Money, money, money

Race Reflections AT WORK

In today's episode Guilaine expands on her thinking around money which she has previously covered a little on the podcast and on the Race Reflections website. She specifically reflects on the relationship between money and attachment, considering internalised scarcity, social class and social deprivation, framing her thoughts around her own background and lived experience. This episode was inspired by the work she was doing for the Freud Museum Conference about the relationship between psychotherapy and money.
She begins by going over attachment theory as it exists from initial work done by Bowlby which relates to maternal or parental attachment. She offers some critique and complications around these theories but generally doesn't dispute the ideas and evidence around this topic. She does however suggest that whilst a lot of time is given to maternal attachment theory not enough has been done around how material circumstances influence attachment, and that maternal and material are seldom considered together.
She has done some work in this area when writing Living While Black, specifically considering attachment to and with place. We attach to spaces as well as to bodies, and anyway bodies and spaces are related to each other. And looking at places means looking at the influence of geopolitical factors such as borders and money. She then covers her own relationship with money and with scarcity thinking, looking at how growing up poor can create adaptive behaviours/internalised issues around things like experiencing injustice, a lack of familiarity with wealth, and difficulties navigating spaces without cultural capital. She asks us to imagine a graph that cross references material and maternal/parental attachments and how that kind of thinking can help us understand our own relationship to attachment and to how we relate to money.
She ends by linking all this back to the workplace.
The article she mentions is on the Race Reflections website for members (and if you are not a member you are welcome to join): Poverty, deprivation and internalised scarcity

Her book Living While Black where she explores some of what she talks about today is available to buy here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442992/living-while-black-by-kinouani-guilaine/9781529109436
Her new book White Minds has just been published and is available to buy here: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/white-minds
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