APT:B Public Lecture – Jay Barlow
Organised by:
West Midlands Institute of Psychotherapy
Location
St Paul's Convent, 94 Selly Park Road, Selly Park, Birmingham, B29 7LL
Description
THE UMBILICAL
Traditional psychoanalytic approaches view excessive parental, social or relational involvement in human development as an opportunity for linking complex gender and identity experiences. The analyst’s unconscious bias might present an opportunity for interpretation that could resemble something akin to conversion therapy. All of which leaves the patient feeling alienated and confirming their exiled Self. Early relational trauma affects every gender and sexual identity. Each traumatic situation, from inappropriate interference to traumatic abuse, affects how an individual forms and experiences relationships. Gender and sexual identity are fluid agencies of the Self within all human development. For people who are non-normative when it comes to gender, identity or sexuality, evidence of early relational trauma should not unthinkingly be treated alongside mental health struggles. This clinical paper explores once weekly analytic work with a young, exiled transman who lived in a dysregulated state of mind from his early relational trauma. It uses Louise Bourgeois’s images to explore the early development of projective identification and proposes that this becomes a way of exiling unwanted feelings into the other with hopes of finding a place of belonging – as if through a psychic umbilical.
Jay Barlow is a Jungian Psychoanalyst member and Director of Training of the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP), London. As a Training and Supervising Analyst, he supervises and teaches on various analytic trainings in the UK and in IAAP developing groups outside the UK. He is interested in Infant Observation, Early States of Mind, and Unconscious Fantasy. He has an MA in Jungian and Post Jungian Studies and has worked as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the NHS. Jay is in full time private practice in South London.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS A HYBRID EVENT SO ATTENDANCE VIA ZOOM IS ALSO AVAILABLE.
To book, email aptc@wmip.org
