This presentation examines the community art therapy open studio as a pivotal model for group intervention following collective trauma. Central to this approach is the creative process, acting as an axis around which a shattered community can reorganize to address the restoration of trust and agency through the dynamics of rupture and repair.

In the wake of external attacks, communities often experience a collapse of trust in the systemic structures intended to protect them. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this mirrors a profound sense of abandonment by the "parent object". The open studio addresses this rupture by establishing a non-directive "safe zone" where the creative process allows for the externalization of complex emotions. Within this space, images created by participants engage in a symbolic dialogue, allowing individuals to reflect upon their experiences from a safe distance.

To illustrate these dynamics, we present a case study of academic staff influenced by the ripples of collective trauma. We follow a trail of images to demonstrate how their artistic expressions embodied traumatic communication and provided a tangible manifestation of societal rupture. We suggest that working with images motivates a sense of agency and fosters resilience. Within the secure boundaries of the studio, trust is reconstructed non-verbally, offering a foundation for existing within an uncertain reality.

Connection to the conference: This presentation directly addresses the conference theme by exploring the tension between mistrust stemming from the collapse of protective systems and the restoration of trust within a community. By examining the art therapy studio as a space for repair, we demonstrate how collective creative action can heal the societal fabric and rebuild the essential bonds of trust necessary for communal recovery.

In many psychoanalytic formulations, patients’ mistrust is commonly understood as a manifestation of past trauma, pathological repetition, or a distortion of transference. Such approaches implicitly assume that trauma belongs to the past and that the present offers a sufficiently safe context in which mistrust can be interpreted, corrected, or resolved. Drawing on the concepts of ongoing trauma and moral injury, this paper challenges this assumption and argues that in contexts marked by persistent violence, instability, and loss, mistrust may constitute a realistic response to lived conditions rather than a pathological phenomenon.

Adopting a theoretical-clinical perspective, the paper conceptualizes mistrust not as an obstacle to therapeutic work but as psychic material requiring understanding and containment. Moral injury, understood as sustained assaults on meaning, justice, and the credibility of others and institutions,profoundly alters the conditions under which trust can be established. In such contexts, mistrust reflects efforts to preserve psychic and moral integrity in the face of repeated betrayal, exposure, and threat.

Drawing on anonymized clinical vignettes, the paper illustrates how ongoing trauma blurs the boundary between sensitivity and oversensitivity. It further explores how attempts to prematurely interpret or pathologize mistrust risk retraumatization, reinforce experiences of invalidation, and intensify withdrawal from relational and social life.

The paper argues that the containment of mistrust, rather than its elimination or resolution, constitutes a central therapeutic task when trauma is ongoing. Containment allows mistrust to be held, thought about, and metabolized without requiring the premature restoration of trust. The paper concludes by considering the clinical and ethical implications of containing mistrust in therapeutic work with individuals and communities living under conditions of ongoing trauma, emphasizing the necessity of tolerance for uncertainty, reflexivity, and restraint in contemporary psychoanalytic practice

This paper begins from a simple but unsettling experience: moments when trust cannot find a place to land. During periods of social rupture and infrastructural shutdown in Iran, communication at times felt like sending messages into a void — words addressed to others whose presence, safety, or ability to respond could not be assumed. In such moments, trust did not disappear; it hovered, searching for an object.

Drawing on situated clinical experience and lived observation, the paper reflects on how psychic life reorganises when ordinary anchors of reliability are strained. Hospitals, schools, and other sites of care can become psychically ambivalent, holding both meanings of protection and threat. Language itself may falter when official narratives diverge sharply from lived reality, unsettling the symbolic ground on which shared meaning depends.

From a psychoanalytic–psychosocial perspective, these conditions complicate familiar distinctions between inner fantasy and outer reality. Experiences easily labelled as “paranoid” may emerge close to actual danger, while memory, imagination, and perception become tightly interwoven. The clinician, far from standing outside this field, inhabits the same atmosphere of uncertainty, attempting to sustain spaces where experience can still be thought and spoken.

Rather than offering closure, the paper traces fragments of witnessing: small efforts to speak, remember, and symbolise under pressure. It asks what minimal forms of trust remain possible when institutional holding weakens and when testimony itself can feel precarious.

The presentation addresses the conference theme by exploring how trust, mistrust, and fragile forms of community are lived and negotiated at psychic and relational levels when shared infrastructures of certainty are disrupted.

This paper argues that trust is not only an interpersonal attitude but a psychosocial infrastructure—a set of socially learned, affectively charged, and often mediated conditions that determine whether a voice can be received as testimony. I develop listenability as a concept for these conditions: the thresholds of attention, timing, interpretive generosity, and tolerance for ambiguity through which speech becomes hearable as evidence rather than noise, threat, or spectacle.

Through a focused analysis of key listening scenes in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, I propose that the film stages a double testimony. First, an injured subject attempts to speak from vulnerability and altered embodiment. Second, a community—together with its devices, rituals, and interpretive habits—must decide whether that speech can count, and whether the speaker can be held within a shared world. The paper tracks how mistrust operates productively as scepticism in some moments, yet in others congeals into distrust: a corrosive certainty that substitutes suspicion for discernment and reorganises community through exclusion.

To explain how such orientations are learned and reproduced, I introduce formative empathy, building on Steffen Krüger’s account of formative media environments and their unconscious, relational effects. Formative empathy names a distributed calibration of feeling-and-knowing: a pre-reflective shaping of who is expected to be believable, grievable, and worth listening to. It is not offered as a universal solution; rather, it specifies a mechanism by which communities stabilise (or destabilise) trust under conditions of uncertainty.

I conclude with a compact typology of listening failures—deflection, extraction, spectacularisation—and outline “reparative listening” as a psychosocial dynamic of rupture and repair.

Theme statement: The presentation addresses the conference theme by showing how trust, mistrust, and community are constituted through mediated listening infrastructures and formative empathic conditioning that determine whose testimony can count as truth.