The presentation draws on my research project ‘When the rainbow ends’, which focuses on separation experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer people in Finland and inEngland, UK. The aim of the project is to explore how the changing social and legal positions of LGBTIQ people and their relationships entangle with the affective processes of break-ups. In order to grasp the affective, lively and often messy realities of relationships, I combine queer theoretical, new materialist and affect theoretical perspectives with psychosocial approaches in my analysis. I approach the becoming of the relationship break-ups through Deleuzo-Guattarian framework as assemblages, where multiple and complex elements conjoin. This approach makes it possible to explore what kinds of relational assemblages allow LGBTIQ bodies to intensify and to thrive – and what kind of assemblages diminish the vitality of these bodies.

In the new materialist framework, the question is not what bodies are or how to define them, but rather what bodies can do – or what they can be made to do as part of an assemblage. Yet, I have often wondered how to think about the the psyche or psychical within this framework. I follow Blackman (2010, p. 172) and Walkerdine and Jimenez (2012, p. 51), who argue that when we continue to work on affect as something that is not consciously known and which can transfer between bodies (human and non-human), it is necessary to take into account the psychic mediation of affect. This is the point where psychosocial thinking can make important contributions to affect theories. In this paper I concentrate particularly in such breakup situations where there is an opacious personal transformation behind a sudden breakup. Psychosocial thinking and awareness of unconscious processes might help in understanding these situations better.

High rates of mental and emotional distress within LGBTIQA+ communities are often explained via narratives of risk and vulnerability. These dominant psy understandings and reliance upon individual treatment responses in the form of talking therapies and psychotropic medications obscure the way socio-cultural factors shape LGBTIQA+ mental health and wellbeing. They reframe isolation, loneliness, and discrimination as individual characteristics rather than seeing them as an affective sensibility through which an unliveable subject position is experienced by LGBTIQA+ people. Queer forms of relationality which include connection, survival, and healing alongside experiences of marginalisation, shame, and erasure are rendered unintelligible through such ‘psy’ framings. This paper adopts a reparative approach to explore the everyday knowledge and social relations LGBTIQA+ people draw on when navigating unwelcoming and hostile environments and attempt to live a fulfilling life. It details findings from a photo-elicitation project exploring LGBTIQA+ identity, experiences of place, connection, and belonging conducted in Victoria, Australia. Participants were recruited using an intersectional framework and invited to take or find photographs representing their identity and experiences of place, connection, and belonging. The photographs then informed an open-ended interview. To understand similarities and differences across LGBTIQA+ communities, data was grouped and thematically analysed according to gender identity, sex, sexuality, age, ability, geographical location, and cultural background to better understand how intersecting socio-cultural factors shaped the mental health and wellbeing of LGBTIQA+ people. Findings trouble monolithic understandings of queer communities and the simplistic conflation of non-normative genders, sexes, and sexualities and poor mental health. This paper provides temporal and relational insights into the way LGBTIQA+ people navigate the complex interplay of identity and place, connection, and belonging in the pursuit of a liveable life and calls for greater attention to the socio-cultural resources that foster mental wellbeing for queer individuals.

“It feels like my mother wants me to suffer exactly the way she did (in her marriage), like she wants me to give up everything I have worked so hard to have. Shouldn’t she stand up for me and ensure that I don’t have to live the life she does?” asks my patient, confused by the dynamics unfolding between her and her mother as she is pushed towards marrying a man chosen by her family. This is the story of many young women in India who enter psychotherapy, overwhelmed by the abruptly hostile shift in their mother's tenderness and affection towards them.

Through this paper I will use my clinical work and conceptualizations by several Indian psychoanalysts to theorize on this shift; elaborating on the psychic impact of delayed marriages in India on the mother-daughter dyad. I will propose that the increasing agency women in Urban India feel over their lives is leading to the manifestation of hitherto latent and concealed maternal envy in the form of a daughter's cruel superego. As the landscape of the Indian woman’s inner-world begins to shift from one of renunciation symbolized by the Sita complex (Kakar 1981; Haq, 2017) to one of self-formation and expression; shame is used as a means to attack the nascent subjectivity of the daughter.

To theorize this I will suggest a framework of Layton’s (2020) work on unconscious attacks on linking and Minerbo’s (2015) work on the constitution of the cruel superego to highlight the thanatic beta elements transmitted from mothers to daughters in micro-aggressive encounters by using marriage as an object to attack the development of the latter's subjectivity.

Through this work, I aim to recognize the unique intergenerational wound women in India carry; the invisibization of which results in painful enactments in the mother-daughter dyad.

This paper is about a narrative and psychodynamic therapy with an adult experiencing difficulties in executive function where I reflect on how the process by which my client and I slowly came to understand and articulate his experience together created a successful therapy.

I used narrative therapy-based questioning to step away from my own life experience, bridge a significant cultural gap and reach closer to the affect and meaning making of my client. From asking if this is “ADHD” and feeling there was something wrong with him, through a focus on the the history of these difficulties in his life, “ADHD” was left behind, and the work became about recognizing his ways of working and the environment that he needed.

I became curious about how this process - of slowly, patiently, teaching me to understand his world - seemed to have helped him to make significant changes!

Another change was our acceptance of the limits of relationships, and it played out in my client choosing to end therapy, and in my accepting his decision without question. This was also in keeping with narrative therapy’s goal of supporting agency. I felt the sadness of ending while holding the joy of connection (Buechler, 2008). This paper is an attempt to explore what may have happened for both relationship partners.

A different take on learning from experience, I suggest narrative therapy as a powerful tool to help us move closer to an unfamiliar network of meanings and experiences and better relate with people different from us. I want to focus on the joy and aliveness that this joining of worlds’ can bring and think about how this can help us counter fear, othering and violence.

References

Buechler, S. (2008). Making a difference in patients’ lives. New York: Routledge.