Paper and Presentation Announcement by Shalini Masih (UK)

Madness and Otherness: Moments of Possibility

Masih, S. (2026, April 20). Madness and otherness: Moments of possibility [Presentation]. West Midlands Institute of Psychotherapy, virtual.

The presentation explores analytic work with psychotic states through the problem of “otherness”: how a patient cannot bear the therapist as a separate person, and how communication then shifts into enactment, intrusion, eroticisation, and attacks on the analytic gap. It also highlights the therapist’s struggle to maintain the frame, think under pressure, and use reverie/countertransference after sessions when thinking feels impossible in the room. The paper’s value lies in boundary management, sustaining analytic stance, and recognising psychotic modes of relating in clinical work. It models the clinical use of countertransference, embodied subjectivity, and case-writing as part of analytic thinking.

The Mystical Unconscious: Holding the Sublime, the Spectral, and the Sacred in Psychoanalysis

Masih, S. (2026). The mystical unconscious: Holding the sublime, the spectral, and the sacred in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Review, 113(1).

This paper explores the mystical unconscious as a dimension of psychoanalysis that moves beyond psychoanalysis’ emphasis on repression and interpretation. Drawing from psychoanalytic insights, mystical traditions, and personal clinical encounters with states of spirit possession, it argues for a psychoanalytic stance of witnessing. Through concepts such as the mystical vertex, internal third, and the analyst as a double, the author presents psychoanalysis as an art of profound attunement—one that welcomes spectral, sublime, and sacred psychic experiences not as pathology, but as meaningful enactments of suffering, cultural memory, and transformation. This reframes psychoanalysis as an aesthetic and spiritual communion.

Shalini Masih, Ph.D.
Worcester, United Kingdom
Email Shalini Masih