Papers by Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz
Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Jan 8, 2020
This paper explores the function of the maternal phallus in the construction of human subjectivit... more This paper explores the function of the maternal phallus in the construction of human subjectivity, confronting omnipotence and castration as the two terms punctuating the subject's journey from primary to secondary process. The rape of the maternal phallus is posited as a foundational psychic event eliciting the advent of repression via the introduction of the term of castration. This paradigm is examined across a variety of metapsychological and mythological references and an array of clinical situations including fetishism, psychosis and hysteria.
Psychoanalysis and History, Dec 1, 2022
The Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP) is a psychoanalytic clinic of psychosis that delivers talking... more The Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP) is a psychoanalytic clinic of psychosis that delivers talking and art therapy services in deprived communities across inner-city London. I founded the project in 2013 in north London. It started out as a very small unfunded service and, though funding remains an eternal problem for us, we have managed to expand over the years and now have four branches: two in north London, one in south London and a virtual clinic which arose from the COVID-19 crisis. We have, furthermore, developed a racial trauma clinic called USEMI which specifically addresses the challenges of severe mental illness in communities of colour (see Pennycooke, this issue). In the disenfranchised areas where we work, we encounter a high proportion of people who present with complex trauma and severe mental illness and receive little support besides (over-)medication. Their mental health needs are extremely acute while the lack of provision is blatant. In response to this situation, the PTP has developed psychoanalytic therapy services in the community; it currently has a caseload of over 100 people and relies on a growing team of 40 (this includes therapists, supervisors and volunteers) (Figure 1). One aspect of the clinical interventions we implement in the community is a commitment to psychoanalytic technique and, along with the psychoanalytic theorizations we draw from our work, it is what makes the PTP a distinctly psychoanalytic project. We focus, more specifically, on the Freudian concept of truthfulness as a technical requirement. Truthfulness is the foundation of the psychoanalytic treatment, Freud tells us in one of his papers on technique. 'In this fact,' he writes, 'lies a great part of its educative effect and its ethical value' (Freud, 1915a, p. 164). To which he adds: 'It is dangerous to depart from this foundation.' This statement is in 'Observations on Transference-Love', an essay in which, among other things, Freud discusses the fine line between power and love,
The Freudian Matrix of André Green: Towards a Psychoanalysis for the 21st Century, Feb 2, 2023
British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2019
British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2017
This clinical roundtable features a presentation by Dorothee Bonnigal-Katz who posits the impairm... more This clinical roundtable features a presentation by Dorothee Bonnigal-Katz who posits the impairment of the mechanisms of repression as characteristic of psychosis and discusses its consequences for the analyst, especially as regards the place of interpretation. She shows how the analyst's encounter with the psychotic experience radically challenges and paradoxically validates psychoanalytic technique. In response to Bonnigal-Katz's discussion, Tomasz Fortuna offers an overview of the psychoanalytic tradition's response to psychosis, raising the issue of the relation between psychosis and neurosis. Christos Tombras, on the other hand, invokes Freud's discussion of Schreber's Memoirs from a Lacanian perspective and addresses the question of language and experience.
British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2019
Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 2020
This paper explores the function of the maternal phallus in the con
Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community (ed. by Julie Walsh & Barry Sheils), 2017
An overview of the background, ethos and theoretical tenets of the Psychosis Therapy Project, a p... more An overview of the background, ethos and theoretical tenets of the Psychosis Therapy Project, a psychoanalytic therapy project founded by Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz
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Papers by Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz