During and post the Covid pandemic, there has been a new emphasis on ‘home’ and how it is inhabited, within inside and outside spaces, which, combined with home-working, work-life balance, gardening for well-being, environmental anxieties, further pandemic threat and global violence, means that what makes a space ‘Homely’ and safe is of increasing importance. There is a revisiting of the concept of ‘self-sufficient off-grid green living’ Seymore (1976) towards a ‘more sustainable future’ which mirrors the first settled, permanent neolithic homes when farming began. I suggest that these are a parallel place to begin my conceptualisation of an achieved good enough sense of ‘Home’ space, which is beyond the ‘womb’ to a constructed safely organised internalised safe parental structure, as I discuss in relation to the role of the consulting room and the therapeutic process, and the space of home considering the ‘spatialisation’ (Wright 2019, 2022) onto spaces (Searles [1960], Wollheim [1969] and Rey [1994]) to impose ‘human order on the otherwise disorderly natural world.’ (Thomas, 1984, p256). I look at clinical case material of phantasy escaping to safe climate change homesteads. I also look at the phantasy of the unsafe home planet and the moving away to a new home planet, such as Mars, that will be safer in which, as Karl Figlio describes, ‘you bypass destructiveness. Once we have polluted earth, we move on to Mars. It is like the misogynist fantasy that the man pollutes the woman and then moves on to an undamaged one.’ (Wright, 2024). I will address the conference themes of climate crisis, existential crisis, trauma and loss, home dispossession, homelessness, the consulting room and being haunted by bad homes and phantasy good ones with my conceptualising of the enablement of sense of a good enough home space that can be safely inhabited.

In this paper I propose to gloss my recent doctoral research on Brexit and psychoanalysis by repositioning the theme of the conference – crisis – in terms of a conversion disorder. Following Jamieson Webster, conversion disorder can be regarded as an inheritance of Freud’s early clinical work, a diagnostic category which goes beyond more familiar alternatives in its distinctive insinuation of a hidden ‘order’ behind or beyond the manifestation of psychosomatic disarray. Picking up on the philosophical and religious resonances of the term, Webster (2019, p.50) emphasises that conversion meets ‘a growing need to speak about matters of disenchantment, disappointment, and ennui’. In this paper, I relate the all-pervasive sense of ‘disappointment’ to the condition of UK politics since 2016, arguing that Brexit requires an urgent reengagement with postcolonial claims on the psychosocial order. Yet eschewing a strictly deconstructive ethos, I sustain my ‘negative’ assessment of Brexit by appealing to an alternative ‘positive’ model of psychoanalytic politics which reckons with the mutual imbrication between ethics, politics and metaphysis. With reference to the post-Hegelian philosophy of Gillian Rose (1992), including Rose’s critique of psychoanalytic pretensions to metaphysical abstinence, I position the Freudian psyche in the ‘broken middle’ between ethics and law. In an effort to give political content to this claim, I turn to the historian Stella Ghervas’s (2021) account of the European project, relating the struggle of conversion – and continuous reconversions – to the pursuit of a ‘spirit of peace’ in the midst of metastasising ethnic populisms.

Chile, shaped by the imposition of neoliberalism during the dictatorship and its ongoing continuation, bears deep sociocultural wounds. These wounds intertwine historical and present realities—colonialism, dictatorship, patriarchy, environmental devastation, and systemic inequalities—that hinder the possibility of a dignified life. As filmmaker Raúl Ruiz once suggested, Chile offers little more than consumption and melancholy. Yet, alongside despair, pockets of resistance persist and continuously emerge.

Rather than succumbing to paralysis, some communities cultivate alternative responses to imposed and inherited conditions. My PhD research explores two permaculture communities—intentional living experiments—to examine how their worldviews and practices offer embodied cultural tools for navigating sociohistorical pain and the current polycrisis. Through ethnographic inquiry and participatory research, I investigate how these communities foster psychosocial healing by emphasizing the commons, collective life production, and communitarian gestures.

Their practices intertwine ecosocial restoration, syntropy, and creativity, offering grounded, embodied alternatives to despair. These experiences emphasize care and transformation within localized territories, resisting reliance on externally imposed public policies or market-driven solutions. By centering small-scale, community-driven responses, this research highlights how collective creativity and ecological regeneration serve as tangible strategies for addressing sociocultural suffering in contemporary Chile.

This paper outlines how communities are playing a crucial role in preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE). It analyses how families and communities affected by violent-radicalisation are navigating the difficulties in combatting terrorism while coping with ongoing suspicion by the state, media and society. The paper reviews specific activities developed by families, communities, civil society groups and former combatants to steer people away from terrorism and create safe spaces for nonviolent protest which, though more credible, still attract scrutiny due to them operating independently of, and simultaneously challenging the narratives of, the state. It calls for a more holistic, evidence-based approach that recognises the unique contributions of non-state actors and challenges the structural drivers of political violence that state-dominated methods fail to address.