SAFPAC Seminars 2024-2025
All events will take place on Zoom. A Zoom link will be provided upon booking.
The following are open to all. Please distribute to anyone you think would be interested.
For further information, contact Prof Del Loewenthal:
[email protected]
Saturday 28th September 2024 | 9:30 am – 5:30 pm
Joint CPN & SAFPAC Zoom Conference:
Psychotherapy, the Individual and Society: Have we got it right?
Speakers include: Frances Ruiz Alfaro, Arturo Bandinelli, Manu Bazzano, Onel Brooks, Becca Gatrell, David W Jones, Del Loewenthal, Keir Martin, Anthony McSherry, Maya Mukamel, Catherine O'Riordan, Sally Parsloe.
Click here for more information
Saturday 2nd November 2024 | 10:00 – 11:30
Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis and Insights for Integrative Psychotherapy
Dr Mary Edwards
Click here to book
Thursday 7th November 2024 | 18:00 – 19:30
The Basis of An Existential Therapeutic Approach: Formal Indication
Dr Mo Mandic
Click here to book
Thursday 5th December 2025 | 18:00 - 19:30
’To begin a conversation with psychotherapists about the beginning of the conversation that is Republic’
Dr Onel Brooks
Click here to book
Thursday 6th February 2025 | 19:30 – 21:00
The Death Drive Revisited: A Relational Psychoanalytic Perspective
Dr Anastasios Gaitanidis
Click here to book
Saturday 22nd February 2025 | 15:30 – 17:00
Radical psychotherapy
Andrew Feldmár
Click here to book
Thursday 6th March 2025 | 18:00 – 19:30
From Bion to the interpersonal field
Dr Robert Snell
Click here to book
Thursday 8th May 2025 | 18:00 – 19:30
Epistemic justice and psychotherapy
Dr Jay Watts
Click here to book
Saturday 17th May 2025 | 10:00 – 11:30
Bipedality, Premature Birth and Desire
Prof Charlie Gere
Click here to book
Thursday 5th June 2025 | 18:00 – 19:30
No symbols, no meaning: welcome to the hermeneutic labyrinth
Dr Manu Bazzano
Click here to book
Further information
Saturday 2nd November 2024 | 10:00 – 11:30
Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis and Insights for Integrative Psychotherapy
Dr Mary Edwards
Click here to book
In addition to his contributions to existentialist philosophy, Jean-Paul Sartre developed an existential approach to psychoanalysis, which he applied to his biographical subjects throughout his career. In this seminar, Dr Mary L. Edwards will elucidate the key tenets of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis and show how it provides a robust theoretical basis for integrative psychotherapy today. The aim is not to present Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis as a integrative form of psychotherapy that is, somehow, superior to others, nor to propose it as a new pathway to psychotherapy integration. Rather, it is to indicate how Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis can help psychotherapists of all schools enhance their integrative practice by providing them with a conceptual framework through which a plurality of approaches can speak to one another.
Dr Mary L. Edwards is a lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University. She is the author of Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others (Bloomsbury, 2023) and has expertise in existentialism, feminist philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory.
Thursday 7th November 2024 | 18:00 – 19:30
The Basis of An Existential Therapeutic Approach: Formal Indication
Dr Mo Mandic
Click here to book
"Formal indication" is a way of taking particular words simply as provisional placeholders that only point towards a phenomenon, rather than treating them in our accustomed ways as well-defined, fixed meanings that correspond to our experience. This means that enquiry based on formal indication takes on a more existentially-oriented direction when the therapeutic conversation moves ever-closer towards the stance that the client is taking in relation to their own existence.
Mo runs a private practice in West London, and supervises students at Regent's University London and the New School for Psychotherapy and Counselling. He is currently reflecting on the metaphysical status of therapy in all its forms, including the existential, and the metaphysical ways in which we currently attempt to move beyond it.
Thursday 5th December 2024 | 18:00 – 19:30
’To begin a conversation with psychotherapists about the beginning of the conversation that is Republic’
Dr Onel Brooks
Click here to book
Dr Onel Brooks is particularly interested in philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is a core member of the SAFPAC (www.safpac.co.uk) teaching team and was a senior lecturer in Psychotherapy, Counselling and Counselling Psychology, Psychology Department, Roehampton University. He is BACP-accredited and UKCP registered as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and as an existential analytic psychotherapist. As well as working in universities, he has worked for many years with adolescents and adults, in therapeutic communities, the NHS and in voluntary organisations. He also contributes to the teaching at The Philadelphia Association, London
Thursday 6th February 2025 | 19:30 – 21:00
The Death Drive Revisited: A Relational Psychoanalytic Perspective
Dr Anastasios Gaitanidis
Click here to book
In this seminar, Anastasios will revisit Freud's controversial concept of the death drive from the perspective of contemporary relational psychoanalysis. He will argue that the death drive can be productively re-conceptualised through a relational psychoanalytic lens as a destructive force emerging from and impacting human relationships and intersubjectivity. He will explore the relational origins of the death drive in failures of empathic attunement and recognition in early attachments, its defensive functions in warding off vulnerability and mourning, and its enactments within therapeutic dynamics and transference. By situating the death drive relationally as a manifestation of distorted intersubjectivity and disruptions to the recognising systems that constitute psychological life, he intends to demonstrate the enduring clinical relevance of this challenging concept for themes of aggression, trauma, mourning and psychopathology. He will argue that the death drive's insistent repetitions and enactments are framed as paradoxical strivings for interpersonal connection and care in the face of tragic alienation and loss.
Dr Anastasios Gaitanidis is a Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, Director of Studies, Author, Theory Editor and Supervisor. In addition to his clinical work as a psychoanalyst, Anastasios held appointments as a Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies and provided clinical and research supervision to psychotherapists and counselling psychologists at Regent’s University London, University of Roehampton and Metanoia Training Institute. He currently holds the position of Visiting Professor for the professional doctorate in counselling psychology at Regent’s University London. Anastasios is the Theory Editor of the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling (EJPC) and an author who published a substantial body of academic work including journal articles and edited books over the years, with a recent book publication entitled “The Sublime in Everyday Life”.
Saturday 22nd February 2025 | 15:30 – 17:00
Radical psychotherapy
Andrew Feldmár
Click here to book
Andrew will summarize insights he has gained from fifty-five years of practising psychotherapy under the influence of R. D. Laing.
Andrew Feldmár is a Vancouver-based psychologist and psychotherapist. He has taught, lectured, and led workshops at SFU, UBC, Emily Carr University, and Douglas College. During 1974–1975, he spent a year in London, England, intensively studying and training in the practice of psychotherapy under the renowned and controversial Scottish psychiatrist, R. D. Laing. During this year, he also studied with Francis Huxley (the anthropology of healing), John Heaton (existential psychotherapy), Hugh Crawford (community therapy), and Leon Redler (spiritual emergency). In 1989, he was a guest on a 3-part CBC Ideas radio series entitled R. D. Laing Today. He has also worked as a consultant in both television and film (e.g., Showcase’s Kink series, Neurons to Nirvana: The Great Medicines). Other career highlights include work with the United Nations; founding the Integra Households Association, a non-profit charity working with those in extreme mental distress; and Third Mind Productions, a film production company that went on to turn out the 1987 film, Did You Used to Be R. D. Laing? He has also worked extensively overseas, mainly in Hungary, where he has published over 30 books. He is well-known to international audiences in the field of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, having presented at numerous conferences on the subject.
Thursday 6th March 2025 | 18:00 – 19:30
From Bion to the interpersonal field
Dr Robert Snell
Click here to book
W. R. Bion (1897-1979) brought about a huge paradigm shift in psychoanalysis, from
a search for meanings to an experience of becoming – a psychoanalytic equivalent to the French Revolution, according to Antonino Ferro. This lecture / discussion is a basic introduction to some of Bion’s contributions, from his thinking on groups, to his theoretical innovations in the 1950s and 1960s (linking, container-contained, alpha and beta functions, waking dream thought, reverie, caesura - a whole new account of emotional development and transformation), to his extraordinary late trilogy, A Memoir of the Future. Robert hopes to outline how these innovations prepared the ground for Italian analysts, notably Ferro, to develop the idea of an analytic ‘field’, in which change is less a matter of individual psychology than a process of playful elaboration of the in-between, of the interpersonal field which the participants are constantly co-dreaming and co-creating. In preparation you might like to look at his ‘Antonino Ferro: A Critical Introduction’ (Routledge 2024) particularly Chapter 2, ‘The Bionian Dream Model’.
Dr Robert Snell is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, a member of the British Psychoanalytic Council and the British Psychotherapy Foundation, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Roehampton University, UK.
Thursday 8th May 2025 | 18:00 – 19:30
Epistemic justice and psychotherapy
Dr Jay Watts
Click here to book
For over five decades, mental health discourse has been divided by debates about the validity of psychiatric diagnoses. While diagnosis can facilitate support, critics argue it may obstruct personal meaning-making and potentially harm patients. This presentation challenges both diagnostic rigidity and the moral superiority often accompanying trauma-centred approaches in psychotherapy. Jay proposes a paradigm shift: centering epistemic justice in therapeutic practice. Drawing on Miranda Fricker's work on epistemic justice and Kristie Dotson's concepts of testimonial smothering and silencing, we will explore how power dynamics in therapy can amplify or silence patients' voices. This framework urges us to move beyond the false dichotomy of pathology versus trauma, focusing instead on the subtle, micro-level interactions that shape patients' ability to articulate their experiences. By prioritising epistemic justice, therapists can create more equitable spaces for collaborative care, fostering genuine dialogue and mutual understanding. This approach not only honours patients' lived experiences but also enhances the therapeutic process, potentially leading to more effective and ethically sound mental health practices.
Dr Jay Watts is a consultant clinical psychologist, relational psychotherapist, honorary senior lecturer, and journalist. More importantly, she is a psychiatric survivor and was one of the first lived experience practitioners in Europe in the 1990s. Disability justice is central to her work, which spans both mainstream roles, such as leading an early intervention in psychosis team, a family therapy service, and tier two psychology, as well as more radical efforts to address iatrogenic harm and the toxicity of the welfare system alongside Mad allies. She makes noise in various ways, from writing research papers to creating bad art, and spends too much time tweeting as @Shrink_at_Large.
