Friday 25th - Saturday 26th November 2022
In commemorating the life and work of Neville Symington (1937- 2019), we will re-visit some of his central contributions. We hope for lively discussion that will challenge and extend psychoanalytic thought and practice. We are pleased to announce that Michael Brearley will be our in-room international guest speaker.
University of Sydney (in-room)
(Saturday in-room and webinar)
Meet our guest speakers
Michael Brearley
Michael Brearley is a Distinguished Fellow and former-President of the British Psychoanalytical Society He has been in private practice in London for 40 years, now working at less intensity. He has also given lectures and taught in several fields, especially in the Application of Psychoanalysis, the committee for which he was a member for about fourteen years, and which he chaired for six years. He has also worked in a psychotherapy unit in London, as a school counsellor, and occasionally as a consultant to companies. In earlier years, he was a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne for three years, and a professional cricketer. He captained Cambridge University, Middlesex for twelve years, and, between 1977 and 1981, England. He toured Australia for MCC three times. Since retiring he has been President of MCC and Chair of their World Cricket Committee. He has also written – papers on psychoanalysis and journalism on sport and especially its psychology. While playing, he wrote three books on Ashes series. Since retiring from cricket, he has published The Art of Captaincy (1985), On Form (2017), On Cricket (2018) and Spirit of Cricket (2020). He hopes to publish Turning over the Pebbles in 2023.
Harriet Wolfe
Harriet Wolfe, M.D. is President of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), Past President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. She has a private practice of psychoanalysis, and individual and couples’ psychoanalytic psychotherapy in San Francisco.
Louise Gyler
Louise Gyler, Ph.D. is a Child and Adult Training Analyst and President of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society, a guest member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a visiting professor at the Chinese - American Continual Training Program at Wuhan Hospital for Psychotherapy. She chairs the Programme Committee for IPA Asia-Pacific Conference 2023 (India). She authored The Gendered Unconscious: Can gender discourses subvert psychoanalysis? (Routledge, 2010). In 2007, she was runner up for Ticho Charitable Foundation Lectureship at the 45th IPA Congress, Berlin and in 2019, won the 22nd International Frances Tustin Memorial Prize and Lectureship. She has a private practice in Sydney.
Tim Keogh
Timothy Keogh PhD is a training and supervising analyst with the Sydney Branch of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society (APAS) and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Sydney. His other current roles include President of the newly formed Australian Forensic Psychotherapy Association, President of Penthos (penthos.org.au - a psychoanalytic charity providing a brief intervention for parents experiencing prolonged grief), Chair of the Ethics Committee of the Australasian Confederation of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies (ACPP), Co-Chair (Asia-Pacific) of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) Committee on Couple and Family Psychoanalysis (COFAP) and a member of the IPA Violence Committee. His forensic publications include Through a Glass Darkly: The Internal World of the Juvenile Sex Offender (Karnac).
Joan Thompson
Joan Thompson is a Psychoanalyst working with adults in private practice in London. She is Director of the Margaret Street Practice. She grew up in Australia and has lived in London for the past 26 years. Joan did her psychoanalytic training in London at the British Psychoanalytic Association (BPA). As well as seeing adults in full time practice, Joan also supervises clinicians in Australia and in London. Prior to training, Joan was in the film industry in both Australia and the UK. She still is interested in film and psychoanalysis and is currently Joint Film Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Joan founded the BPA Film Society, and until recently was a BPA Board Member and Chair of Outreach as well as being the previous Editor of the BPA Bulletin.
Louise Hird
Louise Hird is a Clinical Psychologist and a Child and Adult Training Analyst and Vice President of the Australian Psychoanalytic Society. Louise is the founder and Director of The Winn Clinic. She is an honorary lecturer at Macquarie University in the School of Clinical Medicine.
Charlie Stansfield
Charlie Stansfield is a writer and psychoanalyst working in Sydney's northern suburbs.
Talia Morag
Talia Morag (PhD, University of Sydney) is a lecturer of philosophy at the University of Wollongong. Her main research interests are philosophical psychology, especially liberal naturalism and the philosophical foundations of psychoanalysis, the philosophy of emotions, ethics, and social psychology, as well as the philosophy of television. Her book Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason was published by Routledge (2016).
