Paul Wadey Associates - Accredited Counsellor/Psychotherapist, Nags Corner, Nayland, Colchester (2025)

18/11/2025

Institutional Misrecognition: The ME/CFS Debate as Relational Trauma

The decades-long nosological war over Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), fought between psychogenic and biomedical models, represents more than a sterile academic dispute; it is a systemic iatrogenic enactment. This essay argues that the very binary in which the debate is trapped constitutes the primary relational trauma for the patient, functioning as a societal psychic retreat from the clinical encounter with profound bodily suffering in the absence of a simple, unifying biomarker. Deploying a relational psychoanalytic lens, amplified by the richly phenomenological framework of the 2003 Canadian Clinical Definition, this analysis re-reads the diagnostic labyrinth not as a failure to find a lesion, but as a failure of medicine's capacity for what D.W. Winnicott termed a ‘holding environment’. The psychogenic attribution, particularly as codified in treatments like Graded Exercise Therapy (GET), is revealed as a defensive manoeuvre against clinical uncertainty, a re-traumatising invalidation that positions the patient's cry for help as the pathology itself. Consequently, this paper posits that relational psychoanalysis offers not merely an adjunct to future biomedical therapy but a crucial hermeneutic for understanding the present traumatogenic discourse. By bearing witness to the patient’s experience of being caught within this dissociative cleavage and by analysing the enactment itself, a relational approach can begin to repair the profound psychic damage inflicted by institutional misrecognition....

The decades-long nosological war over Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), fought between psychogenic and biomedical models, represents more than a sterile academic dispute;…

05/11/2025

This paper explores the significance of naming in psychotherapy, emphasizing the performative nature of clinical diagnoses. It critiques the notion of a neutral observer, arguing that such a perspective embodies a colonial gaze, a phallogocentric ideology that distorts human relationships. It advocates for a shift towards a more relational approach, towards a dialogical imperative, to something akin to "speaking-as-two."...

This paper explores the significance of naming in psychotherapy, emphasizing the performative nature of clinical diagnoses. It critiques the notion of a neutral observer, arguing that such a perspe…

04/11/2025

In his 1929 essay, Sándor Ferenczi examines the impact of early maternal aversion on psychological well-being, conceptualizing this as linked to the death instinct. Ferenczi's work symbolizes a theoretical compromise between classical Freudian drive theory and emerging relational approaches. He argues the 'unwelcome child' embodies psychodynamic consequences from environmental failures, revealing how perceived rejection disrupts life instincts and enhances self-destructive tendencies. His observations and therapeutic suggestions reveal profound tensions within psychoanalytic theory, particularly in trying to assimilate relational insights into biological models. Ferenczi's insights presage radical shifts pursued by later relational theorists, emphasising the relational matrix in shaping psychodynamic developments....

In his 1929 essay, Sándor Ferenczi examines the impact of early maternal aversion on psychological well-being, conceptualizing this as linked to the death instinct. Ferenczi’s work symbolizes…

04/11/2025

This essay critiques the so-called "Vinyl Revival," noting that while sales appear strong, the market shows complexity, with event-driven spikes rather than a consistent rise. The author rejects two explanations for this revival: the search for authenticity against digital formats, and a more sophisticated understanding of it as a hermeneutic practice reconnecting with human temporality. Instead, the essay argues that the revival embodies a failed attempt at attunement to finitude, revealing a fetishisation of the vinyl medium. The revival is characterised as a symptom of cultural anxiety, creating an illusion of authenticity rather than genuinely reconnecting listeners with their musical experience....

This essay critiques the so-called “Vinyl Revival,” noting that while sales appear strong, the market shows complexity, with event-driven spikes rather than a consistent rise. The autho…

28/10/2025

This essay critiques the philosophical understanding of love through a psychoanalytic lens, presenting love as an ongoing struggle between seeing others as whole individuals versus reducing them to fragmented parts. It argues that traditional philosophical problems—like Appraisal and Bestowal—represent strategies for retreating from whole-object relationships, driven by envy of others' goodness. The work synthesizes insights from Plato's Symposium, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and Wilfred Bion to propose that mature love requires the labor of containment, navigating inevitable regressions to part-object thinking. Ultimately, love is depicted as a complex, intersubjective effort to sustain the recognition of others as whole....