Saturday 17th May 2025 | 10:00 – 11:30
Bipedality, Premature Birth and Desire
Prof Charlie Gere
Click here to book
Charlie’s starting point is how the work of Jacques Derrida and those he influenced allow us to consider the relation between the human and the technical. One of the most important ideas emerging out of Derrida’s development of grammatology is Bernard Stiegler’s ‘originary technicity’, which was also greatly influenced by palaeoanthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s ideas about the relation between human bipedality and technicity. Following Leroi-Gourhan Stiegler proposed that technics invents the human rather than the other way round, or that the human and the technical co-evolve. Stiegler never properly engaged with psychoanalysis, other than a late engagement with Winnicott and the Transitional Object. The work of Jacques Lacan is largely missing from Stiegler’s thought, a lacuna Charlie wishes to address by way of a consideration of the relation between bipedality and the necessity for premature birth in humans. For Lacan the latter is crucial in the emergence of the symbolic order. As Lorenzo Chiesa puts it ‘Lacan postulates a primordial biological discord between man and his environment, centred on premature birth and a subsequent disorder of the imagination, from which language and the Symbolic arise immanently’. He suggests that, for Lacan, ‘the human being is born with foetalised traits, that is to say deriving from premature birth’. Henry Sullivan invokes Lacan to ask whether ‘the most elementary stone tools to be regarded as indications of human desire’. Here there might seem to be a possible connection between the work of Lacan and that of Stiegler, and a single sentence in the first volume of his magnum opus Technics and Time offers a potential Lacanian slant to Stiegler’s thought. He writes that ‘Flint is the first reflective memory, the first mirror’. Thus, following Lacan and Sullivan, perhaps the earliest flint tools and all our tools since, up to the Metaverse, are objets petit a, and that the specific human relation to technicity is one of lack and desire.
Charlie Gere is professor of media theory and history at the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University, and the author of a number of books, most recently Unnatural Theology: Religion, Art and Media after the Death of God (2019), I Hate the Lake District (2020) and World’s End (2022).
Thursday 5th June 2025 18:00 – 19:30
No symbols, no meaning: welcome to the hermeneutic labyrinth
Dr Manu Bazzano
Click here to book
A genuine philosophy of becoming (and a psychoanalysis-psychotherapy inspired by it) naturally shuns symbols and inductive meaning, those conventional existential shibboleths which lure us into believing that what is impermanent can be made permanent, that what is confused can be made clear and what is mediocre can be made great. Symbols in particular are “images that suppress the noise of the senses and dip the forehead into the stream of transcendence” (Musil). Against symbols, I will argue in favour of allegory, a construct that is loyal to emergent phenomena, in life as in in therapy. Against inductive meaning, I will present the case in favour of free association and rhizomatic investigation – modes of inquiry that grant access to both practitioner and client/patient to the hermeneutic spiral or labyrinth.
Dr Manu Bazzano is an author, psychotherapist/supervisor in private practice with a background is philosophy and rock music. He is an internationally recognized lecturer and facilitator, and a Zen priest who facilitates meditation retreats and groups having studied Eastern contemplative practices since 1980. He is a visiting tutor at Cambridge University and Goldsmiths College London where he teaches existential philosophy and therapy. His latest book is Subversion and Desire: Pathways to Transindividuation (2023). Autumn 2025 will see the publication of two books: Difference and Multiplicity: Adventures in Philosophy and, as an editor, Primacy of Affect, a collections of essays from international philosophers and psychotherapists. www.manubazzano.com
The following are open to all. Please distribute to anyone you think would be interested.
For further information, contact Prof Del Loewenthal:
[email protected]
Saturday 28th September 2024 | 9:30 am – 5:30 pm
Joint CPN & SAFPAC Zoom Conference:
Psychotherapy, the Individual and Society: Have we got it right?
Speakers include: Frances Ruiz Alfaro, Arturo Bandinelli, Manu Bazzano, Onel Brooks, Becca Gatrell, David W Jones, Del Loewenthal, Keir Martin, Anthony McSherry, Maya Mukamel, Catherine O'Riordan, Sally Parsloe.
Click here for more information
Saturday 2nd November 2024 | 10:00 – 11:30
Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis and Insights for Integrative Psychotherapy
Dr Mary Edwards
Click here to book
Thursday 7th November 2024 | 18:00 – 19:30
The Basis of An Existential Therapeutic Approach: Formal Indication
Dr Mo Mandic
Click here to book
Thursday 5th December 2025 | 18:00 - 19:30
’To begin a conversation with psychotherapists about the beginning of the conversation that is Republic’
Dr Onel Brooks
Click here to book
Thursday 6th February 2025 | 19:30 – 21:00
The Death Drive Revisited: A Relational Psychoanalytic Perspective
Dr Anastasios Gaitanidis
Click here to book
Saturday 22nd February 2025 | 15:30 – 17:00
Radical psychotherapy
Andrew Feldmár
Click here to book
Thursday 6th March 2025 | 18:00 – 19:30
From Bion to the interpersonal field
Dr Robert Snell
Click here to book
Thursday 8th May 2025 | 18:00 – 19:30
Epistemic justice and psychotherapy
Dr Jay Watts
Click here to book
Saturday 17th May 2025 | 10:00 – 11:30
Bipedality, Premature Birth and Desire
Prof Charlie Gere
Click here to book
Thursday 5th June 2025 | 18:00 – 19:30
No symbols, no meaning: welcome to the hermeneutic labyrinth
Dr Manu Bazzano
Click here to book
Further information
Saturday 2nd November 2024 | 10:00 – 11:30
Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis and Insights for Integrative Psychotherapy
Dr Mary Edwards
Click here to book
In addition to his contributions to existentialist philosophy, Jean-Paul Sartre developed an existential approach to psychoanalysis, which he applied to his biographical subjects throughout his career. In this seminar, Dr Mary L. Edwards will elucidate the key tenets of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis and show how it provides a robust theoretical basis for integrative psychotherapy today. The aim is not to present Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis as a integrative form of psychotherapy that is, somehow, superior to others, nor to propose it as a new pathway to psychotherapy integration. Rather, it is to indicate how Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis can help psychotherapists of all schools enhance their integrative practice by providing them with a conceptual framework through which a plurality of approaches can speak to one another.
Dr Mary L. Edwards is a lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University. She is the author of Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others (Bloomsbury, 2023) and has expertise in existentialism, feminist philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory.
Thursday 7th November 2024 | 18:00 – 19:30
The Basis of An Existential Therapeutic Approach: Formal Indication
Dr Mo Mandic
Click here to book
"Formal indication" is a way of taking particular words simply as provisional placeholders that only point towards a phenomenon, rather than treating them in our accustomed ways as well-defined, fixed meanings that correspond to our experience. This means that enquiry based on formal indication takes on a more existentially-oriented direction when the therapeutic conversation moves ever-closer towards the stance that the client is taking in relation to their own existence.
Mo runs a private practice in West London, and supervises students at Regent's University London and the New School for Psychotherapy and Counselling. He is currently reflecting on the metaphysical status of therapy in all its forms, including the existential, and the metaphysical ways in which we currently attempt to move beyond it.
Thursday 5th December 2024 | 18:00 – 19:30
’To begin a conversation with psychotherapists about the beginning of the conversation that is Republic’
Dr Onel Brooks
Click here to book
Dr Onel Brooks is particularly interested in philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is a core member of the SAFPAC (www.safpac.co.uk) teaching team and was a senior lecturer in Psychotherapy, Counselling and Counselling Psychology, Psychology Department, Roehampton University. He is BACP-accredited and UKCP registered as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and as an existential analytic psychotherapist. As well as working in universities, he has worked for many years with adolescents and adults, in therapeutic communities, the NHS and in voluntary organisations. He also contributes to the teaching at The Philadelphia Association, London
Thursday 6th February 2025 | 19:30 – 21:00
The Death Drive Revisited: A Relational Psychoanalytic Perspective
Dr Anastasios Gaitanidis
Click here to book
In this seminar, Anastasios will revisit Freud's controversial concept of the death drive from the perspective of contemporary relational psychoanalysis. He will argue that the death drive can be productively re-conceptualised through a relational psychoanalytic lens as a destructive force emerging from and impacting human relationships and intersubjectivity. He will explore the relational origins of the death drive in failures of empathic attunement and recognition in early attachments, its defensive functions in warding off vulnerability and mourning, and its enactments within therapeutic dynamics and transference. By situating the death drive relationally as a manifestation of distorted intersubjectivity and disruptions to the recognising systems that constitute psychological life, he intends to demonstrate the enduring clinical relevance of this challenging concept for themes of aggression, trauma, mourning and psychopathology. He will argue that the death drive's insistent repetitions and enactments are framed as paradoxical strivings for interpersonal connection and care in the face of tragic alienation and loss.
Dr Anastasios Gaitanidis is a Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, Director of Studies, Author, Theory Editor and Supervisor. In addition to his clinical work as a psychoanalyst, Anastasios held appointments as a Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies and provided clinical and research supervision to psychotherapists and counselling psychologists at Regent’s University London, University of Roehampton and Metanoia Training Institute. He currently holds the position of Visiting Professor for the professional doctorate in counselling psychology at Regent’s University London. Anastasios is the Theory Editor of the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling (EJPC) and an author who published a substantial body of academic work including journal articles and edited books over the years, with a recent book publication entitled “The Sublime in Everyday Life”.
Saturday 22nd February 2025 | 15:30 – 17:00
Radical psychotherapy
Andrew Feldmár
Click here to book
Andrew will summarize insights he has gained from fifty-five years of practising psychotherapy under the influence of R. D. Laing.
Andrew Feldmár is a Vancouver-based psychologist and psychotherapist. He has taught, lectured, and led workshops at SFU, UBC, Emily Carr University, and Douglas College. During 1974–1975, he spent a year in London, England, intensively studying and training in the practice of psychotherapy under the renowned and controversial Scottish psychiatrist, R. D. Laing. During this year, he also studied with Francis Huxley (the anthropology of healing), John Heaton (existential psychotherapy), Hugh Crawford (community therapy), and Leon Redler (spiritual emergency). In 1989, he was a guest on a 3-part CBC Ideas radio series entitled R. D. Laing Today. He has also worked as a consultant in both television and film (e.g., Showcase’s Kink series, Neurons to Nirvana: The Great Medicines). Other career highlights include work with the United Nations; founding the Integra Households Association, a non-profit charity working with those in extreme mental distress; and Third Mind Productions, a film production company that went on to turn out the 1987 film, Did You Used to Be R. D. Laing? He has also worked extensively overseas, mainly in Hungary, where he has published over 30 books. He is well-known to international audiences in the field of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, having presented at numerous conferences on the subject.