David Macarthur
David Macarthur (Ph.D. Harvard) is Associate Professor in Philosophy at The University of Sydney. He has published widely on liberal naturalism, metaphysical quietism, pragmatism, skepticism, common sense, perception, ordinary language, and philosophy of art especially regarding architecture, photography and film. He edited Hilary & Ruth-Anna Putnam, Pragmatism as a Way of Life (Harvard, 2017); and with Mario De Caro co-edited: Naturalism in Question (Harvard, 2004); Naturalism and Normativity (Columbia, 2010); Hilary Putnam: Philosophy in an Age of Science (Harvard, 2012); and Hilary Putnam: Philosophy as Dialogue (Harvard, 2022). Living Skepticism (Brill, 2022) co-edited with Stephen Hetherington, is forthcoming from Brill.
Robin Chester
Robin Chester is a Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst and PhD in Psychanalytic Studies (Monash). His thesis title was: “A Critical Study of What Psychoanalysis is: The Role of Paradox”. He has presented numerous papers and seminars in Australia and overseas, mainly questioning the essential nature of psychoanalysis: the how, the what, and the why. Currently he is semi-retired from clinical work, continuing as a training analyst and conducting supervisions and outreach seminars. He is a senior visiting consultant at Flinders Medical Centre, giving weekly seminars (for last 25 years) introducing psycho dynamic theory to psychiatric registrars. Previously he was a Lecturer at Edith Cowan University.
Maurice Whelan
Maurice Whelan did his psychoanalytic training with the British Psychoanalytical Society. He was a social worker, a visiting supervisor and academic lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic. He is a member of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society. His tenth book Thought: The invisible Essence was published in 2022.
Gerard Webster
Gerard Webster is a training and supervising psychoanalyst and faculty member of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, where he previously earned a Doctor of Psychoanalysis and a PhD (Psychoanalysis) at the same Institute. He has worked with child, adolescent, and adult victims and perpetrators of crime for four decades and he is the Vice President of the Australian Forensic Psychotherapy Association.
Pamela Nathan
Pamela Nathan is a clinical and forensic psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Kew, Melbourne. She was previously a sociologist working as an academic and researcher for over a decade. She has completed co-designed research in Aboriginal health over forty years in Victoria and the Northern Territory and published three books with The Victorian Aboriginal Health Service and the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress. She has worked in the public sector in clinical and forensic settings for fifteen years. She is currently Director of the Aboriginal Program, CASSE and is working in partnership with communities, organisations and government in Alice Springs on violence and trauma. Pamela continues to practise, supervise, teach and publish in the psychological and psychoanalytic arena.
John Kearney
John Kearney is a clinical social worker and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. He treats children, adolescents, adults and couples presenting with a broad range of emotional and behavioural disturbances. This includes assessments of and treatment for children who engage in harmful sexual behaviours and for adult offenders. He also provides expert advice to the courts, government organizations and NGOs in relation to parenting capacity, child protection, family violence and permanency planning.
Susie Orbach
Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and co-founder of The Women’s Therapy Centre in London (1976) and The WTCI in New York (1981). She is the author of many books. Her most recent In Therapy: The Unfolding Story is an expanded edition of In Therapy (an annotated version of the BBC series listened to live by 2 million people). Her first book Fat is a Feminist Issue has been continuously in print since 1978. Bodies (which won the APA Psychology of Women’s Book Prize in 2009) was updated in 2019. She is the recipient of the Inaugural British Psychoanalytic Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2019. She continues to help many individuals and couples from her practice in London.
Carine Minne
Carine Minne is a psychoanalyst with the BPAS and Consultant Psychiatrist in Forensic Psychotherapy at Broadmoor Hospital and Portman Clinic (NHS, Public Health Service UK). In her work, she brings together the disciplines of forensic psychiatry and psychoanalysis to work directly with offender patients in different settings, and indirectly, via teaching, training, and lecturing to professionals from various disciplines, nationally and internationally. She is Editor-in-Chief of the IJFP (International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy). Carine also chairs the IPA Violence Committee in the Community and World. She was President of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy until May 2022.
