April 11th 202610.30 am - 12.45 pm
Jay Barlow
The Umbilical
Traditional psychoanalytic approaches view excessive parental, social or relational involvement in human development as an opportunity for linking complex gender and identity experiences. The analyst’s unconscious bias might present an opportunity for interpretation that could resemble something akin to conversion therapy. All of which leaves the patient feeling alienated and confirming their exiled Self. Early relational trauma affects every gender and sexual identity. Each traumatic situation, from inappropriate interference to traumatic abuse, affects how an individual forms and experiences relationships. Gender and sexual identity are fluid agencies of the Self within all human development. For people who are non-normative when it comes to gender, identity or sexuality, evidence of early relational trauma should not unthinkingly be treated alongside mental health struggles. This clinical paper explores once weekly analytic work with a young, exiled transman who lived in a dysregulated state of mind from his early relational trauma. It uses Louise Bourgeois’s images to explore the early development of projective identification and proposes that this becomes a way of exiling unwanted feelings into the other with hopes of finding a place of belonging – as if through a psychic umbilical.
Jay Barlow is a Jungian Psychoanalyst member and Director of Training of the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP), London. As a Training and Supervising Analyst, he supervises and teaches on various analytic trainings in the UK and in IAAP developing groups in Europe, Eastern Europe and China. He is interested in an analytic approach to Human Development, how Infant Observation informs the development of an Analytic Attitude, Early States of Mind, and Unconscious Fantasy in the consulting room. He was recipient of the 2022 BPC Diversity in Training excellence award, and received the 2025 Michal Fordham Journal of Analytical Psychology Prize for his paper The Umbilical. He has an MA in Jungian and Post Jungian Studies and has worked as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the NHS in an acute unit for Borderline, Narcissistic and Affective Personality Disorders. Jay is in full time private practice in South London.
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