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The aim of this article is to add some theoretical and practical scaffolding to our clinical work with black male adolescents who have offended violently. The article considers a “racialised primal scene”, the absence of the black father's “paternal function” and attempts to extend Esther Bick's concept of “psychic skin” to a racialised context. The article introduces the concept of a metaphorical “melanised psychic skin” as a container as it applies to racialised subjects, i.e. black- and brown-bodied people, enabling them to manage racialised projections and projective identifications, thereby mitigating self-destructive enactments that can take them into the criminal sphere. I attempt to speak to the omission of the symbolic father prevalent in both clinical discussion and theorising, while specifying the importance of establishing of a paternal function of the Black/Indigenous father when working with racialised/colonised subjects. His absence is symptomatic of colonisation, slavery, and the attack on African and indigenous family structures as a deliberate and calculated strategy of the coloniser and enslaver that, via the intergenerational transmission of trauma, is still relevant today. The task is to establish a decolonising clinical framework and the environmental essentials for our clinical practice within this very marginalised patient population.