Farhad Dalal is a psychotherapist, group analyst, organisational consultant, and training group analyst and supervisor for the Institute of Group Analysis in London. He convenes a group analytic psychotherapy training programme in Bengaluru, India, and is a former Associate Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire’s Business School. Over the past quarter century, his four books have each challenged received wisdom in a different field: Taking the Group Seriously, a radical extension of Foulkesian group analytic theory; Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialization, which drew on Norbert Elias and power relations theory to rethink the psychodynamics of racism; Thought Paralysis: The Virtues of Discrimination, an early and prescient intervention into what we now call the culture wars; and CBT: The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami, a forensic dismantling of the evidence base behind Britain’s dominant therapeutic model.
In this episode, Barry and Mustafa talk with Farhad about the single provocation running through all his work: that psychotherapy’s deepest assumption — the primacy of the individual — may itself be part of the problem. The conversation moves from his arrival in Britain at twelve and his own erased experiences of racism, through his turn from humanistic therapy to group analysis, to a sustained critique of psychoanalysis as individualistic and internalist — explaining the social through the psychological while leaving unasked how social conditions arise in the first place. Drawing on Foulkes and Elias, Farhad makes the case for a genuinely psychosocial way of thinking in which power relations sit at the centre of how human beings are formed. The discussion closes on the corruptions of evidence-based science, the neoliberal logic reshaping healthcare and education, and a defence of enlightenment rationality against its distortion into a paralysing hyper-rationality.
