The Unhoused Mind - Psychic homelessness and the analytic frame

‘…the house a substitute for the womb - one’s first dwelling place, probably still longed for, where one was safe and felt so comfortable’.  (Freud, S. 1930 Civilisation and its Discontents)

Homelessness can be a concrete and a psychic state - descriptive of estrangement and a lack of containment - and both states are sometimes closely entwined in each other.

Using clinical material our speakers will explore different aspects of the concept from a psychodynamic perspective - from Adlam and Scanlon’s suggestion that, ‘Homelessness is….both a symptom and a communication of unhoused and dismembered states of mind’, to Robin Anderson’s examination of the analytic frame and its crucial importance in work with patients and clients.

Gabrielle Brown

Gabriella Brown will explore how homeless people, excluded frombelonging in society, find themselves lonely in a crowd but ill at ease in their own company. Melanie Klein saw ‘belonging’ as the antithesis to lonely states. For Klein, loneliness brings a sense that ‘one is not in full possession of oneself…one does not fully belong to oneself, or, therefore, to anybody else’ (1963). 

Gabrielle will draw on work with chronically homeless patients, typically considered unsuitable for psychotherapy through insistent self-sufficiency and passionate attachment to analgesic objects. She will discuss the therapist’s own sense of working far from an analytic home, dispossessed of both the comforts of benign and trusting transferences and the familiar rituals of the therapeutic frame