PPNow 2022

This conference considers divisions between the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’, what is ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the psychoanalytic profession and practise, and how we might take more of a psychosocial and intersectional perspective in psychoanalytic work.

Perhaps you don’t agree with this approach – join us to share your thoughts so we might broaden the discussion.

Click this link to read more about our Friday programme.

Click this link to read more about our Saturday programme.

Click this link to read more about speakers.

Click this link to read more about trainee tickets.

Click this link to download the conference programmes and directions to County Hall.

Friday 11 November: PPNow 2022 Public Lecture
(in-person and online delegates)

19.00 Registration / Zoom opens

19.30 Welcome from Lee Smith, BPC Chair

19:40 Dr Noreen Giffney: ‘Grappling with Uncertainty: Thoughts and Thinking about Sexuality and Gender in the Consulting Room’

20.20 Q&A, chaired by Caroline Bainbridge. Including questions from online participants

21.00 Drinks reception / online break out rooms open
Sponsored by Scholars Network. Find out more about them here.

22.00 Close

Dr Noreen Giffney – Grappling with Uncertainty: Thoughts and Thinking about Sexuality and Gender in the Consulting Room
Psychoanalysis deals with one of the fundamental facets of life: We must find a way to live with uncertainty. No-one knows what will happen in the future, however hard we try to hypothesise or plan ahead. Life has a way of surprising us. This fact evokes great anxiety in us. We often grasp after certainty as a way to manage it. Each of us does this to greater or lesser extents, consciously and unconsciously. Psychoanalytic clinical practitioners are not immune to this. It becomes a difficulty if a clinician grasps onto certain thoughts to the extent that it prevents them from thinking about a patient or aspects of a patient’s experience. There is a difference between having thoughts and thinking them through; one does not equate to the other. Some of this existential anxiety regarding certainty and uncertainty gets played out more broadly against the backdrop of sexuality and gender. In other words, clinically speaking, thoughts can sometimes exist about sexuality and gender in the absence of a capacity for thinking them. These thoughts might be assumptions or stereotypes the clinician holds about sexuality and gender, particularly when confronted with experiences that diverge from their own. When this is the case, some patients’ experiences, identities, persons and communities can become reduced in the clinician’s mind to a diagnosis or category, already known and understood. In this instance, the clinician has latched onto certainty, with the result that thinking falls away; there is no need for thinking because the clinician already knows. How might clinicians address this difficulty in order to keep a space open for the patient’s experience and their own thinking, without saturating it with presuppositions?
Recommended Reading: Noreen Giffney, ‘Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory’ in Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson (eds.) Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory (New York: Punctum Books 2017), pp. 19-48. Available to download here.

This Friday evening lecture is sponsored by our Scholars Network. Find out more about them here.

We are committed to providing reasonable adjustments for accessibility requirements wherever we can, please email us if you would like to discuss this further.

Saturday 12 November PPNow 2022 Insiders and Outsiders: Navigating identities and divisions inside and outside the consulting room
(in-person and online delegates)

09.00 Registration / Zoom opens

10.00 Welcome

10:10 Professor Lisa Baraitser: On being with others ‘now’

11:00 Q&A, chaired by Jan McGregor Hepburn. Including questions from online participants

11.30 Break

11.50 Professor Ankhi Mukherjee: The Green Clinic: Sohbet in St. Mary’s Secret Garden

12:30 Q&A, chaired by Tim Kent. Including questions from online participants

13:00 Poetry reading: Romalyn Ante

13:15 Lunch

14.00 Panel discussion: The Question of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Institutional Racism with Fakhry Davids, Maxine Dennis, and Helen Morgan

15:00 Q&A, chaired by Fakhry Davids. Including questions from online participants

15:30 Break

15:50 PPNow Awards

16:15 Plenary discussions: Lisa Baraitser, Ankhi Mukherjee, Fakhry Davids, Maxine Dennis, and Helen Morgan. Chaired by Tim Kent

