by Admin General | Mar 16, 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 Bloom 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 | Feb 28, 2026
When: Saturday 28th February 2026
Time: 2:00pm to 5:00pm
Where: Swedenborg House
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The Clinical Site is a series of clinical workshops for practicing psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, and those at advanced stages of their training. Each workshop is facilitated by a senior member of The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, who will lead a group in an exploration of a clinical topic of particular interest to them. Each meeting of the Clinical Site therefore represents a one-off working group, with participants encouraged to bring and share their own clinical experience and ideas. The workshops are limited to approximately 20 participants, and meet in-person in the upstairs meeting room at Swedenborg House. Suggested reading will be circulated before the event.
Peter Nevins: ‘The Colour of Experience: Race, Phenomenology, and the Pragmatics of the Clinical Encounter’
This workshop invites clinicians to think with phenomenology and American pragmatism as living resources for psychoanalytic work with racial difference. Through a detailed clinical presentation and shared reflection, we will explore how moments of racial tension in the analytic field can become openings for renewed presence, responsiveness, and ethical encounter.
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This is an in-person event only.
NO REFUNDS AVAILABLE
by Admin General | Feb 18, 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 | Feb 7, 2026
When: Saturday 7th February 2026
Time: 2.00pm – 5:00pm
Where: Swedenborg House
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The Clinical Site is a series of clinical workshops for practicing psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, and those at advanced stages of their training. Each workshop is facilitated by a senior member of The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, who will lead a group in an exploration of a clinical topic of particular interest to them. Each meeting of the Clinical Site therefore represents a one-off working group, with participants encouraged to bring and share their own clinical experience and ideas. The workshops are limited to approximately 20 participants, and meet in-person in the upstairs meeting room at Swedenborg House. Suggested reading will be circulated before the event.
Haya Oakley: ‘Have we forgotten how to suffer? Working with ‘’Common unhappiness’’ as part of the ‘Human condition’.
‘’When I have promised my patients help or improvement by means of a cathartic treatment I have often been faced by this objection: ’why, you tell me yourself that my illness is probably connected to my circumstances and the events of my life. You cannot alter these in any way. How do you propose to help me then? ’And I have been able to make this reply:
‘No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health, you will be better armed against that unhappiness’.”
― Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria
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This is an in-person event only.
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.
