Klein, 1946), aspects of the individual’s internal trauma may ‘hook’ onto external elements of oppression, thus providing fertile ground for the re-enactment of oppression... What I am highlighting here is the strong possibility that powerful memory imprints from a legacy of a painful historical past might heighten oppressive...experiences...Therefore, the work of throwing off the shackles of the past and emerging from the entanglement of historical barriers is still an important modern day (therapeutic) task for members of the black diaspora (and other oppressed groups). It would be true to say that a reflexive identity will only begin at the point where unconscious identification and fixation with aspects of one’s history