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We met with the psychoanalyst Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz in March of 2017 in London on the occasion of a two-day conference, “Transgender, Gender and Psychoanalysis,” an event she organized with The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Freud Museum. We were intrigued by the Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP), an Anglophone psychoanalytic treatment center for psychotic patients she directs, and asked her if she would be willing to be interviewed for DIVISION/Review to tell us about her current work.
MS & PG: What led you to open a treatment program for psychosis?
DBK: I started working with psychotic patients in the context of my psychoanalytic training at the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in London. The Site was founded by former members of the Philadelphia Association, many of whom had direct involvement in the anti-psychiatry movement in the 1960s (Kingsley Hall, etc.). Psychosis is therefore an important interest at the Site and there is a tradition of working with psychosis there. The Site in fact includes outstanding clinicians who worked with R. D. Laing closely for years, including Haya Oakley, whose guidance has been invaluable to me over the years. Haya is one of the key teachers and supervisors at the Psychosis Therapy Project, the clinic for psychosis that I launched in North London over four years ago. This is the immediate context of my personal interest in psychosis, and the reference to Laing is an important one.
MS & PG: Can you tell us about your own trajectory?
DBK: Having trained in France before moving to the UK about ten years ago, my work has also been influenced by Jacques Lacan's groundbreaking contribution to the psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis. Lacan was one of the greatest clinicians of psychosis; he was able to draw key insights into the treatment of psychosis from the Freudian corpus itself, despite and beyond Freud's claim that psychoanalysis might not be relevant to psychosis. The works of Serge Leclaire, Jean Laplanche, Fran