Yolanda Gampel
Biography coming soon
Andrew Symington
Andrew Symington is a business and human rights specialist with a particular focus on the extractive industries and the impacts of the energy transition on vulnerable communities, a core topic of his PhD research at UNSW Sydney. He is an associate director at KPMG Banarra, a dedicated human rights and social impact consultancy; a research associate of the Australian Human Rights Institute and editor-in-chief of Human Rights Defender. Andy is a regular commentator and lecturer on sustainability issues and is also a widely published travel writer who has authored and co-authored over 180 guidebook titles. He has tertiary qualifications in archaeology, psychology and human rights law.
Alison O'Carroll
Alison is a registered psychologist in private practice in northern Sydney and a Candidate with the Australian Psychoanalytic Society. Prior to qualifying in psychology, she studied music at Sydney University and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music before playing professionally for 15 years. The highlight of these years was the creation of her own contemporary ensemble, Alison’s Wonderland, which produced one album of her original music titled “Once Upon a Timelessness”.
Rowena Macneish
Rowena studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the Australian National Academy of Music (Melbourne), and the Royal Academy of Music (London). During her time in London she played with Southbank Sinfonia, performing at Covent Garden, Queen Elizabeth Hall and various festivals throughout Europe. Now in Sydney Rowena plays and tours with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. She is a founding member of the Sydney Omega Ensemble and the Musica Viva Artists Enigma Quartet.
Neville Symington Commemorative Conference
Friday Programme
25th November 2022 The Refectory, Holme Building, University of Sydney
4:45—5:05
Welcome
Louise Gyler, President
Musical performance Sonata in D major by Handel Performed by Alison O'Carroll (violin) and Rowena Macneish (cello)Alison Biography
Alison is a registered psychologist in private practice in northern Sydney and a Candidate with the Australian Psychoanalytic Society. Prior to qualifying in psychology, she studied music at Sydney University and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music before playing professionally for 15 years. The highlight of these years was the creation of her own contemporary ensemble, Alison’s Wonderland , which produced one album of her original music titled “Once Upon a Timelessness”.
Rowena Biography
Rowena studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the Australian National Academy of Music (Melbourne), and the Royal Academy of Music (London). During her time in London she played with Southbank Sinfonia, performing at Covent Garden, Queen Elizabeth Hall and various festivals throughout Europe. Now in Sydney Rowena plays and tours with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. She is a founding member of the Sydney Omega Ensemble and the Musica Viva Artists Enigma Quartet.
5.05—7:00
Film Screening and Reflections
Chair: Louise Hird
Introduction to the Film of Neville Symington interviewed by Joan Thompson Speaker: Joan Thompson Discussants: Susie Orbach (online, UK), Carine Minne (pre-recorded, UK), Yolanda Gampel (online, Israel), Andrew Symington (Sydney)Joan Thompson Biography
Joan Thompson is a Psychoanalyst working with adults in private practice in London. She is Director of the Margaret Street Practice. She grew up in Australia and has lived in London for the past 26 years. Joan did her psychoanalytic training in London at the British Psychoanalytic Association (BPA). As well as seeing adults in full time practice, Joan also supervises clinicians in Australia and in London. Prior to training, Joan was in the film industry in both Australia and the UK. She still is interested in film and psychoanalysis and is currently Joint Film Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Joan founded the BPA Film Society, and is also BPA Board Member and Chair of Outreach and was the previous Editor of the BPA Bulletin.
Susie Orbach Biography
Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and co-founder of The Women’s Therapy Centre in London (1976) and The WTCI in New York (1981). She is the author of many books. Her most recent In Therapy: The Unfolding Story is an expanded edition of In Therapy (an annotated version of the BBC series listened to live by 2 million people). Her first book Fat is a Feminist Issue has been continuously in print since 1978. Bodies (which won the APA Psychology of Women’s Book Prize in 2009) was updated in 2019. She is the recipient of the Inaugural British Psychoanalytic Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2019. She continues to help many individuals and couples from her practice in London.
Carine Minne Biography
Carine Minne is a psychoanalyst with the BPAS and Consultant Psychiatrist in Forensic Psychotherapy at Broadmoor Hospital and Portman Clinic (NHS, Public Health Service UK). In her work, she brings together the disciplines of forensic psychiatry and psychoanalysis to work directly with offender patients in different settings, and indirectly, via teaching, training, and lecturing to professionals from various disciplines, nationally and internationally. She is Editor-in-Chief of the IJFP (International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy). Carine also chairs the IPA Violence Committee in the Community and World. She was President of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy until May 2022.
