by Admin General | Oct 10, 2021
‘When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe’ Franz Fanon
Saturday 9 October – Sunday 10 October 2021
What can we dare to imagine of a psychoanalysis yet to come? More of the same or the courage to open our minds, hearts and practice? This conference will explore the complex ways in which race percolates through the psychoanalytic project – even if it is often denied. It offers an opportunity to think about how race impacts upon the clinic, our theory-making, access to the treatment and the structures of our institutions and training.
Organised by The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in conjunction with the department of Social, Therapeutic and Community Studies (STaCS), Goldsmiths University of London, to coincide with Black History Month.
The conference will be recorded and made available to attendees after the event.
This will be a blended conference held online via Zoom with limited personal attendance, depending on Covid restrictions. Details to be confirmed nearer the time.
Speakers
- Achille Mbembe
- Adam Phillips
- Abi Canepa-Anson
- Anthea Benjamin
- Christina Moutsou
- Claudia Bernard
- Dawn Estefan
- Francis Gilbert
- Gill Pelage
- Helen Morgan
- Leena Dhingra
- Lynne Brown
- Paul Kassman
- Peter Nevins
- Riad Akbur
- Salma Siddique
- Steve Roberts
- Stuart Stevenson
- Tina Mistry
- Wendy Dugba
- Wanderley Santos Moreira
Programme
Saturday 9 October 10am – 5pm
9.45am: Welcome
10 – 11am: Key note address – Prof Achille Mbembe
11 – 12.30pm: Race in the clinic
- Chair: Nick Blackburn
- Abi Canepa-Anson – The gap between the silence and the scream – exploring the problems of racism and colour blindness in psychotherapy training
- Peter Nevins – Race matters: practising psychoanalysis differently
- Dawn Estefan – The Black Screen: an exploration of the arbitrary visibility of blackness in the working alliance between the educator and student, therapist and client
- Q&A
1.30 – 2.30pm lunch
1pm: Film screening: I can’t breathe
- Eric Harper, Matt Lee, Tamara Shefer and Sunny Tsai
1.45 – 3.15pm: Race, trauma and psychoanalysis
- Chair: Eric Harper
- Stuart Stevenson – Working with institutional and inter-generational trauma
- Wanderley Santos Moreira – Slavery trauma: Afropessimism, psychoanalysis and resistance
- Gill Pelage – White supremacy as an illusion of knowledge and power internalised worldwide
- Q&A
3.30 – 5pm: Panel
- Chair: Peter Nevins
- Adam Phillips – Discussion of the book White Fragility
- Helen Morgan – The problem of whiteness
- Tina Mistry (aka The Brown Psychologist) – Being South Asian and the struggle for emotional wellbeing
- Q&A
Sunday 10 October 10am – 5.30pm
9.45 – 10.45am: Key note address – Prof Claudia Bernard
- Chair: Chrysanthi Nigianni
- Q&A
10.45 – 12pm: Stories and narrative – challenging binary thinking
- Chair: Chrysanthi Nigianni
- Christina Moutsou & Salma Siddique – Doing anthropology in the consulting room
- Riad Akbur – It was 30 years ago today… Class, race and the making of obscured legacies
- Q&A
12 – 1.30pm: Breaking out – working outside the therapeutic frame
- Chair: Andrew Linton
- Discussion on Changing the Game, a social enterprise which delivers therapeutically oriented group interventions to young people of colour in prisons
- Speakers: Paul Kassman, Wendy Dugba and Anthea Benjamin
1.30 – 2.30pm lunch
2.30 – 4pm: Creative writing – exercises in escape
- Francis Gilbert: Introducing free writing
- Leena Dhingra: White privilege and partition – exercise
- Steve Roberts: Standard english and writing in dialect – exercise
- Plenary
4 – 6pm: Fish bowl
- Facilitators: Lynne Brown and Peter Nevins
- The participants will divide into two groups, one made up of those from black and other ethnic minorities and the other of white practitioners. The groups will have a 30-minute discussion among themselves, one after the other, with the audience watching. Then they will have a joint conversation before the discussion is opened to the floor.
- Participants: Adebukunola Odeyemi, Celestina Oniye-Thomas, Colette Ferns, Eric Harper, Eugenia Noble, George Taxidis, Hodan Salah, Julia Ogunmuyiwa, Julie Knowles, Manar Ahmed, Monique Williams, Nick Blackburn, Patrick Ackason, Penelope Allsobrook, Peter Nevins, Preety Das, Priscilla Penniket, Sanjay Sur, Swaliha Bax, Wanderley Santos Moreira
6pm: Conclusion
by Admin General | Jun 5, 2021
In Greek mythology, the seer Tiresias was allegedly transformed into a woman for seven years for disturbing two copulating snakes on Mount Cyllene. Niya B re-reads this myth from an eco-transfeminist lens through ritual performances, workshops and sonic explorations. The project is called Ekdysis – the biological term for the process of shedding the external layer of the skin in reptiles. Counteracting the traditional, patriarchal way of manufacturing history, Niya B engages with her own autobiography to re-envision this metamorphosis as a transgender mythopoesis, which is directly affected by ecology, the feminine/Other and the non-human.
