This paper presents a reflexive exploration of how accumulated secondary trauma can shape a helping professional’s response to her own personal trauma. Drawing from my dual experience as a social worker and researcher working with abused and neglected children in East Jerusalem, and as a mother who survived a life-threatening birth due to HELLP syndrome (hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes, and low platelet count), I examine the subtle and unconscious ways in which years of exposure to others’ suffering infiltrated my body and mind during my own crisis. Through narrative writing, excerpts from therapeutic dialogues, and psychoanalytic concepts such as projective identification and the “dead mother,” I trace the journey of recognizing how my professional caregiving identity collided with my maternal one. The paper offers both a personal and theoretical reflection on the blurred boundaries between caring for others and caring for oneself and on the potential of relational therapy to restore safety, connection, and compassion in the aftermath of trauma.

This article explores the nuanced transference and countertransference dynamics that can arise in therapy and clinical consultation between Black women therapists and their Black women clinical consultants. Many Black women’s lives have often been shaped by intersecting histories of racial, gender, and class-based oppression, which may emerge within psychotherapy and clinical consultation as relational enactments. If used purposefully, these clinical enactments can become opportunities for growth for Black women clients, therapists, and clinical consultants. Unfortunately, gender, class, and race-based clinical enactments between Black women are underrepresented within the existing supervisory and clinical consultative literature. While these relationships hold immense potential for parallel growth and liberation, they also require careful attention to the complexities of shared experiences of marginalization and the inevitability of re-enactments occurring along the way. Through two composite vignettes, the authors introduce the concept of intersectional enactments and offer considerations for future therapy and clinical consultation with Black women that explicitly address these dynamics.

This paper focuses on the topic of marital conflict and how it can be conceptualized and processed in the child’s mind through a psychoanalytic intervention carried out in public services, that is, child and family mental health and social welfare services operating within the Italian public healthcare system. As is often the case in the Italian context, in public mental health services for children and their families, interventions are typically reserved for patients with multiple diagnoses, leaving at-risk cases—those requiring clinical attention—on long waiting lists. Such situations of family conflict and emotional distress observed in public child and family services, however, could benefit from psychoanalytically-informed interventions capable of preventing future maladjustment. After providing a theoretical and clinical framework of the concept of co-parenting—understood as a psychic space offered to the child to accompany them through the phases of mental growth—I will highlight the most meaningful elements from a year-long weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a seven-year-old boy. I believe this child allowed his mind to begin thinking again (Bion, 1962) and to emotionally reinvest in the surrounding world, reintroducing a virtuous cycle into family life that enabled more adequate care for each member’s emotional experiences.

Mobile phones 1 have become ubiquitous, however their import for the psyche remains under-researched from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. The central ideas of this paper draw from psychoanalytically informed, unstructured qualitative research interviews with post-graduate students about their use of mobile phones, during which a strong theme regarding mobile contact with mothers specifically and spontaneously emerged. These mother-child dynamics, as enacted through mobile phone usage, are explored using Winnicott’s concepts of the ‘capacity to be alone’ and transitional phenomena and Mahler’s theory of separation-individuation, with a focus on the ways in which closeness, dependency, and separation are negotiated. Following on from Winnicott’s notion of object survival, concepts from Benjamin and Baraitser such as attacks on maternal subjectivity and separateness, and reparative gestures are borrowed to extend the discussion of development from an intrapsychic process to acknowledging the self-other dialect as a mutually influencing process. In these negotiations the mobile phone becomes a site where transitional dilemmas are expressed - we see the phone operate, as well as fail, as both a transitional object and a transitional space in which to negotiate developmental strivings. The authors also consider clinical implications and applications of considering the psychological value mobile phones may play for patients.

“Taboo obsessions” occur when our thinking is consumed by unwanted thoughts of an unacceptable nature (i.e., repugnant or violent thoughts). Given that much of the recent psychological research has operated from a cognitive-behavioral viewpoint, unacceptable thoughts are understood to be “cognitive distortions” that result from assigning too much significance to such thoughts. This article puts forth the perspective that taboo obsessions reflect a state of the self, prone to fragmentation states. These fragmentation states, according to this shift in focus, are conceptualized as unformulated experiences, which accounts for the distressing relational containment. A brief clinical example illustrates the application of these concepts in treatment and highlights the need to expand intervention options beyond cognitive-behavioral therapy.

In seeking to affirm queer identity, clinical social work practice and psychotherapy has potentially foreclosed consideration of how aspects of race inform gender experiences as well as desires for both cis and trans patients. This foreclosure may limit the complexity with which we understand both cis and trans subjectivities, particularly when whiteness is left uninterrogated as a structuring force in identity formation. The authors utilize composite clinical case vignettes and psychoanalytic thinking to bring attention to how colonial legacies are woven into experiences of gender and desire. Rather than seeking categorical affirmation, the authors propose resisting the drive toward clinical certainty and adopting a stance of uncertainty as a deliberate tactic for advancing decolonial practice. This stance potentially opens the space for patients and clinicians to explore potential colonial legacies embedded in all gender experiences.