Looking at the state of the world at present it appears that the lessons from the not too distant past have not been learnt: right wing movements are on the rise; the European Union, born of the lessons of WWII, has been put into question by the nostalgia fuelled Brexit; in-group insularity and hatred inform strategies for gaining power; manipulation of projective dynamics through folk devils and moral panics abounds. None of these developments are new, but we ask why, from a psychosocial perspective, are they gaining traction? How are they amplified ? and Why now?

We know from experience that healing is not about shutting out the past or avoiding problems, but learning to live with them and avoid repetition. How can psycho-social approaches help us keep in mind lessons from the past to inform present and future, learning from experience with a longer time-span in view?

This plenary panel will consider the wider current context of these polarising social dynamics, trans-generational trauma and collapse of any long-term unifying vision. It will touch on the escalating destructiveness of conflicts and societal shifts such as loss of trust in one another, the environment, and the public sphere. It will also highlight changing conceptions of the relationship between humans, machines and the natural world

The aim, however, is not only of ‘social diagnosis’ where psychosocial approaches have already made a significant contribution, but in the more difficult task of finding grounds for hope, healing and imagining a better future.

In this article I explore the phenomenon of ecological disaster through the perspective of relationships and intersubjectivity using a psychosocial lens. I argue that fragmentation and hyper-individualism in late modernity are the root causes of ecological disaster. Fragmentation and disconnection from the consequences of our actions allows us to exploit our finite resources, as if infinite, with catastrophic consequences for our ecosystems. The hyper-individualism we have become acculturated to today and socialised into believing denies the reality of our interconnectedness and interdependence on one another. In the context of climate change, the logical conclusion of fragmentation results in a fatal kind of disconnection, akin, I argue, to suicide and genocide, which the climate change campaigner Polly Higgins referred to as ‘ecocide’. To highlight my argument I will make some links between the concepts of suicide, genocide and ecocide in an attempt to understand the psychosocial dynamics of fatal self destructiveness, using personal experiences to explore aggression, in the hope that personal insights may shine a light on dynamics that lie at the heart of climate change brought about by fragmentation and disconnection.

Just as political ecologists have critiqued narratives of “climate migration” and “climate conflict” for their implicit climate determinism – or the tendency focus on climate change as the decisive causal factor behind complex social processes – this article argues that we should move beyond climate or ecology-centric accounts of “climate emotions.” Some of the existing literature highlights how the emotional impacts of climate change intersect with histories of class, race, and gender oppression. But these insights can be deepened by developing a critical political economy approach that illuminates how climate emotions are conditioned by intersecting developments in global capitalism, technology, and subjectivity. To do this, I will bring together the work of philosopher Bernard Stiegler with Feminist Marxist analyses of the “care crisis” of neoliberal capitalism. These analyses help demonstrate how emotional responses to ecological crises are shaped and constrained by broader epidemics of depression and “burnout” driven by neoliberal capitalism’s systematic devaluation of care, production of precarity, and diffusion of ideologies of self-optimization and individualized responsibility. By bringing these insights to bear on climate emotions and the climate-mental health nexus, we will be in better position to develop strategies of collective healing and activism that can help address the intersecting crises of ecology and what I call “burnout capitalism.”

In Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric: Freud, Burke, Lacan and Philosophy's Other Scenes (Routledge 2022), psychoanalyst Chris Vanderwees and I stage a number of encounters between psychoanalysis and Kenneth Burke's "New Rhetoric." Burke's approach to rhetoric was tremendously influenced by Freud in that he saw Freud's conceptions of identity, subjectivity, and the unconscious as not only psychoanalytic concerns but fundamentally rhetorical ones bound up with interpretation, persuasion, and influence. Whereas previous waves of rhetoricians saw the two disciplines as mutually exclusive, Burke caused them to coalesce in a fashion that brought out the therapeutic and philosophical potentials within each of these lines of inquiry.

Drawing on the work of Freud, Burke, Klein, Lacan, and Zupančič, my presentation will build on some of the optics developed in my book to probe hybrid psychoanalytic/new-rhetorical approaches to diverse psychosocial strategies for the processing of dangerous, traumatic, and mundane experience. Zeroing-in on Burke's adoption and adaptation of Freud's conceptions of reality testing and "the pleasure principle," I will cast several nets to reflect on the mechanisms that set in when individuals and groups have to reorient themselves towards and metabolize economic turmoil, environmental catastrophe, and social crises. Following Burke and Lacan, I will suggest that these questions necessitate profoundly multiperspectival, interdisciplinary points of reference in order to orient the psychic life towards something like what Alenka Zupančič calls an "ethics of the Real."

This talk will shed some light on a poorly-known country, Lithuania. Although its population has been significantly decreasing, the academic literature has been (and remains) largely silent on the matter – even that of the UK, the prime destination of Lithuanian emigrants. Lithuania is a noteworthy case from a psychosocial perspective, and specifically from the ‘learning from experience’ perspective due to its history of trauma. My study investigates the possibility that this increased mobility of Lithuania’s population is partly related to an immobility within the ‘cultural psyche,’ related to the country’s exposure to repeated historical trauma over many decades. Arguably, some migrants are ‘haunted’ by legacies of the past.

My study – using psychosocial interviews and groups – looks at how the cultural imaginary (the ways migrants imagine their collective social life) is produced out of this history.

There is a search for cultural containers in the imaginary, predominantly through landscape, which plays out differently between generational groups. However, this search falls short of satisfactory as a secure container out of which people can grow and flourish is not found.

This presentation will focus on the use of poetry alongside my other research methods, as it evokes additional meanings to the prosaic and the apparent, and seems to be the most effective vehicle for conveying the stuck and ambivalent states of mind.

Immigrants often find themselves entering a host country that resembles an unknown world. Cultural identity tends to become increasingly significant following immigration, as individuals navigate unfamiliar surroundings. Each culture possesses unique cultural artifacts that hold captivating narratives. These cultural objects, ranging from material items like handicrafts and artifacts to non-material elements such as literature, art, music, and film, play a vital role in helping immigrants preserve their cultural identity and maintain connections to their heritage.

Drawing from both my observations as an Iranian female analyst within the consulting room and my individual experiences as an immigrant, I have developed an interest in the significance of cultural objects in Iranian immigrants' lives.

