If the journey in the direction of listening involves letting go of familiar boundaries, what can be said about the most basic structure of our psychoanalytic work – the frame? Do these ‘ground rules’ always constitute the necessary setting ‘that help to keep both the therapist and the client safe’ and ‘to contain the difficult feelings’, or might a rigid frame become in some instances a retraumatising experience? Can it become the analyst’s defence, guarding against listening to the pain of that scream? Wendy Dugba is inviting the readers to explore this question through her experience of working in ‘trauma-saturated’ settings. Her paper, ‘A Black Female Therapist Working in Forensic Settings: Adapting the Frame’, is delving into the complexity of the therapeutic work with children and young people who offend. For these ‘traumatised children and young people, locked up, away from family, friends, and the community’, the frame is part of a forensic setting that is imbued with ‘racism’ and ‘classist attitudes’. Challenging traditional psychoanalytic concepts within the frame, such as the use of language, the setting of the therapy room and therapist’s neutrality, Dugba is demonstrating the way in which the relational approach is key for the building of trust in working with racial trauma. ‘Culturally responsive’ therapy is reflected not only in different ways of taking off the mask of the blank-screen therapist, but also in agreeing to acknowledge the ‘isms’ that have been traumatising these young people and that are part of the therapeutic system as well. Dugba’s question – how can the therapist ‘remain neutral’ in the face of children’s trauma – echoes throughout all the contributions to this issue, in challenging psychoanalytic dogmatism in response to injustice and highlighting psychoanalytic blind spots.