IAFP Seminar Member Rate - Timothy Paris

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Group analysis is centrally concerned with how the wider social and political field is reproduced within organisations and therapy spaces through the social unconscious, scapegoating processes and the location of disturbance. In forensic settings, these dynamics can crystallise around “the stranger”: the person who is made to carry what the institution cannot bear - fear, disgust, rage, shame - becoming a projective canvas for anxieties about danger, responsibility and social fracture. We will explore how neoliberal cultures of privatisation, hyper-individualism and scarcity shape both care and custody. Under conditions of austerity, organisational meaning-making is pressured toward simplification: risk is moralised, complexity is disavowed, and exclusion can become a defensive “solution.” Using the concept of necropolitics as a clinical-organisational metaphor, we consider how systems under strain drift toward deciding - implicitly and pragmatically - whose lives are treatable, containable or disposable, both socially and clinically. The paper also links scarcity to difficulties with mourning and acknowledging loss in teams and patients, with consequences for aggression, hope and responsibility. Group-analytic work can subvert these pressures by providing a frame in which anger, fear and violent fantasy can be represented in words rather than enacted. In doing so, the group supports responsibility without foreclosure, and makes room for alternative identities and positions that neoliberal institutions may deny, disavow or denigrate. By holding a frame that distinguishes fantasy from action, the group supports responsibility without moral collapse - an ethic of non-violence that is clinically realistic in forensic contexts.