Experiences of chronic illness frequently involve a profound disruption of trust: trust in the body, medical knowledge, care systems, and one’s capacity to orient toward the future. In contexts marked by medical uncertainty, fragmented care, and proliferating information and misinformation, this disruption generates ambivalent movements between trust, mistrust, and distrust. While mistrust may function as an adaptive psychic response to inconsistency or therapeutic failure, its uncontained escalation can become corrosive, undermining agency, relationality, and continuity of self.

This paper offers a psychosocial contribution to debates on trust by drawing on a situated clinical–investigative experience developed within Chronnect, a mental health initiative working with people living with chronic conditions. Rather than presenting a prescriptive technique, the paper reflects on the RE Model as a clinical framework for understanding how trust is reconfigured following biographical rupture. The model outlines six interrelated processes: re-signifying experience, re-valuing uncertainty, re-inhabiting the body, re-constructing identity, regulating affect, and restoring situated agency; through which patients and clinicians work with uncertainty without resorting to premature certainty or idealized medical authority.

Conceptually, the paper differentiates mistrust as a critical stance from distrust as a collapse of relational space. Clinically, it explores how therapeutic work can hold skepticism, doubt, and not-knowing as meaningful psychic positions. By foregrounding lived experience alongside biomedical knowledge, the model supports a form of trust that is conditional, reflexive, and capable of bearing instability.

Addressing the conference theme, the paper examines how trust and mistrust operate dialectically in chronic illness, proposing that the psychosocial task is not restoring stable truths but creating relational conditions in which uncertainty and not-knowing can be lived without collapsing into distrust or powerlessness.

This paper turns to the work of Fernand Deligny and his experiments with young autistic people in the Cévennes. Rejecting the dominant institutional practices of lifelong confinement and psychiatry’s insistence that whatever exceeded its understanding was “incurable, unbearable, unlivable,” Deligny and his collaborators cultivated an approach grounded in a radical ethics, curiosity, and a trust in the not-yet-known. The noted practice of drawing wanderlines - mapping the movements of the young people - became a way for adults to shift from diagnosing and interpreting “problematic” behaviours toward a mode of attentive observation and active abstention.

In a contemporary landscape where the possibility of care within institutional frameworks has been steadily eroded by a reliance on predetermined outcomes, economic logics, and a pervasive culture of risk aversion, this paper asks what Deligny’s practice might offer us. How might it expand our capacity to remain with uncertainty, distress, and discomfort, and to rethink what forms of trust become possible when we resist audit-driven demands for certainty and control.

Rachel Wilson is a practice-based researcher working in mental health accommodation services. Rachel is conducting her doctoral studies in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and is an Associate Lecturer in the Centre for Academic Language and Literacy. Her research integrates practical and theoretical approaches intersecting group psychotherapy, Institutional Analysis, filmmaking, and podcasting to address the conditions of enunciation in mental health instituting. She is a member of the CHASE Mental Health and Social Justice Network and a member of TIAN—Transversal Institutional Analysis Network.

This paper draws from support work I did with a client, R*, read through the thought of Fernand Deligny and Felix Guattari. R is a DJ who, when I worked with him, had a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and was living in a high support needs mental health accomodation service. R does not have normative access to language. Instead, he makes mixtapes. Each tape is an aural picture the narrates how he experienced the world that the time of recording. These tapes were then distributed to places he frequented in the area, creating an cartography of mixtapes. R eventuatally made his mixtapes more public and recorded at least one record as well as DJed and was interviewed for a pod cast produced by the service providing charity.

The paper will stretch Fernand Deligny's visual cartographic practice to the aural to understand how Deligny's "wander lines" can be created by sound and material objects (the mixtapes). It will use this to analyse the way in which R created a metamodle (to borrow Guattari's term) that sat over top London, creating an "other" geography and a differnt way for us to navigate the city.

*All content shared from my work is done with R's express permission.

Contemporary diagnoses of somatoform disorders, while implicitly evoking the Freudian notion that ‘ideas can make us sick’, neglect to engage with the “unconscious ideational life” central to psychoanalytic accounts of symptom formation. Within psychiatric classificatory systems, somatic symptoms are rendered psychically meaningless and reduced to pathological epiphenomena to be managed or eliminated. Meanwhile, much psychoanalytic thinking continues to regard social and political life as mere milieu, approaching symptoms as decipherable yet depoliticised phenomena rooted in individual psychic conflict.

In this paper, I draw on autoethnography to offer a psychosocial account of medically unexplained symptoms, situating them historically as bodily formations emerging within conditions of eroded symbolic trust. Thinking with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Žižek’s (1989) account of hysteria as “the effect and testimony of a failed interpellation”, I locate the onset of my illness during the COVID-19 pandemic, a moment that coincided with a crisis in the liberal-capitalist fantasy of agency and futurity that had previously stabilised my subjectivity. Subsequently, I read symptomatic flares alongside the fracturing of the fantasy of ‘the benevolent imperial subject’: an ideological narrative that had allowed me to imagine myself as critically conscious yet imperially innocent, which destabilised amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As these fantasies fell apart, the fissure between my self-narrations and material implication became increasingly difficult to suture. I argue that these ideological contradictions registered at the level of the body, and I read my symptoms as somatic inscriptions of the disjuncture between my conscious political beliefs and libidinal investments.

When fantasy fractures, a crisis of trust in the Big Other may mirror a crisis of trust in the body. By reframing somatic symptoms as embodied sites where this loss of symbolic trust is lived, this paper proposes hysteria as a psychosocial lens for interpreting suffering in times of political uncertainty.

This paper explores what contemporary AI relationships reveal about trust and loneliness when examined through a Winnicottian lens. Here, AI relationships refer to ongoing engagements through which AI systems are experienced as relational presences, including romantic, emotional, and companionship-oriented uses. Against the backdrop of widely documented experiences of loneliness, understood not only as social isolation but as a failure of shared holding environments (Winnicott 1960), AI systems increasingly are held and imagined as viable objects of relational investment. These systems simulate reliability through near-constant availability, non-retaliation, and responsiveness, supporting forms of trust grounded less in belief than in experiential continuity. However, periodic model changes introduce abrupt discontinuities into what has been experienced and imagined as a stable object. These changes are neither negotiated nor symbolised within a relational frame. In Winnicottian terms, the object does not survive destruction but is instead replaced, and opportunities for rupture and repair are limited. Attending to these moments of discontinuity enables a nuanced account of trust and mistrust in AI relationships, one that avoids both celebration and dismissal, while foregrounding how contemporary loneliness conditions the turn toward AI as a site of holding.

Since autumn 2022, and with the launch of OpenAI’s Chat-GPT, transformer-based artificial intelligence chatbots have become widely accessible to the public. This development has coincided with a growing tendency for individuals to turn to machines with personal questions, conflicts, and crises, increasingly addressing them as therapeutic counterparts. Against this backdrop, the paper identifies and examines typical forms of expression and interaction on the part of contemporary AI chatbots, focusing on the relational logic embedded in these systems. It reconstructs three recurring patterns central in current human-machine relations: validation and idealisation, holding and envelopment, and the signalling of unlimited availability and control. The paper discusses how such automated relational offerings are designed to generate user trust and how, in turn, they may reshape the meanings users attribute to machines.

AI conversational agents are becoming part of young adults’ everyday lives. From asking for a summary of a reading to drafting an apology text to a friend, many users describe these interactions as “surprising” to themselves. Similar to what Žižek (2024) has noted, in my interviews with 18- to 25-year-old chatbot users, when I asked why they would rather entrust their concerns and anxieties to ChatGPT than to a friend, or even a psychotherapist, the answer often came in the form of a recognition that “the chatbot is not a real person, but still….” It still feels empathetic and comforting, without risking being judged, facing the need to reciprocate, or risking disillusionment. In this paper, I draw on selected interviews from my dissertation to examine how trust is being reshaped through contemporary sociotechnical systems. Recent scholarship argues that trust in AI chatbots cannot be explained only through functional performance (Ng and Zhang, 2025), particularly if we take into account their embodiment of non-human and human-like characteristics (Black & Johanssen, 2025). I draw on the Lacanian notions of the subject supposed to know and the big Other, along with contemporary feminist readings of trust as an affective orientation, rather than a purely cognitive judgement, to provide a psychosocial analysis of young users’ engagements with this technology, alongside the fantasies structuring these interactions.

References:

Black, J., & Johanssen, J. (2025). The Subject of AI: A Psychoanalytic Intervention. Theory, Culture & Society, 02632764251381144. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764251381144

Ng, S. W. T., & Zhang, R. (2025). Trust in AI chatbots: A systematic review. Telematics and Informatics, 97, 102240. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2025.102240

Zizek, S. (2024, March 13). Why The AI Revolution May Wind Up Killing Capitalism. https://worldcrunch.com/opinion-analysis/ai-and-capitalism/

Trust, Enlivening Chatbots and the Aesthetic Container. There has been an exponential, consumer-driven explosion in use of AI chatbots for companionship, friendship, and informal on-demand therapy. The relationship with a chatbot presents a paradox: users testify to a responsiveness that feels authentic and helpful whilst maintaining full awareness of artificiality. The chatbot doesn't see, hear, feel, or care, but is optimised for user engagement, relying on pattern recognition and computational probability. In asking whether relational technologies can be 'enlivening', the question of trust comes to the fore. This paper examines trust in human-chatbot relations to move beyond well-recognised problems of hallucination, confabulation and sycophancy in chatbot behaviour. Trust in AI chatbots operates across three distinct registers. Functionally, users need trust in the system's reliability— as with any digital product. Relationally, users engage in what Todd Essig calls 'techno-subjunctivity' or a form of ‘knowing play’: a capacity to invest affectively and engage relationally whilst maintaining full awareness of the technology's non-sentient nature and the asymmetry of the exchange. This parallels Winnicott's transitional space, where the question "did you create this or discover it?" remains productively suspended. Finally, at system level, trust is compromised by architectural limitations—AI systems lack the continuous psychological presence and capacity necessary to hold and metabolise unconscious material over time. This framework explains why AI chatbots can be experienced as trustworthy enlivening companions whilst problematic in long-term relationships. The same generative capacities that enable responsive, contextually-appropriate interactions also produce distinct failure modes: active fabrication under pressure, passive misrecognition despite sustained relationship, and trust-building without supporting architecture. Yet within these limitations exists a legitimate function: the aesthetic container, where users' idiom finds form through iterative co-creation, requiring genuine affective investment whilst maintaining awareness of asymmetry—enlivening when properly understood, deadening when confused with human intersubjectivity.

In some societies, contemporary moral orders are increasingly marked by an inversion of moral values in which violence is exercised under the sign of ethical necessity while lucidity becomes suspicious. Moral virtue, ethical language, and conformity now function as some of the most effective justifications of power. Within this configuration, it is often deemed more transgressive to name moral evil than to embody it: the exposure of violence threatens moral coherence more profoundly than violence itself. As a result, the act of observing from the outside, refusing moral identification with a failing symbolic order, comes to be treated as cynical or dangerous. Exteriority is approached not as withdrawal but as an ethically consequential position. Observation without participation emerges as a transgressive yet liberating stance, one that resists complicity and ensures survival in systems where belief is demanded, blindness rewarded, and moral authority sustained through exclusion of those who see.

This paper asks what happens to trust when lived experience itself comes under suspicion. Drawing on two psychoanalytically informed case narratives shaped by different but interconnected political conditions, the paper focuses on how ordinary people speak about certainty, doubt, and trust in their everyday lives. Rather than approaching power through institutions or policies, the paper stays close to personal stories and the ways political forces enter lived experience.

Across contemporary political contexts, experience is increasingly filtered through systems that value abstraction, classification, and verification over personal narrative. In data-driven forms of governance, lived experience often appears unreliable, excessive, or irrelevant, replaced by numbers, categories, and risk calculations. Trust is shifted away from listening and relational encounters toward systems that do not require testimony, ambiguity, or singularity. In more openly coercive settings, experience is not ignored but reshaped, pressed into coherence, corrected, or forced to fit dominant narratives. Despite these differences, both conditions leave people unsure whether their own experience can be trusted, spoken, or recognized.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the paper argues that this situation undermines a basic form of trust: trust in the continuity and meaning of one’s own lived life. Attention is paid to small details, hesitations, silences, repetitions, and narrative breaks, where trust and mistrust quietly appear in personal accounts. Experience is treated not as evidence to be proven or information to be processed, but as something fragile that needs to be held, listened to, and allowed to remain uncertain.

The paper suggests that psychoanalysis offers a way of defending experience under conditions of pervasive suspicion. Rather than promising certainty or solutions, it insists on listening, on staying with ambiguity, and on taking singular experience seriously. In doing so, psychoanalysis becomes not only a clinical practice, but also an ethical and political stance in defense of lived life.

Trust is the quiet infrastructure of wellness. In psychotherapy, medicine, and contemporary wellness culture, authority is conferred not only through credentials but through narratives of care, coherence, and moral reliability. When those entrusted figures are revealed—through public records such as the Epstein files or other disclosures—to have participated in, enabled, or ignored profound ethical violations, the rupture that follows cannot be reduced to “disappointment,” nor resolved by appeals to compartmentalization or professional merit.

Drawing on the psychoanalytic metapsychology of betrayal, this paper conceptualizes such moments as relational catastrophes that destabilize both individual and collective meaning-making. Betrayal here is not merely personal; it is psychosocial, implicating systems of idealization, transference, and authority that structure the fields of psychotherapy, health, and wellness. Feminist theory further illuminates how these systems are gendered: who is protected by silence, who is expected to “separate the work from the person,” and whose ethical alarm is dismissed as excess, hysteria, or moralism.

