Episode 57 of Voices from ROOM: A Podcast for Analytic Action, “Race Matters with Jennifer Hall”

Episode 57 of Voices from ROOM: A Podcast for Analytic Action, “Race Matters with Jennifer Hall” is now available wherever you listen to podcasts.

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Jennifer Hall, a psychotherapist with a private practice in New York City. Hall, as a Black therapist, entered her practice prepared to seek and advertise primarily to Black women. Navigating the complex bundle of expectations around race, care, and expertise, she found herself surprised as she took on referred white clientele. Far from deciding that race does not impact the clinical space, Hall instead elucidates how racial difference doesn’t work like a brick wall against connection, but rather, as a nuanced bundle of conscious and instinctual expectations shared across an encounter.

“Rather than as an impenetrable block, race shows itself in the instinctual ways that we both attempt to edit ourselves in order to foster connection.”
— Jennifer Hall, “This Black Thing” ROOM 6.26