The NWRPA does not meet in January
The Impossibility of Goodness in an Impossible Profession
Robin Hobbes
Friday 11 February 2022, 6.30pm – 8.00pm
What constitutes goodness in our work as therapists? In this Zoom talk Robin invites us to reconsider the ethics of psychotherapy and counselling. He’ll present some familiar ethical frameworks for evaluating goodness before engaging with the work of the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida and considering its implications for our work.
Robin Hobbes spends his professional life teaching, supervising and practicing Transactional Analysis psychotherapy and counselling. He is Ethical Advisor to the European Transactional Analysis Association and writes a regular column on ethics for the EATA Newsletter. He co-founded Elan Training and Development in 1982.
Negotiating Consent and Dissent: respect for autonomy and resistance in clinical practice
Adrian Sutton
Friday 11 March 2022, 6.30pm – 8.00pm
In a change to our advertised Zoom event we welcome Adrian Sutton, Director of the Squiggle Foundation, a registered charity which aims to study and disseminate the work of Winnicott. Adrian was Consultant in Child & Family Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the Winnicott Centre, Manchester, and a Director of Studies at Manchester Medical School. He is author of Paediatrics, Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis: through countertransference to case management.
15 years of neuroscientific research into appetite control: from restrictive eating to addiction
Dr Samantha Brooks
Friday 8 April 2022, 6.30pm – 8.00pm
In this Zoom talk Samantha provides an overview of her research over the past 15 years at a number of medical campuses including the The Maudsley Hospital, King’s College London, and the Faculty of Health, Liverpool John Moores University. She will consider the neural processes of appetite control as well as the unconscious functions associated with anorexia and bulimia.
Samantha is Reader of Cognitive Neuroscience at Liverpool John Moores University, a Chartered Member of the British Psychological Society and a member of the Neuro-Psychoanalytic Society. She is developing an intervention in Liverpool – Curb Your Addiction (C-Ya).
Head First – Stories of Mind and Body
Dr Alastair Santhouse
Friday 13 May 2022, 6.30pm – 8.00pm
In secondary care, an organic explanation for the patient’s symptoms is made in only about 50% of consultations. For common presentations in primary care, the figure is far less. The costs of this – financial, clinical and societal – are huge and include altruistic kidney donation, bariatric surgery, chronic pain, capacity and end of life care. This Zoom talk sets out some of the issues and explores how we ended up here in 21st century medicine.
Dr Alastair Santhouse is a Consultant Neuropsychiatrist at The Maudsley Hospital. After graduating, he trained in internal medicine, before switching to psychiatry and for most of his clinical career has been a Consultant in Liaison Psychiatry at Guy’s Hospital in London. He is the author of Head First: A Psychiatrist’s Stories of Mind and Body (Atlantic Books, 2021).
Displacement, Disguise and Two Paintings by Hockney
Paul Melia
Friday 10 June 2022, 6.30pm – 8.00pm
In this Zoom talk art historian and psychotherapist Paul Melia will use paintings by the contemporary artist David Hockney to consider the processes of condensation and displacement, processes which also structure neurotic symptoms, parapraxes and other formations of the unconscious. Examples from the clinical literature will also be considered.
Paul Melia is an art historian and psychotherapist in Manchester. He founded Therapy in Manchester in 2011. His curatorial work includes the retrospective exhibition of David Hockney’s drawings shown in Los Angeles, Hamburg and at The Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Acrylic paint on canvas, 183x183cm / 6ftx6ft
Private collection © David Hockney
Talking to a Brick Wall
Dr Mark Fisher
Friday 8 July 2022, 6.30pm – 8.00pm
On the joys and necessities of not hearing and misunderstandings. “I like talking to a brick wall – it’s the only thing in the world that never contradicts me!” Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan
Mark Fisher’s interest in psychoanalysis began whilst a research fellow at Oxford in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2000, after two decades working in the NHS Merseyside as professional lead in psychotherapy, he founded the Rodney Street Counselling and Psychoanalytic Practice, a clinical and supervisory practice in Liverpool and online.
This talk is on Zoom
The NWRPA does not meet in August
Images and Words in the Clinic of Autism
Dr Leon S. Brenner
Monday 12 September 2022, 7.00pm – 8.00pm
In this Zoom talk Leon Brenner considers some of the marked differences in the autistic subject’s acquisition of language and speech development. Drawing on clinical examples from art therapy he outlines what may be described as ‘visual supplements’ supporting the representation of both ambiguous and abstract concepts.
(No prior knowledge of Lacan or psychoanalysis is assumed.)
Leon is research fellow at the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin and author of The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2020. His website is https://leonbrenner.com/
Using Time as a Clinical Intervention
Dr Astrid Gessert
Monday 10 October 2022, 7.00pm – 8.00pm
Most therapy takes place in sessions which last for around 50 minutes. In this Zoom talk I will outline the rationale for varying the duration of sessions. I will also explore how ‘punctuating’ the flow of the client’s speech and thought in unexpected ways can lead to the emergence of new material as well as re-transcriptions of their original stories.
Astrid Gessert is a psychoanalyst and a member of CFAR and of the College of Psychoanalysts-UK. She has worked in the NHS, in private practice and as a supervisor. She contributes regularly to public lecture and training programmes. She has written articles and edited books, including ‘Obsessional Neurosis: Lacanian Perspectives’ (Routledge 2018).
The Two Times of Trauma: Touching the Real
Leslie Chapman
Monday 14 November 2022, 7.00pm – 8.00pm
There are a number of ways to consider psychological trauma, and perhaps the most common one is that the individual is overwhelmed by an event which they struggle to come to terms with. One of Freud’s key discoveries was that trauma occurs retroactively. In other words, it is not the ‘original event’ that traumatises the individual. Rather, something else has to happen to the individual later on in their life that ‘triggers’ trauma.
Leslie Chapman has been actively involved in the mental health field for over twenty-five years, including twenty years working as a psychoanalytic practitioner within the Lacanian tradition. He is currently undertaking doctoral research in the field of trauma studies. His website is https://therapeia.org.uk/ttr/
The Experience of Being a Therapist for a Much Younger Client
Dr Tony McSherry
Monday 12 December 2022, 7.00pm – 8.00pm
Our short series on time in therapy continues with Tony McSherry who will discuss the phenomenology of an imaginary adult client, one much younger than the therapist. He will discuss how therapy is co-produced, the attempts to avoid the alienation involved in such moves, and the grief involved in letting the other live their own life.
Dr Tony McSherry is an Existential-Analytical Psychotherapist working in private practise. He is a member of the Constructivist and Existential College of the UKCP through the Southern Association for Psychotherapy and Counselling. His main psychotherapeutic interests are in phenomenology and psychoanalysis. His website is https://speakingforyourself.co.uk/