Andrew Symington Biography
Andrew Symington is a business and human rights specialist with a particular focus on the extractive industries and the impacts of the energy transition on vulnerable communities, a core topic of his PhD research at UNSW Sydney. He is an associate director at KPMG Banarra, a dedicated human rights and social impact consultancy; a research associate of the Australian Human Rights Institute and editor-in-chief of Human Rights Defender. Andy is a regular commentator and lecturer on sustainability issues and is also a widely published travel writer who has authored and co-authored over 180 guidebook titles. He has tertiary qualifications in archaeology, psychology and human rights law.
7:00—8:30
Cocktail reception
Neville Symington Commemorative Conference
Saturday Programme
26th November 2022 In-room: The Social Science Building lecture theatre 200, University of Sydney
Zoom webinar
8:15—8:45
Registration
8:45—9:15
Opening
Welcome: Louise Gyler, APAS President
Opening address: Harriet Wolfe, IPA President (online, USA)
9:15—10:45
Keynote lecture
Growth of mind: - person-to-person and mystery
Presenter: Michael Brearley / Chair: Louise Gyler
Abstract
I start with Neville’s ideas of what is most essential in psychoanalysis. He believed that we are all tempted to regard inessentials – rituals of practice, rules handed down in the form of both theories and technique – as central. He argues passionately for our learning to find our own deep personal convictions. This requires trusting the unconscious - setting aside memory and desires - as well as challenging it. He argues that the most important element is person-to-person relating, of an authentic kind. During his time as an analyst, he constantly reviewed and enlarged his convictions, questioning his allegiance to particular schools of thought (though he holds firmly to many of the ideas of his own analyst, John Klauber, and particularly of Wilfred Bion.) Throughout, as he puts it, he relied on, and made increasingly explicit use of, the ‘rock’ that sustained him against waves of doubt and opposition, the ideas on ontology – the eternal in the world as in the self – taught by George,??? a lecturer at his theology college. This notion provides the note of mystery alluded to in the title of this talk. He sees the notion of the core of the self in light of these ideas, which underpin and are at the root of his ability to give credit both to the absolute uniqueness of each person (and each relationship) with all its detail and particularity, along with our capacity to generalise and abstract, a capacity that is also evident in Bion’s concept of O – of being in touch with the ‘thing-in-itself’.
Biography
Michael Brearley is a Distinguished Fellow and former-President of the British Psychoanalytical Society He has been in private practice in London for 40 years, now working at less intensity. He has also given lectures and taught in several fields, especially in the Application of Psychoanalysis, the committee for which he was a member for about fourteen years, and which he chaired for six years. He has also worked in a psychotherapy unit in London, as a school counsellor, and occasionally as a consultant to companies. In earlier years, he was a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne for three years, and a professional cricketer. He captained Cambridge University, Middlesex for twelve years, and, between 1977 and 1981, England. He toured Australia for MCC three times. Since retiring he has been President of MCC and Chair of their World Cricket Committee. He has also written – papers on psychoanalysis and journalism on sport and especially its psychology. While playing, he wrote three books on Ashes series. Since retiring from cricket, he has published The Art of Captaincy (1985), On Form (2017), On Cricket (2018) and Spirit of Cricket (2020). He hopes to publish Turning over the Pebbles in 2023.
10:45—11:15
Morning Tea
11:15 - 12:45
Panel: Psychoanalytic Conversations
Presenters: Louise Hird, Charlie Stansfield, Talia Morag / Chair: Tali Israelstam
Psychoanalytic Conversations
Presenters: Louise Hird & Charlie StansfieldAbstract
Throughout his clinical, supervisory and teaching work, Neville maintained the conviction that psychoanalysis was not exclusive to psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists or psychotherapists working with patients in an intensive treatment situation. Nor did he believe that psychoanalysis lives solely within an IPA credentialed psychoanalyst, organisation or was even first discovered by Freud!
This panel will discuss Neville's wide, sometimes radical and always provocative views of psychoanalysis and we will explore how psychoanalytic conversations can take place in many deep relationship contexts including supervision and friendship.
Biography
Louise Hird is a Clinical Psychologist and a Child and Adult Training Analyst and Vice President of the Australian Psychoanalytic Society. Louise is the founder and Director of The Winn Clinic. She is an honorary lecturer at Macquarie University in the School of Clinical Medicine.