Thursday 6th March 2025 | 18:00 – 19:30
From Bion to the interpersonal field
Dr Robert Snell
Click here to book
W. R. Bion (1897-1979) brought about a huge paradigm shift in psychoanalysis, from
a search for meanings to an experience of becoming – a psychoanalytic equivalent to the French Revolution, according to Antonino Ferro. This lecture / discussion is a basic introduction to some of Bion’s contributions, from his thinking on groups, to his theoretical innovations in the 1950s and 1960s (linking, container-contained, alpha and beta functions, waking dream thought, reverie, caesura - a whole new account of emotional development and transformation), to his extraordinary late trilogy, A Memoir of the Future. Robert hopes to outline how these innovations prepared the ground for Italian analysts, notably Ferro, to develop the idea of an analytic ‘field’, in which change is less a matter of individual psychology than a process of playful elaboration of the in-between, of the interpersonal field which the participants are constantly co-dreaming and co-creating. In preparation you might like to look at his ‘Antonino Ferro: A Critical Introduction’ (Routledge 2024) particularly Chapter 2, ‘The Bionian Dream Model’.
Dr Robert Snell is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, a member of the British Psychoanalytic Council and the British Psychotherapy Foundation, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Roehampton University, UK.
Thursday 8th May 2025 | 18:00 – 19:30
Epistemic justice and psychotherapy
Dr Jay Watts
Click here to book
For over five decades, mental health discourse has been divided by debates about the validity of psychiatric diagnoses. While diagnosis can facilitate support, critics argue it may obstruct personal meaning-making and potentially harm patients. This presentation challenges both diagnostic rigidity and the moral superiority often accompanying trauma-centred approaches in psychotherapy. Jay proposes a paradigm shift: centering epistemic justice in therapeutic practice. Drawing on Miranda Fricker's work on epistemic justice and Kristie Dotson's concepts of testimonial smothering and silencing, we will explore how power dynamics in therapy can amplify or silence patients' voices. This framework urges us to move beyond the false dichotomy of pathology versus trauma, focusing instead on the subtle, micro-level interactions that shape patients' ability to articulate their experiences. By prioritising epistemic justice, therapists can create more equitable spaces for collaborative care, fostering genuine dialogue and mutual understanding. This approach not only honours patients' lived experiences but also enhances the therapeutic process, potentially leading to more effective and ethically sound mental health practices.
Dr Jay Watts is a consultant clinical psychologist, relational psychotherapist, honorary senior lecturer, and journalist. More importantly, she is a psychiatric survivor and was one of the first lived experience practitioners in Europe in the 1990s. Disability justice is central to her work, which spans both mainstream roles, such as leading an early intervention in psychosis team, a family therapy service, and tier two psychology, as well as more radical efforts to address iatrogenic harm and the toxicity of the welfare system alongside Mad allies. She makes noise in various ways, from writing research papers to creating bad art, and spends too much time tweeting as @Shrink_at_Large.
Saturday 17th May 2025 | 10:00 – 11:30
Bipedality, Premature Birth and Desire
Prof Charlie Gere
Click here to book
Charlie’s starting point is how the work of Jacques Derrida and those he influenced allow us to consider the relation between the human and the technical. One of the most important ideas emerging out of Derrida’s development of grammatology is Bernard Stiegler’s ‘originary technicity’, which was also greatly influenced by palaeoanthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s ideas about the relation between human bipedality and technicity. Following Leroi-Gourhan Stiegler proposed that technics invents the human rather than the other way round, or that the human and the technical co-evolve. Stiegler never properly engaged with psychoanalysis, other than a late engagement with Winnicott and the Transitional Object. The work of Jacques Lacan is largely missing from Stiegler’s thought, a lacuna Charlie wishes to address by way of a consideration of the relation between bipedality and the necessity for premature birth in humans. For Lacan the latter is crucial in the emergence of the symbolic order. As Lorenzo Chiesa puts it ‘Lacan postulates a primordial biological discord between man and his environment, centred on premature birth and a subsequent disorder of the imagination, from which language and the Symbolic arise immanently’. He suggests that, for Lacan, ‘the human being is born with foetalised traits, that is to say deriving from premature birth’. Henry Sullivan invokes Lacan to ask whether ‘the most elementary stone tools to be regarded as indications of human desire’. Here there might seem to be a possible connection between the work of Lacan and that of Stiegler, and a single sentence in the first volume of his magnum opus Technics and Time offers a potential Lacanian slant to Stiegler’s thought. He writes that ‘Flint is the first reflective memory, the first mirror’. Thus, following Lacan and Sullivan, perhaps the earliest flint tools and all our tools since, up to the Metaverse, are objets petit a, and that the specific human relation to technicity is one of lack and desire.
Charlie Gere is professor of media theory and history at the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University, and the author of a number of books, most recently Unnatural Theology: Religion, Art and Media after the Death of God (2019), I Hate the Lake District (2020) and World’s End (2022).
Thursday 5th June 2025 18:00 – 19:30
No symbols, no meaning: welcome to the hermeneutic labyrinth
Dr Manu Bazzano
Click here to book
A genuine philosophy of becoming (and a psychoanalysis-psychotherapy inspired by it) naturally shuns symbols and inductive meaning, those conventional existential shibboleths which lure us into believing that what is impermanent can be made permanent, that what is confused can be made clear and what is mediocre can be made great. Symbols in particular are “images that suppress the noise of the senses and dip the forehead into the stream of transcendence” (Musil). Against symbols, I will argue in favour of allegory, a construct that is loyal to emergent phenomena, in life as in in therapy. Against inductive meaning, I will present the case in favour of free association and rhizomatic investigation – modes of inquiry that grant access to both practitioner and client/patient to the hermeneutic spiral or labyrinth.
Dr Manu Bazzano is an author, psychotherapist/supervisor in private practice with a background is philosophy and rock music. He is an internationally recognized lecturer and facilitator, and a Zen priest who facilitates meditation retreats and groups having studied Eastern contemplative practices since 1980. He is a visiting tutor at Cambridge University and Goldsmiths College London where he teaches existential philosophy and therapy. His latest book is Subversion and Desire: Pathways to Transindividuation (2023). Autumn 2025 will see the publication of two books: Difference and Multiplicity: Adventures in Philosophy and, as an editor, Primacy of Affect, a collections of essays from international philosophers and psychotherapists. www.manubazzano.com
SAFPAC Seminars 2023-2024
All events will take place on Zoom. A Zoom link will be provided upon booking.
There are limited spaces available to attend Thursday evening events in person in Wimbledon, please contact us at [email protected] for further information if you are interested.
The following are open to all. Please distribute to anyone you think would be interested.
For further information, contact Prof Del Loewenthal:
[email protected]
Saturday 30th September 2023 | 9:30 am - 5:30 pm
Joint CPN & SAFPAC Conference:
Technology, AI Bots and Psychotherapy After Covid: What future for psychotherapy in a digital age?
Speakers include: Aaron Balick, Adele Greaves, Del Loewenthal, Deborah Madden, Helen Molden, Daniel Rubenstein, Geraldine Sheedy, Gail Simon, Ronen Stilman, Patrica Talens and Ian Tucker
Click here for more information and booking
Thursday 2nd November 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Diahermeneutic delight: the heart of Daseinsanalysis
Anthony Stadlen
Click here to book
Saturday 4th November 2023 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
To change our thinking: Philosophical practice for difficult times
Helen Douglas
Click here to book
Thursday 7th December 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
The skull beneath the skin: death, suicide and existential therapy
Dr Manu Bazzano
Click here to book
Thursday 8th February 2024 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Authenticity with Heidegger and Freud
Jake Osborne
Click here to book
Saturday 24th February 2024 | 10:00 am - 11:30 am
What is it like to be a person with BPD? Lived experience at the intersection of psychoanalysis and phenomenology in the clinic
Prof Alessandra D’Agostino
Click here to book
Thursday 7th March 2024 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
The Possibility of Existential Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis
Dr Julia Cayne
Click here to book
Thursday 9th May 2024 | 6:00pm – 6:30 pm
Psychoanalysis and the Postmaternal
Joanna Kellond
Click here to book
Saturday 11th May 2024 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Jacky and the Women
Prof Charlie Gere
Click here to book
Thursday 13th June 2024
Anouchka Grose
The Birth of Ecopsychology
Click here to book
Further information:
Saturday 30th September 2023 | 9:30 am - 5:30 pm
Joint CPN & SAFPAC Conference:
Technology, AI Bots and Psychotherapy After Covid: What future for psychotherapy in a digital age?
Speakers include: Aaron Balick, Adele Greaves, Del Loewenthal, Deborah Madden, Helen Molden, Daniel Rubenstein, Geraldine Sheedy, Gail Simon, Ronen Stilman, Patrica Talens and Ian Tucker
Click here for more information and booking
Thursday 2nd November 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Diahermeneutic delight: the heart of Daseinsanalysis
Anthony Stadlen
Click here to book
Some Daseinsanalysts speak as if they have unmediated access to phenomena, which it is their task to teach to the client. Heidegger denounced "dialectic", from his early lectures of 1919 to his final seminar of 1973. Yet he described "phenomenology" in Being and Time (1927) as logos (discourse, conversation), in the middle voice, revealing phenomena. And in 1919 he said, once, that philosophical dialectic is "diahermeneutics", a term he never used again. Can Daseinsanalysis be renewed as Diahermeneutics, the stone the builders forgot?
Anthony Stadlen is a Daseinsanalyst, Independent Effective Member (UK) of the International Federation of Daseinsanalysis; convenor of Inner Circle Seminars; historical researcher on paradigm cases of psychotherapy; former Research Fellow, Freud Museum, London; recipient of Thomas S. Szasz Award for Outstanding Services to the Cause of Civil Liberties.
Saturday 4th November 2023 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
To change our thinking: Philosophical practice for difficult times
Helen Douglas
Click here to book
This talk describes the development of Douglas' philosophical counselling practice as a practice of emancipation in concert with the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Rancière. It considers the significance of personal engagement and companionship for the cultivation of a well-lived life and suggests that the intransigence of our global crises indicates an incorrect view of human nature and an ossified or unbalanced relationship between practical and theoretical ways of knowing and wisdom. As this was originally written for an academic philosophy audience, she is delighted to bring it to the SAFPAC community. To encourage a rich discussion, the paper is available here for prereading. You might also want to view the three videos on her website here.
Helen Douglas is a counselling philosopher in Cape Town, South Africa. She came to both aspects from her experience in the anti-apartheid movement in the late 1980s. Her philosophical work is largely informed by the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and the approaches of scepticism and phenomenology; her therapeutic lineage goes back to RD Laing through a long apprenticeship with Laing’s colleague, the Hungarian-Canadian psychotherapist Andrew Feldmár. Helen is the author of Love & Arms: Violence and Justification After Levinas (Pittsburgh: Trivium, 2011). In 2021, she gave a keynote address to the North American Levinas Society’s conference on Solidarity and Community. Her website, with videos and other publications, can be found at https://philosophy-practice.co.za/.