Employing a psychoanalytic framework, my project aims to explore the impact of displacement on immigrants' psychological well-being and their relationships with people, objects, and culture. Specifically, the research investigates how cultural objects can serve as “transitional objects” in the Winnicottian sense (1953), either facilitating or impeding an immigrant's integration into a new culture. After immigration, the world is perceived as black and white with no grey area; for immigrants, it could be we vs. Others, my country vs. your country. Through the process of integration into the new culture, immigrants could move to a depressive position in Kleinian’s sense that is a grey area, both good and bad. By delving into these dynamics, the project contributes to a deeper understanding of the interplay between psychosocial processes and cultural adaptation. My project will build upon existing scholarship in cultural and migration studies, innovatively bringing together psychoanalytic theory and migration studies. This integration offers a novel approach to understanding the complexities of migration and cultural dynamics.

In our world, the sense of safety often eludes us. This sentiment permeates our daily lives through both direct experiences and indirect influences. Yet, this feeling of insecurity is not evenly distributed across the globe. It is natural for those trapped in precarious situations to seek refuge elsewhere, whether by migrating to a different locale or becoming refugees, hopeful for a new beginning. As the world's insecurity deepens, so does the number of refugees seeking solace elsewhere. The journey of a refugee typically commences with hope, but the subsequent experiences alter their lives irreversibly.

The trajectory of a refugee's experience hinges greatly upon the environment and its policies. To overcome the trials endured and to assimilate into a new environment, individuals require a degree of containment. However, when the prevailing environment and policies lack this essential feature and lean towards rejection and dehumanization, refugees struggle to articulate their emotional and psychological journey. Thus, a journey that commenced with hope often results in further setbacks and injuries in the new setting.

The destination country also has its rationale, prioritizing the protection of its borders, its populace, and its interests. Unfortunately, the media often portrays refugees as burdens, associating their arrival with insecurity and resource depletion. It seems as though lessons from past experiences and exclusionary policies go unheeded, perpetuating the cycle of systemic inadequacies.

One might even perceive the refugee's journey as a quest for restoration and hope. If the destination country could serve as a nurturing entity, offering containment and fulfilling the individual's needs to some extent, perhaps both parties could learn and grow, breaking free from the cycle of trauma repetition.

This paper delves into the emotional violence and developmental impacts of caste in India, a form of social stratification that obstructs one's capacity of being and becoming by enclosing individuals in the logic of purity-pollution and congenital transmission. Despite efforts to address its social impact, the psychic effects of caste are often dismissed as an individual lack rather than a complex psychosocial consequence. Building upon the theorizations of caste by Indian psychoanalysts as the splitting of the self into pure and polluted parts, the former acceptable and the latter unbearable, we attempt to take a step further to theorize the fate of this split with the help of a clinical encounter through a reflexive engagement with acts of emptying, splitting and projective identification.
Engaging with the complexities of caste in the context of psychoanalytic practice in India, this paper proposes a theoretical framework that seeks to use, incorporate and extend conceptualisations of – Green’s (1999) 'negative hallucination', Layton’s (2020) 'psychosocial attacks on linking', Bion’s (1967) idea of 'container-contained', and Benjamin’s (2018) theorisation of 'mutual recognition' – to address the entrenched psychosocial realities of caste.
Through a clinical vignette of the author and both the author’s shared theorization of the case, the paper illustrates how psychic reality is not only impacted by, but also constructed within the constraints of one’s caste identity; as it influences which parts of the self are recognised, allowed to develop, or are arrested prematurely. It underscores our imaginations and the importance of working through these inner realities as well as its implications for both the patient and the therapist, thereby offering insights to psychotherapists in navigating various forms of cultural and psychosocial hierarchies and stratifications within the clinic, with a particular focus on the complexities of caste in the Indian subcontinent.

Inter and Transgenerational memory workshop.

After a short introduction with case studies this session will help participants to develop their own sense of the similarities and differences between intergenerational memory running in families, groups and organisations and transgenerational memory located in culture and bodies in deeper time. Participants will be invited to reflect on the way that “generation” signifies both familial relationships and peer groups across society.

We will test out the usefulness of these distinctions and explore how they might enrich or challenge our sense of self and how we go about solving problems individually and socially.

Nigel Williams is a Fellow in Psychology and Psychosocial studies at the University of the West of England and is author of Mapping Social Memory a Psychotherapeutic and Psycho-Social Approach, in the Palgrave Psychosocial series and has recently published a chapter on generational memory in Studying Generations, Bristol University Press edited by Helen Kinstone and Jennie Bristow.

The purpose of the research article is to explore through reflective analysis the ethics and dilemmas faced by practising theologians in healing trauma in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Trauma requiring intervention of theologians is vast, ranging from physical impairment to emotional and spiritual wounds. Balancing competing healing theories founded upon different philosophical groundings and practical applications presents theologians with sources of dilemma that are not made any better by the vast backgrounds of service users and their complex situations. The emergence of AI has added another complex ethical dilemma dimension with no obvious roots of solutions found in the Holy Bible nor the Parliamentary Laws of the country. Given the possibility of super AI machines that could outcompete human beings in efficiency and quality of decisions, including those required to optimise trauma healing, the dilemma for the theologians is how and to what extent to embrace the AI today and the future. The study uses psychosocial analysis frameworks to provoke some philosophical questions that underpin intellectual reasoning in trauma healing by the Church. The study then interrogates practical dilemmas informed by practising theologians in trauma healing. Ownership and accountability of AI driven and generated solutions in trauma healing present some of the interesting points discussed in the study.

Abstract:

In the midst of the 1960s, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum launched what became known as one of the first chatbots: Eliza. Employing a basic process of pattern matching, the program was designed to emulate a psychotherapist, identifying keywords and responding with short prompts or open questions that diverted the attention from itself to the user. Unlike ELIZA, current natural language processing chatbots can produce news articles, and essays, as well as provide extended answers to specific questions from users in seconds.

By January 2023, ChatGPT had become the fastest-growing internet application ever, boasting over 100 million monthly active users. Simultaneously, higher education institutions grappled with whether to ban or integrate the platform due to concerns over academic integrity. Recent discussions have highlighted worries about academic dishonesty and the potential effects of these technologies on the development of crucial skills like critical thinking, creativity, problem-solving, and writing.