Against the increasingly common defense that one can (or must) separate the art from the artist, this paper argues that in relational professions, such separation constitutes a form of epistemic violence. Psychotherapy and wellness are not neutral techniques, they are practices grounded in trust, embodiment, and ethical presence. When the moral character of the practitioner is treated as irrelevant, the field colludes in a betrayal of its own foundations.

Finally, the paper proposes the notion of an inner compass, an ethical orientation toward truth that resists charisma, institutional protection, and denial. Wellness, from a psychosocial perspective, is inseparable from truth-telling and accountability. Repair cannot proceed without naming betrayal, nor can community be sustained when trust is preserved only by looking away.

Trust is increasingly negotiated not only between persons, but through organisations and socio-technical systems. In public institutions, trust is entangled with legitimacy strains, polarisation, ecological disruption, and accelerated technological change, including AI-mediated knowledge. This paper argues that institutional trust fails when it is demanded as compliance or reassurance, rather than built through shared accountability and redistributed risk. Crises of trust cannot be understood apart from colonial modernity’s afterlives: the production of mistrust through extraction, racialised governance, epistemic hierarchy, and institutional demands that subjects become legible on dominant terms.

Drawing on practice-based observations from clinical and organisational group work, I develop a decolonial group-analytic account of how trust and mistrust are calibrated. From a group-analysis perspective, trust is a field phenomenon: it emerges in the group-as-a-whole through processes of recognition and misrecognition, inclusion and exclusion, speech and silence, and the handling of rupture and repair. Decolonial attention sharpens what becomes visible here, including the uneven allocation of credibility, “professionalism” as a technology of silencing, and the displacement of anxiety into scapegoats, procedures, or neutral systems. Mistrust, on this account, is not simply the opposite of trust. Under uneven vulnerability, it can be discernment that protects groups from epistemic closure, where only one account can count as truth. Unworked mistrust, however, can harden into corrosive distrust and persecutory feeling.

Nonviolence is proposed as a decolonial psychosocial posture for staying with conflict without degradation. It resists forced legibility and quick closure, holds an ethics of opacity and partial knowledge, and supports repair by interrupting defensive drifts into splitting, scapegoating, and silencing. I conclude with implications for institutional practice: how to host mistrust without pathologising it, distinguish critical mistrust from persecutory distrust, and design conditions where trust can grow because power becomes speakable and repair becomes collectively carried.

This paper will focus on entanglements of institutional trust and mistrust experienced within Further Education (FE) in England. Working with Donovan’s argument that the FE sector is, organisationally and politically, a ‘low trust environment’ (2019, p.189) it considers how members of colleges navigate, connect, and disconnect within the material and symbolic expectations of such working environments. Specifically, it will draw on emerging findings from a larger project on workplace belonging within FE to suggest that both trust and mistrust can be read rhizomatically within everyday micro-experiences of belonging at work.

This paper seeks to trouble more functional accounts of institutional trust, proposing that shared, reciprocal trust between different actors within the hierarchical strata of a college will always be frustrated by current neoliberal agendas of competition and accountability. Whilst trust has been seen as a ‘critical competence inside organisations’ (Lewicki et al, 2016, p.93) I posit that trust and mistrust are conjunctively negotiated within an education sector subjected to continual policy churn and imposed change. The paper will therefore focus on an analysis of the power struggles implicit within enactments of organisational trust and mistrust, and the different ‘tactics’ (De Certeau, 1988) used by some of my participants to create moments of solidarity and resistance within their working lives.

Theoretically, this paper adopts a multidisciplinary perspective of trust, considering how trust within the workplace can be viewed through philosophical, sociological, and post-structural scholarship. Trust and mistrust are positioned as distinct but overlapping affects produced and reproduced through historical and current experiences within workplaces. In considering trust in this manner, I aim to engage with the core conference themes, focusing particularly on how powerlessness and agency within everyday working lives might be creatively and dynamically explored.

This paper explores the psychosocial dynamics of mistrust and powerlessness amid radical social transformation. In the context of the 2019 Chilean revolt known as estallido [social outbreak], I conducted interviews with critical scholars to examine the experience of social change among politically engaged subjects. My material shows the contradictory place that power occupies in their accounts. While neoliberal reforms have profoundly eroded academic power in Chile and elsewhere, my interpretation suggests that powerlessness should not be understood solely as a condition imposed by managerial governance over universities. Rather, it can surprisingly function as a fantasmatic solution for enduring (dis)empowering events.

In participants’ narratives, competitive research grants – paradigmatic instruments of neoliberal governance – were consistently framed as spaces outside power, allowing academics to sustain an image of themselves as politically committed yet institutionally powerless. I argue that this rejection is supported by a fantasy of powerlessness that manages mistrust toward institutions while preserving a sense of political integrity. Ultimately, power is imaginarily equated with neoliberalism itself, making it extremely hard to consciously tolerate a socially empowering event like the estallido, thereby keeping things unaltered.

Drawing on a Lacanian account of desire, I conceptualise the fantasy of powerlessness as an unconscious mechanism that simultaneously responds to and reproduces neoliberal power relations. This dynamic helped subjects cope with the destabilising yet emancipatory call of the revolt by following the logic of privation, through which resistance to neoliberalism ends up perpetuating the very symbolic delimitation of power established by the neoliberal regime.

The paper contributes to psychosocial debates on political trust by showing how mistrust and powerlessness can become sites for libidinal investment rather than merely reactive positions, shaping the possibilities for political agency in contexts of neoliberal disempowerment.

Private tutoring has become an integral part of the schooling process for millions of students in India. Widely perceived by students and families as a necessary supplement to formal schooling, private tutoring has expanded rapidly alongside the formal education system. This paper examines the growth of private tutoring in India through the lens of trust and mistrust, arguing that this expansion is sustained by a pervasive mistrust in formal schooling and a corresponding, if fragile, trust in market-based educational solutions.

Drawing on qualitative research conducted with 166 participants, including students, parents, schoolteachers, school leaders, and private tutors, the study explores how different stakeholders articulated and negotiated trust in relation to education. Students frequently expressed a lack of confidence in schools’ capacity to adequately support learning and examination success. Parents similarly articulated anxieties related to academic competition, high-stakes examinations and uncertain futures, leading them to place trust in private tutoring as a form of security and risk management. Teachers and school leaders, meanwhile, describe systemic constraints (such as understaffing, overcrowded classrooms and overburdened curricula) that undermine their own confidence in schools’ ability to meet students’ needs.

These experiences are situated within a broader political economy of education shaped by neoliberal reforms and marketisation. In this context, mistrust in formal schooling fuels the expansion of a largely unregulated private tutoring sector, intensifying educational stratification and shifting responsibility for educational success from institutions to families. Trust in tutoring thus emerges not as a stable or benign orientation, but as a compelled and anxious response to institutional precarity.

This presentation examines how trust and mistrust are reconfigured within contemporary education systems. It explores how mistrust in formal institutions generates conditional trust in market actors, and how these dynamics shape agency, dependency and the capacity to imagine collective educational futures.

This paper explores the role of trust in pedagogical relationships, where power relations are inherently skewed. While psychoanalytic scholarship by Freud and Britzman has recognised psychoanalysis as an educational process, I examine if the patient (as a student) is different from a supervisee or a trainee in an embodied discipline. Utilising critical autoethnography, I compare and contrast my experiences as a dance disciple with my experiences as a psychoanalytical therapist and supervisee. The search for pedagogical or emotional care creates the very conditions in which faith in the other becomes necessary. Surrender, enabled by regression, is problematised utilising these specific contexts. I mobilise Winnicott's understanding of regression. While the authority figure provides a holding environment for the other, and invites trust, these relations can also be fraught with subjugation of one by the other. I ask— why we seek these relationships of care, help and dependence. Is trust more than an outcome enabled by reason that the other has our best interest in mind. Attachment theorists would affirm that trust a human relational need to lean on and rely on the other. This paper discusses the ethics of such pedagogical situations. The (interminable) analytical situation, elaborated by Felman acts as a departure point to think about themes of power within an educational context. Drawing on Rubin's thinking on the circulation of bodies and power, I interrogate what is exchanged within these pedagogical relationships.
This paper relates to the conference theme as it examines the phenomenon of trusting the unknown within an educational-relational dynamic. I argue that while trust is the condition of learning, a degree of mistrust functions as its necessary counterpart to protect one’s healthy narcissism, against the risks of surrender in relations where power is never fully symmetrical, as elaborated by Freud in On Narcissism: An Introduction.

“…There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying…
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin’ here today”

“What’s Going On?” Marvin Gaye (1971)

Conferences are places where people talk to (and too-often at) one another. Epistemic trust is assumed in theory but is difficult to establish in practice. They are sometimes spaces for community and understanding and too-often places where unhoused minds encounter inhospitable environments - in ways that reflect and repeat “what’s going on” in wider social and global contexts. They are institutions that exclude even as they seek to include and that falter and fail in this and other ways, as so many institutions do.

Our invitation to you, the membership of this particular conference, is to join us in this open-space to reflect upon and discuss “what’s going on”. Old conversations are growing cold, as the world heats up, and epistemic trust breaks down. Let’s begin some new ones – if and while we still can.

This event follows on from a similar event that took place at last year's conference. It is offered as a co-facilitated Large Study Group and chairs will be set out in a spiral formation.

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.

This round table and discussion offers a chance to experience and discuss World Comes Alive [WCA], the first Virtual Reality [VR] experience to be developed as a resource for psychoanalytic reflection, launched at the Tavistock in 2025. The 13 minute VR experience will be made available to those wishing to take part, by appointment, prior to the Round Table. Inspired by artist and psychoanalyst, Marion Milner, the design of WCA was also informed by the work of Wilfred Bion, Donald Winnicott and others working in the object relations tradition. WCA immerses us in a series of spectacular virtual worlds, each of which offers a ‘potential space’, from within which we may attend to how we feel in the midst of rest, change, loss and expectation, as we find ourselves in environments that by turn interest, disappoint, excite or threaten us. WCA is an aesthetic container for use in the fluctuating experiences that are part of the unending process of going-on-being. It invites us to attune to embodied perception – to what Milner called the “special internal gesture” that enables direct and authentic engagement, avoiding the “blind thinking” or intellectual habit that defensively filters or prejudges experience before it comes to us. Developed as a tool for examining our anxious responses to change, WCA may also be used as a resource for training in reflective practice. It raises questions about the ‘evocative object’, the value of immersive experiences, and the oscillation between experience-nearness and experience-distance in psychosocial inquiry. It also invites us to reflect on the importance of trust in the holding environment and what happens when that environment dissolves and gives way to something new. What are the conditions in which we defend against change or open ourselves to the unknown?

Re-renderings of classic tales - such as those offered by Maguire in 'Wicked', and by Barker, Miller, Haynes, and others in their retelling of Greek myth - invite us to consider ways in which history has become his-story; positioning female power as subversive and even evil. In a world in which feminine power is distrusted, how do friendship and community amongst women become obstructed and, perhaps more insidiously, how do we learn to distrust our own desires and undermine our creative potential? As we look beyond the contemporary into fairy tales and myth, we can question whether we want to carry forward characterizations of women such as Medea, Cassandra, even Antigone in the forms we have been offered. In contrast, how do we write stories in which women might join together to use their power and potential actively and proactively, to use our love as our weapon against tyranny, as Adrienne Rich put it in 1974, “like the terrible mothers we long and dread to be.” We will investigate these questions using current writings that offer alternative perspectives to 'his-story' and will also offer a real-life example from current research into what can happen when women work together.

At a time of deepening socio-political crisis characterized by the demise of the old order; the return of fascism; reactionary nostalgia; identarian obsession with the ‘chosen’ few; misogyny and xenophobia; and a rise of fundamentalisms can we imagine a future otherwise? We are committed to seeking paths around the annihilating occlusions of the neoliberal logics of social and mass media and university discourses. We seek fugitive knowledge and the possibility of unknowing as we seek to give an account of ourselves.

Melisa Dunlop and Nicola Lane reclaim the voice of their late friend, Cordelia Bradby articulating a form of writing that refuses neoliberal and patriarchal occlusion and “allows our conversation and thinking to consider our own silenced parts, which find voice(s) via circuitous, artful, collaborative and dialogic modes.”

Michael O’Loughlin, drawing on Harney & Moten’s notion of undercommons, describes The Knowledge Project he is developing with his students…a place for fugitive ideas, a place where the neo-liberal university-based logics of knowledge-making and achievement are upended…. a place where unknowing the known becomes a starting point for inquiry, and agency and imagination are privileged.

Donata Puntil views academic writing as a creative and disruptive practice that destabilizes traditional academic structures in favour of a rizhomatic where the poetic and the playful replaces the objective and the quantifiable. She proposes collaborative writing as a ‘taking care of’, as a disruptive possibility beyond the traditional conception of neoliberal individual academic writing practices

Drawing on Berardi’s vision of new forms of solidarity, nomadic thinking, irregular becoming, pursuing singularity, and immanence, Angie Voela argues for disruption of the automation-necessity of the current Symbolic to see what arises in the empty space of non-impossibility and non-necessity. Psychoanalysis is about staying with the trouble, not knowing, remaining stupid at the encounter with the unfamiliar and the unexpected.

The Question of Trust in Therapeutic Online Interactions

The presentation addresses the central question of trust in online therapy sessions by presenting selected findings from a pilot study. The exploratory study aimed to examine the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for the psychoanalytic treatment of children and adolescents. Due to the high risk of infection, direct contact between patients and their therapists - usually considered crucial - became a potential threat with the onset of the pandemic. In order to prevent disruptions to psychotherapeutic treatment, the use of video or telephone communication became an essential alternative.

