ABSTRACT
Anxieties relating to belonging and not belonging are restaged throughout the life cycle. These tensions inform our countertransferences with our patients and also with our professional associates. As clinicians, we both belong and don’t belong in our patients’ lives. We occupy an intimate space with them, but we have no place in their wider social world. Within our institutes, the vulnerabilities of belonging and not belonging often lead us to split with each other along sectarian and ideological lines. This can create the hegemony of one theoretical orientation dominating an institute, whereby one is considered ‘in’ and others are considered ‘out’. We argue that holding onto the binarism of belonging and not belonging is reductive and limits possibilities. We propose that the notion of ‘optimal marginality’ helps us maintain a thoughtful position both in the clinic and in our institutes, which precludes our collapse into the polarism of belonging or not belonging.
