Recording available: ‘ENGLISH LANDSCAPE: AN ARCHETYPAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE EX-BOARDER’
Speaker: Sally Mclaren
When: Monday 1st December 2025, 7:15pm – 8:45pm
Where: Online via Zoom
WMIP was pleased to invite Sally McLaren to present her paper published by Routledge in 2025 in a new book, ‘The Un-Making of Them: Clinical Reflections on Boarding School Syndrome’.
Editor Nick Duffell introduces her chapter as ‘a fascinatingly detailed case study of Jungian psychoanalysis with one ex-boarder patient.’ Not an ex-boarder herself, McLaren allows her patient to get under her skin; over time, she creatively allows the deep-seated issues to emerge and reveal themselves. The therapy appears haunted by the shadowy presence of a fox. This wily, secretive survivor is featured in many English myths and legends, rooted in landscape; here he becomes a totem animal for the ex-boarder ‘strategic survival personality’. After much hunting for her patient’s fox, McLaren finds her way, inspired by Donald Kalsched: ‘In trauma work … we must learn to speak a soulful language, because it is uniquely the human soul that is threatened with annihilation by early trauma in a child’s life.’
Sally adds, ‘My paper is largely a demonstration of my analytic attitude and of the crucial role this plays in bringing to light the deeply hidden issues as they begin to emerge within the analytic relationship’.
Participants were encouraged to view the 1994 BBC documentary, ‘The Making of Them’, available on You Tube, in advance of the meeting.
SALLY MCLAREN
Sally McLaren is a Jungian Analyst and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, based in West Sussex. Her paper, ‘Birds, Beasts and Babies – Notes from an Infant Observation’, won the Rozsika Parker Prize and was published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy in 2014. She is interested in the relationship between the experience of Infant Observation, soul and analytic attitude. Her clinical work in recent years with ex-boarders has led to a particular interest in the long term emotional and psychological impact of sending children away from home at a very early age and placing them in the care of an institution in the belief that it will be ‘the making of them’.
www.sallymclarentherapy.co.uk
Recording Fee: £25
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