This paper explores the perspectives of undergraduate students on the use of AI-powered chatbots as a resource for writing. Through interviews and reflexive auto-ethnography, I provide a reading of the relationships formed between students and chatbots, examining how the former navigate tensions about agency and authorship concerning their written work. By adopting a psychosocial and psychoanalytically informed lens, I approach writing as an embodied practice, exploring the ways in which it articulates to the desire to (not) know. This approach allows for a critical reading of the potentials and constraints posed by AI technology applied to writing as a pedagogical strategy. In this way, my aim is twofold: firstly, to contribute to a deeper understanding of how students interact with AI Chatbots, and secondly, to bring to the fore the role of chatbots as social agents that are reshaping how we approach learning, thinking, and writing in contemporary precarious times.

In this paper, I outline the main drift of what I call Formative Media. Beyond its intended psychoanalytic connotations, the Formative ties in with the rise of a new formalism in the humanities. For example, the literature scholar Caroline Levine (2015) has suggested a “new formalist method” that pays attention to “both aesthetic and social forms” with a particular focus on “patterns of sociopolitical experience”. Anna Kornbluh (2019), in turn, captures the political orientation of this new formalism when she defines form as “composed relationality”.

This return of formalism in the humanities goes together well with Psychosocial Studies whose core interest lies in identifying specific relational forms and their psychic and social productiveness. Yet, the formative in my psychosocial conception is not entirely coextensive with the new formalism in the humanities. Whereas Levine (2015) identifies “fissures and interstices, vagueness and indeterminacy, boundary-crossing, and dissolution” as lying outside the limits of form and formalism, my approach invites for such fissures and changes in the evolution of socio-technological forms to come into the picture. Where are the decisive changes in the design of social forms on the part of the digital platforms, I ask, that have made a formative difference for the ways in which their users constitute themselves and each other?

It is in this formalist/formative mode of re/construction that I will unpack in my paper some of the central turns in the development of digital platforms that have made a difference in their formative orientations: with the introduction of “newsfeed” on Facebook turning flirtation into haunting; the introduction of deep neural networks to video recommendations turning YouTube into a ‘feeding tube;’ and the addition of the FaceTune application turning self-image practices on Instagram into traps of impossible self-constitution.

According to the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, a child’s navigation of the relationship between inner and outer reality persists throughout their lifespan and can be manifested in cultural activities such as religious practices or the appreciation of the arts. Winnicott views the moments in which people become lost in fantasy and forget the boundary between inner and outer worlds during cultural activities “the little madnesses.” He argues that such moments, i.e. “transitional” moments, are a necessary break from the pressure of being rational and the arenas of play allowing for joy, imagination, and creativity. Using Winnicott’s concepts of “transitional phenomenon” and “play” and building on recent applications of such concepts to media studies, this paper discusses a case study of a Vietnamese woman’s parasocial engagement with romantic South Korean television dramas, which bolstered the rise of a “Korean Wave” in Vietnam. This case study built upon two psychosocial in-depth interviews conducted in mid-2019. The woman’s immersion in fantasy manifested in the way she kept revisiting favourite scenes and was able to recite dialogues from the dramas with precision, integrating the narrative into her inner world and making it her own. Her solitary viewing of favourite dramas thus became a personal ritual replete with meaning and a site of play where she sought to escape the ordinary and perceived social invisibility. Through this case study, the paper seeks to advance the application of Winnicott’s theory to television audience research and enrich a psychosocial approach to the studies of pop culture and fandom.

This roundtable offers a nuanced exploration of anti-oppressive psychotherapy training practices, specifically tailored for psychotherapy trainers. Focused on addressing prevalent issues of racism and oppression within the UK counselling and psychotherapy professions, our discussion centres on the design, implementation, and outcomes of training initiatives aimed at fostering inclusive and equitable practices.

Drawing on the diverse expertise of participants, who are experienced psychotherapy trainers intimately involved in crafting and delivering such trainings, we delve into the multifaceted dimensions of our collective work. The roundtable provides a platform for candid dialogue and knowledge exchange, facilitating a deeper understanding of the aims, challenges, and transformative potential inherent in anti-oppressive training endeavors.

Central to our discussion is the approach taken by three participants in developing a comprehensive training course that critically examines issues of white privilege and supremacy within psychotherapy contexts. This initiative, designed to enhance the competencies of training staff in navigating racialized identities and fostering safe learning environments, has garnered significant interest and demand within a predominantly white training institute. Moreover, the roundtable incorporates the perspective of a participant who has extensive experience in delivering anti-oppressive training and engaged with the course as a learner, bringing forth rich insights from her experience. Through reflective dialogue, we illuminate the intricacies of delivering anti-oppressive training, exploring the emotional terrain, challenges, and moments of growth encountered along the journey.

By fostering a reflexive space for introspection and shared learning, this roundtable aims to fill a notable gap in the existing literature by offering firsthand accounts and experiential insights into the process of delivering anti-oppressive psychotherapy training. Our discussion underscores the importance of ongoing dialogue, self-awareness, and collective action in advancing the principles of social justice and equity within therapeutic practice and education.

As the long-standing patterns of power that have emerged as a result of colonialism, coloniality establishes hierarchies of belonging based on difference. As Maldonado-Torres puts it: “coloniality survives colonialism”. In her book Psychoanalysis and Colonialism, Sally Swartz suggests that the disentanglement of psychoanalysis from coloniality involves an ongoing series of projects. In this symposium, we address the embeddedness of colonialities within psychoanaltyic theory and practice and focus on some intersections of culture and nationalism, micropolitics and neoliberal ideology, and the construction of adolescent identity as a special case of colonialising under late capitalism in order to begin this necessary disentanglement.

In this paper, I offer a Winnicottian perspective on Freud’s (1925, 1937) infamous indictment of teaching as an “impossible profession.” Specifically, I argue that what makes teaching impossible today is the inability to allow for a group regressive experience rooted in Winnicott’s (1954a,b) “regression to dependence.” It is from this experience that a transitional space can emerge, apperception can blend with perception, and the self can come alive. And yet, if learning is created and found in this space, so too is madness, and it is this latter danger that forecloses on teaching with a degree of risk. Instead, teachers and learners would rather carry on with what Winnicott (1949) calls the “split-off intellect” because, in part, this is what we are socialized into, but also because the risk concomitant to regression is perceived as too great. In brief, because there is no opportunity to regress, there is no space to aggress and be bad-enough teachers and learners. The teacher cannot become a usable object, and the learner cannot learn beyond a schizoid oscillation between withdraw and compliance.