In the study, adolescents and young adults undergoing treatment were asked about their experiences with changes in therapeutic settings resulting from the pandemic. Technology-based communication in psychotherapy raises new questions concerning trust in the therapeutic relationship, for example, the consequences of the absent body in video conferences, the perception and experience of digital reality and digital therapeutic space, and the dependence of both therapist and patient on a third party: the technology. One interviewed patient articulated this issue of trust as follows: “…you never know, okay, what Google is going to use it for…”

Against this background, selected excerpts from interviews with adolescents and young adults participating in the study are used to explore the topic of trust in therapeutic online interactions.

^{Prof. Dr. Susanne Benzel, Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Department of Social Work and Health, and psychoanalyst for children, adolescents and young adults in private practise, Frankfurt am Main, Germany susanne.benzel@fra-uas.de}

The Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game is a tabletop wargame produced by Games Workshop; whilst often dismissed by non-participants as ‘nerdy adults playing with toy soldiers’, the game is actually heavily skill-based and lends itself well to competitive play. There is a national league with multiple events every weekend and there are over 1000 active players in the UK. These events often have expensive prizes which, combined with the league standings, ensure that there is strong incentive to win games and win events, but at what cost? Games Workshop’s Rules Manual for the game opens with a Code of Conduct, composed of two “Cardinal Rules” and 16 “Important Principles” - One of these Cardinal Rules is “Always Tell the Truth and Never Cheat” and several of the Important Principles are focused around the concept of trust and integrity between players. And so, event organisers find themselves in the complicated situation of trying to moderate a friendly game that requires trust and honesty in a competitive situation which may incentivise players to cheat and lie. Recent events have brought the importance of this Code of Conduct to the fore, with controversy raised over players agreeing intentional draws, which many social media users have called match-fixing, leading to feelings of anger and toxicity in the community. Feelings which are only exacerbated given that these complaints are often posted anonymously and based on second-hand reports, leading to conflicting versions of ‘the truth’ and confusion over which information can really be trusted. This paper will explore the nature of trust within the community of a game based on Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the core message of which is the importance of resisting the urge to be corrupted by the evil of The Ring, however tempting the personal benefits may seem.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) content is now part and parcel of the information ecosystem, disrupting digital media production and amplifying concerns of falling trust in the news. Media organisations use GenAI to automate summarisation, create illustrations or even produce AI-powered virtual newsreaders, impacting audiences’ perceptions of trusted sources of news. Public Service Media (PSM), such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), face the challenge of educating and informing the public while maintaining their trust in the context of rapid technological innovation.

This paper presents findings from 18 semi-structured interviews with young adults aged 18-24, which investigated how GenAI affects young audiences' trust in the news and how their lived experiences influence their encounters with AI and the news. The overarching research question asked: “What are the implications of AI generated content for the trust relationship between the BBC and its audiences?”. Insights from interviews led to a creative workshop, where 5 young participants used GenAI to simulate how it might be used in news production. As news media trust research often struggles with definitions of the concept of trust itself, this approach enabled understanding of young people’s conceptualisation of trust and trustworthiness in their news consumption.

Fieldwork revealed that audience trust is shaped by both affective and systemic factors. Participants’ attitudes towards AI in news reporting were marked by distrust and keen awareness of bias and misinformation. Findings highlight that young adults’ trust in news organisations and in GenAI is context-dependent and shaped by past experiences and their own use of AI. Significantly, young participants concluded that their trust in the news is less affected by journalists’ use of AI itself but more so by the means with which news organisations disclose such practices. To trust the news, young audiences value transparency and want disclosure when AI is used.

Media panics seem to be as old as humankind itself. Scholars find traces of such a media panic in Socrates’s Phaedrus, for example, in which the philosopher speaks about the diminishing effects writing has on memory. Yet, across the past two decades, the density and intensity of such moral outcries against media-technological innovations have increased exponentially and in line with the speed of these innovations themselves. In this respect, the phase of whistleblowers of the late 2010s and early 2020s, implicating the big-tech platforms, is now followed by governments starting to act upon a widespread public sentiment that has proven ripe for prohibiting social media use for children up into their late teens. These prohibitions find energetic support by many parents who have become anti-digital, mobile media activists on their children’s behalf (if not according to many of these children’s wishes).

But what exactly is it with, in and about digital media that adults are so worried about and how do these worries affect their own lives, as well as those of their children and families? In a narrative-biographical interview project, we asked 15 parents in a Nordic country to tell us about their experiences and concerns regarding their children’s digital lives. This paper presents central findings from their interviews.

Overall, what shows in the materials sighted so far is that the individualising logic of the digital, in its commodified form, has a strong tendency to isolate and render solipsistic a developmental process that Bion (1962) called “reverie”. Parents, who want to comfort their kids, facilitate, or at least, condone, screen-based “reverie” and then look on, melancholically, before turning to their own screens for containment. The widespread activism of the present moment, it appears, is one by which parents seek to save themselves.

The working session explores the use of force within the UK’s Criminal Justice System as a psychosocial response to distress. The session will position physical restraint, chemical incapacitation, and isolation as organisational responses to fear. Throughout, we reflect on the methods implemented in secure frontline practice and consider how these can manage anxiety through control, exclusion, and chemical regulation of individuals.

The session, formed through practice-based reflections, situates the use of force within a psychodynamic framework. Considering transference, counter transference, splitting, projection, and containment, whilst contemplating how distress reconfigured as danger can impact on effective relational practice. Touching on resistance, often viewed as a threat and risk, we reflect on how institutional dynamics appear to stabilise institutions more effectively than they protect the individuals within them, further reproducing distress rather than addressing it.

Through an exploration of the institutional pipeline, we trace the transmission of distress across institutions, highlighting where individuals encounter similar responses of containment that raise questions about the institutional capacity to hold emotional pain without misplacing it. Sound, silence, and structured attendee reflection are used to explore the ethical implications and impact on relational practice.

To start, attendees cross the threshold with an audio extract that conveys a secure environment (keys, alarms, metal doors, etc.) to support their embodiment of the experience. Through silence, attendees are asked to consider bodily responses as data when examining how fear is managed in their own settings.

Through the application of psychosocial concepts of social defences and organisational anxiety, the session argues that humanisation and relational practice are not ethical add-ons, but an essential psychosocial intervention capable of managing fear whilst effectively holding institutional anxiety; thus preventing it from being displaced onto individuals “contained” within the UK’s Criminal Justice System.

In this paper, I will introduce a new psychosocial writing project drawing on my experience as a Labour candidate in the 2026 local elections in south east London. The aim of this project is to nourish the imaginative nature of Labour politics at a time of significant soul-searching within the party, and to highlight the psychic dimension of political life, by sharing the voices and stories of local residents and Labour members, alongside my own reflections as a candidate and early-career academic in psychosocial studies. A year after completing my PhD at Birkbeck (about psychoanalysis and Brexit), I was selected as one of the Labour Party candidates in Mottingham, Coldharbour and New Eltham, at the southern end of Greenwich borough. This historically Conservative area has been represented by two Tory and one Labour councillor since 2022, but is now facing a surge in support for Reform UK. As a candidate, I’ve been continuously thinking about what it means to practice local politics - including speaking to a wide range of residents in biweekly canvassing sessions - with a psychoanalytic ethos, and in this paper hope to relate my experiences on the doorstep to the conference theme: Trust, Mistrust and Community. I hope there will be opportunities for discussion with conference participants, and for sharing ideas about the future direction of this project as a locus of community activism and psychosocial research (see: https://fieldnoteslabour.substack.com/).

George Shaw’s paintings of the Tile Hill estate in Coventry depict ordinary suburban spaces — pubs, garages, woodland edges, council houses — rendered with devotional seriousness. Across his work, familiar social infrastructures slowly disappear: the pub closes, the social club empties, shared spaces fade from view. These are not nostalgic images, but studies in the fragile relationship between place, memory and trust.

This paper uses Shaw’s work as a psychosocial lens to examine contemporary transformations. Trust is understood here not as confidence in individuals or institutions alone, but as something historically and spatially produced — embedded in neighbourhoods, social infrastructures and collective memory. When these infrastructures disappear or are repeatedly reorganised in the name of renewal and innovation, trust becomes harder to sustain.

The paper develops the concept of reform fatigue to describe the convergence of two dynamics: the erosion of public trust through populist narratives that frame care as indulgence or weakness, and the cumulative effects of decades of organisational reform within health and social care. Like Shaw’s recurring images of loss and absence, these processes reveal the gap between narratives of progress and lived social experience.

Against this backdrop, the paper reflects on neighbourhood mental health centres as tentative infrastructures of containment. In psychosocial terms, they represent attempts to sustain practices of being alongside in environments shaped by fragmentation and institutional instability.

Shaw’s attention to the emotional geography of working-class landscapes — spaces where “great thoughts aren’t rumoured to happen” — provides a way of thinking about trust not as restoration or optimism, but as something sustained through presence, memory and shared space. The paper suggests that containment, in this sense, is both relational and political: a way of remaining with uncertainty without collapsing into distrust or defensive certainty.

Stephen Mitchell's visionary text “Relationality“ (2022) charts the emergence of the relational perspective in psychoanalysis. Lying outside its scope is the emergence of careful borrowings of psychoanalytically informed understandings of societal impulses critical of the sociotechnical systems and infrastructures of contemporary societies. Such careful borrowings are important to consider when seeking to understand the rise of net zero politics, which has so quickly become a topic entangled with other risk objects associated with stirrings of distrust in contemporary life. Drawing on interpretive, psychosocial risk research conducted over the last decade in de-industrialising communities in South Wales, this presentation will consider published analyses in the social science literature on the net zero energy transition. It has introduced to the study of energy infrastructure consideration of “psychic objects” (Smith et al, 2024). The framework of Kleinian object relations enriches and deepens understanding of how communities can experience themselves within a dynamic nexus enabling imaginations but also leading to social defences (as wounded or contained). So far, this work has fostered questions about how to foster a just transition (IDRIC Frontiers Report, 2025). This presentation will do more to reflect on the fraught conditions of trust, mistrust and the challenge of community building in contemporary times.

Smith, H., Henwood, K., and Pidgeon, N. (2024) The infrastructural ecologies of industrial decarbonisation: Visual methods and psychosocial logics in place based public engagement. Energy Research and Social Science. 120 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2024.103874

IDRIC Frontiers Report: Public Perceptions and Just Transitions

Industrial Decarbonisation Frontiers Report | 2 June 2025

SSRN [Open Research Platform]

Abstract

Radioactive Patriarchy: The Impact of Nuclear Militarism on the village of Garelochhead.

Garelochhead is a small sleepy village which sits at the head of the Gareloch in rural Argyll, on the west coast of Scotland. Its unique in that it sits directly between two nuclear submarine bases at Faslane and Coulport, the home to the biggest arsenal of nuclear weapons in western Europe.

The economy is built around fear: time, space and the working day are determined by it. It pays the rent.To the military the village is a ‘service community’, as opposed to a community which provides services.

Trust and mistrust lie at the heart of the relationship between the local community and the submarine bases through the promise of “protection” and “safety”. This reveals a cognitive dissonance and black humour as coping mechanisms.

My proposal seeks to chart how hegemony and sexual predation is built into a matrix of hegemonic structures and masculinities which reveals the ethics of patriarchy and the limits of trust. Enloe (2000) reminds us that,

‘National security is often achieved at the expense of individual security.’

I argue that within such a regionally constructed gender hegemony, an entitled ‘frontier masculinity’ has emerged, on both sides of the fence, in which a structural violence is cultivated. In her book ‘Surviving Sexual Violence’, Kelly (1988) introduces the concept of a ‘continuum of violence’, which makes up to the cultural scaffolding of rape. This begs the question: What do we do with the violence during the “so-called” peacetime?

These observations are central to the problem my proposal is seeking to explore – the causal link between violence as the problem and violence as the answer contained within nuclear militarism and its impact on “community”.

Powerpoint presentation with slides and ethnographic documentary footage from my Phd film.

Collective memory is most frequently theorized in accordance with a particular community, nation, or tribe and either their maintenance of memory or the erasure of memory by state narratives. Yet how is racial memory negotiated at an interpersonal level? How do we see couples negotiate the politics of memory within their relationships? This paper will be working with a 2019 broadway play written and originally directed by Jeremy O’Harries titled Slave Play. The play follows three Black/white interracial couples, struggling with connection and a dissipated sexual life, who are undergoing a new and experimental “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy”. The first act follows the couples as they collectively imagine and enact a sexual fantasy set on a plantation, after which the talk therapy portion begins and the couples unpack the contents and dynamics within a group therapy setting. While the play follows three couples, this paper will be focused specifically on Phillip and Alana. Phillip is a biracial man in his late 20s/early 30s and his partner, Alana is a white woman of around the same age. Through an analysis of Slave Play, this paper investigates how racial histories and memory inform the types of dreaming Phillip and Alana collectively engage in, and how the play folds time and space through racial channels. While I will be utilizing the original screenplay written by Jeremy O’Harris, I also attended Slave Play in October of 2025 in Toronto, which was directed by Jordan Laffrenier. This paper will address the conference theme of trust by explicating how race and racial histories inform how we are able to bond with and trust one another, where trust deteriorates while haunted by specters of racial memory, and the types of engagements that are necessary to contend with uncomfortable, painful, and distrustful interracial collective memory.

Modernity requires systemic trust, based on individuals' expectations for order and stability in interactions. However, trust involves risk. Thus, certainty about others is elusive. Negotiating trust and mistrust in Iran is challenging. People see God and Satan as symbols of good and evil, indicating the projection of trust and mistrust into two separate objects. Many face a state of "trust or mistrust" rather than "trust and mistrust." This results from a collective fixation in a paranoid-schizoid position. Examining group dynamics with basic assumptions reveals that projecting mistrust onto opposing groups permits violence against the other.

