Decolonising and queering group analysis and psychotherapy: The Indigenous Father and the repair of Cultural Mega Containers

This article explores the impact of colonial and heteronormative trauma on the group analytic process, introducing the concepts of Mega Cultural Containers, the erasure of the Indigenous Father and the Metaphorical Melanised Psychic Skin to conceptualise how racialised and queer subjects navigate inherited psychic wounds. Drawing on decolonial, psychoanalytic, queer, and group analytic frameworks, the paper examines how the symbolic erasure of the Indigenous and Black father—and the colonial disruption of kinship and gender structures—fractures not only cultural systems but also the foundational psychic matrices that sustain identity, attachment, and symbolic function. Colonial violence is theorised as a disturbance of the group matrix itself: the shared field through which unconscious processes are held and meaning is co-created. Racialised and queer group members often carry the projected contents of the group’s unprocessed anxieties around race, gender, and sexuality, appearing in the group field through scapegoating, enactments, and splitting—particularly in relation to trans and non-normative embodiments. The violent disruption of Mega Cultural results in a diminished symbolic capacity and a weakening of psychic skin. In response, the Melanised Psychic Skin is introduced as a defensive and adaptive psychic structure developed by racialised and queer individuals to metabolise racialised and homophobic projections within the social unconscious. Clinical vignettes illustrate how these dynamics emerge in the group setting, challenging the conductor to recognise them not as individual pathology, but as expressions of a traumatised matrix. This demands an attuned, theoretically informed, and intersubjectively engaged response. The paper advocates for a decolonising group analytic practice that affirms identity without reification, holds fluidity alongside belonging, and fosters collective reparation through symbolic witnessing, containment, and co-creation within the analytic matrix.