Curiously, Winnicott despised teaching (he would fall asleep in front of his students). Borrowing from Ogden (2019), one might wager that Winnicott intuited the necessity of shifting away from a form of epistemological teaching to one of ontological teaching; one that prioritizes feeling alive rather than feeling equipped with knowledge. How, then, to withstand the desire to teach and embrace a sense of going-on-being that is itself a paradoxical form of teaching? What is at stake? And what might we learn from Winnicott the radical pedagogue?

This paper addresses the conference theme by offering a psychoanalytic (particularly Winnicottian) contribution to the psychosocial understanding of teaching and learning, experiential learning, and the fear of breakdown (trauma) manifest in educational settings.

In order for a classroom to become an effective safe space, it helps to regard it as an object. As such, all that exists within a classroom space, what goes into creating that intersubjective area of experience, falls under the auspices of ‘object,’ including, students, instructor, architecture, material furniture, audio-visual equipment etc. This paper contextualizes the trigger warning as one part of how a classroom is used as an object, arguing that the trigger warning takes on many different functions in maintaining the way in which a safe classroom is used as an object by instructor and student alike.

Using D.W. Winnicott’s paper ‘The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications’ (1969/1999), I consider the term ‘use’ through his specific psychoanalytic frame, emphasizing one’s capacity to think, that is ‘the making of interpretations, and not about interpretations as such’ (Winnicott 1999: 86). How one develops and establishes a capacity to use objects, and significantly where that capacity is thwarted or absent, is the project. As such, by positioning the classroom as an object of use, I examine the purpose and role of trigger warnings as mechanisms for creating ‘safe spaces.’ The aim is to highlight that trigger warnings can only ever succeed as markers of whether or not the classroom has succeeded in establishing an authentic safe space.

This psychoanalytic examination of ‘use’, then, is very much attendant to the student’s point of view, because it is how the student uses, or rather develops a capacity to use, the classroom (or indeed the instructor) that determines the construction and viability of a safe space. Trigger warnings, as a particle of this use, function as indicators of how successful (or not) a safe space has been established collaboratively.

My doctoral inquiry considered how the nature of a learner teacher relationship is involved in the limitation and demonstration of complex thought. Working within an overarching psychoanalytic framework and socio-cultural paradigm provided by Alfred Lorenzer’s (1986) In-depth Hermeneutic method(ology), answers were sought by considering the nature of the intersubjective relationship that supported, or failed to support, the demonstration of complex thought for these learners.

My conclusion includes that when the learner operates within a schema of traumatically skewed intersubjectivity (Schechter, 2017) and attempts to connect and communicate with a teacher who does not operate similarly, there results misunderstanding, miscommunication, and a relational field of being-at-odds-with-another (adapted from Stern, 1985/2000). Emerging as part of these intersubjective relational attempts, my expression of an affective-relational dynamic (the Shame-Agency dynamic) articulates a process from doubt toward shame that acts as a limiter for demonstrating complex thought and a struggle to learn from experience. Clear recognition of these affective states, along with certain relational qualities in the teacher contribute toward supporting developing self-agency, complex thought, learning and its demonstration, connecting a feedback loop to the learner of their ability to learn in relationship with a teacher.

With the centrality of the learner teacher relationship in relational pedagogy, this offers a different paradigm through which to consider how early developmental trauma impacts relationships, educational achievement, and underachievement. My research outcome offers the teacher a means for developing a learning culture beneficial to children who experience(d) being looked after by those other than their parents, as well as all others in the class, contributing to a psychosocial approach to teaching and learning.

Keywords: learner teacher relationship; developmental trauma; complex thought; intersubjectivity; affective-relational dynamics; the Shame-Agency dynamic.

Social isolation and loneliness are “epidemic” in the twenty-first century, directly affecting physical, mental, and societal health (Office of the Surgeon General, 2023). Social isolation increases the risk for premature death by 29%, doubles the risk for depression, and is justifiably the strongest predictor of suicides. The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in alarming rates of loneliness.

Neoliberalism valorizes “extreme individualism” and “denies connections of all kinds” (Layton, 2006, p. 83), thus contributing to social isolation’s epidemic proportions. By promoting competition and creating feelings of disconnection, it both feeds loneliness and isolation and also undermines people’s sense of solidarity (Becker, Hartwich, and Haslam, 2021).

Increasing social isolation and disconnection in turn drive fraying societal bonds. In recent years the size of social networks has shrunk—and alienation and distrust have increased. Splitting and projection lead to polarization and tribalism. When people are lonely, they become more insecure, anxious, and fearful. To relieve their feelings of exclusion and gain a sense of belonging, they may turn to populist and extremist groups.

A culture of connection is necessary if we are to repair societal bonds and ameliorate social isolation. Psychoanalysts—and, in particular, community psychoanalysts—can teach mentalization, i.e., the understanding that the other person has a subjectivity similar to one’s own; mentalization can be taught in schools, churches, and community centers. At the societal level, social conditions—enabled by laws or norms which allow the creation of “containing social environments”—can help people to mentalize (Rustin, 2001, p. 6; as cited in Weintrobe, 2021, p. 83). Weintrobe calls these social environments “frameworks of care.” They allow individuals to tolerate and recognize “each other’s states of mind,” or subjectivities. When we can see and appreciate the other, splitting and projection decrease, lessening distrust and polarization on one hand and loneliness and isolation on the other.

The digital age, in its ever-expanding state of technology, continues to offer a reconceptualization of our most fundamental human characteristics with each technological advancement. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are two prominent figures in forging this new and dubious path for humanity. Most recently, Elon Musk has just announced that the first human candidate for Neuralink, a surgical implant meant to merge the brain with the internet, is ‘recovering well’ from the surgery. Jan de Vos’ 2020 book titled “The Digitalisation of (Inter)subjectivity” discussed how the efforts of these tech billionaires and other digital age technologies ultimately serve the commodification of the subject and give rise to a ‘digital death drive’. In his book, he points out how our technology and social media were created with psychological models in mind, essentializing what it means to be human through what the psychological and neuropsychological ‘psy-sciences’ purport being human to be. As such, digitalising every aspect of the human experience may lead to the undoing of humanity as we know it. Adjacently, philosopher Byung-Chul Han has written on psychopolitics and the impact of rampant technosolutionism and neoliberalism on how humans live their lives. He alerts his readers to the frictionless state of being that ensues from the neoliberal focus on performance and production. In the fully-realized digital society, technologies that proclaim to facilitate intersubjective engagement instead commodify the human subject. This paper will follow suit with de Vos’ psy-critique of these issues, exploring whether or not psychoanalysis can offer an alternative to the predominant psychological and neuropsychological models that risk objectifying the human subject.

