Portman Papers Series – serie

This book is aimed at all practitioners working in healthcare and criminal justice community settings with individuals displaying antisocial, offending, and challenging behaviours, at times complicated by severe mental disorders. Despite risk assessment policies and procedures, we all know how disorientated we can feel when trying to make sense of what is going on in the course of our work. Contributors to this book describe familiar anxiety-provoking situations. Most importantly, they illustrate ideas and perspectives that can help you to rediscover meaning and purpose in your roles and tasks, with the ultimate objective of enabling service-users to manage more effectively the emotional turbulence that invariably lies behind their challenging behaviours.

In this volume contemporary staff describe their thinking and clinical work. Theoretical underpinnings for the understanding of perversion and violence, questions of risk and ethics and the institutional difficulties which emerge in the care of these patients are presented alongside chapters on clinical work, with adults and adolescents, including

Forensic Group Psychotherapy: The Portman Clinic Approach stands as a comprehensive account of theoretical and practical approaches to the group treatment of patients who present with problematic sexual behaviour, criminality, and violence. The first section of the book focusses upon key aspects of group analytic theory as applied to clinical work with forensic patients and describes how to provide a setting in which treatment can proceed. This is followed by a series of chapters with a clinical emphasis, providing a rich and evocative account of the challenges of working with forensic patients in groups. The guiding principle is the need to understand and work with the victim within the perpetrator. This book is a must for any clinician working with forensic patients in groups. Though based on the work of an outpatient clinic, there are ideas and techniques that can be applied to many other settings, including prison, probation, and inpatient.

In this volume contemporary staff describe their thinking and clinical work. Theoretical underpinnings for the understanding of perversion and violence, questions of risk and ethics and the institutional difficulties which emerge in the care of these patients are presented alongside chapters on clinical work, with adults and adolescents, including chapters on paedophilia, the compulsive use of internet pornography and transsexuality. This volume is of relevance to all those working with people with a range of personality disorders and those working with individuals who present with these types of problems in the mental health services and in private practice.The Portman Clinic has been applying a psychoanalytic framework to the understanding and treatment of violent, perverse, criminal and delinquent patients since its foundations in the early 1930's. All Portman Clinic patients have crossed the boundary from fantasy and impulse to action - action which defies legal and moral boundaries but which also breaches the body boundary of the victims. Ultimately, the violence underlying most of such violent, perverse and delinquent action, also attacks and disturbs the mind of both the victim, be that an individual or society, and that of the perpetrator.