The Society for Social and Critical Psychoanalysis (SSCP) has recently joined the FreePsy Free Clinics Network. This Autumn the SSCP is running an online Introductory Course in Social and Critical Psychoanalysis. Course Lead, Dr Guy Millon and Training Committee Chair, Dr Sally Sales have contributed a guest blog about the upcoming course and the activities that the SSCP is engaged in, including running a low-cost clinic and full psychoanalytic training in the South West of the UK.
How might we take a critical approach to psychoanalytic thought and practice? In what ways can we ensure that psychoanalysis is grounded in the contemporary social field? In the Society for Social and Critical Psychoanalysis (SSCP) we have a critical and comparative engagement with traditional and contemporary theories and practices of psychoanalysis and the social, political and philosophical discourses that generate and produce them. We have a commitment to exploring how the specificities of race, gender, sexual orientation, class and disabilities shape and form the people who come to clinical work.
An Introductory Course in Social and Critical Psychoanalysis
This Autumn we have a new programme we are offering as an Introduction to Social and Critical Psychoanalysis. This course is an introduction to how the foundations of psychoanalysis can be examined and interrogated, a forum to discuss how psychoanalytic ideas can be put to work in new ways that help us understand and respond to the crises and challenges of life in 2023. Taught by members of the Society for Social and Critical Psychoanalysis, this course will address issues including: How might social inequalities produce states of abjection in working class communities? What can Freud’s famous patient, the Rat Man, tell us about the relation between capitalism and masculinity? Is melancholia an idea that can help us think about the immigrant experience? What do we refer to when we talk of feminine sexuality? Along the way we will draw upon neglected figures from the history of psychoanalysis, such as Sándor Ferenczi, whose radical ideas about mutuality challenge classical assumptions about clinical practice; we will ask questions about the nature of the bond between analyst and patient, discussing how to be open to difference and the dangers of colonising the other. Over the past 125 years, encounters between psychoanalytic thinking and other disciplines such as Marxism, feminism, and queer theory have generated a rich, dense, heterogenous body of thought that we will bring to bear upon topics that touch our daily lives, including dreams, time and politics.
This course will be of interest to those who are curious about the relevance of psychoanalysis to the dilemmas and questions posed by contemporary life. For those interested in embarking upon a full psychoanalytic training, the course will provide an entry point into psychoanalytic thought and practice within the culture of the SSCP. The course can also serve as CPD for counsellors and therapists who want to invigorate their clinical practice with new and diverse ideas.
The course will run online over Zoom, on Thursday evenings (6pm-8pm UK time), over ten weeks from 14th September to 16th November 2023. The fee is £225 plus a booking fee. Take a look at the full teaching programme and book your place here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-social-and-critical-introduction-to-psychoanalysis-zoom-evening-course-tickets-605066689757 For all general enquires please email enquiries@sscp.uk or see our website: https://www.sscp.uk
The Ethos of the SSCP and our Full Clinical Training
SSCP offers a training that is unusual in the attention it pays to the historical, philosophical and political contexts of the development of psychoanalysis. The training places critique at its centre, fostering in the students a spirit of passionate enquiry into the diversity and complexity of therapeutic work and relationships. Rather than being rooted in one body of psychoanalytic thought, the training interrogates the different psychoanalytic schools – Lacanian, Object Relations, Kleinian, Relational, Jungian, post-Freudian – and the different clinical practices they have produced. The critique of the training is framed by contemporary political and intellectual movements, such as feminism, post structuralism, post colonialism, queer theory, post modernism, and the thinkers that have informed those movements, for example, Butler, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu.
Central to the ethos of SSCP – and reflected in our name – is the social field in which all psychoanalytic practice is both constructed, developed and undertaken. We make central how the specificities of race, gender, sexual orientation, class and disabilities shape and form the people who come to clinical work. These categories operate unequally, favouring certain identities and disadvantaging others. We consider an awareness of and an address to, these power dynamics to be foundational to the clinical encounter.
Our teaching is broad, comparative and critical. Students are encouraged to develop their own individual positions as psychoanalysts, with an ability to self-question and self-reflect in the clinical encounter being fundamental. We place particular emphasis in clinical work on the centrality of careful and deep listening, the importance of language in the therapeutic encounter and a mindfulness about the social context of mental distress.
Our Low Cost Clinic
We recognise the historical position of psychoanalysis as a largely urban practice, and so in Cornwall we encourage an exploration of the relevance of psychoanalytic and critical thought specifically to the experience of rural and coastal communities. This difference invites a questioning of psychoanalysis as a set of urban practices, addressing urban subjects. What happens to psychoanalysis in a rural setting? How do its theories and practices speak to people living in rural communities and cultures? We place particular emphasis on the inequalities that often structure rural communities and how inequality produces and exacerbates troubled psychological states. The clinic we have developed alongside our training has served a dual purpose: to make psychoanalysis accessible to communities across the region who have been traditionally excluded from such opportunities and to provide our students with a diversity of clinical work.
The low cost clinic was set up in 2011 against the back drop of the then coalition government’s programme of austerity. Indeed, part of the clinic’s purpose was to provide mental health support at a time of draconian cuts to public services and welfare provision. The short term, solution focussed therapies, such as CBT, commonly available within the statutory services, suited an austerity agenda. The low cost clinic stood in marked opposition to these kinds of therapy approaches and the austerity driven economics that supported them. The clinic offers up to 2 years twice weekly psychoanalysis to people who would otherwise not be able to afford to access such therapy privately. The fee is set according to what the person can pay, even if this is very minimal. Most of the people who come to the clinic are from working class backgrounds and have the complications of poor, insecure housing, poverty, social isolation, low paid work or are dependent on benefits, all of which have complex effects on their mental health. One of the clinic therapists captured how recent government welfare changes come directly into the clinical work:
“Pieces of legislation coming into the clinic – bedroom tax, changes in benefit – I see the psychological impact of these changes appear in the clinic. These will interrupt any other conversation that is going on in therapy. Working class people cannot just fall back into the ‘internal self’ and reflect upon themselves.”
This therapist is drawing a sharp comparison between middle-class and working-class lives in therapy. For many SSCP clinic users managing the challenges of their material existence is the clinical work, and prevents the more dreamlike, free associative space that the ‘traditional’ psychoanalytic encounter provides. All SSCP clinicians are very alive to these classed differences and the need to make psychoanalysis accessible to this very different constituency.
To find out more about the SSCP, visit: https://www.sscp.uk
