Creating Psychological Homes: Hospitality and Belonging- 1:30pm- 2pm The Real City: Psychosis and the Ethics of Hospitality - Loren Dent, PhD, Matthew Oyer, PhD
- 2-2:30pm A Co-Created Psychological Home as a Respite from Psychosis, Trauma and Social Alienation - Jessica (Yisca) Baris Ginat, MD
The Real City: Psychosis and the Ethics of Hospitality - Loren Dent, PhD, Matthew Oyer, PhD
The contemporary city is a paradoxical space that draws people into close proximity yet relentlessly excludes subjects who cannot conform to its dominant logics. While ordinary urban encounters are symbolically mediated and sustaining, for psychotic subjects, they often arrive raw and unmediated, proving overwhelming. The challenge is to invent "heterotopias"—spaces where chance meetings can be transformed into occasions for speech, recognition, and new forms of belonging. This invention demands a conception of psychosis treatment grounded in an openness to alterity, receiving the unexpected without reducing it to the already known. This requires sensitivity to contingency and structures of hospitality to temper the city's shocks by symbolically elaborating encounters and opening institutional circuits to circulation and translation.
A Co-Created Psychological Home as a Respite from Psychosis, Trauma and Social Alienation - Jessica (Yisca) Baris Ginat, MD
Psychosis has been phenomenologically described as a state of existential homelessness (Kamens et al., 2023), an experience of alienation and social estrangement. While the prevailing view in psychiatric literature, as well as in general culture, conceptualizes this alienation as originating from within the individual, this perspective can be understood as part of a social construct in marginalizing individuals suffering trauma and discrimination, thus contributing to the estrangement of individuals experiencing psychosis. Bion (1959) posited that the therapists must locate their own psychotic states within themselves in order to understand their patient (Lotterman, 2026). Drawing on a case study of a long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy, including vignettes from the consulting room, the journey of a young man who has suffered consecutive early trauma starting at birth, and discrimination, leading to consecutive psychotic breaks and traumatic psychiatric hospitalizations is described. Transformation can be initiated when the psychiatric ward becomes at times a respite from life’s adversities, a space for human contact and understanding (Kamens, Ginat et al, 2026, work in progress) . Via an active involvement in a prolonged psychotherapy a sense of trust in humanity and self worth can start to rebuild.This presentation will suggest that within the psychoanalytic encounter the foundation of an asymmetric co-created psychological home could function as an “Ethical Seduction” of the analytic situation (Chetrit- Vatine, 2019) and a feminine-maternal stance of responsibility for the other. Through versions of the playful squiggle game (Winnicott, 1971), emotional contact can form between its two participants, thus allowing a better mutual understanding and growth. The sense of psychological homecoming can expand beyond the walls of the consulting room to allow for a growing involvement in the day to day activities of urban societal life, and a sense of belonging to the community can evolve. Supported by social services the co-created psychological home can strive to mitigate the consequences of early and severe trauma and of social discrimination, in hopes to further the process of disalienation.