Thursday 7th December 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
The skull beneath the skin: death, suicide and existential therapy
Dr Manu Bazzano
Click here to book
Drawing on notions such as being-towards-death (Heidegger) and staring at the sun (Yalom), traditional existential therapy replicates the failings of conventional psychology: it turns death into an experience to be apprehended and managed. But death remains “unappeasable and implacable” (Levinas). Closely linked to the desire to apprehend death are the fearful ways in which conventional therapy deals with suicide and so-called suicidal ideation. I will explore whether there may be other ways of confronting death and to deal with the likelihood of suicide.
Dr Manu Bazzano is a writer, psychotherapist/supervisor in private practice, and independent researcher. Among his books: Subversion and Desire: Pathways to Transindividuation (2023) Nietzsche and Psychotherapy (2019); Re-visioning Existential Therapy: Counter-traditional Perspectives (Ed, 2020); Re-visioning Person-centred Therapy: Theory and Practice of a Radical Paradigm (Ed, 2018); Zen and Therapy: Heretical Perspectives (2017); Therapy and the Counter-tradition (co-edited with Julie Webb, 2016); After Mindfulness (Ed, 2014); Spectre of the Stranger (2012); The Speed of Angels (2013); Buddha is Dead: Nietzsche and the Dawn of European Zen (2006); Haiku For Lovers (2003); Zen Poems (2002). He studied Eastern contemplative practices since 1980 and in 2004 was ordained in the Soto and Rinzai traditions of Zen Buddhism. He has been co-editor of PCEP Journal and is associate editor of Self & Society, Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Website: manubazzano.com
Thursday 8th February 2024 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Authenticity with Heidegger and Freud
Jake Osborne
Click here to book
This seminar will look at Heidegger's understanding of authenticity in Being and Time, putting it in cultural context and contrasting it with contemporary views. We will then go on to discuss how this might help us relate to the Freudian unconscious.
Jake Osborne trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist with the Philadelphia Association, going to work for many years as a house therapist in one of their therapeutic communities as well as working with the homeless for St Mungo's. I now work for the NHS in Oxford.
Saturday 24th February 2024 | 10:00 am - 11:30 am
What is it like to be a person with BPD? Lived experience at the intersection of psychoanalysis and phenomenology in the clinic
Prof Alessandra D’Agostino
Click here to book
As Bollas points out, the constitution of a new common field of clinical intervention, consisting mainly of the borderline area, has forced many psychoanalysts to abandon interpretations based on the idea of an explanatory ‘unmasking’ (more appropriate to the traditional treatment of neurotic patients) and to become aware of the fundamental role of paying attention to the level of the patient’s immediate subjective experience in order to meet them where they are. The ‘phenomenological temptation’ in psychoanalysis, which André Green viewed with suspicion and saw as a trap, seems today to have become one of the paths that allow further ‘extensions’ of psychoanalysis. The aim of the presentation is to discuss the main theoretical-clinical areas that characterize contemporary psychoanalysis in which phenomenology can claim a legitimate (or, for some, illegitimate) position and the implications of this shift at the level of psychoanalytic technique and practice. Finally, a clinical case is presented.
Alessandra D’Agostino, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo (Italy), where she teaches Personality and Psychopathology and Clinical Psychology (BA in Psychological Sciences and Techniques) and Clinical Psychopathology (MA in Clinical Psychology). She is a psychologist, psychotherapist, and psychoanalyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI-IPA). She has completed postgraduate training in England (Anna Freud Center, London) and the United States (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA). She is a member of the College of Professors and Researchers of Clinical Psychology of Italian Universities, an ordinary member of the Italian Association of Psychology (AIP, Section of Clinical and Dynamic Psychology), and a member of the European Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ESSPD). Author of numerous publications in psychopathology and clinical areas, she serves as a reviewer for several national and international scientific journals in the field, including the Journal of Personality Disorders (Guilford) and Psychopathology (Karger). Her research interests include severe personality disorders/borderline (psychopathology and assessment), self-harm and suicide (psychopathology and assessment).
Thursday 7th March 2024 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
The Possibility of Existential Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis
Dr Julia Cayne
Click here to book
This seminar raises a question of the possibility of practising as a psychotherapist drawing on both existential phenomenology, (with reference mainly to Kierkegaard and Boss) and psychoanalysis (with reference mainly to Freud and Lacan). In comparing: the epistemological basis of each ie the philosophical approach of existential phenomenology (here considered through the stories we tell) with the logical positivism of psychoanalysis, (as abstraction/theorising); their methodological approaches; and, some case vignettes, points of divergence and convergence will be considered.
Dr Julia Cayne is an Existential-Analytic Psychotherapist, Chair of training with the Southern Association For Psychotherapy and Counselling and working in private practice in South West Wiltshire. Her interests include questions around the nature of knowledge and what kinds of knowing and unknowing best serve psychotherapeutic practice and research and in particular what phenomenology can teach us about how we learn from experience.
Thursday 9th May 2024 | 6:00pm – 7:30 pm
Psychoanalysis and the Postmaternal
Joanna Kellond
Click here to book
In her book of 2011, Confronting Postmaternal Thinking, Julie Stephens suggests that contemporary societies in the global north are decidedly ‘postmaternal.’ By this she means that they are characterised by a “widespread cultural unease, if not hostility, towards certain expressions of the maternal and maternalist political perspectives in general” (2011, ix). This talk will unpack various understandings of the term ‘postmaternal,’ both positive and negative, and consider the contribution that psychoanalytic accounts of subjective development can make to theorising the postmaternal as a utopian horizon, where practices of mothering circulate beyond, and contrary to, the nuclear family.
Joanna Kellond is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton, where she leads the BA (Hons) Politics, Sexuality and Gender. She is also a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Association. Her scholarly work is located at the intersection between psychoanalytic theory and practice and socialist-feminism. Her monograph, Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care, was published in the Palgrave Macmillan series, Studies in the Psychosocial, in 2022.
Saturday 11th May 2024 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Jacky and the Women
Prof Charlie Gere
Click here to book
Charlie's new writing project concerns Jacques Derrida’s relationship with four women in his life, and how they informed Derrida's work at various points in his life. They are his mother Monica, who is the subject of his biographical essay ‘Circonfession’, his wife Marguerite, who was a practicing psychoanalyst, and introduced him to the work of Melanie Klein, his mistress Sylviane Agacinski, who, in Charlie's view, informed his most radical work in the 1970s, including The Post Card, Glas and Cinders, and finally his friend Helene Cixous. In this talk, Charlie focuses on the relationship with Agacinski, which is the one most directly related to psychoanalysis, particularly in The Post Card, much of which takes the form of letters sent to an unnamed lover, but also includes essays on Freud’s Fort/Da and Lacan’s reading of Poe’s Purloined Letter. The last is about hiding in plain sight, which is, Gere suggests, what Derrida was doing in his work of that period.
Charlie Gere is professor of media theory and history at the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University, and the author of a number of books, most recently Unnatural Theology: Religion, Art and Media after the Death of God (2019), I Hate the Lake District (2020) and World’s End (2022).
Thursday 13th June 2024 | 6:00 - 7:30 pm
The Birth of Ecopsychology
Anouchka Grose
Click here to book
This talk will focus on the work of Theodore Roszak, who coined the term ‘ecopsychology’ in the early nineties. With hindsight, his ideas seem extraordinary prescient and useful for thinking about how to respond to climate-related distress.
Anouchka Grose is a psychoanalyst and writer practising in London. She is a member of CFAR and The College of Psychoanalysts-UK. She has written non-fiction: No More Silly Love Songs: a realist’s guide to romance (Portobello, 2010) and Are you Considering Therapy (Karnac, 2011), as well as writing fiction: Ringing for You (Harper Collins, 1999) and Darling Daisy (Harper Collins, 2000). She is the editor of Hysteria Today (2015), a collection of essays on hysteria in the contemporary psychoanalytic clinic. Her journalism is published in The Guardian, and she also writes for numerous art and fashion publications. She has taught at Camberwell School of Art and gives talks on art and psychoanalysis in museums and galleries, as well as sometimes speaking on the radio.
There are limited spaces available to attend Thursday evening events in person in Wimbledon, please contact us at [email protected] for further information if you are interested.
The following are open to all. Please distribute to anyone you think would be interested.
For further information, contact Prof Del Loewenthal:
[email protected]
Saturday 30th September 2023 | 9:30 am - 5:30 pm
Joint CPN & SAFPAC Conference:
Technology, AI Bots and Psychotherapy After Covid: What future for psychotherapy in a digital age?
Speakers include: Aaron Balick, Adele Greaves, Del Loewenthal, Deborah Madden, Helen Molden, Daniel Rubenstein, Geraldine Sheedy, Gail Simon, Ronen Stilman, Patrica Talens and Ian Tucker
Click here for more information and booking
Thursday 2nd November 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Diahermeneutic delight: the heart of Daseinsanalysis
Anthony Stadlen
Click here to book
Saturday 4th November 2023 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
To change our thinking: Philosophical practice for difficult times
Helen Douglas
Click here to book
Thursday 7th December 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
The skull beneath the skin: death, suicide and existential therapy
Dr Manu Bazzano
Click here to book
Thursday 8th February 2024 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Authenticity with Heidegger and Freud
Jake Osborne
Click here to book
Saturday 24th February 2024 | 10:00 am - 11:30 am
What is it like to be a person with BPD? Lived experience at the intersection of psychoanalysis and phenomenology in the clinic
Prof Alessandra D’Agostino
Click here to book
Thursday 7th March 2024 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
The Possibility of Existential Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis
Dr Julia Cayne
Click here to book
Thursday 9th May 2024 | 6:00pm – 6:30 pm
Psychoanalysis and the Postmaternal
Joanna Kellond
Click here to book
Saturday 11th May 2024 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Jacky and the Women
Prof Charlie Gere
Click here to book
Thursday 13th June 2024
Anouchka Grose
The Birth of Ecopsychology
Click here to book
Further information:
Saturday 30th September 2023 | 9:30 am - 5:30 pm
Joint CPN & SAFPAC Conference:
Technology, AI Bots and Psychotherapy After Covid: What future for psychotherapy in a digital age?
Speakers include: Aaron Balick, Adele Greaves, Del Loewenthal, Deborah Madden, Helen Molden, Daniel Rubenstein, Geraldine Sheedy, Gail Simon, Ronen Stilman, Patrica Talens and Ian Tucker
Click here for more information and booking
Thursday 2nd November 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Diahermeneutic delight: the heart of Daseinsanalysis
Anthony Stadlen
Click here to book
Some Daseinsanalysts speak as if they have unmediated access to phenomena, which it is their task to teach to the client. Heidegger denounced "dialectic", from his early lectures of 1919 to his final seminar of 1973. Yet he described "phenomenology" in Being and Time (1927) as logos (discourse, conversation), in the middle voice, revealing phenomena. And in 1919 he said, once, that philosophical dialectic is "diahermeneutics", a term he never used again. Can Daseinsanalysis be renewed as Diahermeneutics, the stone the builders forgot?