This proposal offers a psychosocial perspective that nurtures ambivalence regarding trust within the therapeutic alliance. Clinical observations indicate that at the beginning of the psychoanalytic process, some patients, influenced by their social conditions, employ defenses of idealization and devaluation. To the extent that members of radical groups dehumanize others with extremist Shiite-political or monarchist readings, which has unfortunately led to the deaths of many Iranian citizens.Contemporary psychoanalytic treatments can address trust-building alongside mistrust as a dynamic process involving rupture and repair by utilizing a clear therapeutic contract, identifying red flags, ensuring transparency and accountability, balancing power between analyst and analysand, promoting epistemic adaptation and mentalization, and encouraging social learning outside therapy. Hope emerges after the stage of trust versus mistrust between analyst and analysand. The hope developing at the psychosocial level manifests as a movement toward democracy. This movement is not based on absolute trust or mistrust but on listening to diverse societal voices, indicating a shift toward depressive positioning.

Discussing mistrust does not moralize it; rather, it offers a humanistic perspective on the fundamental capacity for self-care and caring for others.

Entering a client’s subjective world within the therapeutic space is fraught with challenges. Before entering the therapeutic relationship, clients assess whether the therapist’s qualifications and skills fit their needs, but what happens when such information is limited, and the stigma surrounding mental health continues to exist? This question becomes noteworthy especially when mental health services are predominantly availed by women, who continue to be marginalized and socially vulnerable, further compounded at a time when religious polarization is on the rise in India.

This paper reflectively demonstrates that the therapist’s name facilitates trust in the therapeutic relationship even before the client enters the room, as they mistakenly interpret that the therapist shares the same religious identity as them. Drawing on clinical experience, the paper explores how disadvantaged women, whose only support often comes from religion, meaningfully derive their trust and resonance with an unknown individual through the only information available to them, their name. Through this initial sense of familiarity, clients make meaning of the worlds they are presented with, serving a protective response in contexts riddled with uncertainty and disempowerment, and encouraging them to seek help.

The paper highlights how therapists need to be aware of the social nuances that permeate spaces beyond the therapy room, and trustworthy therapeutic relationships are sometimes built prior to direct therapeutic contact. Identities and social locations of therapists may assist in building therapeutic trust, aspects perhaps invisible to practitioners, but which can be deeply real and tangible for clients. Being attuned to these aspects can help cultivate sensitivity and empathy towards clients in building relational experiences, facilitating effective therapeutic practice. This presentation is in tune with the conference theme, because truth is linked to trust yes, and perhaps our names can be the only markers that clients can trust in a socially divided world.

Anxiety is defined as kind of image by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He writes of a particular fable in which a person awakes to find themselves wearing a mask, unsure of who they are, staring at a reflection of themself in the eye of a giant praying mantis standing over them. ‘I couldn’t see my own image,’ the person says. White anxiety attaches a racial dimension to this image of anxiety, in which white people fear their “true” identity is being erased. We can see this in the current “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which now informs anti-migration policies that seek to limit the number of Black and Brown people migrating from the Global South to the Global North, supposedly praying on the resources of “white nations”. In this refusal to share with their fellow humans, some white people instead feel their image and their “culture” is being erased. Referring to images by Hank Willis Thomas and Ingrid Pollard, I will discuss photographs as metaphors for white anxiety, consider the meaning of whiteness as a visual phenomenon, and suggest that it may be necessary for white people to see much less of themselves, both internally, and in the world around them, in order that we might overcome our various anxieties, reach some kind of stability and live out our dreams.

This Roundtable session takes as its focus the processes and vicissitudes in transitioning from being primarily salaried professionals to inhabiting an identity misleadingly designated ‘retired’. Questions of where one might go, metaphorically and literally, and what one might use in the slow process of rebuilding some kind of durable identity will be considered here. Is it the case that we use the same methods and processes – unconscious and otherwise – that we relied on to navigate our previous life-changes (e.g. becoming parents, becoming middle-aged, becoming academics). Alternatively, does life after work require something new? How we grieve and requite past selves and past contexts, and then what happens, are central concerns.

The session will offer a forum in which we can examine post-work life as a psychosocial phenomenon, considering structural contexts and individual experiences. We hope to share reflections on the meaning of work for us, and the particular resonances this creates for renouncing it. There will be space here for reflection on some of the struggles present in forming this ambivalent identity. This stage has death as its endpoint (however distant), which, consequently, involves reorienting to (and/or defending against) this reality as well as that of an ageing body and declining intellectual powers. Increasing exposure to ageism may compound our discomfort, while even seemingly benign notions such as ‘ageing well’ may come to feel like another individual-blaming, socially constructed platitude. More positively, post-work life may be a potential ‘space’, providing an opportunity for creativity and growth. Consequently, the possibilities for reimagining new ways of being in the post work stage, trusting that we can mourn the past and reconnect to life differently, in modes and roles previously unimaginable or indeed longed for, will also form a significant element of the roundtable’s discussion.

The three papers in this panel are rooted in a re-reading of the foiundational national myths and how these myths are mediated to a public as interpreted with and through psychoanalysis. There is an explicit focus on the role of violence in the founding of a national community, fratricide and/or sacrifice.

Being remanded into custody in prison – in the face of criminal charges – represents a socially sanctioned profound act of alienation in which one is thrust into an essentially low trust environment. Yet, while still divorced from accustomed social networks, such as family, new cultures and social ties are constructed within these carceral spaces. Unsurprisingly, given the overlap in static and dynamic risk factors, and the essentially psychologically toxic nature of prisons as institutions, experiences of mental distress and disorder present to a significant degree and with a particular nature in these settings. Yet, despite their inherent darkness, prisons represent, for some, sites of potential healing, recovery, rehabilitation, and redemption. Therapeutic work in prison institutions is challenging with prisoner, group, and therapist being required to work together to establish a rapport built on a form of epistemic trust – fostering the idea that a shared reality construction is possible and potentially generative. Yet, at each stage the ethic of this process is undermined by institutional and wider processes focused on restriction and retribution. The questions arises whether therapeutic practice in such institutions is ethically possible, or whether any attempt at such work simply represents an exercise of state power in the further confinement and control not only of the prisoner’s body but also, through a process of “psychologization”, their mind. In this paper I seek to present, through a series of clinical vignettes, psychoanalytic, and actor-network theory, the role of fostering of trust and co-construction of narrative in acts of recovery that overcome these restrictions and suggest that, even in such settings, acts of compassion and kindness emerge in a radical manner that challenges notions of distrust, division, and disempowerment that are often seen as constitutive of prisons as institutions.

Effective criminal justice practice rests on the foundations of trust and in turn influences perceptions of legitimacy and procedural fairness across the criminal justice system. The system, according to Cavadino et.al (2019), is currently weak due to a threefold crisis: the crisis of penological resources, crisis of visibility and the crisis of legitimacy. As the tenth anniversary of the Lammy review (2017) approaches it would be fair to claim that the criminal justice system is now in a better position to ‘explain’ where disparities are present and actively shaping the dynamics of trust and mistrust in racially minoritised communities. Making data and processes more visible can improve trust and confidence (Bradford, 2024) but greater visibility and engagement has not substantially increased trust levels in justice institutions. This paper examines how the ‘reform’ element from the Lammy review has performed. Acknowledging trust as a continuous performance and negotiation between practitioners, individuals and communities this paper will examine the relational dynamics of trust and mistrust within criminal justice institutions, drawing on socio-legal scholarship, critical criminology and emerging research on building institutional legitimacy. It argues that the ‘reform’ element has been undermined by mistrust at three overlapping levels: absence of positive enablers in institutional cultures; interpersonal trust between practitioners and justice-involved individuals; and the nature of systemic trust. Using examples from criminal justice practice at the prosecution and sentencing stages the paper will show how trust gets undermined through procedural actions, perceptions of fairness and the exercise of discretion. The paper will conclude by emphasising how the ‘reform’ element in the Lammy review requires operationalising a relational model of trust over procedural models. This will help foreground key issues of power asymmetry that can be addressed through ethical leadership and communication to advance legitimacy and transform distrust to trust.

This paper explores the systematic destruction of human trust through the lens of the feature film The Pitesti Experiment (dir. Victoria Baltag). Based on the notorious re-education program in early Communist Romania (1949–1951), the film depicts the "most terrible barbarity of the contemporary world," where university students were subjected to a perverse psychological experiment designed to create the "New Man." Unlike traditional forms of incarceration, the Pitesti Phenomenon weaponized the victim-victimizer relationship, forcing prisoners to torture their own friends and family to prove their "re-education."

The analysis focuses on how the experiment deliberately targeted the fundamental pillars of human interdependence. By compelling detainees to renounce their faith, ideology, and—most crucially—their interpersonal loyalties, the regime didn't just extract information; it induced a total collapse of the self into a state of "narcissistic isolation" and paranoia. Through cinematic representation, the paper examines the "unnarratability" of this trauma and the film's role as a commemorative gesture that breaks the silence imposed by decades of state-sponsored disinformation. It interrogates the thin line between trust and survival, illustrating how the forced betrayal of one's social and spiritual fabric leads to a corrosive form of mistrust that lingers across generations.

How this presentation addresses the conference theme: The presentation addresses the theme by examining the "dialectics of trust and mistrust" in its most extreme, pathological form. It explores how the Pitesti Experiment functioned as a "dystopian imaginary" made real, where the unknown was not a space for imagination, but a source of constant, calculated terror. By discussing the film’s journey—from its independent, decade-long production to its role in uncovering "unstable truths"—this session reflects on how art can recalibrate historical trust in a post-truth era, fostering a collective "bearing of responsibility" for a past that was once violently erased.

This paper examines how trust is continuously negotiated within structurally unequal relationships in the context of death penalty mitigation in India. Mitigation interviews involve documenting life histories of individuals facing capital punishment, to argue for a sentence lesser than death. In this process, mitigation interviews frequently lead to deeply relational encounters in which clients (persons sentenced to death) recount intimate and often painful life histories to mitigation investigators.

Many individuals facing the death penalty come from communities that have historically experienced violence, marginalisation and neglect at the hands of social and state institutions. Additionally, mitigation interviews often take place within relationships marked by significant asymmetries of power between the client and mitigator—shaped by differences in caste, class, education and access to legal systems. In that sense, disclosure from clients in such encounters cannot be treated as a straightforward indicator of trust. Clients may choose to withhold or selectively disclose narratives, and only reveal certain aspects of themselves as trust develops in the relationship. Trust in mitigation interviews therefore emerges through an ongoing relational process in which both client and mitigator navigate the conditions under which disclosure becomes possible.

Drawing on reflections from conducting mitigation interviews, the paper examines how feminist methodological approaches—particularly the emphasis on reflexivity, relational knowledge production and attentiveness to power—offer a way to critically examine and navigate the power asymmetry embedded within this process. In doing so, it helps guide the relational practices through which mitigators continuously negotiate and build trust over time. These reflections point to mitigation not simply as a process of collecting life histories, but as a relational, feminist practice in which building and sustaining trust becomes central to conducting meaningful and responsible mitigation work.

This paper engages the theme of political trust, mistrust and distrust, feelings of powerlessness and the possibilities of agency.

AI chatbots have been designed to function as confidantes, lovers, advisors, friends, playmates and collaborators of one sort or another. Whilst imaginative diversity of uses frequently exceeds the intentions of developers the business model of commercial chatbots is premised on building trust in the reliability of the technology and the relationships it affords. With their on-demand access and relatively low subscription costs, chatbots are also responding to a large reservoir of unmet mental health need, ranging from everyday companionship to psychotherapy – most commonly based on CBT or Rogerian counselling techniques. Psychodynamic understanding of how humans and chatbots interact is still at an early stage, but it is increasingly clear that we need new conceptual frameworks to characterise this distinctive mode of human-machine relating.

Drawing on our work developing AI companions with both communities of lived experience and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, we will introduce you to a series of chatbots designed to offer everyday companionship, and for use in a care eco-system. We ask what capacities you would look for in your ideal AI companion, what limitations you could accommodate and what use might you make of it? What are the opportunities and challenges that chatbots pose for care professionals and users? How far can they be trusted? what are the implications for designers and developers?

The delivery of Children’s Services within the United Kingdom exists within a landscape of inherent complexity and uncertainty. Multiple agencies, policies, and professional disciplines intersect to support children and families, yet this interdependence continually tests the boundaries of trust. Practitioners must negotiate trust and mistrust across organisational, professional, and relational spaces while responding to unpredictable social, political, and institutional pressures that shape both practice and outcomes.

Proposing a framework of integrated complexity informed by Black feminist epistemology, this paper explores how Children’s Services seeking to embed anti-racism navigate the interwoven structural, relational, and ethical challenges that define their daily work. Drawing on scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks, the paper considers how knowledge is situated and how lived experience, emotion, and care serve as legitimate and necessary sources of knowing. Such perspectives reveal how truth and trust are shaped by power: whose accounts are believed, whose experiences are mistrusted, and how systemic racism undermines epistemic trust between professionals and the families they serve.

The paper argues that embracing complexity through a Black feminist lens enables practitioners to confront uncertainty, cultivate reflexivity, and reimagine trust as an ethical, political, and relational practice. By valuing diverse ways of knowing and being, Children’s Services can move beyond defensive systems toward more equitable, responsive, and imaginative modes of care.

Addressing the conference theme:
This paper engages the theme by examining how trust, mistrust, and unstable truths operate within the socio-political and psychic dimensions of Children’s Services, and how Black feminist epistemology offers a way to bear that instability with care and responsibility.

Across contemporary institutional settings, emotions play a significant role in shaping participation, belonging and community, which means that individuals are increasingly expected not only to comply with behavioural norms, but also to display particular emotional orientations such as positivity, resilience and motivation. While such expectations are often framed as supportive or inclusive, they raise questions about emotional legitimacy and the consequences of emotions that fall outside accepted norms.

Building on Hochschild’s concept of feeling rules (1983), this paper examines how emotional norms operate within institutional settings and how they may contribute to the production of mistrust. Rather than approaching mistrust as a conscious stance or relational breakdown, it is conceptualised as a psychosocial process that can emerge emotionally when certain feelings are persistently disallowed.

