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, chair@safpac.co.uk
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.
26th February 2022 | 10:00 am - 11:30 am
'Cézanne and the post-Bionian field'
Robert Snell
Click here to book
Robert invites us to a conversation/seminar-with-pictures/discussion centred on Robert’s recent book Cézanne and the post-Bionian field: an exploration and a meditation (Routledge, 2021).
Robert’s book is an introduction to Cézanne - the ‘father of modern art’ - and to one of the most interesting developments in contemporary psychoanalysis: the post-Bionian theory of the field, as it has been evolving in Italy in the hands of Antonino Ferro, Giuseppe Civitarese, and others.
Cézanne and Bion pioneered fundamentally new directions in painting and in psychoanalysis. Both allow us to develop a vital insight: we are not merely isolated, self-contained ‘subjects’, trying to connect with each other across some neutral ether. We exist, rather, within a dynamic, interpersonal ‘field’, which we are also constantly co-creating. The experience of looking at Cézanne’s painting can give us powerful intimations of this.
The Italian field analysts build on Bion’s work, as well as on Lewin and Merleau-Ponty, group and narrative theory, and theatre, cinema, literature and visual art. For them, the particular, interpersonal field created in the analytic encounter is a sort of unconscious, a living ‘multiverse’ of images, storylines, and ‘characters’ in search of a voice and an author (‘thoughts waiting for a thinker’, as Bion put it). More than the supposed psychology of the individual, it is this populous and multi-dimensional ‘in-between’, the field, that is to be explored and ‘elaborated’, and the primary points of access to it are reverie, metaphor and dream.
All this has profound implications for technique. A field-sensitive psychoanalysis proceeds, like the painter, by unsaturated ‘touches’, and allows the primitive ‘proto-emotions’ that link us all to be transformed - just as Cézanne transformed what he famously called his ‘sensations’ - into feelings-linked-to-thoughts that in turn enrich and expand the field and its co-generators. It is a quintessentially aesthetic transformation.
Robert Snell is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, and a PS and BPF member. He is also an art historian, and the author of Uncertainties, Mysteries, Doubts. Romanticism and the Analytic Attitude (Routledge, 2012), and Portraits of the Insane. Théodore Géricault and the Subject of Psychotherapy (Karnac, 2016), and the co-author, with Del Loewenthal, of Postmodernism for Psychotherapists. A Critical Reader (Rouledge, 2003).
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.
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
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 youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VEwcAAJ-LEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VEwcAAJ-LE.
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.
Click here for a list of previous events
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, chair@safpac.co.uk
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.
26th February 2022 | 10:00 am - 11:30 am
'Cézanne and the post-Bionian field'
Robert Snell
Click here to book
Robert invites us to a conversation/seminar-with-pictures/discussion centred on Robert’s recent book Cézanne and the post-Bionian field: an exploration and a meditation (Routledge, 2021).
Robert’s book is an introduction to Cézanne - the ‘father of modern art’ - and to one of the most interesting developments in contemporary psychoanalysis: the post-Bionian theory of the field, as it has been evolving in Italy in the hands of Antonino Ferro, Giuseppe Civitarese, and others.
Cézanne and Bion pioneered fundamentally new directions in painting and in psychoanalysis. Both allow us to develop a vital insight: we are not merely isolated, self-contained ‘subjects’, trying to connect with each other across some neutral ether. We exist, rather, within a dynamic, interpersonal ‘field’, which we are also constantly co-creating. The experience of looking at Cézanne’s painting can give us powerful intimations of this.
The Italian field analysts build on Bion’s work, as well as on Lewin and Merleau-Ponty, group and narrative theory, and theatre, cinema, literature and visual art. For them, the particular, interpersonal field created in the analytic encounter is a sort of unconscious, a living ‘multiverse’ of images, storylines, and ‘characters’ in search of a voice and an author (‘thoughts waiting for a thinker’, as Bion put it). More than the supposed psychology of the individual, it is this populous and multi-dimensional ‘in-between’, the field, that is to be explored and ‘elaborated’, and the primary points of access to it are reverie, metaphor and dream.
All this has profound implications for technique. A field-sensitive psychoanalysis proceeds, like the painter, by unsaturated ‘touches’, and allows the primitive ‘proto-emotions’ that link us all to be transformed - just as Cézanne transformed what he famously called his ‘sensations’ - into feelings-linked-to-thoughts that in turn enrich and expand the field and its co-generators. It is a quintessentially aesthetic transformation.
Robert Snell is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, and a PS and BPF member. He is also an art historian, and the author of Uncertainties, Mysteries, Doubts. Romanticism and the Analytic Attitude (Routledge, 2012), and Portraits of the Insane. Théodore Géricault and the Subject of Psychotherapy (Karnac, 2016), and the co-author, with Del Loewenthal, of Postmodernism for Psychotherapists. A Critical Reader (Rouledge, 2003).
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.
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
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 youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VEwcAAJ-LEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VEwcAAJ-LE.
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.
Click here for a list of previous events