This presentation will present the results of an explorative study in which self-presentations on TikTok were examined in connection with content on eating disorders. Representations in which the recovery from eating disorders is discussed and documented were also included and understood as a digital expression in the sense of learning from experience.

The latter are also known as #Recovery. While there are already international findings on the thematization of eating disorders on social media platforms such as Instagram, there is still a need for research on representations on the comparatively young platform TikTok. The changed and thus new formats on TikTok - especially short videos - in turn lead to changed forms of aestheticization of self- and body presentations associated with eating disorders.

Combining media theoretical and psychoanalytical social psychological perspectives, selected qualitative form and content analyses of videos are presented and discussed on the basis of key questions: What meanings about eating disorders are intentionally conveyed by adolescents and young adults via videos? How do the manifest motives relate to the aestheticization of the self-presentations and thus also to implicitly conveyed meanings?

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, we present a qualitative content analysis of selected videos and argue that they necessitate a reconceptualization of the psychoanalytic concept of ‘hysteria’. Traditionally understood as a regressive condition which often seeks a return to childhood and the ‘pure’ or ‘innocent’ body of the child while maintaining strict bodily boundaries against others, the TikTok videos show a type of hysteria which maintains the holding onto strict symptom-based identities, but also an opening up towards unknown users on TikTok. This act is often underscored through the use of the #ForYou hashtag. Secondly, many videos also present a creative and complex negotiation, rather than turning away from, issues of sexuality by tapping into existing aesthetic regimes on the platform.

Historically, discussions of self-harm in fiction have prioritised concerns around imitation – that is, the possibility that seeing or reading about self-harm might cause people to self-harm. Such discussions have prioritised the views of parents, clinicians, researchers, and politicians: people who self-harm have often been erased or ignored. This paper explores specifically how such debates might be altered or radically reframed when experiences of self-harm are centred rather than marginalised, opening up broader questions regarding how Literary and Cultural Studies might draw on experiential knowledge in interpreting and assessing the function and impact of fiction.

In doing so, the paper employs an innovative, interdisciplinary methodology to interweave Literary and Sociological approaches, drawing on a close reading of the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects (2018), and 16 qualitative interviews with people with experience of self-harm. By centring their perspectives, the paper will critique assumptions regarding what is a ‘good’ depiction of self-harm, and the tendency to limit what ‘counts’ as a happy ending to recovery and the cessation of self-harm. Instead the paper will offer alternate views and forms of conclusion which centre the complex, uncertain temporalities of experiences of self-harm.

First, I will explore participants’ frustration that embodied after-effects of self-harm, specifically scars, are often written out of fictional narratives, erasing the ways that self-harm lingers and extends through time in complex ways. I will connect this to participants’ desires for alternative forms of chronicity, and for textual genres or forms that might represent ongoingness or resist containment through totalising conclusion. Thus, the paper brings together aesthetic and social concerns to explore what it might mean to want or resist an ending in the context of self-harm, both in fiction and in life. In doing so it demonstrates one (among many) possible way that Psychosocial Studies might learn from experience.

In this paper, we propose to analyse the phenomenon of female right-wing influencers on (German) social media and interpret it on the basis of Freud’s classic paper “A Child Is Being Beaten” (1919).

Freud saw the fantasy, “a child is being beaten,” offered by his analysands as a recollected fragment during analysis, to fall into three distinct, yet overlapping, layers of relational meanings. The first layer holds a sadistic meaning, with the child, beaten by the subject’s father, being an unspecified other to the self, most likely a sibling as a ‘significant-other-like-myself.’ The second, more repressed layer concerns a masochistic level of meaning, with the beaten child identified as oneself, implicating the subject in the violently intimate scenario. The third layer, in turn, might be called the “phatic” layer, in that it is stripped of all relational context and stands by itself as a monolithic, yet highly sexually exciting, observation, decoupled from all social ties.

Recently, the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster (2023) has applied Freud’s text to the politics of reproductive rights in the US, repurposing it as “a child is being aborted”. “Perhaps there is an attempt here,” she writes, “to get closer to what it feels like to be on the other side of a divide. The problem is that this is being done through what I can only call a beating fantasy” (p. 275).

In our paper, we build on Webster’s advance and offer analyses of the different positionings of right-wing female influencers in order to unpack the various layers and variations of what might likewise be called a “beating fantasy.”

This article explores men’s psychic attachments to organisational masculinities in the context of gender equality initiatives in the UK finance sector. Deploying an object-relations psychoanalysis and generating interview data with 30 male executives and non-executives, it unpacks why and how men outwardly support but unconsciously repudiate workplace gender equality. We explain how this conflict indicates the presence of what Melanie Klein (1946) terms the paranoid-schizoid position. We examine two key unconscious processes of the paranoid-schizoid position in men’s accounts: gender-splitting, when men dissociate undesirable aspects of organisational masculinity, and projection, when repressed, negative parts of their masculine ideals are instead attributed to women. This article’s contributions demonstrate how the paranoid schizoid position is defensive, enabling men to articulate support for gender equality, but also protect paranoid constructions of organisational masculinity when it is threatened by women. Empirically and theoretically, this article shows how organisational masculinities are ambivalent, which in Kleinian terms underscores how masculinity has ‘good’ and ‘bad’ components that are constituted unconsciously through its relationship with the object world. This article concludes by drawing out the implications for (re)positioning men within workplace gender equality debates and activities.

This essay is a feminist of color meditation on anger that draws from postcolonial psychoanalysis and feminist phenomenology. Thinking through anger by way postcolonial and feminist theory provides us with the blueprints for how to think about anger historically, structurally, psychologically, and culturally. By situating feminist anger as a response to an excessively violent modernity, with its modes of inferiorization, I examine the coloniality of everyday sexism through my own recollections of anger. It’s a story that moves between the patriarchy of the home, the neighborhood, the workplace, and then back home again. In resisting patriarchy, I learned vital lessons about anger. Anger contests subordination to survive. Anger makes demands on humanness, but its expression can ironically lessen its claim. An angry woman of color is unhinged, excessive, has lost control. This is familiar feminist terrain.

