Seminar RECORDING - David Morgan

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“If I tell you everything I will have to kill you.” - One of my first forensic patients Forensic psychotherapy operates at the frontiers of what the mind can bear. To sit with those who have enacted extreme violence, sexual homicide, sadistic abuse, cannibalism is to sit with the disintegration not only of the patient’s mind, often the death, mutilation of the other, but with the profound risk of disintegration in oneself, in the face of such experience. Or worse the failure to breakdown in the face of such material. In such contexts, the therapist is asked not simply to think about trauma, but to be in relation to it: to sustain presence in the face of horror, without resort to omnipotent defences or collapse into identification. Yet within forensic settings, where the ordinary safeguards of human relatedness have already been shattered, there often emerges a distinctive form of psychic defence among clinicians, which I want to address both in myself and colleagues, what might be called heroic denial. This is a rather manic refusal to acknowledge the impact of trauma on the therapist’s own mind, an unconscious idealisation of our capacity to absorb violence without psychic injury. It can masquerade as professional competence, or even as moral virtue, “I can bear it; others cannot.” This is often a thin membrane, easily ruptured by the force of what is encountered or defended against at all costs. I want to explore what this ability is and how much it reflects something in these patients' presentations that manifests itself in this way.