Anthony Stadlen is a Daseinsanalyst, Independent Effective Member (UK) of the International Federation of Daseinsanalysis; convenor of Inner Circle Seminars; historical researcher on paradigm cases of psychotherapy; former Research Fellow, Freud Museum, London; recipient of Thomas S. Szasz Award for Outstanding Services to the Cause of Civil Liberties.
Saturday 4th November 2023 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
To change our thinking: Philosophical practice for difficult times
Helen Douglas
Click here to book
This talk describes the development of Douglas' philosophical counselling practice as a practice of emancipation in concert with the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Rancière. It considers the significance of personal engagement and companionship for the cultivation of a well-lived life and suggests that the intransigence of our global crises indicates an incorrect view of human nature and an ossified or unbalanced relationship between practical and theoretical ways of knowing and wisdom. As this was originally written for an academic philosophy audience, she is delighted to bring it to the SAFPAC community. To encourage a rich discussion, the paper is available here for prereading. You might also want to view the three videos on her website here.
Helen Douglas is a counselling philosopher in Cape Town, South Africa. She came to both aspects from her experience in the anti-apartheid movement in the late 1980s. Her philosophical work is largely informed by the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and the approaches of scepticism and phenomenology; her therapeutic lineage goes back to RD Laing through a long apprenticeship with Laing’s colleague, the Hungarian-Canadian psychotherapist Andrew Feldmár. Helen is the author of Love & Arms: Violence and Justification After Levinas (Pittsburgh: Trivium, 2011). In 2021, she gave a keynote address to the North American Levinas Society’s conference on Solidarity and Community. Her website, with videos and other publications, can be found at https://philosophy-practice.co.za/.
Thursday 7th December 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
The skull beneath the skin: death, suicide and existential therapy
Dr Manu Bazzano
Click here to book
Drawing on notions such as being-towards-death (Heidegger) and staring at the sun (Yalom), traditional existential therapy replicates the failings of conventional psychology: it turns death into an experience to be apprehended and managed. But death remains “unappeasable and implacable” (Levinas). Closely linked to the desire to apprehend death are the fearful ways in which conventional therapy deals with suicide and so-called suicidal ideation. I will explore whether there may be other ways of confronting death and to deal with the likelihood of suicide.
Dr Manu Bazzano is a writer, psychotherapist/supervisor in private practice, and independent researcher. Among his books: Subversion and Desire: Pathways to Transindividuation (2023) Nietzsche and Psychotherapy (2019); Re-visioning Existential Therapy: Counter-traditional Perspectives (Ed, 2020); Re-visioning Person-centred Therapy: Theory and Practice of a Radical Paradigm (Ed, 2018); Zen and Therapy: Heretical Perspectives (2017); Therapy and the Counter-tradition (co-edited with Julie Webb, 2016); After Mindfulness (Ed, 2014); Spectre of the Stranger (2012); The Speed of Angels (2013); Buddha is Dead: Nietzsche and the Dawn of European Zen (2006); Haiku For Lovers (2003); Zen Poems (2002). He studied Eastern contemplative practices since 1980 and in 2004 was ordained in the Soto and Rinzai traditions of Zen Buddhism. He has been co-editor of PCEP Journal and is associate editor of Self & Society, Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Website: manubazzano.com
Thursday 8th February 2024 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Authenticity with Heidegger and Freud
Jake Osborne
Click here to book
This seminar will look at Heidegger's understanding of authenticity in Being and Time, putting it in cultural context and contrasting it with contemporary views. We will then go on to discuss how this might help us relate to the Freudian unconscious.
Jake Osborne trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist with the Philadelphia Association, going to work for many years as a house therapist in one of their therapeutic communities as well as working with the homeless for St Mungo's. I now work for the NHS in Oxford.
Saturday 24th February 2024 | 10:00 am - 11:30 am
What is it like to be a person with BPD? Lived experience at the intersection of psychoanalysis and phenomenology in the clinic
Prof Alessandra D’Agostino
Click here to book
As Bollas points out, the constitution of a new common field of clinical intervention, consisting mainly of the borderline area, has forced many psychoanalysts to abandon interpretations based on the idea of an explanatory ‘unmasking’ (more appropriate to the traditional treatment of neurotic patients) and to become aware of the fundamental role of paying attention to the level of the patient’s immediate subjective experience in order to meet them where they are. The ‘phenomenological temptation’ in psychoanalysis, which André Green viewed with suspicion and saw as a trap, seems today to have become one of the paths that allow further ‘extensions’ of psychoanalysis. The aim of the presentation is to discuss the main theoretical-clinical areas that characterize contemporary psychoanalysis in which phenomenology can claim a legitimate (or, for some, illegitimate) position and the implications of this shift at the level of psychoanalytic technique and practice. Finally, a clinical case is presented.
Alessandra D’Agostino, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo (Italy), where she teaches Personality and Psychopathology and Clinical Psychology (BA in Psychological Sciences and Techniques) and Clinical Psychopathology (MA in Clinical Psychology). She is a psychologist, psychotherapist, and psychoanalyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI-IPA). She has completed postgraduate training in England (Anna Freud Center, London) and the United States (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA). She is a member of the College of Professors and Researchers of Clinical Psychology of Italian Universities, an ordinary member of the Italian Association of Psychology (AIP, Section of Clinical and Dynamic Psychology), and a member of the European Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ESSPD). Author of numerous publications in psychopathology and clinical areas, she serves as a reviewer for several national and international scientific journals in the field, including the Journal of Personality Disorders (Guilford) and Psychopathology (Karger). Her research interests include severe personality disorders/borderline (psychopathology and assessment), self-harm and suicide (psychopathology and assessment).
Thursday 7th March 2024 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
The Possibility of Existential Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis
Dr Julia Cayne
Click here to book
This seminar raises a question of the possibility of practising as a psychotherapist drawing on both existential phenomenology, (with reference mainly to Kierkegaard and Boss) and psychoanalysis (with reference mainly to Freud and Lacan). In comparing: the epistemological basis of each ie the philosophical approach of existential phenomenology (here considered through the stories we tell) with the logical positivism of psychoanalysis, (as abstraction/theorising); their methodological approaches; and, some case vignettes, points of divergence and convergence will be considered.
Dr Julia Cayne is an Existential-Analytic Psychotherapist, Chair of training with the Southern Association For Psychotherapy and Counselling and working in private practice in South West Wiltshire. Her interests include questions around the nature of knowledge and what kinds of knowing and unknowing best serve psychotherapeutic practice and research and in particular what phenomenology can teach us about how we learn from experience.
Thursday 9th May 2024 | 6:00pm – 7:30 pm
Psychoanalysis and the Postmaternal
Joanna Kellond
Click here to book
In her book of 2011, Confronting Postmaternal Thinking, Julie Stephens suggests that contemporary societies in the global north are decidedly ‘postmaternal.’ By this she means that they are characterised by a “widespread cultural unease, if not hostility, towards certain expressions of the maternal and maternalist political perspectives in general” (2011, ix). This talk will unpack various understandings of the term ‘postmaternal,’ both positive and negative, and consider the contribution that psychoanalytic accounts of subjective development can make to theorising the postmaternal as a utopian horizon, where practices of mothering circulate beyond, and contrary to, the nuclear family.
Joanna Kellond is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton, where she leads the BA (Hons) Politics, Sexuality and Gender. She is also a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Association. Her scholarly work is located at the intersection between psychoanalytic theory and practice and socialist-feminism. Her monograph, Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care, was published in the Palgrave Macmillan series, Studies in the Psychosocial, in 2022.
Saturday 11th May 2024 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Jacky and the Women
Prof Charlie Gere
Click here to book
Charlie's new writing project concerns Jacques Derrida’s relationship with four women in his life, and how they informed Derrida's work at various points in his life. They are his mother Monica, who is the subject of his biographical essay ‘Circonfession’, his wife Marguerite, who was a practicing psychoanalyst, and introduced him to the work of Melanie Klein, his mistress Sylviane Agacinski, who, in Charlie's view, informed his most radical work in the 1970s, including The Post Card, Glas and Cinders, and finally his friend Helene Cixous. In this talk, Charlie focuses on the relationship with Agacinski, which is the one most directly related to psychoanalysis, particularly in The Post Card, much of which takes the form of letters sent to an unnamed lover, but also includes essays on Freud’s Fort/Da and Lacan’s reading of Poe’s Purloined Letter. The last is about hiding in plain sight, which is, Gere suggests, what Derrida was doing in his work of that period.
Charlie Gere is professor of media theory and history at the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University, and the author of a number of books, most recently Unnatural Theology: Religion, Art and Media after the Death of God (2019), I Hate the Lake District (2020) and World’s End (2022).
Thursday 13th June 2024 | 6:00 - 7:30 pm
The Birth of Ecopsychology
Anouchka Grose
Click here to book
This talk will focus on the work of Theodore Roszak, who coined the term ‘ecopsychology’ in the early nineties. With hindsight, his ideas seem extraordinary prescient and useful for thinking about how to respond to climate-related distress.
Anouchka Grose is a psychoanalyst and writer practising in London. She is a member of CFAR and The College of Psychoanalysts-UK. She has written non-fiction: No More Silly Love Songs: a realist’s guide to romance (Portobello, 2010) and Are you Considering Therapy (Karnac, 2011), as well as writing fiction: Ringing for You (Harper Collins, 1999) and Darling Daisy (Harper Collins, 2000). She is the editor of Hysteria Today (2015), a collection of essays on hysteria in the contemporary psychoanalytic clinic. Her journalism is published in The Guardian, and she also writes for numerous art and fashion publications. She has taught at Camberwell School of Art and gives talks on art and psychoanalysis in museums and galleries, as well as sometimes speaking on the radio.
SAFPAC Conference and Seminars 2022-2023
All events will take place on Zoom. A Zoom link will be provided upon booking.
There are limited spaces available to attend Thursday evening events in person in Wimbledon, please contact us at [email protected] for further information if you are interested. .
The following are open to all. Please distribute to anyone you think would be interested.
