Friday 8th - Saturday 9th November 2024

In-room & Online | RACV City Club, Bourke St, Melbourne

The APAS is pleased to invite you to our annual conference held in Melbourne. Our focus is on contemporary psychoanalytic thought and practice about the mind and body. The intimate connection of mind and body is especially important in fashioning the ways we face external and internal turbulence. Psychoanalytic theory about the use and meaning of the body and bodily expressions has been debated and evolved over time. We hope to enrich our conversation about theoretical concepts and clinical practice by exploring issues such as transgender dysphoria, trauma and the body, and contemporary ethical dilemmas through a discussion of film, papers and panels.

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Speakers   Friday Programme   Saturday Programme   Registration

Professor Alessandra Lemma

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Professor Alessandra Lemma is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and Consultant Clinical Psychologist at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families. She is Visiting Professor, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London. For many years she worked at the Tavistock Clinic where she was, at different points, Head of Psychology and Professor of Psychological Therapies. She was the Editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis book series (Routledge) for ten years until 2020 and was one of the Regional Editors for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis until 2018. She has published on psychoanalysis, the body, the impact of new technologies and trauma. Her most recent books are Transgender Identities (2022, Routledge) and First Principles: Applied Ethics for Psychoanalytic Practice (forthcoming, OUP).

Rise Becker

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Rise Becker is a member (training and supervising analyst), of the Sydney Branch of APAS. She immigrated from South Africa in 1990 to take up the position of Clinical Director of the NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors. She now works as a psychoanalyst in private practice in Sydney.

Elizabeth Kerr

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Elizabeth Kerr is a Training and Supervising Analyst of APAS. She is a Founding Director of the Australian Psychoanalytical Foundation. She previously Chaired the Committee for Ethics and Professional Standards of APAS.

Matthew McArdle

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Matthew is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst working in Melbourne. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst of APAS. He is currently the Melbourne Branch and Institute Chair.

John McClean

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John McClean is a training analyst with the APAS, now retired from clinical practice. For many years he has had an interest in using selected films to discuss aspects of psychoanalytic theory and technique. For some 10 years he was on the organising committee of the Literature and Psychoanalysis Conference which was held annually in Sydney. His publications include “Lord of the Flies: a psychoanalytic view of destructiveness” and "All About My Mother: an essay on film and psychoanalysis”. Both are available on the APAS online journal Psychoanalysis Downunder.

Coll Osman

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Coll Osman is a training and supervising psychoanalyst, working in private practice in Melbourne. She is a member of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society and a guest member of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Dr Richard Price

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Dr Richard Price completed his psychoanalytic training in Melbourne in 2022. He works in full-time private practice in Kew, working psychoanalytically with a wide range of long-term patients. Prior to this, since 1998, he trained and worked as a psychiatrist, predominantly based in a suburban community mental health service part of Monash Health. He maintains an interest in working with patients with trauma and psychotic illness. For the last 3 years he has been on the committee, as secretary, for CARO, establishing an analytic service for refugees, asylum seekers and front-line workers.

Dr Peter Smith

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Dr Peter Smith is a psychiatrist and Training Analyst with the Australian Psychoanalytical Society (APAS). He is a past Chairman of the Melbourne Branch of APAS and the Melbourne Institute for Psychoanalysis. His professional interests include mother-infant psychology, the conceptualization and manifestations of trauma and mind-body psychology. For many years, he has been actively involved with the education of psychoanalytic candidates-in-training with teaching in theoretical and clinical seminars together with the supervision of clinical work.

Charlie Stansfield

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Charlie Stansfield is a writer and psychoanalyst working in Sydney's northern suburbs.

Sonia Wechsler

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Sonia Wechsler is a Child and Adult Psychoanalyst and Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst. She is the current Scientific Chair of Australian Psychoanalytical Society (APAS) and the Asia Pacific Representative of the Psychoanalytic Education Committee (PEC) of the IPA. Sonia has a private practice in, Sydney.

