On being a member of the Red Clinic

This is the text of a talk given by the Red Clinic’s Rebecca Sharp at the Feminist Therapy Network’s first anniversary event, 8th June 2024.

I’m going to speak briefly about why it felt important to be involved with a collective like Red Clinic at this point in my practice, at this moment in history, and this moment for psychoanalysis .

I think there’s much said about the problematics of psychoanalytic training and institutions in terms of the transmission of conservatism and a self preserving interest in neutrality which often functions as a cover for whiteness, or “white ears”, and other forms of normative listening. As I near the end of my training I would say that the major lessons have been about defining the terrain of institutional psychoanalysis and witnessing how severely lacking and in fact damaging its half hearted relationship with the psychosocial is - for the purposes of our work, and our social reality. Not only are we still in a field of exclusivity (in the crudest sense the trainings are painfully expensive and therapy itself is prohibitively expensive) and there is also in some spaces an explicit investment in maintaining this a set of conditions. So already just acknowledging the ways this inhibits people of colour, those from working class backgrounds from training (and thus patients finding representation or comprehension in the therapy they seek) we are in the realm of the highly charged political. Not to mention the sanctions therapeutic bodies are currently trying to place on trans and queer psychic complexity and survival and the ways this is profoundly mishandled as we train. To underscore the rest I remind myself that my cohort began our training during a global pandemic and are graduating amidst a genocide.

To supplement or antidote my learning I have sought out people who are theorising the impossibility of neutrality (a repressive myth), and who resist the colonising / privatising / normativising forces of psychoanalysis so that we can broaden the scope of what containment can mean. I believe that transference needs to be a radical and dynamic relationship that does not perform the sedimentation of coercive institutional power.

The question then becomes what can psychoanalysis do for the collective? It was quite clear that as much as the group work we were doing suppressed / repressed its understanding of operant power dynamics that if you’re dealing with the unconscious you’re dealing with the collective - and so we find a relational matrix drenched in colonialism, racism, patriarchy, queerphobia, transphobia, albeism and so on. It strikes me that the “symptom” is clarified once some of these structures are questioned or dismantled, but it’s an incredibly delicate psychic work. I found myself increasingly radicalised by the experience of overhearing people’s clinical material, the intense vulnerability with which a patient offers up their unsconscious world to a therapist and the potential for harm done. It feels extremely dissonant to me to imagine people’s wellbeing without being invested in fighting for them in material and thoughtful ways. At the very least we should be practicing listening to the patient about what’s actually needed for their own liberation. At the very least the therapeutic dyad should be a space to rehearse disalienation.

In thinking about the possibilities of free clinics or accessible therapy I found Red Clinic, and have found the space in which these ideas about what therapy could do are circulating and not gaslit (because that is the experience in institutions and psychoanalytic bodies). It means a great deal to be connected with practitioners whose values and ethics I trust (because trust is a big part of therapeutic work). Separately, it’s been a fascinating contrast to the work I have done at the NHS where patients with complex trauma require a lot of active containing, I am a kind of mother in the transference; with Red Clinic patients I am at least initially and primarily a comrade. The therapeutic power dynamic is much more lateral, which feels generative and rhizomatic. The sessions feel like a kind of dialectical space that feeds into political work and the two breathe into each other. These politicised patients are claiming agency and refusing mechanics of objectification, simultaneously they are inevitably drawn to perpetuate and repeat enigmatic features of oppression that have been internalised. While consciously we may be ideologically opposed to something, our unconscious has been wrought by our origins and interchanges with (for example) the family. These psychic divestments are not so easy. In our political work we have investments in an ideal family / draw from the failures of the family - psychoanalysis is well poised to think through these complexities of family as a primary site of contestation.

I think it feels necessary to position myself as a practitioner in a struggle that believes cycles can be broken, and that depends not only on an understanding of repetition compulsion but also on a negotiation of our part in community, solidarity and abolition. What does it mean to be in real solidarity with our patients beyond the confines of the clinic? There is a transference to the Red Clinic that affords its patients an extended and broadened sense of containment, to know that their worldview is received and held as well as enacted. And a feeling that their therapists’ lives are also committed to being in service to our mutual possibilities of health and a future imaginary - this idea that the clinic and its therapists are politically life sustaining serves a kind of enhanced transference in my experience so far.

So what I think feels quite beautiful and affirming about the work of the Red Clinic is being able to provide care that is consciously about reckoning with the psychic toll of living within a violent world, and increasingly bearing witness to that violence. To name a vivid example - Lara and Steven Sheehi talk about the absurdity of attempting a dissociation of the political from the psychic in clinical work when we have stories like that of a Palestinian therapy session being conducted as tear gas seeps into the room. Given the ever presence of metaphorical and literal gaseous encroachments, some awareness of social reality feels like it can offer a crucial counterpoint to the many ways psychology and psychoanalysis gets conscripted by state logics. The hope is that the clinic might be a site of resistance to violence and ideology and its psychic intrusions, and the ways this bleeds into our emotional worlds. From a position of feeling ethically concerned with protecting and doing no harm as clinicians the hope is we can offer a space that cultivates connection and potential transformation by ‘staying with the trouble’ or disrupting internalisations of injustice.

Ultimately I hope to attend to the affective inner life of those seeking therapy and play a caring role in a liberation effort.