For further information, contact Prof Del Loewenthal:
[email protected]
Thursday 3rd November 2022 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Sartre and Psychoanalysis: The Role of Freedom in the Clinical Encouter
Dr Michael Guy Thompson (USA)
Click here to book
Saturday 5th November 2022 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Anxiety About Absurdity
Prof Jonathan Webber
Click here to book
Thursday 1st December 2022 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Risking experiencing and speaking: fear of intoxication, and not being afraid enough of the intoxication involveed in feeling that we are above intoxication
Dr Onel Brooks
Click here to book
Thursday 2nd February 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Transparency Matters
Dr Rosie Rizq
Click here to book
Thursday 2nd March 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Thinking Psychoanalysis Differently
Dr Peter Nevins
Click here to book
Thursday 4th May 2023 | 6:00pm – 6:30 pm
The Other Side of Abyssal Psychoanalysis
Dr Robert Beshara
Click here to book
Saturday 13th May 2023 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Hearing Other Voices - The Ear as the Eye of Invisible Class Oppression
Dr Anastasios Gaitanidis
Click here to book
Thursday 8th June 2023
Psychotherapy as Subversive Art
Dr Manu Bazzano
Click here to book
Further information:
Saturday 1st October 2022 | 9:30 am – 5:30 pm
Joint Annual Conference: Critical Psychotherapy Network (CPN) and Southern Association for Psychotherapy and Counselling (SAFPAC): Diversity and Inclusion:
Everything a psychotherapist may need to know about ‘intersectional feminist, trans*, critical race/whiteness, migration, (in)equality, queer, disability, post-colonial, decolonial, approaches and studies’ but may be too afraid to ask?
Speakers include: Speakers include: Christian Buckland, Artemis Christinaki, Laura Evers,
Nicole Chew-Helbig, Erene Hadjiioannou, Geourgiou Konstantinos, Del Loewenthal, Daryl Mahon, Anthony McSherry, Peter Meades, Silva Neves, Gillian Proctor, Julian-Pascal Saadi, James Sedgwick
Click here for more information and booking
Thursday 3rd November 2022 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Sartre and Psychoanalysis: The Role of Freedom in the Clinical Encouter
Dr Michael Guy Thompson (USA)
Click here to book
In this presentation Michael Guy Thompson will explore Jean-Paul Sartre’s relationship to psychoanalysis, including Freud’s conception of the unconscious and the role of freedom in the therapeutic encounter. He will also examine Sartre’s theory of the
emotions and their role in psychic conflict, concluding with how change is a possible outcome of psychoanalytic treatment.
Michael Guy Thompson received his psychoanalytic training from R. D. Laing and associates at the Philadelphia Association in London in the 1970s and is Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and a member of the IPA. He founded Free Association, Inc., in the 1980s in San Francisco to disseminate the legacy of Laing and hosts annual symposia at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California in his honor. Dr. Thompson is the author of numerous books and journal articles, the most recent of which is THE DEATH OF DESIRE: AN EXISTENTIAL STUDY IN SANITY AND MADNESS (2016, 2nd Ed.), an homage to his work with Laing. He lives in Berkeley, CA.
Saturday 5th November 2022 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Anxiety About Absurdity
Prof Jonathan Webber
Click here to book
This talk traces the idea that anxiety is the feeling that life is absurd. It begins with the thought that there is no God to determine the meaning and value of our endeavours (Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky), then shows how this motivates the simpler idea that the world does not display any meaning or value that would justify our endeavours (Kafka, Camus), which in turn becomes the more precise claim that the meanings and values we experience are dependent on our goals and so cannot justify those goals (Sartre, Beauvoir; also indebted to Heidegger, Kierkegaard). The talk will then briefly sketch Beauvoir's response to this problem, her argument for the moral imperative to respect human freedom and the positive value of human endeavours within the constraints of that imperative.
Professor Jonathan Webber is Head of Philosophy at Cardiff University and President of the UK Sartre Society. His most recent book Rethinking Existentialism is available in paperback from Oxford University Press.
Thursday 1st December 2022 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Risking experiencing and speaking: fear of intoxication, and not being afraid enough of the intoxication involveed in feeling that we are above intoxication
Dr Onel Brooks
Click here to book
Here, Onel is concerned with how speaking and experiencing might reveal and uncover how we are afraid of the intoxication of desire, and how in our intoxication with our self-image, we might want to see ourselves as above intoxication.
Dr Onel Brooks is particularly interested in philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is a core member of the SAFPAC (www.safpac.co.uk) teaching team and was a senior lecturer in Psychotherapy, Counselling and Counselling Psychology, Psychology Department, Roehampton University. He is BACP-accredited and UKCP registered as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and as an existential analytic psychotherapist. As well as working in universities, he has worked for many years with adolescents and adults, in therapeutic communities, the NHS and in voluntary organisations. He also contributes to the teaching at The Philadelphia Association, London
Thursday 2nd February 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Transparency Matters
Dr Rosie Rizq
Click here to book
As psychologists, counsellors, and psychotherapists, we are told that transparency is foundational to ‘scientific inquiry’. But why does the credibility of research rest on the transparency of the methods, measures and processes deployed in the research process? Transparency is a concept with a long history. It is rooted in Enlightenment ideals, where notions of visibility and clarity became associated with responsible decision-making predicated on established rules and procedures available to all. Indeed, the notion that ‘to see is to know’ now so firmly grounds our current way of being in and understanding the world, it is hard to imagine otherwise. But if transparency privileges the visibility of information, does it also mandate the visibility of the self?
In this talk, I will offer a critical perspective on the pre-eminent status of transparency in our contemporary research culture. Drawing on the practices of poetry and psychoanalysis I will explore how knowledge can come about by means of something other than the disclosures proposed by the ‘transparency agenda’. Along the way, I will critique the prevailing ‘business ontology’ privileged by neoliberal aims within psychotherapeutic education and training.
Rosemary Rizq, PhD. is professor of psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the University of Roehampton where she teaches psychoanalytic theory and practice on the doctoral programme in Counselling Psychology. She also has a private practice in West London. She has published widely on issues related to organisational dynamics and psychotherapeutic training and practice, and her latest book The Industrialisation of Care, co-edited with Catherine Jackson, was published in 2019 by PCCS Books.
Thursday 2nd March 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Thinking Psychoanalysis Differently
Dr Peter Nevins
Click here to book
The kind of psychoanalysis I am interested in is the kind that places the social at the forefront of our explanatory world. This kind of psychoanalysis for me involves a consideration of the philosophical concepts of Phenomenology and pragmatism. The seminar will explore how we can think psychoanalysis differently.
Dr Nevins has been a Psychoanalyst in private practice since 1995. He holds a Doctorate in clinical science in psychotherapy from University of Kent. He was a founder member of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He teaches at various psychoanalytic training institutions. Dr Nevins has worked in mental health services in London since 1987 and was the Chief Executive Officer at Islington Mind a London based mental health charity from 2001 – 2020. He is an accredited Alternative Dispute Resolution Mediator with experience of both corporate mediation and mediation between patients and therapists. He is interested in Phenomenology and psychoanalysis and how the disciplines of psychology and philosophy can inform the practice of psychoanalysis
Thursday 4th May 2023 | 6:00pm – 6:30 pm
The Other Side of Abyssal Psychoanalysis
Dr Robert Beshara
Click here to book
This talk offers a critique of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, which is read not only as a modern field but also as a colonial project. The attempt is not to reject psychoanalysis altogether, for it contains within itself the potential for its own liberation. Rather, the aim of the critique is expanding psychoanalysis beyond its comfort zone within modern epistemology by way of the decolonial theorizing of Boaventura de Sousa Santos.
Robert K. Beshara is the author of Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies (Routledge, 2019), Freud and Said: Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis (Palgrave, 2021), and From Kanye to Ye: The Legacy of Unconditional Love (Punctum, forthcoming). He is also the editor of A Critical Introduction to Psychology (Nova, 2019) and Critical Psychology Praxis: Psychosocial Non-Alignment to Modernity/Coloniality (Routledge, 2021). Further, he is the translator of Mourad Wahba’s (1995) Fundamentalism and Secularization (Bloomsbury, 2022). He is the founder of the Critical Psychology website: www.criticalpsychology.org. For more information, please visit www.robertbeshara.com
Saturday 13th May 2023 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Hearing Other Voices - The Ear as the Eye of Invisible Class Oppression
Dr Anastasios Gaitanidis
Click here to book
In a world where the only acceptable ideological perspectives are those of the affluent middle class, being poor and a member of the working class is not anymore either conceivable or possible, as this subject position is not available within the hegemonic neo-liberal discourse. As a result, members of the working class have been symbolically erased - although they are still alive and materially constrained by their class position, they have been rendered invisible by being ideologically assassinated. I would like to argue that the function of the therapist is not unlike that of a blind seer, one who could use his ears to see what has been ideologically disavowed and excluded from representation and visibility. But what happens when the erasure of class as a social category and the concomitant symbolic (and, at times, literal) assassination of the working class is what also what operates in the therapist’s unconscious? In this case, there is a need to pay attention to the lingering cries of the assassinated, the un-dead who still haunt our (and our patients’) bodies and minds. By hearing their laments and recognising their affliction, we can lift the curse of their invisibility and offer them a relational home where their suffering can be redeemed.
Dr Anastasios Gaitanidis is a Relational Psychoanalyst in private practice. In addition to his clinical work, Anastasios held appointments as a Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies as well as provided clinical and research supervision to trainee psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors and counselling psychologists at the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Regent’s University London, University of Roehampton, and Metanoia Institute. Anastasios is the Theory Editor of the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling (EJPC) and an author who published a substantial body of academic work including journal articles and edited books over the years, with a recent book publication entitled “The Sublime in Everyday Life: Psychoanalytic and Aesthetic Perspectives”.
Thursday 8th June 2023
Psychotherapy as Subversive Art
Dr Manu Bazzano
Click here to book
It is hight time for psychotherapy to come of age: to leave behind the Mommy-Daddy scenarios of its own infancy which keep it confined; to resist the allure of neoliberal gadgetry and gimmickry which turn it into another tool in the hands of the reactive forces of stupidity and control. Only then will it fulfil its role of becoming a subversive art. This seminar will capitalize from key insights present in Critical Theory and Post-Phenomenology.
Dr Manu Bazzano is a psychotherapist, supervisor, author and internationally recognized lecturer, author and facilitator. His latest book is 'Subversion and Desire: Pathways to Transindividuation'.
There are limited spaces available to attend Thursday evening events in person in Wimbledon, please contact us at [email protected] for further information if you are interested. .
The following are open to all. Please distribute to anyone you think would be interested.
