Decolonising forensic psychotherapy: Racial trauma, the primal scene, and delinquency in a black male adolescent— binding a metaphorical melanised psychic skin

The aim of this article is to add some theoretical and practical scaffolding to our clinical work with black male adolescents who have offended violently. The article considers a "racialised primal scene", the absence of the black father's "paternal function" and attempts to extend Esther Bick's concept of "psychic skin" to a racialised context. The article introduces the concept of a metaphorical "melanised psychic skin" as a container as it applies to racialised subjects, i.e.black- and brownbodied people, enabling them to manage racialised projections and projective identifications, thereby mitigating self-destructive enactments that can take them into the criminal sphere. I attempt to speak to the omission of the symbolic father prevalent in both clinical discussion and theorising, while specifying the importance of establishing of a paternal function of the Black/Indigenous father when working with racialised/colonised subjects. His absence is symptomatic of colonisation, slavery, and the attack on African and indigenous family structures as a deliberate and calculated strategy of the coloniser and enslaver that, via the intergenerational transmission of trauma, is still relevant today. The task is to establish a decolonising clinical framework and the environmental essentials for our clinical practice within this very marginalised patient population.