HCSA is a crime which haunts the fabric of our history, culture and social structures. It is clear that denial and a culture of lies have bred injustice, suffering and the traumatic isolation of survivors whose testimony now reaches back into the community.
There is also another side, picked up with aliveness, creativity and refracted within global movements such as #MeToo. Survivors are also speaking with an exuberant focus on future, for those to come, and toward developing creative therapeutic processes many of which are informed by historic and recent psychoanalytic paradigms. As an introduction to her presentation, Maggie Schaedel will show a brief film based on Sigmund Freud’s analysis of Dora. This film was made at a particular moment of mourning for psychoanalysis and a pervasive melancholic sensibility is unmistakable. A trail of sadness, pain and outrage moves through the film which addresses the need to find attunement and to know the humanity of Dora. As our own professional history becomes reclaimed with sorrow and loss we are challenged to move beyond disavowal and culpability.
A traumatised generation is speaking out, one which has grown through the impact of invalidation and invisibility to develop an historic and powerful narrative. Women are called as witnesses to traumatic levels of unmourned loss as past events are recalled in scenes of haunted suffering. The film makes explicit links with the coming into being of psychoanalysis at the turn of the 20th century and returns us to its earliest days. Ideas which once seemed lost are now re-found and Maggie Schaedel cites as example aspects of the work of D.W.Winnicott which recently have found a home within trauma informed contexts and re-imagined within the literature on trauma. In particular, she refers to his ideas of primitive states, analytic inter-subjectivity and transitional space.
In this presentation Maggie Schaedel makes reference to the parallel processes between the therapeutic couple and the social and institutional contexts of the NHS where health and illness commingle. She will use clinical material, appropriately disguised, to extend some of these ideas within the body of her presentation.