This essay critiques the philosophical understanding of love through a psychoanalytic lens, presenting love as an ongoing struggle between seeing others as whole individuals versus reducing them to…

24/10/2025

This essay critiques the proposed synthesis of relational psychoanalysis, systemic practice, and attachment theory, arguing against the orthodox view of their convergence. It highlights the tension between the "felt" phenomenological world and the "made" linguistic narratives, positing that psychoanalysis is fundamentally about navigating this tension. The essay challenges existing critiques that misrepresent the relationship between depth psychologies and systemic approaches as either irreconcilable or reductive. It advocates for a dialectical praxis, affirming the necessity of both felt experiences and linguistic constructs in therapy, with an emphasis on attachment theory as a bridge between the two realms, essential for understanding and facilitating therapeutic processes....

This essay critiques the proposed synthesis of relational psychoanalysis, systemic practice, and attachment theory, arguing against the orthodox view of their convergence. It highlights the tension…

19/10/2025

This essay critically reassesses Karl Tomm’s quadripartite framework of interventive interviewing, challenging the binary distinction between strategic and reflexive questioning. It argues that Tomm's model encapsulates a paradox regarding the therapist’s influencing intent, suggesting these two modalities cannot be easily separated. Through a re-examination of an illustrative Dutch family case, it reveals reflexive questions function as strategic interventions rather than merely facilitative tools. The essay contends that understanding and embracing the inherent tension within this framework is crucial for ethical therapeutic practices, emphasizing that effective intervention respects client autonomy while acknowledging the therapist's role in influencing change....

This essay critically reassesses Karl Tomm’s quadripartite framework of interventive interviewing, challenging the binary distinction between strategic and reflexive questioning. It argues that Tom…

16/10/2025

Medea killing one of her sons. Side A from a Campanian (Capouan) red-figure neck-amphora, ca. 330 BC. From Cumae. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) I never yet saw that father, but let his son be never so decrepit or deformed, would not, notwithstanding, own him: not, nevertheless, if he were not totally besotted, and blinded with his paternal affection, that he did not well enough discern his defects; but that with all defaults he was still his....

Medea killing one of her sons. Side A from a Campanian (Capouan) red-figure neck-amphora, ca. 330 BC. From Cumae. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) I never yet saw that father, but let his son be never so …

14/10/2025

This essay argues that the contemporary Western discourse of the ‘Good Death’ represents a significant mutation in the exercise of biopower. While the twentieth century’s ‘Forbidden Death’ enacted a biopolitics focused on the medical management of the dying body, the twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of a more subtle and pervasive form of control: the government of the psyche at the threshold of its annihilation. Through a critical examination of the historical genealogy of dying, palliative care discourse, literary non-fiction, and Psychotherapeutic theory, this essay introduces the concept of Psychotherapeutic governmentality. It contends that the seemingly liberatory scripts of meaning-making, narrative coherence, and developmental achievement—championed in the influential works of physician-authors like Atul Gawande and institutionalised in psychosocial models such as Erik Erikson’s—function as governmental technologies. These technologies discipline the dying subject’s inner experience, enjoining them to perform a final, normative project of the self. This project transforms the unrepresentable trauma of finitude into a manageable psychological task, effectively veiling the radical negativity of death behind a comforting, yet coercive, fantasy of a ‘Good Death’. The essay concludes by exploring potential sites of resistance to this thanatopolitical regime, located in the visceral materiality of the co**se and the so-called ‘bad death’ that fails to conform to the new psychological ideal....

