ABSTRACT
Whilst meeting to plan and discuss the writing of this chapter, we found ourselves reflecting upon why it has taken eleven years to begin to record publicly the clinical work undertaken at Islington Women’s Counselling Centre (IWCC). The clients, coming as they do from poor white and ethnic minority communities, are multiply deprived and, being so, they are often deemed marginal, representing the objects rather than the subjects of society. Like our clients, we, as analytic counsellors, have rendered ourselves marginal to and invisible within the psychotherapeutic world. Just as our clients have felt compelled to hide their struggles to withstand and survive violent and abusive past and present relationships, so too have we hidden our therapeutic relationships. Perhaps we feared that, by constantly holding in focus our clients’ external worlds and external objects whilst simultaneously focusing on the way these external realities impacted on their psychic constellations, we might not be ‘good-enough’ counsellors. The shame and invisibility experienced by our clients became felt and experienced by those who work with them.
