Erica Burman

This article introduces Frantz Fanon as a vital contributor to a socially-grounded, anti-racist and social justice-oriented group analytic practice now. Fanon eloquently described how, even as they are structural and historical, racist and colonial dynamics are subjectively experienced, within the body, within the muscles, as a ‘nervous condition’ (Fanon, 1970: 8), albeit being externally caused by processes of objectification and dehumanization, or what (in the context of racialization) he called ‘epidermalization’. He wrote, vividly, of subjective states of zombification and petrification highlighting the mental debilitation, as well as sense of excision from the body, produced by racism. Hence Fanon recognized how distress was caused by oppression and, while his primary concern was with racialized oppression, his analysis can be extended, especially when read intersectionally, to engage class, gender, sexuality (for example) as engaging with race and racialization in mutually constitutive ways (Nayak, 2021; Paré, 2025). Increasingly recognized for his phenomenological contributions, Fanon was both a vehement critic of mainstream (colonial) psychiatry and an advocate for reforming and transforming mental health practice. He understood madness as alienation; that is, a neurotic or traumatic response to oppression and dehumanization, such that the key task was not only restoring social bonds but collective socio-political transformation for individual liberation. Three key examples from Fanon’s clinical papers are discussed to highlight what group analysts can learn from his analysis of the intersectionally gendered and racialized dynamics of assessment; how colonialism is played out within the doctor-patient relationship, and, third, how the colonial contract structures institutional settings, so setting up impossible double binds for the colonized or racialized subject who can only emerge as deficient, inferiorized or silenced. As well as highlighting compatibility with the best of group analytic and democratic therapeutic community models, some alignments with feminist and other self-advocacy mental health movements are noted.

Loneliness and social isolation are growing public health concerns. Conversely, community membership is associated with reduced mortality risk and ameliorates mental distress. This paper explores how residents of a self‐governing cohousing community, comprised of private dwellings and common spaces, understand the impact of community living on their mental health and well‐being. An ethnographically informed method is used. Data is analysed using reflexive thematic analysis and comprises fieldnote observations of a community, semi‐structured interviews, and relevant community documentation. Four themes were generated: (1) Social Pollination: How a Community Protects, (2) Finding Your Tribe: Meaning and Purpose in Cohousing, (3) Deconstructing Defensible Spaces, (4) Conflict and Tension in a Social World. Residents benefitted from a strong sense of meaning and identity, support when experiencing distress or raising children, and increased security from a sharing economy. Perceived social burdens, conflict, and distress are experienced and mitigated by resolution processes.

This chapter engages with emotional labour within humanitarian intervention as a realm to explore the political economies of emotions. In other words, what do we do with this apparent ‘excess’ of work – in terms of working hours as well as emotional negotiation and labour – in the field of migration? This chapter centres the discussion on the emotional excess of humanitarian labour through the examination of a case study arising from doctoral research on the politics of psychosocial support (PSS). This case involves a family who arrived as a ‘spontaneous arrival’ in a refugee camp in mainland Greece and were subsequently asked to leave the camp as they were not registered there. We first discuss the humanitarian and political economies of emotions in relation to psychology. Then, we critically explore what the ‘feminisation’ of work may signify in the context of PSS and within humanitarianism and refugee camps. We outline how the spatial context of camps relates to the unfolding of the political economy of both space and emotion. Drawing inspiration from feminist geographers and discussions on the ‘feminisation’ of asylum and migration, we reflect on how work is ‘feminised’ within the humanitarian landscape.

This article engages with issues arising from a 2021–2022 project consulting with Pakistani heritage-identifying adults in an economically deprived British town, Rochdale, to document and communicate their needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. While our original research brief reflected local and national government concerns around the “child mental health crisis,” matters affecting educational practices and other support provisions for children emerged that were neither specifically educational nor child-focused. Our participant accounts foregrounded experiences of transgenerational, historical, racialised, and intersectional gendered oppression (re)kindled by the government responses to the pandemic. We mobilise two research analytic to interpret consultation extracts, “child as method” and “border as method.” We caution that a child-focused approach works to abstract and depoliticise wider historical and socioeconomic inequalities alongside racism and transgenerational injustice whilst psychologising issues of “mental health.” Then, we question both what is topicalised and excluded by “child mental health,” without minimising wider traumatogenic contexts of distress affecting both children and adults arising from racialised, transgenerational, gendered oppression. Engaging Fanon's psycho-political understandings with feminist analyses, we conclude by arguing how claims to, and for, “childhood” support provision and “mental health” sit within wider axes of oppressive power relations.

In 2017, Judith Butler was attacked by ultraconservative demonstrators during an academic visit to São Paulo, Brazil. Those demonstrations were part of an anti-gender agenda and in the name of idealized ideas of (gendered and stable) childhood. In this chapter, Child as method is used as an analytical lens to understand how ideas of childhood are used to oppose gender recognition rights. It is shown that those ideas are weaponized against gender-nonconforming rights, promoting injury and misrecognition, and challenging the field of children’s rights. However, Butler’s theoretical framework on gender, recognition, and democracy supports a claim for nonviolent action and self-determination – individual and collective – including on gender and childhood.

Addressing concerns around positioning, (un)knowing, and action in relation to current geopolitical events, specifically the current Middle East context, this article offers some speculative analyses from my own perspective as a UK-based Jewish group analyst. Retracing the trajectory of my associative process, it considers sociocultural as well as individual defensive processes at play in remembering and responding to both past and current existential threats. I start by reflecting on French suppression of the memory of Vichy-Nazi occupation as seen in sublimated form within the writings of Holocaust survivor and author Georges Perec. Some disjunctions between Israeli Jewish and Diasporic Jewish identifications (both attributed and assumed) in relation to the Holocaust/Shoah are also considered. This traumatic history is set alongside Frantz Fanon’s account of the devastating impacts of racialization and colonial violence to reconsider both forms of resistance to, and resistance to knowing about, such violence. Group analytic discussions of ‘chosen trauma’ and the ‘soldier matrix’ are evaluated as analytical resources exploring subjective states enabling the current Israeli state genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The article concludes by addressing wider geopolitical responsibilities and positionings at play in maintaining—and hopefully ending—the current genocide, highlighting the urgent need to take up calls to ‘de-identify’ from national identities to counter settler colonial logics .

I interrogate my historical and current positionings in this chapter by recalling memories of growing up during the Cold War but on the other (Western) side of the so-called Iron Curtain. Focused on a specific example from my minoritized but otherwise quite privileged background in the north of England, I explore what returns to me now as either topicalised or occluded by, presumably, the cultural-political construction of the Cold-War period that dominated my own place and time. Specifically, I attempt to retrieve my memories of what I knew and understood about the ‘Save Soviet Jewry’ campaign in the 1970s, and consider what it these might indicate about how now-former Soviet and allied communist countries were perceived. During this process, I encounter memorial gaps and obstacles and address the temptation to fill these in and to elaborate upon them my recollections from my current geopolitical, chronological, and biographical position. What emerges is the impossibility of ‘looking back’ without also reflecting on the ‘now’ and how it shapes the perspective from which the review takes place.