Principles for an anti-racist psychotherapeutic clinical practice

Abstract

Brazilian structural racism needs to be taken into account when analyzing the subjectivities of Black people regarding to psychotherapy, a professional practice that works directly with human subjectivity. This article aims to investigate how evidence-based psychotherapeutic models deal with issues related to the subjectivity of the Black population, as well as to propose principles for contextualized psychotherapeutic interventions to Black people. To this end, a description of some impacts of racism on the subjectivity of the Black population and how it differs from the subjectivity of the White population was carried out, in order to equip psychotherapists to identify the effects of racism on Black clients. Then, the Evidence-Based
Practice in Psychology (EBPP) model was described in order to analyze its notion of therapeutic success and if its apply on the clinical practice of behavior analysis. Besides, to answer this question, the Process-Based Therapy (PBT) developed from Steven Hayes and Stefan Hofmann was brought as a possible alternative to the gaps from the EBPP. It’s also argued that PBT perhaps will be able to contemplate cultural contigencies at clinical analysis. Furthermore, the potential and limits of referred psychotherapeutic models to deal with racism in the clinic were verified and, based on the gaps found in the models, multicultural proposals as Cultural Sensitive Treatment and Broaching, designed to deal with diversity in the therapeutic setting, were described. Then, four groups of principles were listed for an antiracist clinical practice in the Brazilian context: Psychotherapist training on structural racism;
Psychotherapist’s self-knowledge; Clinical practice in the Therapeutic Setting and Clinical Psychoeducation.