An Audience with Dr Isha - Session 8

This is an open meeting and an opportunity for individuals in the helping professions to discuss chapters of my book. A Black Empathic Approach to Psychotherapy: Growing from Rage to Compassion.

At the last meeting we discussed 'An Appropriate Gaze'. As an ongoing concern about the components of history and heritage that inform psychological responses to racism, this chapter connects the potency of history not laid to rest, hovering in the ancestral domain and the psyche. The title draws on Nourbese Philip’s (2011) presentation of the decimation of identity, expressed through performance. (Talk-John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University 8.8.2017). With empathic resonance, and sacred reverence to ancestral grief, and the unburied, she invokes the memory and sorrow of enslaved Africans on the Dutch ship ‘Zong’ in 1781, of whom 150 were thrown overboard and drowned, on the way to Jamaica, so the ship's owners could collect the insurance. (Gregson…