Working with Psychosis
Book ticketsOrganised by:
Manor House Centre for Psychotherapy and Counselling
Description
An online workshop with Dr Laura Chernaik
Saturday 7th June 2025
10am-1pm
In this talk, Dr Laura Chernaik discusses psychoanalytical work with people living with psychosis. A contemporary psychoanalytical practice tends to include a much wider variety of structures and states of mind than Freud’s clinic.
Some of our patients—whether in charitably-funded clinics or in private practice—might be living with severe and chronic mental health or ‘psychoses’, including the schizophrenias, others might be living with less severe but equally chronic non-neurotic structures or states of mind, including what in psychiatric terms are called ‘personality disorders’, while only a proportion of the people who decide upon a long-term psychoanalysis and find their way to us are the hysterical or obsessional neurotics who made up the majority of Freud’s patients.
Her work is based on listening to the patient, inspired by R.D. Laing’s approach, but theorised in ways influenced by Lacan, Laplanche, Roustang, and the Latin American Field Theorists, Madeleine and Willy Baranger.
As the focus is on clinical work and listening, Laura will include a range of ‘clinical fictions’—vivid, fictional imaginings. Nobody fits the crude overgeneralisations that are ‘diagnoses’; the stories we tell and the representations we construct are always strongly, frighteningly, political.
Laura Chernaik is a member of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Guild of Psychotherapists. She is a psychoanalyst in private practice, working with people with a diversity of ways of being in the world. She supervises in private practice, at the Guild of Psychotherapists’ low fee Clinic, and at AGIP. She teaches and writes on the relation between philosophical change and social and political change, as this is played out in the history of psychoanalytical theory and practice. She has been published in numerous books and journals.
