FRSS - No Fixed Abode, No Fixed Support?

All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Attendees will also receive access to the recording on the Monday after the event, available to watch back for 3 months. 

________________________________________________________________________ 

Abstract: 

This paper examines how homelessness has become weaponized as an exclusion criterion within NHS psychotherapy teams, situating this practice within austerity, the cost of living crisis, and systematic NHS defunding. As service thresholds rise and resources dwindle, "housing stability" emerges not as clinical consideration but as a gatekeeping mechanism masking institutional failures.

Drawing on experience from a specialist service providing Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT) to homeless communities, I demonstrate how successful therapeutic work with this population exposes the false economy of exclusion. The gap between institutional ideals of universal healthcare and rationed reality creates a hierarchy of deserving versus undeserving patients, with homelessness serving as proxy for social illegitimacy.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the homeless patient triggers powerful institutional defences, representing what psychotherapy teams cannot face: our own precarity within a collapsing NHS. In supervision, “clinical concerns” about chaos and missed appointments reveal deeper anxieties; class disgust, containment fears, and terror of acknowledging we too are precariously housed within failing institutions. We discuss Winnicott's holding environment while refusing those society has literally failed to hold.

Requiring “stable homes” for accessing psychological support represents institutional violence compounding existing inequalities. Mental health services effectively punish poverty by denying support to those whose psychological distress both contributes to and results from housing instability. We use psychoanalytic language to justify social exclusion, deploying concepts of “readiness” and “capacity” to avoid confronting countertransferential responses to poverty; a failure of institutional veracity, the ethical obligation to acknowledge when exclusion criteria serve institutional self-preservation rather than clinical necessity.

Through case examples and service data, I demonstrate that effective therapeutic work with homeless individuals is not only possible but essential, requiring services to confront both internal anxieties and external political realities.

_______________________________________________________________________ 

Speaker: 

Helen Rose is a Specialist Practitioner in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy at Renfrewshire Health and Social Care Partnership providing psychodynamic psychotherapy and MBT, currently completing a doctorate in Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the University of Exeter. As an accredited MBT practitioner, she previously worked within NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde's specialist Personality Disorder and Homelessness Team, delivering MBT to individuals experiencing homelessness. Her clinical experience spans crisis intervention, forensic settings, and complex personality disorder services. She provides training and consultation across mental health services.

_______________________________________________________________________ 

Tickets: 

Suggested donation £10-£15. 
Minimum donation £1. 

The purpose of this event is to raise funds for the Freud Museum London, which receives no regular Government income. We are grateful to you for supporting our independent museum as generously as possible. 

_______________________________________________________________________ 

The Freudian Research Seminar Series 

The Freudian Research Seminar Series (FRSS) will convene virtually once every month and seeks to establish a forum which both cultivates and circulates new psychoanalytically informed research. We welcome both PhD students and Researchers across disciplines (inc. psychoanalysis, psychology, literature, art, film, history), to participate and form a community in which new ideas can be openly discussed and developed. 

Each seminar will commence at 6pm (London) and last for an hour and thirty minutes, with thirty-forty minutes for the paper followed by a discussion. Seminars will be recorded for those registered to playback for 3 months but please note they will not be later made available on the On Demand service. 

_______________________________________________________________________ 

Schedule: 

Wednesday 22 October – Kimberly Lamm, Fashioning the Ego as Home: Black Women Writers and Clothing 

Thursday 27 November – Helen Rose, No Fixed Abode, No Fixed Support? The Weaponization of Homelessness in an Era of Austerity and NHS Decline 

Thursday 11 December – Kazue Niki, Staging the Finale: Freud’s London Garden as a Constructed Space 

Wednesday 28 January – Foram Trivedi, Home-Environmental Tweaks and Functional Independence in Adults with ADHD: A Narrative Review with Psychoanalytic Reflection 

Thursday 26 February – Arjet Pervizi, Renting Within Oneself: A psychoanalytic exploration of home - between rent and ownership, transience, and the fantasy of belonging in the psychoanalytic subject 

Thursday 26 March – Callum Blades, The Unhomely Mind: Conspiracies as a Defence Against Psychic Displacement 

Thursday 23 April – Nisrina Larasati, “Only You Understand Me Completely”: Contemporary Investigation of the Uncanny in AI Therapy Bots 

Thursday 21 May – Sam Bolton, I Cannot Turn Away from Your Home: A Melancholic Reformulation of Transgender Dysphoria 

Thursday 25 June – Anna-Peter Magyarlaki & Eric Harper, Homes, closets and wombs: Psychoanalytic reflections on home-making and homelessness for queer, trans and gender nonconforming people 

Thursday 30 July – Huaiyuan “Susanna” Zhang, The Ego Is Not Master in Its Own House: Levinas, Freud, and the Ethical Unhousing of Oedipus