Upcoming CPD event! 💭 Come and join this online workshop to learn how to use psychoanalytic principles and methods for working with dream material. For counsellors, therapists and trainees who want to work safely and effectively with their own, and their client’s, dreams. 💭 Go to the link in my bio to book your space! #dreams #dreaminterpretation #psychoanalysis #psychoanalytic #dreamwork #counselling #counsellors #therapist #psychotherapy #cpd #workshop #freud #jung #lacan

I’m absolutely delighted to share that my paper “Ferenczi and Winnicott: the intersubjective, the third and the mother in psychoanalysis” is now published and available with The International Forum of Psychoanalysis. The Freudian concepts of trauma and psychic development focus on the individual, internal psychic experience. Contributions from Sandor Ferenczi, and later D. W. Winnicott broadened the scene of trauma beyond the intrapsychic realm and took seriously the interpersonal, relational and intersubjective. In doing so, psychoanalysis began to legitimise traditionally feminine qualities and acts such as care, devotion and tact. Ferenczi and Winnicott, in different and overlapping ways, became advocates for the acts of mothering that are legitimate both within the clinic and outside of it. They have progressed psychoanalysis beyond Freudian binaries and phallocentrism, toward horizontalised relationalities which are still relevant today. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0803706X.2025.2515086 If you would like to read the paper but don’t have institutional access, please contact me for a copy.

Some snaps from summer so far… I’m thinking about how this time of year can be disjointed for us therapists. Maybe we take some time off, maybe our clients are away, maybe there is extra childcare to organise. The routines change and become destabilised. We are presented with new arrangements of time, (after all, in the UK, there are many more hours of daylight and time seems to stretch out before us) and different possibilities for thinking. Borrowing Timothy Morton’s notion of knowledge as resonance, rather than capture, we can open to the potential of these different arrangements as opportunities for embodied metabolisation without a conclusion. Without necessarily a language or even consciousness. The absence of knowledge contains the potential for meaning.

So pleased (and surprised) to graduate yesterday with an MA Psychoanalytic Studies with a Distinction, the Sigmund Freud Memorial Prize and the Paul Ford Memorial Prize (best dissertation and best overall marks across two programmes and best dissertation in my programme, respectively). My dissertation research “Trauma and the Organisation: Witnessing and Re-Viscerating Intersubjectivities” looked at psychoanalytic traumatologies through a critical lens, utilising autoethnographic research gathered from an organisation positioned at the forefront of working with traumatised individuals. I used my own dream material, observations and created art-work to access the unconscious material of the organisation. What emerged was an insistence of what I termed “re-visceration” of the organisation’s material. Trauma within the organisation causes an overwhelm of viscera: death, disease, disgust. The organisation responds by stripping the body and its viscera away, in an attempt at sterilisation. Imagined intersubjective boundaries are also insisted upon- the divisions between the ‘traumatised’ and the ‘helper’ are reinforced in the very fabric of buildings and their spaces, in administrative procedures and policy-making. By re-turning the organisational material over to the body, the intersubjective boundaries can be read as psychic defences against the overwhelming and incapacitating nature of trauma, not making it go away, but forcing it underground into the organisation’s unconscious, contributing to it’s member’s burn-out and vicarious traumatisation. In this process, the possibility that trauma offers for enlivening or revivification is also lost to repression/suppression. Like the traumatised individual, the organisation struggles to think cohesively and to make associations. This work is dedicated to all those that work in trauma-saturated professions.

It was great to talk with a potential attendee yesterday about the intersections between trauma, addiction, neurodivergence and emotional regulation. It really is the common thread running through all of those experiences- in many different shades, of course. But this is what makes emotional regulation such a broadly understandable and important aspect of therapeutic work (inside the therapy room and outside). I also had the chance to talk with professionals from another helping organisation, discussing the importance of emotional regulation not just as a tool to help clients, but also as a tool for the organisation itself and it’s staff. In-house full day organisational training on emotional regulation when working with trauma and addiction is also available. The final taster session is happening next Wednesday 2nd April 3-4:30pm at @openroadcolchester. Get in touch if you would like to come along!

🌟 first session is being held on Thursday 27th Feb 1:30-2:30pm! 🌟 The group remains open to new members- DM to find out more! • #dreamcircle #psychoanalysis #psychoanalyticdreaminterpretation #dream #dreaminterpretation #jungianpsychology #jungian #jungiananalysis #counselling #counsellor #psychology

Visited the excellent new exhibition “Women and Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists” at the @freudmuseum this weekend. It was an absolute pleasure to traverse through some provoking and honest pieces that encapsulate some of the complexities of the intersections between psychoanalysis and femininity • #psychoanalysis #freud #femininity #feminism #sigmundfreud #freudmuseum #london #art #exhibition

New book delivery! • Understanding the individual as part of a system (family, society, workplace, etc.) can help illuminate things that don’t make sense when we isolate the person in their individuality. Dynamics, inherited rules, inhibitions, introjects, languages and rituals are often systemic in nature and need to be contextualised as such in order to change. • #familytherapy #grouptherapy #systemicfamilytherapy #grouprelations #psychotherapy #psychoanalysis #grouppsychotherapy #families #attachment #newbooks