Anger is part and parcel of a feminist affective inheritance. The basis of this inheritance is violence—psychic, corporeal, and material. Everyday sexism, along with other forms of oppression, are a system of violences that have been normalized and naturalized since the dawn of modern Europe with its colonial conquests. Most women can recall times when they were made to feel inferior, when they had their bodies accosted, and/or when they faced economic insecurity—and so can most people of color. When you belong to a subjugated culture, there are shared ways of being and understanding that reflect and embody a critique of dominant culture; part of that is a shared anger. That anger is expressed through knowing glances, secret cabals, and outbursts. Every subjugated group has a culture of anger that makes up the counter-modernity, which has at its foundation hope. And it is in the feminist counter-modern I end my narrative by looking at the bonds between women as they transform their worlds.

Men’s sexual desire is a powerful but often unexplored element of identity development whose examination can threaten men’s relationship to a masculinity characterized by heteronormativity entailing unequal power in gendered sexuality. Although it is often examined as a biological process of sexual functioning, I explore the experience of sexual desire for young men as intimately linked to psychological, relational, and sociostructural systems. I explored this phenomenon across a diverse group of young men through critical, psychodynamically-informed analysis of qualitative interviews. I am conducting clinical narrative interviews with young men (ages 18-32) diverse by race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, relationship status, and sexual experience. Using the Listening Guide (Brown & Gilligan, 1992), a feminist and psychodynamically-oriented method of qualitative analysis, I have identified multiple voices in young men’s experiences of sexual desire, focusing on voices of constraint and rebellion set against the rigid walls of masculine ideal. Listening to how these voices interact in men’s narrated experiences illuminates the conflicts between expectations of masculinity and desire. For gay and bisexual men, experiences of same-sex desire served as a means of, and sometimes necessitated, deconstructing and resisting masculine ideologies. In contrast, heterosexual men voiced ongoing and often unheeded struggles with identity development impacting interpersonal relationships within the social pressures around maintained expectations of masculinity. I present two case studies, one heterosexual and one gay man, to exemplify the complexity of these struggles and how they differ across sexual identity. Findings present a deeply embedded conflict for young men shrouded by cultural intrusion and relational silence around what it means to be a man.

This project examines the implications of sexual desire for identity formation across social, cultural, and psychological dimensions. Qualitative methodology informs understanding of sexual desire and identity through participant experiences and their struggles to integrate them within their unique sociocultural environments.

Exploring the intricate psychosocial challenges faced by adolescents, focus centered on the often-hidden issue of incestuous abuse. Adolescence, marked by challenges spanning biological, psychological, social, moral, and spiritual dimensions, becomes a battleground for sensitive and tragic experiences. This prompted a qualitative study aimed at understanding the profound intrapersonal impact of incestuous abuse on adolescent girls. Five girls, aged 15 to 18, were selected from a Pakistani organization aiding destitute and neglected children. Through semi-structured in-depth interviews, we aimed to explore the layers of their intrapersonal experiences, allowing their stories to illuminate the dark corners of their struggles. Applying Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), We meticulously transcribed and analyzed the interviews, revealing three overarching themes with associated subthemes. The narratives uncovered a poignant tale of loss and anguish, intertwined with experiences of social withdrawal. Participants, save one, grappled with a profound erosion of self-worth and a reluctance to disclose the abuse, manifesting in self-loathing. Incestuous abuse emerged not only as a breach of physical boundaries but also as a catalyst for mental and emotional turmoil. Participants recounted experiences of suicidal and homicidal ideations, loss of control, and relentless crying spells, with blame and self-harm serving as coping mechanisms. The participants expressed the dissociation towards the society, this highlighted a significant disruption in their social lives, characterized by withdrawal from interpersonal interactions, intensifying isolation, and severing crucial social connections. Another facet revealed a deep-seated despair about humanity, with participants expressing profound disillusionment, hopelessness, and despondency, fostering mistrust in the goodness of humanity. In reflecting on these narratives, it becomes evident that incestuous abuse transcends mere physical violations, leaving an indelible mark on one's being. The findings underscore the urgent need to address this pervasive issue within the societal framework of Pakistan, advocating for comprehensive support and intervention for affected adolescent girls.

The Psy-Disciplines have a longstanding history of pathologising queer and transgender identities, which resulted in harmful practices such as conversion treatments. Even today, mainstream mental health curricula/training in India carry traces of this pathologising impulse, and our mental health community has been complicit in perpetuating this stigma. Thus, there has arisen the need for Indian therapists to be trained in queer-affirmative practices. Our Queer Affirmative Counselling Practice (QACP) Course was built to teach therapists to address the distress of LGBTQ+ persons and promote their well-being. The creators and faculty of the Course are queer/trans-identified trained therapists, with a considerable amount of hours engaged in counselling practice, research, teaching and advocacy with the LGBTQI+ community. They occupy multiple identities within the world of mental health and gender-sexuality, making their contribution to the designing and teaching of this course significant given how historically pathologized and criminalised it has been.

As most students of the QACP Course tend to be cisgender-heterosexual, it could be considered audacious for a few queer/trans-identified therapists to come together in order to teach them. However, with the power of knowledge creation and sharing remaining in the hands of queer-trans faculty, we aim to avoid repeating mistakes from the past, such as the widespread pathologization of queer-trans people. We also aim to shed light on knowledge that has been historically overlooked.

Our students learn from the lived experience of our queer faculty, their family members, queer/trans guest speakers, and case studies based on real concerns of LGBTQ+ individuals. The Course embodies ‘learning from lived experience’ in its entirety. In this paper, through the QACP Course, we will explore the unique pedagogical concept of ‘teaching from the margins’, and the epistemological shift created when marginalised therapists teach mainstream therapists, instead of the other way around.

Keywords: Epistemological shift, teaching, margins, queer affirmative, LGBTQ+

The predominantly liberal-leaning institutions in the UK and US want to “move on” from the issue of homosexuality; indeed, this phrase was included in the title of the British Psychotherapy Council’s 2012 conference on sexuality. But the BPC’s recent failed attempt to issue an apology to LGBT people for past harms, and the refusal of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis to publish an article which acknowledged this harm, suggest that psychoanalytic institutions are still finding it difficult to recognise and learn from this painful history.