This essay argues that the contemporary Western discourse of the ‘Good Death’ represents a significant mutation in the exercise of biopower. While the twentieth century’s ‘Forbidden Death’ enacted …

14/10/2025

This essay rejects the conventional narrative that presents classical, postmodern, and psychoanalytic theories of power as a cumulative synthesis. Instead, it argues that these frameworks exist in a state of violent, constitutive antagonism, with each theory achieving its coherence by ‘abjecting’—in the Kristevan sense—the conceptual subject and core anxieties of the others. Through a symptomatic reading, this paper examines how the act of theorising power is itself a ‘dividing practice’, producing a subject fit for analysis by expelling that which threatens its intellectual borders. The analysis proceeds dialectically, first exploring how classical models (Hobbes, Marx) abject the passionate, desiring subject; then how Foucault’s analytics of power abjects the notion of a sovereign origin to produce the ‘normal’ subject; and finally, how the psychoanalytic subject functions as the ‘return of the repressed’ for the entire theoretical field. The essay contends that a genuinely radical critique requires moving beyond a politics of resistance to external power and toward a politics of the ‘theoretical abject’—a critical practice attentive to that which our own theories must cast out to maintain their coherence....

This essay rejects the conventional narrative that presents classical, postmodern, and psychoanalytic theories of power as a cumulative synthesis. Instead, it argues that these frameworks exist in …

06/10/2025

This essay interrogates the recent, politically charged proliferation of the St. George’s Cross across the English public sphere. Moving beyond a conventional diagnosis of postcolonial melancholia, which it finds insufficient to account for the phenomenon’s aggressive, manic character, the analysis posits a more severe and specific pathology. It argues that this resurgent nationalism is the symptomatic activity of a transgenerational phantom—the unmourned, encrypted trauma of imperial collapse, transmitted from a psychic crypt in which the unspeakable loss of empire has been pathologically incorporated rather than mourned. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theories of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Homi K. Bhabha, the essay dissects the libidinal economy of this performance, identifying its motor not in defensive anxiety but in the pursuit of jouissance—an excessive, perverse enjoyment derived from a fantasy of reclaiming a national potency supposedly stolen by the abjected Other of multiculturalism. The tripartite structure of the St. George myth is re-read as the script of this haunting: the nationalist Hero is possessed by the phantom’s mandate; the Dragon is the Kristevan abject, a threat of internal contamination; and the Community-in-Peril is a feminised national body requiring masculine mastery. The essay concludes that the flag itself functions as a tombstone, and its compulsive display is a form of cryptonymy—a ritualistic performance at the gates of a psychic tomb, desperately managing the ghost of an imperial trauma that England has refused to bury....

This essay interrogates the recent, politically charged proliferation of the St. George’s Cross across the English public sphere. Moving beyond a conventional diagnosis of postcolonial melancholia,…

22/09/2025

This essay challenges the traditional interpretation of Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis as a tragic dilemma between public duty and private love. Employing Kleinian object-relations theory, it argues that the 'choice' at Aulis is a cultural illusion masking a psychic inevitability. The analysis posits that Agamemnon, arrested in the primitive Paranoid-Schizoid position, was incapable of perceiving his daughter as a 'whole object', rendering her instead an instrumental 'part-object' to be sacrificed without genuine conflict. The essay concludes that political power does not corrupt but rather provides the stage for a leader's pre-existing psychic architecture to be enacted as destiny, reframing the myth as a timeless warning about the psycho-politics of leadership....

This essay challenges the traditional interpretation of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis as a tragic dilemma between public duty and private love. Employing Kleinian object-relatio…

Paul Wadey Associates - Accredited Counsellor/Psychotherapist

18/11/2025

05/11/2025

04/11/2025

04/11/2025

28/10/2025

24/10/2025

19/10/2025

16/10/2025

14/10/2025

14/10/2025

06/10/2025

22/09/2025

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Practice

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Consulting clinical supervisor, psychotherapist, & systemic family practitioner