Ekdysis is an ongoing project which is displayed through live actions, moving image and installations. In this iteration, Ekdysis manifests as a single-channel video following an autoethnographic journey in the land that holds the mythological events of metamorphosis.
This project has been made possible with support from Arts Council National Lottery Grants.
Niya B is a transfeminist artist working at the intersections of visual art and performance exploring themes related to ecology, (trans)gender politics and equity in mental health. Niya uses video, soundscapes, text and live acts to create a meditative space of vulnerability, affect and interdependence.
Selected shows include: From Tomorrow (Tate Britain, London); WIP: Work in Progress/Working Process (online); Cultural Institute commission (Leeds); Futureless (Somos Art, Berlin); Ekdysis, solo (Enclave, London); NEoN digital arts festival (Dundee); Unfix (CCA, Glasgow); Eco-futures festival, Disorders, Translucent, Queer Artists Now, Fringe!, @disturbance (London); Emergency (Manchester); Trans:plant, solo (London), International Print Biennale (Newcastle); 5th Moscow Biennale; 5th Thessaloniki Biennale.
Niya was awarded with an a-n bursary and a Jerwood bursary in 2020. Ekdysis installation (2020) features in the publication Future Now (Aesthetica Art Prize 2021).
#ekdysis
IG: niya___b
TW: niya___b
FB: Niya.B.art
web: www.niyab.com
This event forms part of our summer series, In Relation.
by Admin General | Jun 4, 2021
Saturday 10 July, 2-4pm
This talk will be geared towards giving the audience a taste of the flavour psychoanalysis acquires when it travels to the Indian terroir. As a psychoanalytic researcher in a temple famous for exorcism rituals the author struggled to converse with her participants. As a result, a language had to be conjured infused with the spirit of psychoanalysis but driven to meet the possessed person where s/he was.
Shalini Masih PhD is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Delhi. She also offers supervision to other psychoanalytic psychotherapists. She has taught psychoanalysis to trainees at Ambedkar University in Delhi. She has worked with traumatised children and adolescents and with psychotic young adults. Her doctoral thesis was a psychoanalytic study on ‘Beauty in Ugliness in Spirit Possession and Exorcism’. Her interest lies in dissociation, psychosis, dreams and nightmares, the impact of motherhood on the clinician, cultural processes and the kind of psychoanalysis feasible to a given cultural soil.
She has presented papers at a number of national and international psychoanalytic conferences. Recently one of her papers was nominated for best article in the 2020 Gradiva Awards. She is constantly in awe of the psyche and learning to become a mother to her toddler daughter.
This event forms part of our summer series, In Relation.
by Admin General | Jun 4, 2021
Jane Haynes trained as a Jungian psychoanalyst at the Society of Analytical Psychology but defected after realising that the transference was no longer the alpha and omega of her clinical work. She is a founder member of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and continues to be committed to the role of the unconscious and the question of the origins of the self.
Haynes met Jutta Laing after she read The Divided Self and gave up her career in the theatre to work as personal assistant to R.D. Laing during the Dialectics of Liberation in 1967. They share a profound experience of motherhood.
Haynes worked in St Petersburg where she was responsible for helping to develop a post graduate training at the Eastern European Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies. Author of several books including Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am?, with an introduction by Hilary Mantel. She continues to work on Zoom and face to face in full time practice. www.intheconsultingroom.com
Jutta Laing was four years old in 1944 when her family fled the Russians by boarding one of the last trains out of Upper Silesia into the unknown, carrying few possessions. In Germany, as a refugee, she spent seven years in camps, in crammed spaces of squalor and alienation. In Stuttgart she studied graphic design. In 1965 she left for London with a list of five names given to her by a friend. First on that list was R.D. Laing, who invited her to live with him at Kingsley Hall.
She met Jane Haynes in 1967.
For many years Laing has been working professionally through the body using the breath to develop awareness. “I didn’t realise, until I experienced profound tragedies in my own family, how developing a heightened experience of internal peace can soothe a suffering mind.”
This event forms part of our summer series, In Relation.
by Admin General | Jun 3, 2021
Shortly after my father died unexpectedly in 2018 I began watching videos on YouTube about the nuclear accident at Chernobyl and its aftermath, where wild nature is reclaiming the former urban areas nearby. Watching initiated a process of writing, which became a book named after the makeshift radiation cover for the power plant – Shelter Object – which became a book called The Reactor. With the hope of a lively discussion, this talk will involve some readings from my own work and elsewhere, and trace some connections between psychoanalysis, “the hysteric”, artworking, trauma and the law.
Nick Blackburn is a psychoanalyst in private practice. He studied for a PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge in Renaissance literature, where he taught English for several years. He then moved into theatre at English National Opera and The Wooster Group in New York, before training as a psychoanalyst with the Site, where he is now Acting Chair. As a therapist, he has worked with MIND and the Single Homeless Project and has a particular interest in working with anxiety and trauma as well as LGBT+ patients. His first book, The Reactor, is about psychoanalysis, creativity and annihilation. It will be published by Faber early next year.
This event forms part of our summer series, In Relation.