For further information, contact Prof Del Loewenthal:
[email protected]
Thursday 3rd November 2022 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Sartre and Psychoanalysis: The Role of Freedom in the Clinical Encouter
Dr Michael Guy Thompson (USA)
Click here to book
Saturday 5th November 2022 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Anxiety About Absurdity
Prof Jonathan Webber
Click here to book
Thursday 1st December 2022 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Risking experiencing and speaking: fear of intoxication, and not being afraid enough of the intoxication involveed in feeling that we are above intoxication
Dr Onel Brooks
Click here to book
Thursday 2nd February 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Transparency Matters
Dr Rosie Rizq
Click here to book
Thursday 2nd March 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Thinking Psychoanalysis Differently
Dr Peter Nevins
Click here to book
Thursday 4th May 2023 | 6:00pm – 6:30 pm
The Other Side of Abyssal Psychoanalysis
Dr Robert Beshara
Click here to book
Saturday 13th May 2023 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Hearing Other Voices - The Ear as the Eye of Invisible Class Oppression
Dr Anastasios Gaitanidis
Click here to book
Thursday 8th June 2023
Psychotherapy as Subversive Art
Dr Manu Bazzano
Click here to book
Further information:
Saturday 1st October 2022 | 9:30 am – 5:30 pm
Joint Annual Conference: Critical Psychotherapy Network (CPN) and Southern Association for Psychotherapy and Counselling (SAFPAC): Diversity and Inclusion:
Everything a psychotherapist may need to know about ‘intersectional feminist, trans*, critical race/whiteness, migration, (in)equality, queer, disability, post-colonial, decolonial, approaches and studies’ but may be too afraid to ask?
Speakers include: Speakers include: Christian Buckland, Artemis Christinaki, Laura Evers,
Nicole Chew-Helbig, Erene Hadjiioannou, Geourgiou Konstantinos, Del Loewenthal, Daryl Mahon, Anthony McSherry, Peter Meades, Silva Neves, Gillian Proctor, Julian-Pascal Saadi, James Sedgwick
Click here for more information and booking
Thursday 3rd November 2022 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Sartre and Psychoanalysis: The Role of Freedom in the Clinical Encouter
Dr Michael Guy Thompson (USA)
Click here to book
In this presentation Michael Guy Thompson will explore Jean-Paul Sartre’s relationship to psychoanalysis, including Freud’s conception of the unconscious and the role of freedom in the therapeutic encounter. He will also examine Sartre’s theory of the
emotions and their role in psychic conflict, concluding with how change is a possible outcome of psychoanalytic treatment.
Michael Guy Thompson received his psychoanalytic training from R. D. Laing and associates at the Philadelphia Association in London in the 1970s and is Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and a member of the IPA. He founded Free Association, Inc., in the 1980s in San Francisco to disseminate the legacy of Laing and hosts annual symposia at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California in his honor. Dr. Thompson is the author of numerous books and journal articles, the most recent of which is THE DEATH OF DESIRE: AN EXISTENTIAL STUDY IN SANITY AND MADNESS (2016, 2nd Ed.), an homage to his work with Laing. He lives in Berkeley, CA.
Saturday 5th November 2022 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Anxiety About Absurdity
Prof Jonathan Webber
Click here to book
This talk traces the idea that anxiety is the feeling that life is absurd. It begins with the thought that there is no God to determine the meaning and value of our endeavours (Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky), then shows how this motivates the simpler idea that the world does not display any meaning or value that would justify our endeavours (Kafka, Camus), which in turn becomes the more precise claim that the meanings and values we experience are dependent on our goals and so cannot justify those goals (Sartre, Beauvoir; also indebted to Heidegger, Kierkegaard). The talk will then briefly sketch Beauvoir's response to this problem, her argument for the moral imperative to respect human freedom and the positive value of human endeavours within the constraints of that imperative.
Professor Jonathan Webber is Head of Philosophy at Cardiff University and President of the UK Sartre Society. His most recent book Rethinking Existentialism is available in paperback from Oxford University Press.
Thursday 1st December 2022 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Risking experiencing and speaking: fear of intoxication, and not being afraid enough of the intoxication involveed in feeling that we are above intoxication
Dr Onel Brooks
Click here to book
Here, Onel is concerned with how speaking and experiencing might reveal and uncover how we are afraid of the intoxication of desire, and how in our intoxication with our self-image, we might want to see ourselves as above intoxication.
Dr Onel Brooks is particularly interested in philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is a core member of the SAFPAC (www.safpac.co.uk) teaching team and was a senior lecturer in Psychotherapy, Counselling and Counselling Psychology, Psychology Department, Roehampton University. He is BACP-accredited and UKCP registered as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and as an existential analytic psychotherapist. As well as working in universities, he has worked for many years with adolescents and adults, in therapeutic communities, the NHS and in voluntary organisations. He also contributes to the teaching at The Philadelphia Association, London
Thursday 2nd February 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Transparency Matters
Dr Rosie Rizq
Click here to book
As psychologists, counsellors, and psychotherapists, we are told that transparency is foundational to ‘scientific inquiry’. But why does the credibility of research rest on the transparency of the methods, measures and processes deployed in the research process? Transparency is a concept with a long history. It is rooted in Enlightenment ideals, where notions of visibility and clarity became associated with responsible decision-making predicated on established rules and procedures available to all. Indeed, the notion that ‘to see is to know’ now so firmly grounds our current way of being in and understanding the world, it is hard to imagine otherwise. But if transparency privileges the visibility of information, does it also mandate the visibility of the self?
In this talk, I will offer a critical perspective on the pre-eminent status of transparency in our contemporary research culture. Drawing on the practices of poetry and psychoanalysis I will explore how knowledge can come about by means of something other than the disclosures proposed by the ‘transparency agenda’. Along the way, I will critique the prevailing ‘business ontology’ privileged by neoliberal aims within psychotherapeutic education and training.
Rosemary Rizq, PhD. is professor of psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the University of Roehampton where she teaches psychoanalytic theory and practice on the doctoral programme in Counselling Psychology. She also has a private practice in West London. She has published widely on issues related to organisational dynamics and psychotherapeutic training and practice, and her latest book The Industrialisation of Care, co-edited with Catherine Jackson, was published in 2019 by PCCS Books.
Thursday 2nd March 2023 | 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Thinking Psychoanalysis Differently
Dr Peter Nevins
Click here to book
The kind of psychoanalysis I am interested in is the kind that places the social at the forefront of our explanatory world. This kind of psychoanalysis for me involves a consideration of the philosophical concepts of Phenomenology and pragmatism. The seminar will explore how we can think psychoanalysis differently.
Dr Nevins has been a Psychoanalyst in private practice since 1995. He holds a Doctorate in clinical science in psychotherapy from University of Kent. He was a founder member of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He teaches at various psychoanalytic training institutions. Dr Nevins has worked in mental health services in London since 1987 and was the Chief Executive Officer at Islington Mind a London based mental health charity from 2001 – 2020. He is an accredited Alternative Dispute Resolution Mediator with experience of both corporate mediation and mediation between patients and therapists. He is interested in Phenomenology and psychoanalysis and how the disciplines of psychology and philosophy can inform the practice of psychoanalysis
Thursday 4th May 2023 | 6:00pm – 6:30 pm
The Other Side of Abyssal Psychoanalysis
Dr Robert Beshara
Click here to book
This talk offers a critique of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, which is read not only as a modern field but also as a colonial project. The attempt is not to reject psychoanalysis altogether, for it contains within itself the potential for its own liberation. Rather, the aim of the critique is expanding psychoanalysis beyond its comfort zone within modern epistemology by way of the decolonial theorizing of Boaventura de Sousa Santos.
Robert K. Beshara is the author of Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies (Routledge, 2019), Freud and Said: Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis (Palgrave, 2021), and From Kanye to Ye: The Legacy of Unconditional Love (Punctum, forthcoming). He is also the editor of A Critical Introduction to Psychology (Nova, 2019) and Critical Psychology Praxis: Psychosocial Non-Alignment to Modernity/Coloniality (Routledge, 2021). Further, he is the translator of Mourad Wahba’s (1995) Fundamentalism and Secularization (Bloomsbury, 2022). He is the founder of the Critical Psychology website: www.criticalpsychology.org. For more information, please visit www.robertbeshara.com
Saturday 13th May 2023 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Hearing Other Voices - The Ear as the Eye of Invisible Class Oppression
Dr Anastasios Gaitanidis
Click here to book
In a world where the only acceptable ideological perspectives are those of the affluent middle class, being poor and a member of the working class is not anymore either conceivable or possible, as this subject position is not available within the hegemonic neo-liberal discourse. As a result, members of the working class have been symbolically erased - although they are still alive and materially constrained by their class position, they have been rendered invisible by being ideologically assassinated. I would like to argue that the function of the therapist is not unlike that of a blind seer, one who could use his ears to see what has been ideologically disavowed and excluded from representation and visibility. But what happens when the erasure of class as a social category and the concomitant symbolic (and, at times, literal) assassination of the working class is what also what operates in the therapist’s unconscious? In this case, there is a need to pay attention to the lingering cries of the assassinated, the un-dead who still haunt our (and our patients’) bodies and minds. By hearing their laments and recognising their affliction, we can lift the curse of their invisibility and offer them a relational home where their suffering can be redeemed.
Dr Anastasios Gaitanidis is a Relational Psychoanalyst in private practice. In addition to his clinical work, Anastasios held appointments as a Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies as well as provided clinical and research supervision to trainee psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors and counselling psychologists at the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Regent’s University London, University of Roehampton, and Metanoia Institute. Anastasios is the Theory Editor of the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling (EJPC) and an author who published a substantial body of academic work including journal articles and edited books over the years, with a recent book publication entitled “The Sublime in Everyday Life: Psychoanalytic and Aesthetic Perspectives”.
Thursday 8th June 2023
Psychotherapy as Subversive Art
Dr Manu Bazzano
Click here to book
It is hight time for psychotherapy to come of age: to leave behind the Mommy-Daddy scenarios of its own infancy which keep it confined; to resist the allure of neoliberal gadgetry and gimmickry which turn it into another tool in the hands of the reactive forces of stupidity and control. Only then will it fulfil its role of becoming a subversive art. This seminar will capitalize from key insights present in Critical Theory and Post-Phenomenology.
Dr Manu Bazzano is a psychotherapist, supervisor, author and internationally recognized lecturer, author and facilitator. His latest book is 'Subversion and Desire: Pathways to Transindividuation'.
SAFPAC Conference and Seminars 2021-2022
Each of the following seminars are on Zoom. Further information of each can be found at the end of the list.
2nd October 2021 | 10:00 am - 5:00 pm
SAFPAC/CPN Joint Zoom Conference
Psychotherapy and Healthy Masculinity: Exploring our values, and what stops us thinking about them, when working psychotherapeutically with increasingly unstable notions of masculinity
Click here to book
4th November 2021 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
What’s so different about existential therapy?