16.55 Closing statement: Lee Smith, BPC Chair

17.00 Drinks reception / online break out rooms open (to reflect on the topics of the conference)

18:00 Close

Professor Lisa Baraitser: On being with others ‘now’
Writing of the Covid 19 pandemic, the Cameroonian theorist Achille Mbembe states ‘we must answer here and now for our life on Earth with others (including viruses) and our shared fate. Such is the injunction this pathogenic period addresses to humankind’ (Mbembe, 2020). The urgency of Mbembe’s call for being with others ‘now’ attempts to interrupt the static time of its refusal – the chronic difficulties with embracing the reality of interdependency and our collective fate, of the psychic and social struggle to be ‘with’ others. Being ‘in’ and pushing others ‘out’ brings temporary relief from being ‘with’, a state in which the psychic terrors of engulfment and abandonment are infused with projections of historical, political, social and ecological ‘othering’.
Drawing on perspectives from the interdisciplinary field of Psychosocial Studies, I reframe notions of ‘insideness’ and ‘outsideness’ from the perspective of time rather than space. I argue that experiences of ‘withness’ have to do with perceptions of being ‘in sync’, and relate to how time is socially and politically produced, as much as how it is lived psychically. Feminist, queer, crip and decolonial scholars have shown how models of time that structure the global temporalities of the present are patriarchal, colonial, ableist, and heteronormative. They discipline and marginalize those who fail to conform to the temporal conventions of Western modernity – the norms of progress and development, for instance, that fail to capture cyclical, repetitive, or revolutionary time. Those whose lives do not fit with normative developmental timelines appear in the social fabric as ‘antisocial’; ‘behind’ the contemporary, ‘arrested’, ‘backwards’, and stuck. In particular, what Charles Mills calls ‘white time’ (Mills, 2014) governs who gets to be included and excluded from social life, including who feels welcome in the psychoanalytic consulting room.
I argue that psychoanalysis must untangle itself from its complicity with ‘white time’ by orientating the psychoanalytic encounter as a time of ‘suspended animation’, a form of ‘waiting with’ that is an alive yet anachronous time in which the rhythms of the ‘antisocial’ are valued and understood. In this pathogenic period, the urgency of learning to ‘be with’ paradoxically occurs through embracing chronic forms of time.

Speakers and Chairs:

Dr Noreen Giffney

Dr Noreen Giffney is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a psychosocial theorist and a founding scholar of the BPC Scholars Network. She is the author of the book, The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis: Cultural Experiences and the Clinic (Routledge 2021), as well as the author and/or editor of a number of additional articles and books on psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, and critical theory. She co-edited six books on gender and sexuality, including Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory (Punctum Books 2017). Noreen is a member of the Editorial Board for the British Psychoanalytic Council’s New Associations magazine, and a full-accredited clinical member of the Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (IFPP) and the Psychoanalytic Section of the Irish Council for Psychotherapy (ICP). She lives and has a psychoanalytic psychotherapy practice in County Donegal on the North West coast of Ireland, and also works as a lecturer and a researcher at Ulster University in Belfast.

Professor Lisa Baraitser

Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Theory in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, and a Psychoanalyst and Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She is the author of Enduring Time (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Routledge, 2009) and has written widely in on feminist theory, motherhood, ethics, care and temporality. She currently co-leads a Wellcome Trust research project on waiting in relation to healthcare.

Professor Ankhi Mukherjee

Professor Ankhi Mukherjee is Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College. Mukherjee’s areas of specialism are Victorian literature and culture, contemporary British and Anglophone fiction, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, philosophical theory and intellectual history. Her latest publication, Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, is an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between global cities, poverty, and psychoanalysis across three continents.

Fakhry Davids

Fakhry Davids is a psychoanalyst in full-time private practice. He is a Fellow and Training Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Honorary Associate Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit at UCL, the current Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, Essex University, Visiting Lecturer in the Tavistock Clinic, and Board Member of PCCA – Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities. He is a Member of the Holmes Commission into Racial Equity in the American Psychoanalytic Association. He teaches, supervises and lectures widely and in 2011 authored the book, Internal Racism: A psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference.

Helen Morgan

Helen Morgan is a Fellow of the British Psychotherapy Foundation and is a training analyst and supervisor for the Jungian Analytic Association within the BPF. She has published a number of papers a-on ‘race’ and racism and her book, ‘The Work of Whiteness. A Psychoanalytic Perspective’ was published in 2021 by Routledge.

Maxine Dennis is a Psychoanalyst (British Psychoanalytic Society) in private practice and previously worked as a Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Psychotherapist and Groups Lead in the Adult Department, Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. She is also a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Essex Clinical Psychology Department and various psychotherapy trainings in the UK and aboard. Her recent publication is Invisible Trauma: Women, Difference and the Criminal Justice System. Co-authored with Anna Motz and Anne Aiyegbusi.

BPC Trainee Tickets

We recognise the significant cost of training and that trainees are often unable to afford conferences. This is a loss to the trainee’s development and introduction to the profession, but also a loss of trainee experience to the wider discussion. Trainees are the future of the profession and we want to involve them in our events where possible.

If you would like to ‘pay forward’ an online place for Friday and Saturday for a BPC trainee who might otherwise not be able to attend, you can do so below.

If you are a trainee on a BPC accredited course and want to register your interest for a free ticket, please email us.

If you are a trainee but not on a BPC accredited course, you can still buy tickets at the Trainee fee for both the Friday online and Saturday online.