31st May 2025 Lecture

No-Go Areas in Psychoanalysis - David Morgan

To be held online from 10.00am to 12.00noon on Saturday 31st May 2025, by Zoom. Attendance is free of charge for all FPC members and will count as 2 hours CPD. The lecture will not be recorded. To book a place please email admin@thefpc.org.uk 

“I think you’re concerned that I’m a white, Eurocentric, normative, cis-gendered, binary thinker who should be deposited in the dustbin of history.”

In the early days of my work at a refugee centre, a staff member approached me with a pointed observation: “I understand you’re a psychoanalyst, a follower of Freud. Freud was a Jew—you must love the Jews.” The comment was neither confrontational nor overtly provocative, but its implications lingered. My response, grounded in the measured tone of psychoanalytic neutrality, was, “It’s true, there are Jewish people I love and admire, including Freud’s pioneering contributions, but that doesn’t exclude my capacity to care for others of different beliefs or backgrounds.”

Yet the encounter stayed with me, not for what was said but for what lay unspoken. Beneath the question was an assumption: that empathy, care, and even allegiance could be bounded by ethnic or religious identity. It exposed an implicit no-go area, one that isn’t spoken of directly but sits in the shadows of cultural discourse—the idea that belonging and bias are inexorably intertwined.

John Berger’s assertion that “Never again shall a single story be told as if it were the only one” (1984) and Wilfred Bion’s advice to remain open-minded but “not so open-minded that your brains fall out” (1967) encapsulate the tensions facing contemporary psychoanalysis. These perspectives highlight the dual challenges of adapting psychoanalysis to embrace multiplicity while maintaining rigorous intellectual integrity.

For too long, the field has avoided grappling with socio-political realities, relegating topics like race, religion, gender, and systemic oppression to “no-go areas.” These omissions perpetuate exclusion and silence, eroding the transformative potential of psychoanalytic practice.

David Morgan worked as a consultant psychotherapist in the NHS for over 25 years for mainly at the Tavistock and Portman Clinic. He is now in full time private practice in North London. He is a training analyst and supervisor for most trainings and a fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is Chair of the Political Minds Seminars at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and has presented a podcast called Frontier Psychoanalyst on Resonance Radio. He has written and edited three books Violence Perversion and Delinquency (with Stan Ryszynszki); The Unconscious in Social and Political Life; and A Deeper Cut: Further reflections on Social and Political Life. He works as a consultant to several socio-political organisations and to whistleblowers.