ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a clinical vignette to contribute to the discussion of whether attachment is the missing link in understanding psychosis. The mental health system in the UK is based on a medical model, looking for genetic or chemical origins, as well as cognitive distortions, as antecedents to mental distress, therefore postulating cognitive behavioural therapy or physical therapies, like medication and electroconvulsive therapy, as treatments of choice. People from black and ethnic minorities are over-represented in the mental health system and in all statistics on mental distress, and yet the world of psychoanalytic psychotherapy remains overwhelmingly white, in relation to both therapists and clients. Unresolved experiences of childhood sexual abuse are still causing the loss of quality of life, or actual lives, of so many women who have not been able to free themselves from the grip of mental anguish, as a result of the trauma they have endured—or who may only have been able to get partial relief.
