October 5th 2024 – In person & Online
CONFERENCE
“Relationality and its Discontents”
The programme is available here and includes biogs of speakers and chairs
The ’relational turn’ in contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy dates back to the 1980s. In the US the work of Mitchell, Greenberg, Benjamin, Aron, Davies, Ghent and others mounted a major challenge to the orthodoxies of American psychoanalysis, particularly Ego Psychology. Its early influences included Fairbairn and British Object Relations theorists. The relational approach can also trace a line back to Freud’s contemporaries Otto Gross and Sandor Ferenczi – and also to C.G. Jung.
It was also part of a movement in psychoanalysis which was in tune with the huge cultural and social changes that have continued since the 1960s. Sexual and racial minorities could contemplate risking going into therapy and analysis both as patients and as practitioners of the profession. These transitions have not all proceeded smoothly, yet they have profoundly affected practice and continue to place demands on received theory. Our conference will speak to some of the questions and clinical challenges that have been opened up, drawing on recent thinking from feminism, queer theory and post-colonialism.
The desirability of an authentic ‘Meeting of the Other’ (last year’s International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy conference title) is a valuable aim and principle of contemporary analytic (and other) therapies. But is there a potential for a new orthodoxy setting in; the cure through ‘proper’ relating? Despite the broadening of the field in the psy-professions, are we in danger of upholding a model of relationality which downplays its discontents?
Speakers include:
Suzanne Adebari
Yael Pilowsky Bankirer
Anastasios Gaitanidis
Stephen Gee
Ana Minozzo
Andrew Samuels
Titles of Papers
Suzanne Adebari
‘In Search of a Smorgasbord Altar’ and The Oppositional Gaze.
Yael Pilowsky Bankirer
Vulnerable Encounters: Identities and Their Discontents
Anastasios Gaitanidis
The Death Drive Reconsidered: A Relational Psychoanalytic Perspective.
Stephen Gee
Passion Stories: Till We Do Part.
Ana Minozzo
Love and Difference Between Us and Beyond: an Ethics of Togetherness.
Andrew Samuels
The Shadow of the “Relationship”: Uses and Abuses of Empathy, Safety, Holding, Containment and the Therapeutic Alliance – No Therapist Works at the Client’s Own Speed.
RELATIONALITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS (downladable poster)
