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Working with psychosis with Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz
In this seminar, Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz will discuss her clinical engagement with severe mental illness both in the community and in inpatient services and share some of her theorisations and insights into the clinic of psychosis as she understands it. She will outline the specificity of psychosis in relation to primary narcissism and the question of origin. This will shed light on key mechanisms of regression and idealisation in psychotic functioning. Clinical implications will be drawn, with significant consequences in terms of technique.
Dorothée will also reflect on 10+ years of leading and developing the Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP) in the community. Since 2013, the PTP has been offering opportunities for psychotherapeutic treatment with a team of psychoanalytically trained practitioners working in the area of psychosis. It is committed to strategies of stabilisation and the management of persistent symptoms. The long-term therapeutic work the PTP offers has given clients time and space to articulate distressing experiences and cultivate robust and enduring solutions.
About the speaker
Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz is a psychoanalyst, clinical supervisor and translator in the field of psychoanalytic theory. She is senior psychotherapist at the Bethlem Royal Hospital, working in inpatient services and the Founder and Clinical Director of the Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP), a specialist community service for people who experience psychosis and complex trauma. She co-founded the USEMI Racial Trauma Clinic during COVID-19, a specialist service that advocates understanding and sensitivity to difference and diversity in its therapeutic work. This aims to address the inequalities in the mental health system and offer culturally sensitive and anti-racist support to ethnically diverse communities. She is a Trustee of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS-UK).



Highbury Counselling Centre provides affordable, long-term counselling for adults in the community. We also provide honorary clinical placements for trainees and qualified therapists.