by Admin General | Feb 11, 2026
When: Monday 16th March 2026
Time: 7:30pm to 8:45pm
Where: Online Event
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Anastasios Gaitanidis will be in conversation Luisa Pretolani about his new book Wilderness and Ecopsychology: From Anthropocentrism to Ecological Awareness (Routledge, 2025).
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Wilderness and Ecopsychology: From Anthropocentrism to Ecological Awareness offers a radical interdisciplinary exploration of human-wilderness relationships during our current climate crisis, drawing on psychoanalytic insight, political critique, and ecological wisdom to diagnose the profound alienation endemic to late capitalist modernity while delineating pathways toward regenerative forms of being.
The book begins by deconstructing wilderness as both geographical reality and psychological construct, tracing its evolution from Enlightenment instrumentality through Romantic idealisation to contemporary relational understandings. In doing so, it examines how dominant narratives illuminate our ambivalent encounter with wilderness as both threat and salvation. The book then moves on to explore concrete alternatives to extractive agriculture, positioning reciprocal land stewardship and agroecological practices as embodiments of interspecies ethics. The culminating vision articulates a ‘wild psychology’ that advocates for collective liberation through practices of deep attention, material engagement, and transformative empathy offering not solutions but threshold experiences for reimagining human-earth relationships beyond the ruins of modernity.
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This is an online event only.
Please Note: This event is going to be recorded, and the recording will be made available to attendees for FREE.
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THERE WILL BE NO REFUNDS.
by Admin General | Jan 25, 2026
When: Wednesday 18th February 2026
Time: 7.30pm to 9.00pm
Where: K. T. Paul Hall, 41 Fitzroy Square, London WIT 6AQ
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Abstract:
This lecture explores how to navigate transference in cases of psychosis. It approaches psychotic transference not as a deficient version of neurotic transference, but as a distinct clinical configuration with its own logic, risks, and clinical demands. From a Freudian and Lacanian perspective, transference in psychosis is marked by a particular certainty and a fragile relation to the Other, which can easily destabilize analytic work if the analyst’s position is not handled with care.
The lecture shifts the focus away from interpretation and insight toward the analyst’s positioning within the transference. It outlines practical coordinates for sustaining analytic work without intensifying invasive or overwhelming relational dynamics. These include avoiding the position of the loving or enjoying Other, maintaining a stance of not-knowing, limiting interpretive authority, introducing forms of triangulation, pluralizing sites of care, and supporting pragmatic inventions that allow the subject to manage intrusive experiences.
Transference in psychosis is presented as a balance between two risks: excessive attachment and disengagement. When handled with restraint and precision, it can function as a workable space in which the subject externalizes and negotiates what would otherwise appear as a direct intrusion of the Other. The lecture offers a clinically grounded framework for maintaining this balance and for keeping analytic work possible in situations where it is often assumed to fail.
Bio:
Leon S. Brenner, Ph.D., is a psychoanalytic practitioner, lecturer, and researcher working within the Freudian and Lacanian traditions. He teaches at the Psychoanalytic University of Berlin (IPU) and has published extensively on autism, psychosis, embodiment, and the limits of contemporary diagnostic frameworks. His work focuses on language, transference, and the clinical and epistemic questions raised by non-neurotic structures, with particular attention to autism and psychosis as sites where standard analytic assumptions break down. He works in private practice in Berlin and regularly lectures internationally on psychoanalysis, critical theory, and clinical practice.
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This is an in-person event only.
It will be recorded, but the price of a ticket does NOT include a recording.
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NO REFUNDS AVAILABLE
by Admin General | Nov 26, 2025
The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis’s French Psychoanalysis in Translation seminar series responds to the steady increase in interest in French psychoanalysis in translation over recent years. English readers are now much better situated to appreciate the breadth and depth of French psychoanalytic thinking thanks to the continued efforts of publishers and translators to bring more classic and contemporary texts to an Anglophone audience. In response to this, the Site is inviting translators to discuss their work and that of the psychoanalytic authors whose texts they have translated.
The second seminar in the series will focus on the work of the French paediatrician and psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto and respond to the recent retranslation of her 1971 book, Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent (Divided, 2025). Translators Lionel and Sharmini Bailly will be in conversation with Site member Nick Blackburn, discussing the timeliness of bringing her clinical case history back to the attention of English readers, and its interest to both Lacanian and non-Lacanian practitioners.
