About SSCP

What we do

The Society for Social and Critical Psychoanalysis is an organisation that promotes and fosters psychoanalytic thinking and practice in Cornwall and the SW region. The Society offers a programme of workshops, a social and critical introduction to psychoanalysis, a four year UKCP accredited training in psychoanalysis and an affordable psychoanalytic clinic. 

Critical ethos

The training in Cornwall is now well known for its critical and comparative engagement with the theories and practices of traditional and contemporary psychoanalysis. Rather than being rooted in one body of psychoanalytic thought, the training interrogates the different psychoanalytic schools — Lacanian, Object Relations, Kleinian, Relational, Jungian, post-Freudian — and the social, political and philosophical practices that generated and produced those schools. The Society shares this critical ethos, reflected in our programme of public events.

The social field

Central to this ethos—and reflected in our name—is the social field in which all psychoanalytic practice is both constructed, developed and undertaken. We make central how the specificities of race, gender, sexual orientation, class and disabilities shape and form the people who come to clinical work. These identity categories operate unequally, favouring certain identities and disadvantaging others. We consider an awareness of and an address to these power dynamics to be foundational to the clinical encounter.   

Rural communities

The Society recognises the historical position of psychoanalysis as a largely urban practice, and we are interested in exploring the relevance of psychoanalytic thought to the experience of rural and coastal communities. What happens to psychoanalysis in a rural setting? How do its theories and practices speak to people living in rural communities and cultures? We place particular emphasis on the inequalities that often structure rural communities and how inequality produces and exacerbates troubled psychological states. The clinic we have developed since 2011 is set up to make psychoanalysis accessible to communities across the region who have been traditionally excluded from the opportunity for long term affordable therapy. 

 Anti-racism

The Society for Social and Critical Psychoanalysis is alive to the urgent need for anti-racist work within the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Traditionally prioritising white subjectivity, psychoanalysis has long neglected to interrogate its own foundational assumptions and prejudices. The Society is committed to questioning our own theoretical, clinical and organisational structures in order to make sense of and critique why psychoanalysis has not been inclusive for people of colour.

Our teaching programme aims to examine and deconstruct processes of othering, oppression, racism and structural inequality via dedicated seminars on key black thinkers and activists, and discussions that enable an interrogation of trainees’ positionality within the field of race. Furthermore, conversations on intersectionality and race are woven through all areas of teaching. 

In terms of race, Cornwall is the least diverse county in England, with the 2011 Census indicating that 98.2% of the county’s population is white. People of colour in Cornwall thus encounter forms of discrimination and marginalisation specific to this unique coastal and rural environment. 

The Society is committed to improving access to both the training and the clinic, acknowledging that there is work to be done to reach communities and individuals beyond those it currently engages with, and to ensure that the training and clinic environments are inclusive spaces for people of colour.