Professor Ernesto Spinelli
Click here to book
6th November 2021 | 10:00 am - 11:30 pm
Rethinking Existentialism in Psychotherapy
Johnathan Webber
Click here to book
9th December 2021 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Fanon’s phenomenological, psychopolitical therapy
Erica Burman
Click here to book
3rd February 2022 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
'What the butler never said: from fiction to psychoanalysis in Kazuo Ishiguro's 'The Remains of the Day'
Rosie Risq
Click here to book
26th February 2022 | 10:00 am - 11:30 am
'Cézanne and the post-ionian field'
Robert Snell
Click here to book
3rd March 2022 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Freud, Play and Creativity
Ivan Ward
Click here to book
12th May 2022 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
The New Opium: the collusive relationship between neoliberalism and mental health.
James Davies
Click here to book
9th June 2022 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Reflections on psychoanalysis and class: Andrea Arnold and Donald Winnicott
Vicky Lebeau
Click here to book
Further information:
2nd October 2021
SAFPAC/CPN Joint Zoom Conference Saturday 2nd October 2021
Psychotherapy and Healthy Masculinity: Exploring our values, and what stops us thinking about them, when working psychotherapeutically with increasingly unstable notions of masculinity
Speakers include: Manu Bazzano, Anastasios Gaitanidis, Robert Grossmark, Chris Hemmings, Del Loewenthal, Alexandra Macht, Anthony McSherry, Sally Parsloe and John Taggart
£15 waged £5 unwaged
Attendance: 6 hours CPD
Click here for more information
Seminars and events 2021-2022
Until further notice, all events will be held on Zoom. A Zoom link will be provided upon booking.
The following are open to all. Please distribute to anyone you think would be interested.
For further information, contact Prof Del Loewenthal, [email protected]
4th November 2021 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
What’s so different about existential therapy?
Professor Ernesto Spinelli
Click here to book
It has been noted by many that there are probably at least as many existential therapies as there are existential therapists. As such, any attempt to define existential therapy is bound to be disputed. Acknowledging this, I will try to offer something of my version of existential therapy, focusing mainly on issues and questions regarding its practice and the implications that this may have on current attempts by both professional bodies and government to place psychotherapy and counselling within a the strictures and conditions of a quasi-medical context.
Professor Ernesto Spinelli was Chair of the Society for Existential Analysis between 1993 and 1999 and is a Life Member of the Society. His writings, lectures and seminars focus on the application of existential phenomenology to the arenas of therapy, psychology, and executive coaching. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS) as well as an APECS accredited executive coach and coaching supervisor. In 1999, Ernesto was awarded a Personal Chair as Professor of psychotherapy, counselling and counselling psychology. In 2000, he was the Recipient of BPS Division of Counselling Psychology Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Profession. And in 2019, Ernesto received the BPS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Practice. His most recent book, Practising Existential Therapy: The Relational World 2nd edition (Sage, 2015) has been widely praised as a major contribution to the advancement of existential theory and practice.
6th November 2021 | 10:00 am - 11:30 pm
Rethinking Existentialism in Psychotherapy
Johnathan Webber
Click here to book
The existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir has important contributions to make to the theory and practice of psychotherapy that have been obscured by seeing their work purely in the context of the existential tradition epitomised by Kierkegaard and Heidegger. In this talk, we will see that reading them within the broad psychoanalytic tradition provides insights into the nature and origins of distress, potential therapeutic routes for reducing distress, and an original way of thinking about the goals of therapy. We will consider three of their central concepts: projects, freedom, and bad faith. We will conclude with some reflections on the limitations of their understanding of human agency in relation to neurodiversity.
Professor Jonathan Webber is Head of Philosophy at Cardiff University and President of the UK Sartre Society. His most recent book Rethinking Existentialism is available in paperback from Oxford University Press.
2nd December 2021 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Fanon’s phenomenological, psychopolitical therapy
Erica Burman
Click here to book
Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary psychiatrist and activist, is more typically known for his explicitly political writings. However more recent attention has turned to consider how these relate to his therapeutic work and writings. When he became clinical director of Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria, Fanon adopted and adapted a form of institutional psychotherapy whose clinical implications have yet to be fully recognised and applied in Anglophone contexts (and beyond). In this talk I consider these developments, and hopefully we will discuss the continuing relevance of his – unfinished – project.
Erica is Professor of Education at the University of Manchester, Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and a United Kingdom Council of Psychotherapists registered Group Analyst (and full member of the Institute of Group Analysis). She trained as a developmental psychologist, and is well known as a critical developmental psychologist and methodologist specialising in innovative and activist qualitative research. She is author of Developments: child, image, nation (Routledge, 2020, 2nd edition), Fanon, education, action: child as method (Routledge, 2019) and Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (Routledge, 3rd edition, 2017). Erica co-founded the Discourse Unit (www.discourseunit.com) a transinstitutional, transdisciplinary network researching the reproduction and transformation of language and subjectivity. Erica's research has focused on critical developmental and educational psychology, feminist and postcolonial theory, childhood studies, and on critical mental health practice (particularly around gender and cultural issues). Much of her current work addresses the connections between emotions, mental health and (social as well as individual) change, in particular as anchored by representations of, and appeals to, childhood. She has co-led funded research projects on conceptualising and challenging state and interpersonal violence in relation to minoritised women and children, and on educational and mental health impacts of poverty and 'austerity'. She currently leads the Knowledge, Power and Identity research strand of the Education and Psychology research group at Manchester Institute of Education (see http://www.seed.manchester.ac.uk/education/research/research-themes-and-projects/sean/projects/knowledge-power-identity/ and works in the team running the Professional Doctorate in Counselling Psychology. For further information see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/Erica.burman/ and www.ericaburman.com). She is a past Chair of the Psychology of Women Section of the British Psychological Society, and in 2016 she was awarded an Honorary Lifetime Fellowship of the British Psychological Society in recognition of her contribution to Psychology.
3rd February 2022 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
'What the butler never said: from fiction to psychoanalysis in Kazuo Ishiguro's 'The Remains of the Day'
Rosie Risq
Click here to book
What can psychoanalysis learn from literary fiction? In this paper, I suggest that Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day sheds light on what Freud (1900), in The Interpretation of Dreams, calls the “day-residues”; those unnoticed memories and fragments of experience that in the dream come to be imbued with psychic significance. Drawing on Freud, Laplanche, Bollas and Barthes as well as a brief clinical example, I explore parallels between the inarticulate nature of the knowledge embodied in Ishiguro’s novel and the tacit kind of knowing exemplified within the psychoanalytic transference. I conclude that literary fiction has the capacity to illuminate how psychoanalysis accommodates and expands the borders of knowledge that is unspoken or inaccessible.
Rosemary Rizq, PhD C. Psychol. AFBPsS. FHEA. is a Chartered Psychologist, an HCPC-registered counselling psychologist and a UKCP-accredited psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She is Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the University of Roehampton and for many years worked as Specialist Lead for Research and Development for NHS Ealing. She has also worked as an Adult Psychotherapist for North-East London Foundation NHS Trust’s Forest House Psychotherapy Clinic. She now has a part-time private practice in West London. Rosemary has published widely on issues related to organisational dynamics and psychotherapeutic training and practice. She is currently preparing a book about the relationship between psychoanalysis and fiction, to be published by Routledge in 2022.
3rd March 2022 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Freud, Play and Creativity
Ivan Ward
Click here to book
Freud is not often regarded as a theorist of play and creativity, yet these subjects form a significant part of his work and can offer an engaging way to understand some of his basic concepts. This talk looks at play through a Freudian lens, revealing explanations that are both simple and profound.
Ivan Ward is Head of Learning Emeritus at the Freud Museum London and former manager of the museum’s conference programme. He is the author of a number of books and papers on psychoanalytic theory and on the applications of psychoanalysis to social and cultural issues. A video of his recent talk ‘The psychological effects of racism’ can be found on the Tavistock Clinic YouTube channel. He is an honorary research associate at UCL Psychoanalysis Unit.
5th May 2022 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
The New Opium: the collusive relationship between neoliberalism and mental health
James Davies
Click here to book
Davies will offer a provocative look at how western society is misunderstanding and mistreating mental health problems, at the depoliticization of distress and just how damaging the privileging of drug treatments for economic and political reasons has been. He will systematically examine why our individualistic view of 'mental illness' has been promoted by successive governments and big business - and why it is so misplaced and dangerous.
In Britain alone, more than 20% of the adult population take a psychiatric drug in any one year. This is an increase of over 500% since 1980 and the numbers continue to grow. Yet, despite this prescription epidemic, levels of distress of all types have increased. Using a wealth of studies, interviews with experts, and detailed analysis, Dr James Davies argues that this is because we have fundamentally mischaracterised the problem. Rather than viewing most mental distress as an understandable reaction to wider societal problems, we have embraced a medical model which situates the problem solely within the sufferer and their brain
Dr James Davies graduated from the University of Oxford in 2006 with a PhD in social and medical anthropology. He is now a Reader in social anthropology and psychology at the University of Roehampton. James is also a psychotherapist, who started working for the NHS in 2004. He is the co-founder of the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry (CEP), which is secretariat to the All Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence. James' most recent book is Sedated: how modern capitalism created our mental health crisis. He is also the author of the bestselling book Cracked, which was his first book written for a wider audience. It is a critical exploration of modern-day psychiatry based on interviews with leaders of the profession. Other than Cracked, James has published four academic books with presses such as Stanford University Press, Karnac Press, Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge. James has spoken about his research internationally, including at the universities of Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Brown, UCL, Oslo, Columbia (New York), The New School (New York), and CUNY Graduate Centre (New York). James has also written for the media.
9th June 2022 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Reflections on psychoanalysis and class: Andrea Arnold and Donald Winnicott
Vicky Lebeau
Click here to book
Psychoanalysis, class: on the face of it, not a promising conjuncture. Psychoanalysis may be one of the central interpretative frameworks of modern Western cultures, but there is a widely-held view that it is has little, if anything, to say about lives that fail to ‘fit’ within its frames: class, as Lynne Layton has put it, is one of its last taboos. In bringing Winnicott together with Andrea Arnold – a contemporary British film-maker, renowned for what she describes as her ‘passion for the real and the method for filming it’ – this paper attempts to explore that taboo – to open up a potential space between psychoanalysis and class via the provocation of Arnold’s short film Wasp (2003).
The talk will be framed around the film, which is freely available to watch on Vimeo at: https://vimeo.com/622764590
The film is about 25 minutes long; it explores the relation between a young, single mum and her four children, and the conflict between her role as a mother and her wish for a ‘break’, a ‘night out’ (what might otherwise be called a ‘full life’).
Vicky Lebeau is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and a trainee member of the British Psychotherapy Foundation. She is currently completing Feeling Poor: Psychoanalysis and Class and a book on Fanon’s Freud. She is a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council.
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