Please Note: This event is going to be recorded, and the recording will be made available to attendees for FREE.
by Admin General | Nov 10, 2025
The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis’s French Psychoanalysis in Translation seminar series responds to the steady increase in interest in French psychoanalysis in translation over recent years. English readers are now much better situated to appreciate the breadth and depth of French psychoanalytic thinking thanks to the continued efforts of publishers and translators to bring more classic and contemporary texts to an Anglophone audience. In response to this, the Site is inviting translators to discuss their work and that of the psychoanalytic authors whose texts they have translated.
The first seminar in the series will focus on the work of Pierre Fédida and celebrate the recent publication of his selected essays, Psychopathologies of Living (Routledge, 2025), in English. Translators Patrick Ffrench and Nigel Saint will be in conversation with Site member Ana Minozzo, discussing the important place of Fédida in French academic psychoanalysis and the challenges of rendering his ideas into English.
Please Note: This event is going to be recorded, and the recording will be made available to attendees for FREE.
by Admin General | Oct 25, 2025
About this event
The most tragic form of loss isn’t the loss of security; it’s the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.
– Ernst Bloch
Utopia promises us an ideal paradox consisting of a limit and an opening: a limit to our suffering and frustrations and an open road to the unimpeded pursuit of our desires. It embodies an unconscious dialectic—a paradoxical symbol standing both as a boundary and as an opening. Utopia functions as a projection of an ideal state where suffering and frustration are contained within a symbolic limit, yet simultaneously, it beckons the subject toward an unbounded horizon of desire’s fulfilment.
The Greek etymology — οὐ τόπος, “no-place”, coined by Sir Thomas More — offers a Lacanian meditation on the allure and treachery of the unattainable. It hints at an impossible desire for a perfect state beyond language and reality, a dead end that may serve as a phantasmatic anchor rather than a genuine horizon. And yet, 500 years after the word was created, the hope for limitlessness and resolution is still ever present, we persistently cling to an elusive longing for an unconditioned plenitude — an eternal resolution that perpetually slips just beyond the grasp of symbolization.
This collection of dialogues — propelled by thinkers engaged in psychoanalytic, philosophical, and critical inquiry — invites us to question the function of hope and utopia within the psychic economy. What revelations can these domains offer about the role of hope in the analytic process? How does utopia manifest in the clinical setting? Are we inclined to relinquish hope, or does it serve as a vital structuring force? If hope persists, how can it be harnessed therapeutically? Moreover, does hope belong solely to the realm of optimal illusions and dangerous fantasies, akin to Pandora’s box, or can it be transformed into a sustained, constructive act within the matrix of the analytic encounter?
Speakers
(In order of speaker)
Richard Gilman-Opalsky
Jon Greenaway
Billie Cashmore
Alexander Stoffel
Jim O’Neill
Foluke Taylor
Anouchka Grose
Programme
10.00-10.30: Registration and Coffee
10.30-10.40: Welcome
10.40-11.30: Keynote Speaker
Richard Gilman-Opalsky – Imaginary Power, Real Horizons: The Political and Psychological Necessity of Utopianism
11.30-13.00: Panel 1:
One or Many Utopias: Marx, Bloch, Materialism and Desire
Jon Greenaway – Thoughts Out of Season: On Inappropriate Utopia and the Heritage of Our Time.
Billie Cashmore – Utopia Must Not Be A Theological Category
Alexander Stoffel – Desire and Capitalist Contradiction: Towards a Non-Functionalist Account of Desire
13.00-14.15: Lunch
14.15-15.45: Panel 2:
The Laboratory for Feminist Listening: Feminist Listening as Worlds in the Making
15.45-16.15: Break
16.15-17.45: Panel 3:
Utopia and the Clinic
Jim O’Neill – Utopia: “Heroic Failure”
Foluke Taylor – TherapeutiX: Sketches from a Black Feminist Playground
Anouchka Grose – Come Back Marcuse, All is Forgiven
17.45-18.00: Closing Thoughts
18.00: Reception
Concessionary rates are available for non-Site students, trainees and NHS employees.
If the ticket price is a barrier to access and the above does not apply to you, please contact the Site Administrator, Jane Nairne, at jane.nairne@the-site.org.uk.
