ABSTRACT
Almost eighty years after it was founded, the Portman Cliniccontinues to thrive as a unique institution of which the coreclinical activity consists of psychoanalytic therapies for a patient population-the perverse, violent, antisocial, and delinquentwhom others, including many psychoanalysts, believed were untreatable, or did not wish to treat. The clinic’s longevity and ability to survive the many challenges it has faced, both internally and externally, depends on a small dedicated staff group, who remain united in a commitment to the basic principles of a psychoanalytic understanding of violent and antisocial behaviour. However, there is also a need to be able to adapt to changing circumstance and opportunity without losing their core psychoanalytic identity, ensuring that therapeutic technique continues to evolve and is tailored to the specifics of current patient need. Estela Welldon describes the resistances she encountered when she introduced group analytic therapy in the early 1970s to the Clinic, where, until that time, individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy was the only treatment offered (Welldon, 2011). Despite the considerable reservations, and even outright hostility, expressed by her colleagues from within the Portman, as well as from the Group Analytic Society and Institute of Group Analysis about why such
disturbed patients should not be put together in a group, Welldon persisted in her endeavour. The result is that group analytic therapy is now not only the main modality for at least half of all patients in treatment at the Portman, but has become an established form of treatment within forensic psychotherapy as a whole for perverse and violent patients, underpinned by sound and well-articulated theoretical principles which remain loyal to their psychoanalytical origins.
