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.

Friday 11 November: PPNow 2022 Public Lecture

Grappling with Uncertainty: Thoughts and Thinking about Sexuality and Gender in the Consulting Room – Dr Noreen Giffney

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.

Saturday 12 November PPNow 2022 Insiders and Outsiders: Navigating identities and divisions inside and outside the consulting room

Sessions will include:

• Professor Lisa Baraitser “On being with others ‘now’”
• A consideration from Professor Ankhi Mukherjee on her latest publication Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between global cities, poverty, and psychoanalysis across three continents, and the issues this raises.
• Panel Discussion: The Question of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Institutional Racism with Fakhry Davids, Helen Morgan and Maxine Dennis.
• PPNow 2022 Awards.

Details of the full programme to be released at a later date.