Charlie Stansfield is a writer and psychoanalyst working in Sydney's northern suburbs.
Neville Symington on Communication in Silence
Abstract
This paper aims to make sense of the phenomenon that Neville Symington called “communication in silence.” The paper will trace the development of this notion in Symington’s writings over the years until its most radical and novel version, exposed in conversation in recent years, where Symington insisted that such communication can occur without the communicators in question being in the same room at the same time. I shall suggest a non-mystical explanation for this form of communication, relying on a new notion of an indirect cue chain that can transmit what might be seen as messages through time and space. I shall show that the term “communication” needs to be qualified to the non-intentional term “expression”. I will be making use of the two thinkers to whom Symington often referred in this connection in our conversations about this issue – Freud and John Macmurray.
Biography
Talia Morag (PhD, University of Sydney) is a lecturer of philosophy at the University of Wollongong. Her main research interests are philosophical psychology, especially liberal naturalism and the philosophical foundations of psychoanalysis, the philosophy of emotions, ethics, and social psychology, as well as the philosophy of television. Her book Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason was published by Routledge (2016).
12:45 - 1:45
Lunch
1:45 - 3:15
Panel: Psychoanalytic understandings of criminality: The contribution of Neville Symington
Presenter: Timothy Keogh / Discussants Gerard Webster, Pamela Nathan, John Kearney / Chair: Daniel Riordan
A commentary on Neville Symington's paper 'The response aroused by Psychopath'
Tim Keogh Abstract
Tim Keogh will bring a contemporary perspective to Symington’s contribution to the forensic psychoanalytical literature contained in his classic paper The Response Aroused by the Psychopath in which Symington considers the response the psychopath arouses under three aspects: collusion, disbelief and condemnation.
Biography
Timothy Keogh is a training and supervising analyst with the Australian Psychoanalytical Society (APAS) and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Sydney. He is Founding President of the newly formed Australian Forensic Psychotherapy Association, President of Penthos (a psychoanalytic charity providing a brief intervention for parents experiencing prolonged grief), Chair of the Ethics Committee of the Australasian Confederation of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies (ACPP), He is author of Through a Glass Darkly (Karnac) and the senior editor of Psychoanalytic Approaches to Loss (Routledge) and Interpretation in Couple and Family Psychoanalysis (Routledge).
Gerard Webster Abstract
Gerard Webster will consider the presentation in light of Neville Symington’s paper The Murder of Laius in which Symington suggests that Oedipus’ worst crime was to consent to the voice of fate of the Delphic oracle, to follow through on what had had been prescribed for him, as opposed to creating his own wife and his own life. Symington also notes “An analysis is an offer of hope, an offer of life; but it is a great threat to one in such a hell as Oedipus”.
Biography
Gerard Webster is a training and supervising psychoanalyst and faculty member of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, where he previously earned a Doctor of Psychoanalysis and a PhD (Psychoanalysis) at the same Institute. He has worked with child, adolescent, and adult victims and perpetrators of crime for four decades and he is the Vice President of the Australian Forensic Psychotherapy Association.
Pamela Nathan Abstract
Pamela Nathan will focus on the so-called youth crisis of high-risk Aboriginal offenders in Central Australia underlining the importance of using the lens of trauma in understanding violence, if not psychopathy. Having worked with heinous psychopaths in maximum security and community settings, she notes that there are differences in the criminal psychopathology to Aboriginal offenders who have experienced the transgenerational trauma of cultural dispossession and the failure of Australia to be a good maternal container.
Biography
Pamela Nathan is a clinical and forensic psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Kew, Melbourne. She was previously a sociologist working as an academic and researcher for over a decade. She has completed co-designed research in Aboriginal health over forty years in Victoria and the Northern Territory and published three books with The Victorian Aboriginal Health Service and the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress. She has worked in the public sector in clinical and forensic settings for fifteen years. She is currently Director of the Aboriginal Program, CASSE and is working in partnership with communities, organisations and government in Alice Springs on violence and trauma. Pamela continues to practise, supervise, teach and publish in the psychological and psychoanalytic arena.
