ABSTRACT
This chapter shows different kinds of psychotherapy at The Refugee Therapy Centre in north London. When patients come for traditional psychotherapy they bring their individual problems of conflict, deficit or trauma. The chapter finds three features of the landscape: confusion, dissociation and the will to survive. The tools of traditional psychoanalytic psychotherapy – transference, counter-transference, reliance on the boundaries of the setting, and the attempt to hear the unconscious communication – are to be found in the work: but their use may require adaptation. Thinking about the transference is complicated when the need for survival in the external world has been an urgent concern and preoccupation. The therapist is first of all representative of the host society. In the tradition of psychoanalytic psychotherapy people are likely to focus on an understanding of internal states and unconscious phantasy, closely related to work in the transference.