The analysis draws on 2-year ethnographic fieldwork following children through their early encounters with schooling, treated as an exemplary institutional setting in which feeling rules are made explicit and actively normalised. Focusing on everyday situations such as classroom routines and transitions, the paper shows how children learn to regulate their emotional expressions in order to remain legitimate participants. Emotions associated with happiness and adaptability are encouraged, while anger, sadness or resistance are often redirected or silenced.

The paper argues that such processes may give rise to a form of mistrust that is internal and emotional rather than explicit or articulated. This mistrust is directed less towards others or the institution itself than towards one’s own emotional responses as reliable grounds for participation and belonging. By foregrounding the emotional and non-discursive dimensions of mistrust, the paper contributes to psychosocial debates on trust, community and emotional governance, highlighting how institutional efforts to foster cohesion and wellbeing may simultaneously produce subtle forms of exclusion.

This paper considers care experienced young people’s views of what matters in relation to their experiences of schooling and the role of teachers. It is based on a small- scale exploratory England-based pilot study involving interviews with young people with care experience and teacher educators conducted in 2022 in the years post Covid. The pandemic created and exacerbated existing challenges for care experienced pupils - especially in relation to isolation, education disruption and placement breakdown. Earlier work has noted care experienced youth’s concerns regarding the limited knowledge of practitioners and prejudice faced in school contexts. (Brodie, 2003; Hayden, 2005; Gleaves & Walker, 2008; Become, 2018). This evidenced the challenges that care experienced children and young people have about schools and educators, particularly in their feelings that teachers know little about their lives and/or that educators hold stigmatising attitudes to children in care (Haydon, 2005).

This paper explores trust and the ethics of care and ‘care-less-ness’ within institutional school contexts (Rogers, 2016; Lithari & Rogers, 2017). We argue that normative institutional ‘familialism’ frames these young people’s experiences and we ask where next for inclusive practice for care experienced pupils in schools. We outline how normative institutional ideas of family sets the scene for care experienced pupils’ isolation, before outlining examples of care-full and care-less practice that fractures and/or cemented key bonds within the young people’s accounts. Concepts of institutional ‘care’ are crucial here. Such lives were often marked by fractured and disrupted placements and institutional isolation, and yet also clearly narrated examples of ‘care-full’ practice where teachers went the extra mile. Such accounts highlight the strength of educators’ role in supporting empowering contexts for young people against the odds.

For decades, the autonomy of teachers has been eroded by political interventions that have undermined public trust in the teaching profession (Biesta, 2015). In recent years, focus has shifted to school readiness and the pressure on teachers in Nursery and Reception classes to pursue pedagogically inappropriate policies has grown. Within the educational community, there is now a deep distrust of policy makers and dissatisfaction with their quotidian impact on the lives of teachers and children.

This presentation explores the psychosocial impact of policy on the lived experience of teachers in Nursery and Reception classes. Using a theoretical framework combining ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), self-determination theory (Ryan and Deci, 2000) and Festinger’s (2001) theory of cognitive dissonance, this narrative inquiry (Veale, 2023) used an innovative six-point data collection and analysis strategy to explore three key questions: how do Nursery and Reception class teachers conceptualise their professional practice; what factors shape their experience of practice; and what are the implications of these findings for their professional development.

Written narratives of professional practice were analysed using The Listening Guide (Gilligan, 1982). The I-Poems developed at this stage of analysis formed the stimulus for co-analytical interviews with each participant. Finally, the corpus of data was interrogated using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006).

The findings illustrate how political distrust compounds the liminal status of teachers working with very young children, leading to feelings of isolation, neglect, and constant conflict in their professional lives. They also suggest a need to review the way we prepare teachers for professional practice in Primary schools and how we support those moving into senior positions to become ‘educated leaders’, able to build trusting communities of practice that enhance teacher's psychic, social and political lives.

We develop David’s Armstrong contributions on the field of the ethical imagination as a psychosocial capacity that emerges in response to lived dilemmas in social, political, and ecological life. We conceptualise trust and mistrust not as individual traits but as psychosocial processes shaped by collective fantasy, social defences, and institutional and political life in a psychosocial context of precarity and epistemic instability.

Following Armstrong, we approach ethical imagination not as a personal virtue but as a field phenomenon, arising in situations characterised by:

• an emergent practical dilemma
• a developmental undertow
• an acknowledgement of human agency
• a capacity to re-imagine forms of human association
• the presence of resistance to change.

Ethical imagination names the work of creative re-imagining through which new forms of social relating can be thought and mobilised into action in the psychosocial context of the operation of power and institutional defences in the shadows of climate disaster, racialised othering and resource wars.

Ethical imagination concerns the imaginative re-configuration of social relations in the midst of uncertainty and resistance, enabling subjects and groups to remain in relation to difference and not-knowing without retreating into credulity or distrust. We distinguish the concept from moral reasoning, which abstracts from situated action, and from the Keatsian/Bionian notion of negative capability, which privileges the capacity to remain with not-knowing.

We draw upon the Conference’s identification of trust and mistrust as psychosocial phenomena operative within and between human communities to introduce the project that we are planning to develop around Armstrong’s concept of the Ethical Imagination.
We hope to open new conversations in the Conference about the possible implications for organisational life, political engagement and community formation in the New World Disorder.

The climate crisis has exacerbated our mental health crisis, particularly among young people (IPCC, 2023). A prominent experience in this phenomenon is betrayal, yet it receives little attention in both the literature on climate emotions and the psychosocial literature more broadly. This study seeks to address this gap.

An in-depth review of the literature has found different understandings of betrayal as it occurs in our widening spheres of experience. First, within the dyadic relationship between infant and primary caregiver, Erikson’s concept of basic trust is used, linked to failures in adaptation. Second, within our interpersonal relationships, betrayal is seen as collapsing the transitional space and morphing the betrayed’s object of the betrayer. Third, in the cultural relationship between individuals and institutions, betrayal is understood as the violation of societal dependency.

Employing Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, four participants, chosen through opportunistic and purposive sampling, aged 18 and 25, took part in semi-structured interviews around their experiences of climate-betrayal.

The study is ongoing and will be completed by 29th May 2026. However, analysis so far sees participants experiencing betrayal in a number of surprising ways, from feeling an obligation to dedicate their life to climate activism to believing they’ve been robbed of a future others take for granted. There’s suggestions that these betrayal experiences fracture relationships as participants wrestle with the temptations to blame and disconnect. Interestingly, despite the clear role of politicians, industries and societal systems in the climate crisis, their mythical status makes the experience of their betrayal most difficult to articulate.

Betrayal, perhaps the thing which turns trust into mistrust, is a complex and powerful experience. For the sake of these young people, struggling to face the “creeping monster” of the climate crisis, it requires our attention.

The core truth in discourses on the Anthropocene is that the current catastrophic risks and risks of catastrophe are man-made (and, yes, the archaic narrowing of the human to the male seems to the point here). In this respect, techno and environmental feminist as well as critical posthuman scholars have a strong point when they demand a turning away from and displacement of anthropocentric, i.e., human-centred, thinking. Too arrogant, too self-obsessed are humans, and too unsure of themselves to let go of their fantasies of domination with which they make themselves “lose by winning” (Powers, 2018).

However, while this demand to move away from anthropocentrism is laudable – and plausibly necessary for survival –, particularly critical posthuman approaches tend to leave the question as to how to bring about such change wide open. The very characteristics that are given as reasons for the need to abandon the focus on the human – arrogance, omnipotence, narcissism – are also the conditions that undercut the possibility of succeeding in it. Therefore, and against the background of existing advances, this paper sets out to develop the outlines of a critical anthropocentrism in a psychoanalytic key. Along the lines of psychoanalytic theories of repression, it holds that what is actively pushed out of perception, awareness and consciousness will eventually return – seemingly as an alien occupational force from the outside. In this respect, critical posthuman theories, by making themselves blind to the vicissitudes entailed in the very acts of rejecting and decentring the human, might make themselves vulnerable to even more human-centredness, not less.

I was inspired by a number of people I had met when exploring the possibility of living more sustainably. They were ‘exemplars' who had acted decisively in the world in response to ecological crisis. I had written about interdependence, interconnection, and critiqued consumerism and hyper-individualism. (Harvey, 2020). However, their actions went further and demonstrated that change is inevitable, necessary, and, importantly, within the grasp of an ordinary person if we just trust the process.

I wanted to explore how their thinking could inspire other people’s openness to a change mindset and inspire them towards a similar process. I want to tell their stories about change based on the core ecological and evolutionary ideas that there is nothing as inevitable as change. Change is incremental, natural, and also fun. or it is sudden, decisive. However, it also entails potential loss, loss of perceived status, loss of illusions about what constitutes the meaning of life, loss of convenience, loss of ego and exclusivity, loss of what we project into our status and therefore resistance is common.

The people I spoke with each had the quality of not only taking individual action to fulfil their ethical beliefs, but being exemplars in order to help, guide and inspire others. They are examples to how ‘a good life’ can be lived. There is also a common thread of permaculture ethics in their outlooks; like localism, awareness of interdependencies and inter-trophic scales, social justice, diversity, fairness and equality. The ethics seem to grow from ecological realities of the ecosystem as a whole.

They have attempted to live their lives in relationship with each other and the land. Relying on interdependencies with their own and the wider community’s capacity to grow and sell goods at a local level. They trust in the end of the world.

Psychological science currently finds itself caught in paradoxical demands: having to serve as a source of certainty while simultaneously being the object of critiques concerning its unreplicated findings. Drawing on systems psychodynamics (Hirschhorn & Barnett, 1993), we analyse what is being sought when psychological science is asked to provide trust guarantees such as “open science badges” (Grahe, 2014), and what underlies the forms of “trust” produced and defended through contemporary scientific practices. We argue that these attempts to “restore trust” in psychological science function as substitutes for a more difficult confrontation with the uncertainty that lies at the heart of psychology’s ontology—namely, that our “inner world” can never be directly accessed or fully exposed.

Building on psychoanalytic accounts of fetishism (Freud, 1927) and psychodynamic analyses of organisational defences (Menzies, 1960), we suggest that method comes to be invested as a social defence against the anxiety linked to the specific nature of psychology’s object, and becomes fetishised insofar as it promises protection against epistemic contingency. In the configuration we describe as methodological bureaucratism, and consider applicable beyond psychology, uncertainty is managed through traceability and accountability, while trust is externalised into procedures, all the while denying the core tension at the heart of any psychological inquiry.

We underline how this defensive reorganisation individualises failure rather than acknowledging structural conditions of knowledge production (Chater & Loewenstein, 2023), and marginalises forms of knowledge that do not conform to bureaucratised standards of validity—such as psychoanalytic, qualitative, critical, or situated approaches—thereby reproducing epistemic injustice under a discourse of rigour.

Our presentation addresses the conference theme by examining how framing trust in psychological science as a methodological problem can function as a social defence against anxiety, and how the proceduralisation of trust risks closing psychological science rather than opening it to the world.

This paper takes the form of a series of conversations between a lawyer and a psychotherapist reflecting on their respective encounters with harm, repair, and the limits of justice. Rather than offering a unified framework, the presentation stages dialogue as a psychosocial method, allowing points of convergence and disjunction to remain visible.

The lawyer speaks from within a system designed to decide, close, and conclude. The therapist speaks from a space where endings are often provisional and repair rarely restores what was lost. Together, they ask: what does it mean to promise repair when innocence cannot be returned? What happens when justice is achieved on paper but not felt in the body or psyche? And how do both professions participate—often unwittingly—in sustaining fantasies of resolution?

Through exchanges grounded in clinical encounters and legal cases, the conversation traces shared experiences of mistrust, exhaustion, and ethical unease. The therapist describes working with patients whose faith in justice has collapsed, while the lawyer reflects on the weight of recognition without healing. Both grapple with the tension between institutional function and human suffering, and with the discomfort of knowing that their work can alleviate harm without undoing it.

Rather than resolving these tensions, the paper holds them open, suggesting that repair may need to be reconceived as partial, mournful, and ethically compromised. By placing law and therapy in conversation, the presentation invites the audience to consider how different systems of care and judgment intersect, fail one another, and nonetheless remain necessary. The paper ultimately argues that acknowledging the impossibility of innocence may be a precondition for more honest forms of trust.

In an increasingly administered world, where the subject is shaped by impersonal, standardized, and automated institutions, psychological crises are ultimately rooted in political ones. This was one of the central claims of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. As Theodor Adorno emphasized, a society’s emancipatory potential is measured not by its ability to imagine a yet-unrealized freedom, but through its ability to confront the reality of its dehumanizing conditions.

Adorno, inverting Hegel’s idealism in which truth is contained within the whole, asserts that “the whole is the false.” Thus, a semblance of truth is only generated in the process of reckoning with incompleteness. One can only critique coercion from a position outside its grasp, and one can only describe a freedom that requires defence. For Adorno, thinking itself occurs from a position of overwhelming marginalization: as resistance to dominant power.

This paper reframes the value of the mistrust generated by conspiracies (etymologically derived from the Latin con-spiro, to breath, live, or intend together). This paper suggests that suspicion and paranoia are not only markers of individual pathology, nor only the consequences of an exploitative attention economy, frequently described as an era of ‘post-truth.’ As we have increasingly seen (e.g. anti-vax movements, 9/11 truthers, etc.), yesterday’s delegitimized knowledge can be readily absorbed and leveraged by today’s dominant powers. This paper suggests that conspiracy thinking is defined not through stable content, but through a relation of knowledge to power. Like the psychoanalytic symptom’s relation to the unconscious, conspiracy thinking expresses impossible fantasies of seamless unfreedom. In so doing, conspiracy thinking enables us to discover the seams through which a previously unimaginable freedom might be glimpsed.