John Kearney Abstract
John Kearney will examine in more detail at the developmental and environmental pathways that contribute to the development of violence, sadism and sexual harm enacted by children and adolescents and considers theory and techniques relevant to working with the family system, including the value of non-interpretive “something more” (Symington’s “X-factor”) mechanisms that contribute to psychic growth and healing. The discussion will draw on the theoretical contributions of Alvarez, Anna Freud, Winnicott, as well as contemporary Kleinian child analysts.
Biography
John Kearney is a clinical social worker and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. He treats children, adolescents, adults and couples presenting with a broad range of emotional and behavioural disturbances. This includes assessments of and treatment for children who engage in harmful sexual behaviours and for adult offenders. He also provides expert advice to the courts, government organizations and NGOs in relation to parenting capacity, child protection, family violence and permanency planning.
3:15 - 3:45
Afternoon tea
3:45 - 5:15
An education in thinking
Presenters: David Macarthur, Robin Chester, Maurice Whelan / Chair: Louise Gyler
Neville Symington: Scepticism as a Way of Life
Presenter: David Macarthur
Biography
David Macarthur (Ph.D. Harvard) is Associate Professor in Philosophy at The University of Sydney. He has published widely on liberal naturalism, metaphysical quietism, pragmatism, skepticism, common sense, perception, ordinary language, and philosophy of art especially regarding architecture, photography and film. He edited Hilary & Ruth-Anna Putnam, Pragmatism as a Way of Life (Harvard, 2017); and with Mario De Caro co-edited: Naturalism in Question (Harvard, 2004); Naturalism and Normativity (Columbia, 2010); Hilary Putnam: Philosophy in an Age of Science (Harvard, 2012); and Hilary Putnam: Philosophy as Dialogue (Harvard, 2022). Living Skepticism (Brill, 2022) co-edited with Stephen Hetherington, is forthcoming from Brill.
The Myth of Bion: an unfinished discussion
Presenter: Robin Chester
Abstract
Doubtlessly Wilfred Bion is one of the most challenging analysts stimulating significant discussion about his ideas: seen by some as significantly extending and even revising the ideas of Freud and Klein, and by others…… Part of the challenge arises from an aura of enigma that seems to surround the man and his work, created in part by his writing style and his difficult ideas and also by the extraordinary amount of literature written about him and his ideas including that written by him as autobiography, creative writing and his “Cogitations”.
In this brief paper a hypothesis is examined:
Bion, paramount among analysts, was seeking relief of his inner pain, and its crippling effects upon him, through a mastery of it. This his theories would seem to have offered. But his autobiographies written towards the end of his life, would seem to indicate that something was missing, something from outside. He seemed to have successfully managed his two personal analyses and needed a third by Bion himself. This being impossible the hypothesis continues that Bion sought to equip the Other, the person with whom he communicates in his “Cogitations”, with tools to conduct this analysis. The tools? Myth. The use of myth to address primary emotional experience. Which myths? He has indicated (“Cogitations”;1992 p237) his choice of myths.
However, in this paper, it will be considered that through his autobiographies etc. Bion is creating a mythological view of himself which will be extended to an understanding of him and his ideas.
Biography
Robin Chester is a Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst and PhD in Psychanalytic Studies (Monash). His thesis title was: “A Critical Study of What Psychoanalysis is: The Role of Paradox”. He has presented numerous papers and seminars in Australia and overseas, mainly questioning the essential nature of psychoanalysis: the how, the what, and the why. Currently he is semi-retired from clinical work, continuing as a training analyst and conducting supervisions and outreach seminars. He is a senior visiting consultant at Flinders Medical Centre, giving weekly seminars (for last 25 years) introducing psycho dynamic theory to psychiatric registrars. Previously he was a Lecturer at Edith Cowan University.
An education in thinking
Presenter: Maurice Whelan
Abstract
Some thoughts about how Neville might approach a discussion about psychoanalysis being described as an education in thinking.
Biography
Maurice Whelan did his psychoanalytic training with the British Psychoanalytical Society. He was a social worker, a visiting supervisor and academic lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic. He is a member of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society. His tenth book Thought: The invisible Essence was published in 2022.
5:15 - 5:30
Closing
Louise Gyler, APAS President
Registration
In-room registration fees include cocktail refreshments on Friday and lunch and refreshments on Saturday
Friday & Saturday in-room
25th to 26th November 2022
$350
Saturday Only in-room
26th November 2022
$240
Friday Only in-room
25th November 2022
Saturday Only Webinar
26th November 2022
