This lecture brings together three senior clinicians who will reflect on their pioneering frontline work with marginalised communities in inner city London. They will discuss their ongoing collaboration leading and developing the Psychosis Therapy Project and USEMI (PTP-Usemi), two innovative specialist services targeting under-served communities where severe mental illness intersects with deprivation, exclusion and discrimination.
Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz will discuss her work at the PTP and share some of her theorisations and insights into the clinic of psychosis as she understands it. She will outline the specificity of psychosis in relation to primary narcissism and the question of origin. This will shed light on the key mechanisms of regression and idealisation in psychotic functioning. Clinical implications will be drawn, with significant consequences in terms of technique.
Earl Pennycooke will discuss his work with racialised communities and account for the specificity of racial trauma both theoretically and from the perspective of his lived experience. He will argue that the reality of racism tends to be reduced to a matter of perception and misinterpretation rather than a harsh fact, thus preventing the validation and the understanding of the experience for the victims themselves. This persistent denial perpetuates the traumatic impact of racism and gets played out in psychoanalysis and society as a whole. What are the clinical conclusions we can draw from this systemic deadlock?
Barry Watt will discuss his work with the homeless. For most securely housed people, the shelter and containment our homes provide are a largely taken for granted. The idea of a ‘home’ does not pose a fraught psychical problem to be interminably navigated, but a basic feature of everyday life. Barry will reflect on how we can understand and support those for whom this is not the case, and for whom home has become an impossible, terrifying, object.
Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz is a psychoanalyst, clinical supervisor and translator in the field of psychoanalytic theory. She is Senior Psychotherapist at the Bethlem Royal Hospital, working in inpatient services and the Founder and Clinical Director of the Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP), a specialist community service for people who experience psychosis and complex trauma.
Earl Pennycooke is a psychotherapist who has worked in a variety of settings, from brief work within the National Health Service to managing frontline addiction and mental health services. Earl is co-director of the Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP) and the Founder and Clinical Lead of the USEMI Racial Trauma Clinic, a Black-led specialist service for those experiencing racialisation and severe mental illness (USEMI is part of PTP).
Barry Watt is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, whose work has focused on making psychotherapy available to those traditionally excluded from it. He is Senior Psychotherapist and co-director at the Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP). He is a member of the Training Committee for the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and currently serves on the Editorial Board of the British Journal for Psychotherapy.