I use historic clinical vignettes to examine one of the ways in which queer sexuality was repressed by psychoanalysis in the clinic: the inabiity to work productively with erotic transference when both psychoanalyst and patient are female, which has identified as a particular psychoanalytic lacuna in respect of lesbian sexuality. Following Sarah Ahmed’s queering of phenomenology, I consider how psychoanalysts orient themselves towards queer sexuality, looking for “straight lines”, “straightening devices”, and “queer angles” in published vignettes about erotic transference between female analysts and patients from 1930 onwards. I discuss three exemplars. Helene Deutsch “straightened up” her description of a lesbian patient’s analysis in her 1944 book The Psychology of Women compared to a 1932 paper. After a four-decade silence, Eva Lester is the next female analyst to write about erotic transference with a female patient in the '80s, orienting herself towards queer female sexuality from a heteronormative frame. And finally, Florence Rosiello’s vignette from the early 2000s demonstrates the possibilities – and the risks – of finding space for queer angles in her clinical work with female patients. I hope to demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of this queer phenomenological method for learning from psychoanalysis' painful past, in the context of today’s increasingly polarised debates around non-normative gender and sexuality.

A 60 minute or 90 minute workshop facilitated by Dr Louise Austin

Contemporary psychoanalytic understanding of countertransference expands researcher reflexivity to utilise rather than ‘bracket’ emotional responses that might emerge in our relational encounters. This workshop is aimed at psychosocial researchers and adult educators who are interested in exploring ways of learning from their emotional responses towards research participants and/or adult learners.

In this workshop I introduce ways to utilise metaphor and image to reveal unconscious relational dynamics, uncover blind spots and discover new ways of meaning making. There will be an opportunity for you to enter a process of reflexive self-examination through working with images, however, no art experience is needed just bring along your lively curiosity and an openness to experiment.

My innovative arts-based methodology – collaborative imaginative engagement – that involves making and working with images of countertransference was devised for my PhD research into the emotional and relational experiences of the adult educator. This collaborative research method draws upon psychosocial and Jungian approaches to utilise countertransference as an affective and imaginal way of knowing, taking us beyond the surface to access unconscious processes.

The aim of this practical workshop is to frame painful and difficult moments of relational encounter as ‘blessings in disguise’ (Freud and Jung, 1906-13) for the researcher and educator, and to promote the capacity to be vulnerable as a core condition for relational reflexivity.

In spring 2024, spurred by a request from Ph.D. students who had taken his migration and displacement elective, Michael O’Loughlin offered a critical, social-psychoanalytic seminar entitled Decoloniality and the clinic. Building from the principle of the constitution of subjectivity in Otherness, the course explores the cultural, ideological and sociopolitical underpinnings of subject formation and addressed how these understandings can lead to a more critical understanding of the nurture of the practice of freedom in the clinic. Readings were determined through a collaborative process, and the class was constructed as a study group of the kind envisaged by Stefano Harney [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJzMi68Cfw0]. The challenge of decolonizing psychoanalysis, a discipline that Ranjana Khanna argues is constitutively colonial in origin, is formidable. Doing this work in a single elective within a conventional clinical psychology doctoral program which lacks a tradition of theoretical or critical inquiry is even more challenging. Michael O’Loughlin will offer a brief introduction to the course. Participating students will share their experience of the course by presenting the culminating projects they conceptualized as a response to the experience.

Professor Meriem Mokdad from Universités de Tunis, who attended all meetings via Zoom, will offer commentary on the class and the projects to open up discussion with the audience. We hope this exposition of what might be called pedagogy at the limits will open up a space for discussion of the possibilities of a decolonizing pedagogy that might lead to a decolonized clinical practice.

In Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL, the onboard computer of a space mission, seems to malfunction, killing off cryogenically preserved astronauts without explanation. Surviving crew members decide to shut down the computer and continue the mission without him, but there is the possibility that HAL himself engineered this event and set up a Second Mission that would be superior to the one designed by his programers. This would be a case of "instrumental convergence," a neg-entropic logic based on an automatism of absence, presenting the user(s) with a series of forced choices. I generalize this instance to revise the current dominant idea of AI, specifically ChatGPT, as an information-retrieval tool. I propose experimental strategies involving Lacan's discourse mathemes, effectively forcing ChatGPT to acknowledge the relevance of rhetorical options. The object is not to create the perfect "Machine-Supposed-to-Know" but rather to encourage ChatGPT users to develop Freud's technique of "floating attention" (Gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit), counterpart to the Analysand's free association. The assumption of this experiment is that there is no such thing as a non-artificial intelligence; all thought is subject to instrumental convergence, an implicit component of Lacan’s interpretation of the torus’s counterpoint of demand and desire. This thesis puts particular emphasis on the Hysteric's Discourse, where the demand of the subject, $, provokes an ambiguous mutation of the Other, from A to Ⱥ, interpreted either as humiliation or key to a new “lalanguean reading” of the signifying-chain Product. Other popular culture examples will be used as "clinical evidence" supporting alternative conclusions.

Wilfred Bion(1897-1979) formulated a theory based on empirical observations within actual group dynamics, a theory that has garnered significant interest among scholars in the fields of social and organizational psychology. Bion posited that inherent is a communal instinct, driving our noblest impulses toward seeking affiliation within a collective. This inclination for belonging, Bion argued, hinges on what he termed the "proto-mental" facet of one's personality, representing a mental stratum where sensory experiences are intertwined with psychological affectations. Bion delineated and elucidated the primary tiers of basic assumptions and workgroups. Foundational hypotheses typically operate at an unconscious level, encompassing three core postulates: the instincts of fight and flight, dependency, and pairing. Each of these hypotheses encapsulates the emotional ambiance of a group, potentially sculpting one of these three thematic scenarios.

My fascination with this discourse lies in its applicability within the realm of virtual interactions. The digital sphere, particularly through social media platforms, provides a unique lens through which we can witness and explore the manifestation of these intense emotional states. Additionally, recent scholarly inquiry has underscored the significance of digital culture within virtual social arenas. Within the domain of psychoanalysis, delving into the unconscious dynamics of online groups and virtual identities holds substantial implications for the evolving landscape of digital culture. This study aims to establish a connection between the unconscious part of Bion's group theory ( basic assumptions) and the latent psychological underpinnings of grouping affects in contemporary social media spaces. Through this exploration, it becomes evident that Bion's insights may transcend time, offering profound insights into the complex landscape of human mentality observable in the digital age.