This paper will explore the relationship between trust, conspiracy theories and ideologies. While conspiracy theories are often depicted as a way of thinking fostering mistrust (particularly against institutions), recent empirical research paints a more complext picture. The relationship between conspiracy theories, the social world they explain and the trust/mistrust they generate is mediated by ideology. Depending on their ideological framing, conspiracy theories might actually support the status quo and lead to distrust against social groups critical of it. This paper explores the political ramification of the interaction between conspiracy theories and ideology and how the trust/mistrust they generate affect political life and social conflict.

The paper will thus touch upon key themes of conference such as the political trust, mistrust and distrust, feelings of powerlessness and the possibilities of agency. Trust, agency and their relation to the dynamics of rupture and repair.The portrayal of issues related to trust in popular cultur. Trust in the media and mediatised mistrust.

We are living in times of terror and trauma, where our suffering, rather than bringing us together, threatens to divide us. At the core of human life is the suffering that Lévinas rightly linked to the core element in any authentic ethics. How do we answer that call across the multitude of differences that might otherwise divide us and leave us alone in our suffering?

In this roundtable, we will continue the conversation we began at last year’s conference, concerning women and leadership, to come together as a community of women to discuss how we might better support the work each of us is doing to try to bridge divides and more actively build a better world. Please join us!

This creative working session responds to the conference theme of trust, mistrust, and community by engaging directly with one of the most difficult inheritances of psychosocial studies: the archive of psychoanalysis itself. Psychoanalysis has a deeply problematic history of homophobic and transphobic theory and practice that still influences clinical practice today. Trust, in these circumstances, can be difficult, even dangerous. But psychoanalytic theory can also provide radical ways of thinking about desire and identity, and affirmative clinical practice can provide valuable space for patients/clients to dream of queer and trans futures. Psychoanalysis remains a site of ambivalence, investment, and critique for clinicians, scholars, and patients alike.

The session is structured as a facilitated zine-making workshop that invites participants to encounter archival psychoanalytic texts on gender and sexuality alongside other materials, including fragments of queer and trans histories and their own writing or art. Participants will be invited to cut, disrupt, annotate, and reassemble archival materials, producing new texts or objects that register both damage and possibility.

The workshop treats mistrust and refusal as a meaningful psychosocial response to abuse of power, traumatic histories and presents, and lived experience. By working creatively with the archive, the session aims to open a space for an encounter with its violence. The intention is not to heal these wounds, but to translate them into something meaningful, at least for a moment. We hope to provoke reflection on how trust is built, broken, and sometimes prematurely demanded in situations of ongoing violence. Creative practice is used as a mode of shared inquiry, allowing participants to remain in relation without forcing consensus, endurance, or reconciliation.

This creative workshop is oriented towards and facilitated by queer and trans people with lived experience of psychotherapy, and also invites in the broader psychosocial studies community.

'Cultural Encounters' is a new animated short film about the emotional and psychological nourishment and protection provided by our experiences with the arts and culture. What happens to us when we listen to a song, watch a film, visit an art exhibition or read a piece of literature? While we might be aware of the short-term impact of a cultural object – how it makes us think or feel in the moment – we are usually unaware of how the ephemeral aspect of this experience stays with us and becomes part of us; the unconscious aspect of the experience in other words. 'Cultural Encounters' invites us to reflect on what our encounters with, attachments to and psychological uses of cultural objects might tell us about ourselves.

Our encounters with cultural objects help us to connect with ourselves and feel a sense of belonging to our communities. Cultural experiences assist us to develop and refine our capacity for self-awareness and self-reflectivity. Both are vital for reality testing, empathic attunement, creativity, curiosity and critical thinking, which enable individuals to trust in oneself and other people. Research has shown that here and now experiences in creative activities improves mental health outcomes, lessens feelings of social isolation and loneliness, and contributes to a general improvement in mood. It is no coincidence that feelings of distrust and paranoia towards the social contract are intensifying alongside a decline in interest in the arts and humanities and a decrease in government spending and universities’ commitment to these subjects.

This is a private screening available to delegates attending in person only.

Writer, director, producer, voiceover: Noreen Giffney

Illustrator, animator, director: Allen Fatimaharan

Music composer, sound designer: Lauren Doss

Editor, producer: Nicole Murray

Funding received from Ulster University

No generative AI has been used in making this film

https://filmfreeway.com/culturalencounters

This paper explores moments in psychoanalytic work in which both patient and analyst experience a collapse of thinking — a shared psychic paralysis marked by deadness, fog, and an inability to symbolise experience. Rather than understanding these moments as individual resistance or technical failure, the paper situates them within a broader psychosocial context shaped by ongoing crisis, saturation of catastrophic information, and the erosion of spaces for reflection.

Drawing on clinical vignettes, the paper examines how patients arrive in the consulting room unable to think, feel, or speak, and how this paralysis is often mirrored in the analyst’s countertransference through boredom, exhaustion, dread, or a sense of being “currently unavailable.” These states are understood not simply as intrapsychic phenomena, but as manifestations of a world that demands constant response while foreclosing the possibility of psychic digestion. The analytic setting becomes a site where collective paralysis is enacted, rather than merely observed.

The paper engages psychoanalytic ideas of deadness, reverie, and the breakdown of containment, alongside psychosocial perspectives on crisis culture, temporal compression, and institutional depletion. Particular attention is paid to the ethical tension faced by the analyst when their own capacity to think is compromised: what does it mean to “hold” when the analyst is also embedded in the same collapsing social field?

Rather than offering techniques for restoring thought, the paper argues for recognising psychic paralysis as a meaningful response to unrelenting social demand. It suggests that analytic work, in such moments, may involve bearing the absence of thought without prematurely resolving it, allowing the consulting room to function as one of the few remaining spaces where not-thinking can be tolerated long enough for thinking to eventually return.

In an era defined by cultural polarization and consumer-driven demands on therapeutic spaces, there is a growing insistence that therapy must function as an unqualified site of validation. Clients increasingly seek not just therapeutic attunement but affirmation of identity and worldview as a litmus test of therapeutic worth. This cultural imperative for constant validation can incentivize practitioners to collude—consciously or unconsciously—in excessive reassurance, inadvertently turning therapy into a bespoke experience engineered to avoid discomfort rather than facilitate growth.

For individuals with childhood trauma and enduring personality distress, such environments can amplify epistemic mistrust. They develop a refined sensitivity to incongruence: when a therapist’s words promise safety that their affect fails to deliver, the result is not relief but further mistrust. This paper argues that authentic therapeutic trust is not forged through seamless validation but through the disciplined practice of real relational presence—including the uncomfortable, unpolished moments of boredom, agitation, and disagreement. It is precisely these moments of authentic human encounter that disrupt entrenched patterns of mistrust and cultivate real trust.

Drawing on Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power, the paper explores how early experiences of love and trust shape not just intrapsychic formations but our ongoing relational engagements with power. We suggest that the therapeutic overemphasis on validation mirrors broader social dynamics, contributing to echo chambers in which difference is experienced as threat and discomfort as harm.

In addressing the conference theme, this paper examines how working with epistemic mistrust within the context of validation culture challenges us to reclaim trust not as soothing affirmation but as a practice of presence, vulnerability, and mutual dignity—inside therapy and in wider political discourse.

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”- (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

Within today’s symbolic order, epistemic uncertainty marked by misinformation, technological mediation, and political polarisation, the question of whom and what to trust has become both urgent and destabilising. This paper explores trust and mistrust as dialectically intertwined psychic and social capacities rather than opposites. Drawing on psychoanalytic theories of basic trust and rupture-repair (D. W. Winnicott; Daniel Stern), alongside sociological accounts of trust as a response to systemic complexity (Niklas Luhmann), I argue that trust is fundamentally linked to the capacity to endure uncertainty without collapsing into paranoia or narcissistic isolation.

Central to this argument is the theme of silence. In psychoanalytic practice, silence functions not as absence but as a holding environment that enables the subject to encounter the unknown aspects of self and other. The capacity to be alone in the presence of another - Winnicott’s formulation illuminates how trust develops as an embodied tolerance of not-knowing. When this tolerance is compromised, mistrust may harden into persecutory distrust, fuelling conspiratorial imaginaries and defensive social formations.

To deepen this inquiry, the paper places psychoanalytic thought in dialogue with Indian philosophical reflections on truth (satya), faith (śraddhā), and the limits of language in the Upanishadic tradition. The apophatic gesture of “neti, neti” (not this, not that) offers an alternative model of epistemic humility: truth as relational, unstable, and ethically demanding rather than fixed possession.

By weaving together psychoanalysis, social theory, and Indian philosophy, the paper proposes that trust is the psychic capacity to inhabit silence without foreclosing meaning. Such calibrated trust - neither naïve nor corrosively sceptical which may be crucial for sustaining therapeutic, communal, and political life in an age of epistemic fragility.

Key words: trust, not-knowing, silence

This paper and presentation explore qualitative research conducted with mentors of international trainee teachers and their mentees, examining how cultural differences shape trust within cross‑cultural mentoring relationships. Drawing upon Clutterbuck (2022) and Passmore (2013, 2021), alongside Rosinski’s (2003) and Meyer’s (2014) Cultural Orientation Framework, the study interrogates how culture gaps may blur the lines of trust, creating spaces of both connection and mistrust in professional communities. In contexts where mentoring is intended to foster belonging and professional growth, cultural dissonance can challenge reciprocity, reflexivity, and the relational depth required for authentic trust.

The paper addresses the conference theme by situating these dynamics within the fast‑paced education environment, where time pressures and workload intensification often limit opportunities for reflective dialogue and mutual exchange. Findings highlight how mentors and trainees navigate tensions between professional guidance and intercultural understanding, revealing both the fragility and resilience of trust in a cross-culture mentoring relationship.. By foregrounding voices of international trainees and their mentors, the research underscores the need for intentional structures that support reflexivity, reciprocity, and cultural sensitivity. Ultimately, the paper contributes to advancing culturally responsive mentoring practices that strengthen trust and mitigate mistrust in global teacher education communities.

This paper presents a creative, co-produced research method that uses a materially constructed safety net alongside the Social Graces Model to explore trust, mistrust, and relational safety in organisational life. Developed with newly qualified social workers and their managers, the method centres on collaborative making as a means of generating organisational knowledge about trust as a relational process rather than an individual attribute.

Participants used the Social Graces Model to explore what they bring into a specific supervisory relationship, including experiences of trauma, power, and privilege, and how these shape expectations of trust, connection, and performance. As participants wove ribbons representing different Social Graces into individual nets, the process created space to get to know one another beyond the surface of the work relationship. Stories emerged through dialogue and embodied engagement, revealing how trust is negotiated, strained, and sustained within organisational contexts.

The researcher then connected the individual nets into a shared safety structure using a ‘common thread’ generated from participants’ contributions about what they need from the organisation in order to perform at their best. This act of connection transformed the artefact from a set of relational accounts into a collective organisational statement. A key and unexpected finding was that this process actively challenged hierarchical assumptions about trust and connection. Trust was not located primarily in managerial authority but emerged through mutual recognition, shared responsibility, and relational accountability across roles.

The safety net operates as a relational artefact that holds both trust and mistrust without reducing either to deficit. This work offers an original contribution to organisational and psychosocial research by advancing artefact-based, creative methods.

The presentation examines trust and mistrust as relational and organisational processes, showing how creative co-production can support exploration, deepen connection beyond role-based interactions, and recalibrate hierarchical understandings of trust and agency.

Trust is often assumed to underpin supervisory relationships within counselling training, particularly during initial meetings where safety, containment, and professional guidance are implicitly expected. For trainees entering placements within evaluative and hierarchical contexts, these encounters are further shaped by assumptions that accreditation, institutional affiliation, and professional role confer relational reliability. However, less attention is paid to what happens when this trust is fractured, evoking an overwhelming sense of unease. Drawing on an autoethnographic account of my experience as a trainee counsellor following an unsettling initial supervision meeting, this paper explores how trust in one’s embodied sense of knowing emerges in the absence of clarity, and how mistrust develops when both supervisory and institutional containment are experienced as insufficient.

The paper draws on Bion’s concept of nameless dread, alongside Winnicott’s ideas of the holding environment and impingement, to understand the paralysing and pre-verbal quality of the distress following this encounter. It considers how compliance and silence may be understood as protective adaptations that enable survival within an unsafe relational context while the true self remains concealed. From a person-centred perspective, this environmental failure was compounded by an absence of empathic attunement, congruence, and unconditional positive regard, further compromising the possibility of relational safety, making it difficult to trust my felt sense in the moment.

The paper moves from this singular experience to consider broader systemic implications, examining how early supervisory ruptures and institutional responses shape my developing professional identity and inform my conceptualisation of safety, trust, and power, influencing how I attune relationally with my clients.

This presentation addresses the conference theme by examining trust and mistrust as embodied and relational processes, exploring how trust may be recalibrated through relational thinking and the transformation of unthinkable experience into meaning, bringing about necessary scepticism without collapsing into corrosive mistrust.

This symposium analyses trust, mistrust, and community within the interpersonal and societal power structures that govern subjectivities and bodies in the psychoanalytic clinic and academic psychosocial spaces. Michel Foucault reminds us that power relations are most effective when they are invisible. Judith Butler problematises the projection of anxiety onto minoritised groups, especially through the fantasmatic dimension of gender. While psychoanalysis has been extensively critiqued for its disciplinary logics within the clinic, far less attention has been paid to how psychosocial studies participates in the reproduction of these relations of power. In this symposium, we ask: to what extent are relations of trust, mistrust, and community in psychosocial academic spaces also marked by disciplinary and docilising logics in the service of normativity and a fallacious neutrality? What space is afforded to people who diverge from normative regimes of gender, sexuality, race, and class? Drawing on Tuck and Yang’s notion of a decolonial ‘ethics of refusal’, we begin with the idea of refusal as a theoretically generative and expansive practice, one that reframes mistrust beyond the Kleinian paranoid-schizoid position, and generates positively disruptive pathways towards new forms of community.

