Decolonising Psychotherapy: Exploring Whiteness to Disrupt Interpersonal and Systemic Racism

By Frances Basset

This book examines how colonialism and racial privilege perpetuates systemic discrimination within psychotherapy and psychology. Drawing from five years of intensive research, this text confronts the racial bias that has long hindered meaningful progress toward racial equity in the psych professions. The author presents four critical categories of whiteness--Violence, Hegemonic Orientation, Ambivalence, and the Need to Conscientise--each supported by lived experiences from research participants and clear recommendations for action. Through transpersonal, psychoanalytic, person-centered, and cognitive lenses, the book explains the defensiveness, shame, and white fragility that can emerge when racism is addressed, while providing practical tools including curriculum reform guidelines, training exercises, reflective practices, and decolonising approaches. The work challenges current EDI initiatives as insufficient and argues that white therapists must honestly confront their complicity in racist systems, examining how they benefit from white-dominated institutions and daily privileges as an essential starting point for authentic antiracist education and practice. This book is essential reading for psychotherapists, counsellors, and mental health professionals of all backgrounds who are committed to creating genuinely anti-oppressive practices, as well as educators, supervisors, and organisational leaders within the psych training institutions who seek concrete strategies for dismantling systemic racism.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1041289006
• ISBN13: 9781041289005
• Release Date: April 2027
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 150 Pages