3.30 – 3.40

Welcome to the APAS Open Days

Ms Sonia Wechsler APAS Scientific Chair

3.40 – 5.25

Film Screening of Lars and the Real Girl

This is a moving and thoughtful story of a young man existing in a frozen and isolated state for reasons no-one can understand. To everyone’s shock and horror he buys what appears to be a full-size sex doll. As the story unfolds, we begin to see the many meanings of this doll, called Bianca, and see her impact on Lars, his family and the whole town. Eventually we come to understand the underlying trauma that Lars has been so affected by. Among other things, this film allows us to explore the use of one’s own body and that of another, both as a retreat and also to help represent the unbearable.

5.25 – 6.30

Film discussion

Presenter: Dr John McClean
Chair: Ms Anne Diamond

6.30 – 7.45

Cocktail Reception

8.30 – 9.00

Welcome To Country

Welcome APAS President, Dr Louise Gyler

9.00 – 11.00

The missing: Exploring the use of photographs in “working through” the natal body with transgender youth

Professor Alessandra Lemma
Chair: Dr Louise Gyler

This paper focuses on how for some young people who identify as transgender, the anticipation, and/or the actual process, of transitioning represents a movement away from something in themselves that feels wrong, painful, or traumatic and that has not yet been consciously recognised as such. This becomes a ‘missing’ part of the self’s experience, locked into the body. I suggest that the process of identifying and restitution of ‘the missing’ part requires working through the natal body in its metaphorical and literal senses, in the service of expanding autonomous choice about how to find a hospitable home in the body. Building on Money-Kyrle’s three ‘facts of life’, I propose a fourth one, namely the inescapable fact of our embodied nature, to underscore that our personal history always includes our embodied history, hence the importance of working through what the natal body unconsciously represents. I describe the use of photographs during psychoanalytic psychotherapy with young people who have commenced social transitioning, to work through visual representations of the natal body in the service of facilitating the working through, in its psychoanalytic sense, of the natal body’s unconscious narrative. I suggest that deploying this visual mode may be especially helpful in engaging young people on the autistic spectrum who nowadays comprise a significant minority of transgender young people.

11.00 – 11.30

Morning tea

11.30 – 1.30

Trauma and the Body

Presenters: Ms Coll Osman, Dr Peter Smith
Chair: Ms Libby Dunn

The Vivisector- A Psychoanalytic Perspective

Dr Peter Smith
This paper details some central features of a literary character Hurtle Duffield, the protagonist in Patrick White’s 1970 novel “The Vivisector”. Dr Smith describes aspects of the character’s life as portrayed by White. In particular, troubled relationships with women and the central character’s artistic work are detailed and explored. Employing a psychoanalytic lens, this paper relates these features to the traumatic early life experience(s) of rejection. The turbulent life and times of the character are used to illustrate some of the key concepts in the understanding of early life personal trauma and its developmental sequelae. Reference is made to pertinent psychoanalytic literature.

A Body Bereft: Lessons in Loss and Grief

Ms Coll Osman
The writer recalls her early days as a novice therapist in which she and a small boy encountered each other in harrowing circumstances. Both child and therapist were forced to listen to the body speak its mind, as the true emotional impact of bodily trauma declared itself. In retrospect, the realisation that compassion was vital but insufficient signified the beginnings of a struggle to develop a receptive mind in the face of catastrophic anxieties. It thus became possible for a space to be created in which the anguish of what could not be retrieved began to be faced and mourned by both child and therapist.

1.30 – 2.30

Lunch

2.30 – 4.30

In Conversation: Three Ethical Dilemmas

Presenter: Professor Alessandra Lemma
Panellists: Dr Richard Price, Ms Charlie Stansfield, Ms Rise Becker
Chair: Mrs Elizabeth Kerr

Professor Lemma will outline her ethics-based approach to complex clinical dilemmas. Three dilemmas will be presented by psychoanalysts to illustrate her approach.

4.30 – 4.45

Closing

APAS President, Dr Louise Gyler