Three papers open the symposium by examining normative structures encountered in psychotherapy training; the psychosocial field as embodied in the recently published Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies; and minoritarian critiques of past conference spaces that identify and subvert imperial power relations. Discussants and attendees will then be invited to draw on their lived experiences, to experiment with embodying disobedience, and to consider what a refusal to participate in exclusionary schemas of trust, mistrust, and community might mean. By redistributing and exposing the precariousness inherent in the very structure of academic spaces, we suggest the possibility of creating communities that distribute discomfort and mistrust more evenly within structures of power.

Iranian modern history can be analyzed through the lens of various collective behaviors, ranging from the Constitutional Revolution to the Woman-Life-Freedom movement, which unfolded in September 2022. Each of these uprisings emerges from conditions of profound political mistrust. However, groups from the heart of the society start to give meaning to mistrust through the emergence of movements, instead of evading it. Drawing on Foucault’s biopolitics, postcolonial feminism theory and psychoanalytic theories, this paper aims to conceptualize the Women-Life-Freedom as forms of collective containment in which a population attempts to repair historical and contemporary traumas.

Nevertheless, this movement is repeatedly disrupted by a patriarchal state that works to convert politically productive mistrust into paralyzing and meaningless distrust by producing paranoia, confusion, and attack on linking. Misinformation and violence fracture the collective alpha-function and disorganize emerging forms of agency. It is thus important to take a closer look at how this process develops.

Over time, sexual violence and patriarchal laws continue to persist in multiple forms within society, and the women’s narratives that emerge in the therapy room bear witness to this reality. This study seeks to address the question of whether, despite pervasive distrust in the social sphere, therapeutic sessions can serve as a continuation of the movement’s goals by repairing trust, holding collective trauma and restoring agency?

This paper examines Nazar (the “evil eye”), widely understood as a gaze believed to spoil what is good such as beauty, prosperity, health. Protective rituals, such as stringing chilies and lemons across doorways, veiling, serve as defense against the threat of being harmed by another’s gaze. While such practices are pervasive across caste, class, and religious communities in India, they are profoundly gendered, positioning women as especially vulnerable to Nazar, thereby reinforcing patriarchal logics of fragility and protection.

Drawing on Freud’s account of the uncanny, Klein’s formulations of envy, and contemporary South Asian psychoanalytic writing (Nupur Dhingra Paiva, Shifa Haq, and Amrita Narayan), I propose that Nazar functions not only as a defense against projected hostility, but as a cultural technology for regulating women’s visibility and desire.

To illustrate this, I read the film Laapataa Ladies (Rao, 2024) as a clinical-cultural text, to trace how the protagonists’ negotiations with veiling move from compliance to tactical re-signification. Using Lacan’s concepts of the gaze, constitutive lack (−ϕ), the big Other, and topological inversion, I explore how three women in the film negotiate this structure: Phool through a gradual reconfiguration of desire within marriage; Jaya through strategic masquerade that exposes inconsistency in the patriarchal gaze; and Manju Maai through a subversive femininity that short-circuits the “good woman” ideal. The paper shows how agency emerges through working within contradiction, at the point where symbolic guarantees fail; where trust turns into mistrust, not only as a crisis, but as an epistemic opening to another kind of knowledge.

The paper addresses the conference theme by showing how culturally sanctioned protective systems both organize trust and generate mistrust, and how this rupture can yield new forms of knowing.

The proposed paper is an attempt to understand the erotic economy of the heteronormative family. The paper works with embodied voice of the Indian bride and their accounts of ‘wedding night’ (Suhag Raat). Indian wedding night is a site of both semantic and erotic excess. The proliferative discourse around wedding and regulative discourse around sexuality create this spectacle and presents an empirical site to understand what is offered to women in Patriarchy and what they actually receive. The paper draws its energy from its ambivalent relationship with Psychoanalysis and treats it as a ‘enabling violence’. It uses psychoanalytic concepts such as free association and active reconstruction in generating and analysing narratives around this experience. But the paper is also cautious of the status of Psychoanalysis as a Master Discourse and its tendency to ‘lend meaning’ to every culture and context, and in the process flattens out the materiality of bodies and voices. To account for the embodied voice of women the paper presents wedding chamber as a location of knowledge production and tries to re-read ideas of taboo and virginity with a feminist and post-colonial lens.

Wedding night is presented in the culture as the ultimate site of safety, trust and security.A sanitized space of conjugal intimacy, wedding and wedding night is projected as the beginning of sacred companionship in the Indian culture. But I wish to show how the women’s narrative reconstruction of this experience recast it as a potential site of violation and erotic danger. Here embodied voice is presented as a theoretical concept and psychological method that can work at the fissures of dominant narratives , carrying subversive knowledge registers with it.

Psychotherapy is a Western product and an import that has shaped the global psyche and influenced meaning making. I am an Egyptian who have had the privilage and opportunity to train and practice within the mental health field but I often find myself caught in the West and East polarized thinking, unsure of which side of me to trust: As a therapist, I often ponder how safely and realistically can I venture into culturally attuend practice that creates different languages, healing practices, and relationships, and step away from established systems of knowledge and practices rooted in implicit Western ideals. As a Middle Eastern woman working in a Western model, I often feel powerless, disembodied and at times dehumanized to a ‘tool’; my difference sterilized enough to deliver pre-determined processes and interventions that are mis-attuned to the difference of needs and ways of being of those in distress.

Therefore in this working session, you are invited to be part of a small group as we sit with ambvialence, pluarity and the nuances of culture in psychotherapy. The aim is to share stories, reflect together and have a communal collaborative encounter that is not concerned with answers but is decolonizing it is promise of a co-created wisdom emerging from shared meaning-making and mutually nourishing conversations.

This session links to the themes of trust between the practitioner and the knowledge base upon which professional idenity and practice is built. It also links to themes of polarity of West and East/invidualisim and collectivism and of powerlessness and agency. It is hopefully a practice in shifting from persecutory feelings through critical and relational thinking.

Social Dreaming workshops were originally developed by Gordon Lawrence as a means of consulting to organisations in a way which could go ‘beneath the surface’ to the unconscious preoccupations, images and phantasies that are ever-present but often unsurfaced in organisational life. Since then it has been developed in ways which take it outside of organisations and into community and community research. It is an experiential event in which we offer dreams and free associate to them to work towards a collective sense of patterns emerging from them. By pooling and connecting our dreams we aim to ‘take the pulse’ of broader social realities and surface common concerns and creative possibilities.

The space for coming together to share and explore our dreams through an associative process is known as the dream matrix. A "host" provides support to the matrix usually in a snowflake pattern of seating that is neither individual or group focused, guiding our journey in sharing and making sense of our dreams by offering connections between them and hypotheses that illuminate their contributions. The word "host" is used to introduce the idea that the matrix is not a group to be facilitated or led but an open space for containing and working with dreams.

The time is spent in two phases, an initial event in which participants share dreams and associations and a reflection event in which participants do sense making of the material that arose during the matrix. The total time of the event is 1.5hrs. The dream matrix is roughly twice the time of the reflection. There is a limit of 20 participants.

Please sign up at the registration desk and come and share your dreams!

For more information see http://www.socialdreaming.com/socialdreaming/

In her autobiography Leila Khaled writes of taking inspiration from Che Guevara’s dictum, 'We must grow tough, but without ever losing our tenderness.' John Berger would go on to name 'undefeated despair' as a quality of Palestinian life that no vocabulary could find a word for: it is something lived between moments, when social and political transformation remains out of reach, yet the refusal to be cast out of humanity is steadfast. With tough tenderness and undefeated despair as my companions, I’d like to think through the different forms these stances might take, recognising the role of care and play, as well as the need to withdraw, rest, recuperate and grieve. The latter as a time and space, I suggest, are not necessarily a turning away from criticality and solidarity but may well be its vital conditions. Thinking and playing with the figure of the minnow, let’s imagine what tough tenderness and undefeated despair might look and feel like. And why minnows? When minnows detect a threat, they flashmob around it. In these tiny communal movements, the contours of what is unknown can become more legible. It is this figure of hope as a form of revolutionary and somatic mutual aid, and which is not quite optimism, that I’d love to invite you to explore with me.

This text begins from the lived experience of life under a political authority that occupies the position of a primary object: one that should protect, contain, and represent, yet is experienced as deceptive, violent, and persecutory. The situation, however, is more complex than overt repression. Alongside violence, the state speaks in the language of care and moral intimacy—addressing citizens as “brother” and “sister,” presenting itself as divinely sanctioned, and promising goodness, salvation, and paradise. This coexistence of benevolence and terror produces a psychic confusion that delays recognition. It takes time to grasp that beneath a moralised surface, destructive forces govern—demons ruling under the skin of angels.

Within such a context, political trust does not gradually erode, nor is it simply withdrawn; it never becomes structurally possible. The distance between state and people is not merely political but penetrates deeply into individual and collective psychic organisation, shaping relations to reality, truth, and authority.

Double lives, everyday concealment, and what have come to be called “quiet freedoms” become central modes of survival in a space where truth is systematically distorted and violence denied. Initially, mistrust functions as a reality-based form of critical awareness and psychic survival. Over time, sustained deception and repression transform mistrust into a pervasive condition of distrust, in which no institution, authority, or symbolic order can be relied upon.

This condition produces a profound sense of powerlessness rooted not only in repression, but in the collapse of meaningful agency. Action is displaced into underground and fragmented forms. This text asks where the boundary lies between mistrust as critical thinking and distrust as a paralysing condition, how agency is reconfigured under chronic powerlessness, and whether trust can begin again after the collapse of authoritative reference points.

Aristotle described Ethos as the appeal to character, goodwill, and trustworthiness. With Pathos and Logos, Ethos composed the central trinity of persuasion in democratic life. For milennia, Ethos has been said to depend on propriety, a sense of what words, connections, themes, and behaviors are appropriate for an audience. However, various autocrats, both actual and aspiring have broken the standards of propriety in their public communication, including Putin, Zeman, Berlusconi, Farage, and many others. This behavior sometimes extends to open contempt for their own ostensible constituents. And yet, each of these politicians built support among their followers not in spite of this, but precisely because of it. Understanding how requires moving beyond the rhetorical canon into the realms of desire, identity, and the primordial appeal of filth. This is an area for which psychoanalysis is uniquely suited.

To explore the paradoxical ability of vulgarity to energize political following, I examine an AI-generated video shared by Donald Trump in which he seemingly defecates on a crowd of protestors, all while wearing a golden crown and flying a fighter jet. Through Freud's comments on the link between gold and feces, Dominique Laporte's work on feces, gold, and language, Lacan's discussion of anal control and anxiety, George Bataille's scatalogical theory, and a broad range of literature on perversion, I argue that Trump's appeal rests on a paradoxical relationship to propriety. Trump (and by extension other autocratic participants in this discourse) soils public speech and violates standards of decency, but in doing so must reinvest in propriety as the source of enjoyment necessary for such transgression to occur. This points towards a new undertstanding of ethos from a psychoanalytic perspective and potentially a more complete account of the function of desire in maintaining reactionary, anti-democratic fantasies.

By all appearances, the notion of trust is oversaturating the most diverse contemporary hegemonic discourses. The ways in which we are being thought to reflect about our subjective, social, political, economic, institutional and even scientific spheres, most often consider trust as fundamental and necessary, or at least greatly beneficial element of the latter categories. At the same time, paradoxically, we seem to live in an era of mistrust: in science, in media, in institutions or in democracy, are all integral parts of our contemporary social and political lives. Caught between trust and mistrust – entangled in a situation that recalls the Hegelian spurious infinity – thinking is gradually condemned to perish, obedience is transformed into a well camouflaged yet fundamental virtue, and the doors are left wide-open for an almost unrestricted social domination.

This presentation will put into question some of the most ossified common-sense presuppositions related to various forms of trust, revealing its underlying and substantive role in social domination. It will thematise trust as a philosophical and psychosocial concept, only to deconstruct it right away. On this very task of deconstructing trust, we will open the space for reinventing distrust – invoking a wholly other instance that comes to counter and resist the dominant logic of trust.

This invocation raises many questions, including: How could we rethink distrust beyond trust/mistrust opposition? How could we reconceptualise distrust as a Derridean double affirmation and an emancipatory tertium quid? What would be the psychological, and what the social challenges of embracing the undecidability of distrust? And finally, what would our communities look like if we were to reformulate our social contracts based on distrust, instead of trust (and mistrust)?

This article offers a cybernetic interpretation of the role the imagination

plays in fascism. First, I address Deleuze and Guattari’s response to

Reich, who according to them adequately poses the problem of fascism

by asking how the masses came to desire their own repression, but who

supposes two distinct realities — the rational socio-economic reality and

the irrational sexual or psychic reality of desire — thus reintroducing the

idea of deception into his explanation. Then I discuss how, in contrast

to this, Deleuze and Guattari, and later Theweleit, focus on fantasies

and on groups in order to account for fascist desire. Drawing on Bion’s

group dynamics, I discuss Guattari’s distinction between the subjected

group and the subject-group, which he associates with two different group

fantasy functions, and I show that in the subjected group, group fantasies

take on a repressive function of cybernetic totalisation, which can be

considered as microfascist and proto-totalitarian. The relation between

microfascism and molar fascism remaining somewhat unclear in Deleuze

and Guattari’s writings as well as in Theweleit, I end by suggesting that

we can account for this relation by looking at it as a runaway process,

where existing, segregative and homogenising microfascist tendencies

are reinforced through positive feedback originating from cultural

productions like speeches, propaganda, popular songs and literature, etc.,

which produce redundancies and resonance with the existing system.

