“The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived — nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died — through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life.”
James Baldwin, Another Country
I am a professionally trained, qualified and BPC-registered psychodynamic psychotherapist. For a brief explanation of what psychodynamic or psychoanalytic psychotherapy is, see the BPC’s overview here. My standard fee is £85 for a 50-minute session. For our first meeting, during which we decide together if and how we might proceed, I allow 90 minutes for the consultation and charge the standard fee. I work in English or French. Some of the issues in which I have expertise include:
- Addiction (including work addiction, sexual addiction, co-dependency and compulsive enmeshment)
- Attachment and intimacy problems
- Anxiety, panic and feelings of emptiness
- Childhood neglect and abuse
- Class and cultural displacement
- Depression and dissociation
- Family dysfunction and parental narcissism
- Loneliness, isolation and emotional anorexia
- Loss and bereavement
- Racialised injury and internalised racism
- Rage and self-sabotage
- Sex, sexuality and the navigation of sexual identities
- Shame and low self-esteem
- Trauma (including complex trauma, developmental trauma, racialised trauma and inter-generational trauma).
I am committed to deepening my understanding of how people may recover from over-identification with the distorting projections of their early environments. This commitment informs my work both as a therapist and as a thinker. I am the Editor of the Miscellany section of the psychoanalytic journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality. I organised the conference Sanity, Madness and the Family: An Urgent Retrospective, exploring the cultural, therapeutic and psychiatric legacies of R.D. Laing’s and Aaron Esterson’s classic 1964 study of “schizophrenia” and its relation to scapegoating in family life. You can listen to that conference here and you can find the papers in published form, with an additional contribution by Hilary Mantel, here. In a related vein, you can hear me talking to June Allen about psychotherapy and recovery from racialised trauma here:
Andrew Asibong Therapy 