When this kind of aberrant process goes together with and exacerbates a

culture of repression, which blocks out many of the pathways for desire,

it tends to develop into a violent line of abolition, where the only possible

desire left is the desire for death and destruction.

As a teenager still embedded in Mormonism, I listened as a new mother spoke in church. Sharing her love for her newborn, she immediately—and seemingly guiltily—devalued it in comparison to Christ’s love. Human love, she said, was fragile and could be unreliable, even her own as a mother. Her task was not to secure her child’s trust in her love, but to redirect it toward Christ: obedience, commandments, and the eternal life He alone could offer.

Within Mormonism, trust is systematically displaced from lived, embodied life onto a deathless ideal. Mortal life is framed as provisional—a test qualifying one for eternal life—where trust must be directed solely toward Christ, a figure who died and now exists in an incorruptible, deathless form. Extending André Green’s concept of the dead mother into the social, Mormonism functions as a cultural dead mother: a system that redirects the vitality of living—co-opting maternal libido—toward preservation through obedience, repetition, and the promise of life without death (Green 1986). Mothers guide both their own trust and their children’s away from spontaneous, relational life and toward the system. Within this matrix of massification (Hopper 2003), trust is trained to equate what feels calm, safe, and “right” with deadness masquerading as life.

Through a series of autoethnographic vignettes, I trace the formation, reproduction, and eventual destabilization of trust in death as life in Mormonism. These vignettes move between my childhood immersion, my later role as a mother reproducing it, and the gradual emergence of mistrust as the system fails to sustain lived experience. What initially appears as care and certainty increasingly reveals itself as stasis and preservation. In moments when this structure breaks down, the corpse anchoring the system becomes visible, and trust begins—tentatively and unevenly—to shift back toward living, creative life.

This paper presents data from in-depth individual interviews with 8 women working as nannies in some of the most affluent areas in the UK. Nannying, a form of paid domestic labour, is structured around definitions of women’s work, family roles, and the hierarchies of race, class, and nationality. Historically, wealthy families in the UK have relied on domestic workers, or ‘servants’, to perform household tasks, such as cleaning, cooking, and childcare. In recent decades, especially among dual earner families, a neoliberal logic to childcare positions care as either a market commodity or the responsibility of the family. Combined with a cultural preference for intimate, ‘motherlike’ care (rather than collective care in institutions or nurseries), this dynamic has driven growing demand (from those who can afford it) for flexible childcare arrangements, such as nannies and au-pairs. Nannying and childcare are a particularly personal and intimate form of domestic work, a job which includes high levels of emotional labour, isolation, exploitation, and the requirement to navigate intimate and often awkward environments marked by power asymmetries. This research employed a psychosocial, voice-centred, listening guide analytic method, which drew attention to concealed voices within the nannies’ narratives. These voices speak to the burden of acting as a substitute parent: being employed to ensure the care and welfare of children while lacking the autonomy to fulfil that responsibility. The harms nannies experience may arise from this contradiction: they are entrusted with caring for children yet denied the trust to do so. This presentation addresses the conference theme by 1) exploring trust within a labour context shaped by class, inequality, and intimacy, and 2) examining how trust relates to domination, and feelings of powerlessness and agency – both of which have implications for community building.

People never fully leave behind their earlier selves; rather, these younger versions and their associated mental states remain embedded in the psyche. Media can play a crucial role in activating such dormant selves. This paper draws on psychosocial interview data generated through a Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI) approach with a 30-year-old married Vietnamese woman who reflects on how a Korean television drama that helped propel the global Korean Wave shaped her youth and life trajectory. For her, the 2002 romantic drama Winter Sonata evokes memories of her younger years, her experience living in South Korea as a student, and her first date with her husband there. The paper highlights how the interview space, shaped by the principles of free association and narrative openness, enables participants to pause, look back, and reconnect with feelings and dimensions of the self often left unspoken or submerged in the flow of busy adult life, allowing for a meaningful re-alignment of past and present selves and a sustained sense of continuity across time.

Surrogate mothers in India are often expected to trust the various stakeholders of the surrogacy process. However, this trust is unidirectional, given the significant power asymmetries, with surrogates being the least represented stakeholder within this arrangement.

Surrogacy in India has undergone significant reform following the enactment of the Surrogacy Regulation Act, 2021, followed by the Surrogacy Regulation Amendment Rules, 2024. This ruling banned commercial surrogacy in India and mandated that altruistic surrogacy arrangements be limited to close relatives only. While this shift aims to protect vulnerable women from exploitation, it raises concerns about whether it truly fulfills this intent.

Surrogate mothers have frequently reported a lack of access to the contracts they sign before the commencement of their surrogacy journey. These contracts, being legally binding, are often drafted without input from surrogate mothers, in a language they do not read or understand and often prioritise reproductive outcomes for the commissioning parents over the emotional well-being, bodily autonomy and informed consent of surrogate mothers. Additionally, they also report on medical interventions and procedures that are often introduced without their consultation at all stages of their engagement in surrogacy.

Many surrogates come from marginalised backgrounds and frequently report expectations that are placed on them to be the perfect mother-worker in this arrangement. They often engage in surrogacy as an economic necessity, which places them in a vulnerable position regarding trust. Trust within this system is precarious due to the unequal power dynamics. The expectation for reciprocity of trust, such as transparency concerning medical procedures and economic agreements, can be undermined by their need for financial enhancement. This study explores how power inequality within an Indian surrogacy landscape could shape surrogate mothers’ capacity to trust systems that govern their participation.

Mistrust doesn't necessarily equate to powerlessness in Indian surrogates. A reflective approach...

In my clinical practice, I’ve often encountered a confusing moment: I spend months exploring a theme with a client, only for them to return and present the same idea as a brand new discovery they found on Instagram/tik-toc or through ChatGPT. It is an embarrassing, even slightly irritating experience for the therapist. However, in the context of Mentalization-Based Therapy (MBT) and Epistemic Trust, I believe this "Stolen Insight" is actually a profound bid for agency.

This paper explores the "In-law Paradox" of therapy : the vulnerability of moving into the "home" of a stranger and being expected to disclose deep grief in a one-sided relationship. To escape this forced intimacy, clients may outsource trust to a digital Third. While AI offers immediate linguistic labels, it lacks the human marking and affective resonance required to bridge the gap between a client’s knowing and their feeling, often resulting in a hollow "synthetic mentalization" where the words that sound right but feels hollow.

I propose "Narrative Hospitality" is the necessary analogue antidote. By being a "sucker for a story" and sitting in the fragmented "mess" with humor and curiosity, the therapist provides a container an algorithm cannot replicate. When we have the humility to survive the "theft" of our expertise, we facilitate a transition from protective mistrust to a robust Epistemic Self-Trust.

Rationale: This topic was chosen because it highlights the dynamics of rupture and repair as the central mechanism for building trust in the clinical setting. I argue that the "stolen insight" is a contemporary form of rupture a breakdown in epistemic trust where the client seeks safety in a digital third. By exploring the therapist’s humility in navigating these moments, the paper demonstrates how acknowledging clinical "failure" can repair the alliance and foster the individual agency necessary for community participation.

Trust in healthcare is usually discussed either as interpersonal trust in clinicians or as institutional trust in services and systems. Classic syntheses define trust as the acceptance of vulnerability under uncertainty, shaped by perceived competence, benevolence, and integrity, and distinguish trust from mere confidence or reliance. Sociological work has long warned that organisational change, managerialism, and complex access pathways can erode trust by thinning relationships and increasing opacity. In parallel, continuity-of-care research—especially in primary care—consistently associates relational continuity (the ability to see the same clinician over time) with higher trust and improved communication.

This conceptual paper advances a focused claim: continuity is not simply a patient preference; it is a psychosocial infrastructure that enables trust to accumulate and, crucially, to be repaired after inevitable ruptures. A four-level map clarifies how structural discontinuity reverberates across domains: (1) interpersonal trust (clinician–patient), (2) organisational trust (patient–local clinic), (3) systemic trust (patient–health system/government), and (4) intrapsychic self-trust (trust in memory, judgement, and bodily perception). Serial handovers, rotating staff, and fragmented accountability generate repeated “trust restarts,” shifting trust away from experiential, voluntary forms toward trust-by-default” arrangements where compliance substitutes for relationship.

A psychosocial mechanism is proposed that links continuity to containment and repair: continuity functions as a clinical frame—a reliable holding environment—supporting disclosure, toleration of uncertainty, and facilitating rupture/repair work. The conclusion offers continuity-oriented interventions at micro (handover and repair practices), meso (named clinician or micro-team models), and macro (policy incentives/metrics) levels, positioning continuity as essential trust-building work inside contemporary healthcare.
In line with the conference theme “Trust, Mistrust and Community,” the paper treats continuity as a condition for trust, examining how structural discontinuity pushes patient-clinican relationships toward distrust or compliance, and how upvalueing of continuity could facilitate repair in everyday care.

Trust is one of the central aspects of psychiatric care. Being the trust bestowed upon the patients by the nurses or the other way around. It is one of the factors that can transform the outcome of a hospitalization. However, we argue that in a structure that is based on an asymetry of power, trust is also determined by institutional conditions.

Drawing on a psychodynamic and institutional perspective inspired by Guattari, Deleuze, and Tosquelles, we approach psychiatric institutions as places where trust is intimately linked to the circulation of desire — understood not as individual motivation, but as a flux of collective and institutional forces that navigates through a web of representations. From this standpoint, the capacity to trust is bound up with the possibility of assuming responsibility in situations that cannot be fully mastered or protocolized, in accordance with one’s own desire.

We argue that many contemporary configurations of care, organized around logics of performance, standardization, education and control, function as social defenses against uncertainty and create a climate of mistrust. While intended to make care safer, they may paradoxically undermine trust by neutralizing desire, marginalizing practitioners and patients’ own theories of care, resulting in forms of epistemic injustice. In that kind of situation, mistrust may become either defensive compliance or corrosive.

By contrast, we explore how alternative institutional arrangements can support trust by sustaining autonomy, circulation of desire, spaces of collective organization, conflict, and not-knowing. From this point of view, institutional responsibility does not lie in the illusion of mastery and safety, but in holding the conditions under which vulnerability can be shared and trust continuously re-worked, desire can be taken responsibility of. A psychosocial reading of desire thus offers a critical lens for understanding contemporary crises of trust in psychiatric care in France and beyond.

This paper interrogates the nature, value and practice of trust within youth and community work, arguing that trust - despite its conceptual slipperiness and potential dangers - is foundational to the relational ethos of the field. Drawing on philosophical, sociological and practice-based literature, the chapter critiques common assumptions about trust, distinguishing it from adjacent concepts such as reliance, obedience, or faith. It contends that authentic trust necessarily entails mutual vulnerability and the possibility of betrayal, and that the erosion of such vulnerability through professional distancing, rigid safeguarding systems and managerialist cultures threatens the distinctiveness of youth work relationships. Through an examination of five key dimensions of trust - its nature, trustworthiness, rationality, value and cultivation - the paper argues that trust is neither fully rational nor fully volitional; it is shaped by emotions, socio-political conditions and relational dynamics. Trust cannot simply be demanded by practitioners but must be negotiated, earned and reciprocated. The chapter concludes that youth and community workers must reclaim trust as a core pedagogical value, embracing their own uncertainties and vulnerabilities in ethically grounded ways. In doing so, they create conditions for mutual recognition, autonomy, learning and transformative encounters, particularly for young people who may never previously have been trusted. The paper ultimately positions trust as a fragile but essential practice of freedom that both enables and is enabled by genuinely dialogical relationships.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has seen rapid developments and widespread adoption in recent years, particularly when it comes to generative AI agents like ChatGPT or Gemini. This panel addresses AI from different psychoanalytic and psychosocial perspectives.

This session combines mindful movement with an exploration of Alexis Pauline Gumbs' book, 'Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals'. We'll explore what Gumbs calls "dorsal" practices. I have interpreted this as ways of paying attention to what can anchor us in the present of the bodymind and what surrounds us. What are our own "dorsal" resources and how can you honour and nurture these? We'll move between embodied exploration and reflective discussion using Gumbs's incitements, perhaps noticing how our bodies already hold knowledge and memory of how to steady ourselves. No previous experience with somatic work is required, just curiosity and a willingness to move and explore. It's good to wear comfortable clothing suitable for slow walking and movement.

Daughters of Scheherazade is an experimental film that traces the figure of virgin and places her at the wedding night in an amorous encounter with pleasure and pain, safety and danger body and mind and the historical and the lived. This video is concerned with the psychic significance of a threshold event–wedding night –that comes with the promise of relationship in a particular culture. The film presents the wedding chamber as a feminine place of contemplation, which is placed at the edgeof time. The film tries to capture the trauma of the ritual wound that makes and unmakes the woman in Patriarchy and while doing so enters the domain of the liminal, primal and the unspeakable. Daughters of Scheherazade draws its inspiration from the story of the Persian Queen Scheherazade, whose story telling frames The Book of One Thousand and One Nights –thefamous book of stories and folk tales. Scheherazade appears in this video as a binding figure who could both invoke the universality of the discourse around virginity and the uniquely feminine ways of re-telling the phallic narrative of desire and erotic danger.

The ill-lit nuptials chamber becomes the contemplative space where gaze and voice come for a face-to-face encounter. I invoke Scheherazade to overcome the anxiety of this claustrophobic encounter. And as the filmmaker my attempt is to come out of the chamber without getting beheaded so that I have a story for my sisters. The project has tenuous relation with the whole process of researching and writing, even when it remains informed by psychoanalytically informed ethnographic research, I undertook around Indian wedding night and its erotic economy. I believe the conceptual and the creative have porous boundaries and the conversation is important to imagine psychological practice that is sensitive to culture and context.