Are there similarities between a human being need for divination and the predictive power of artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence can be seen as the beginning of a new Enlightenment; which, has resulted in achieving the rational dream of the first Enlightenment, with its desire to take subjectivity out of the equation. The irony here is that the assumptions are based on the construction of white supremacy, thereby instituting a structural bias which is wholly subjective. This first Enlightenment, culminating in the 19 century, during the Romantic period, redlined and relegating Africans, as well as people of colour, women and the working classes to the scrapheap of humanity, and in the case of Africans, we were not considered fully human. The assumptions that were inherent then, have been amplified with artificial intelligence as the training Data is inherently and subconsciously biased.

The methodology of practice as research as outlined by professor Robin Nelson, starts with subjectivity within, a psychosocial context of tacit knowledge. This is the basis for my discussions on the comparisons and differences between Ifa and AI.

Training data is crucial in the construction of artificial intelligence, because the quality and quantity of the training data directly affect the performance of the AI models. Biased or insufficient training data can lead to inaccurate or unfair AI systems. Therefore, it's essential to have diverse, comprehensive, and representative data for effective AI model training.

The dynamic between individuals and an expanding array of artificially intelligent (AI) chatbots has become a distinctive focal point in psychoanalytic discussions. Alongside this, prevalent concerns often yield to a paranoid belief that AI could attain ‘total knowledge’, thus transforming into an entity devoid of limitations. While these debates offer insights into our interaction with AI and its applications, my argument in this paper asserts that our connections with chatbots extend beyond their role as mere sources of knowledge. Rather, they are rooted in the subject’s desire not to know.

To support this claim, I explore Lacan’s psychotic and perverse perspectives in order to critically examine the impact of such technology on the subject’s ethical responsibility. In doing so, I couch this discussion in a consideration of the extent to which the AI chatbot serves to expose the relation between two forms of subjectivity: the subject of knowledge and the subject of desire.

It is argued that, outside of the very fears and anxieties that underscore our adoption of AI, the desire not to know reveals the potential to embrace the very loss AI avers. Outside of the fears and anxieties that underscore our adoption of the AI chatbot is the opportunity to render a transformation in our digital lives. In this sense, the desire not to know reveals the opportunity to assert and define the gap inherent to both the subject and the AI we create.

This paper explores how sexual trauma and heterosexual normative power dynamics frame relationship between therapist and a female-identifying teenager. She reportedly experienced fear of men, sexual attraction to women, and panic in public. She grappled with issues of sexual identity and emotional vulnerability, underneath which lay the attempt to integrate past sexual traumas. Despite identifying as a “homosexual,” the patient perceived sexual encounters within the confines of heteronormative power dynamics: she indicated that the man was the dominator and the woman the dominated. She believed as the dominator, the man is powerful and in control of his emotions, while the woman is at the mercy of her feelings. Fear of emotional and sexual vulnerability was further clarified when the patient recounted several dreams with themes of sexual violence. Inevitably, these challenges played out in the therapeutic relationship and a power struggle ensued. The therapist who prioritized emotional expressiveness was viewed as the weak member in the dyad and frequently felt dominated by the patient in the countertransference. However, by working within the power dynamic rather than against it, therapist managed to gain the patient’s trust and facilitate a therapeutic relationship that existed beyond the roles of doer and done to.

In recent years, there has been an acute rise in both the rates of LGBT identification as well as mainstream discourse on Queer gender and sexual expression. A CDC report found 20% of Gen-Z Americans identify as non-heterosexual, with the rate of Trans-identified individuals having doubled in the past five years. This trend is no doubt largely a result of the peeling back of heteronormative mores and increasing acceptance of Queerness in popular consciousness. But, I suggest, there is some distress that can be read in this turn. That is, there is perhaps something symptomatic in the fervor with which younger generations are gravitating to these identities.

Drawing from the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Walter Benjamin, this paper identifies the insidious decline of symbolic power as a potent framework for making sense of this phenomenon. The authority of Law in the west today is arguably in crisis: the individual’s fundamental relationship to the foundations of social authority are in flux, and so tension and antagonisms abound. The political subject more and more frequently struggles and fails to invest belief in a seen-as-legitimate social architecture that allows them to make sense of their world. As the symbolic mandates, processes, and objects which confer authority onto some institution or organizer of Law begin to decompose, this decay reveals the “rottenness” in the unconscious obverse of social authority - it begins to “secrete” a kind of sexuality. This decomposition leads to a collapsing of the symbolic into the subject, the violence immanent to its construction exploding outward and finding expression most immediately in another register similarly awash with rottenness and violence: sexuality. That is, symbolic decline finds its discrete manifestation in part through aberrations in gender and sexuality, and as such in the queering of the political subject.

“Engaging in heterosexual love as a feminist woman can be experienced as extremely conflict-ridden: it is difficult to combine a critical stance towards male power, based on the revelatory practice of identifying injustices that are not apparent at first sight because of their normalized and naturalized status, with the openness, vulnerability, and trust that love requires” Lena Gunnarson (2018)

As a young Indian feminist, I feel that though feminism has created a space for us to talk about the ingrained oppressive gender norms, and pushed us to challenge them, a certain shame and silence continues to hover around the gendered norms we feel ambiguous about, or rather, might even derive pleasure from. The desire to not feel so alone with my confusions is what prompted me to take on this journey.

My paper is a phenomenological inquiry, which attempts at understanding the lived experiences of four Indian heterosexual feminist women from different walks of life. It seeks to put forth their messy journeys of navigating through the paradoxical structures of heterosexual desire and feminism, one marked inherently by subordination and dominance, and another that stands for questioning the given power structures, and disorganizing and disordering the seemingly settled fields of the heteronormative society. My own subjectivity as a cisgendered, heterosexual married woman and a shy feminist has shaped how I have been able to make sense of the different experiences shared with me.

In the current socio-political culture that pushes us into polarized absolutes, amplifying certain voices and narratives while silencing others, I wish to create and occupy a small space under the theme of evolving politics of gender for non-linear, ruptured learnings that emerge as we humans navigate through the blurred boundaries of the “in-betweens” of right-wrong, conscious-unconscious and desire-fantasy-politics.

Bion alters the frame in which psychoanalytic listening might occur, taking us into the realm in which myths hold important aspects of human being and meaning in relation to one another, so the parts can be considered in relation to the whole. Whereas Freud emphasized the sexual aspect of the Oedipal tale, Bion highlights ways in which we turn a blind eye at our peril.

Taking up tasks once held by myth and fairy tales, our relationships with our screens, large and small, highlight the troubles of our times, becoming an important locus for mythic representations of universal themes.

We are currently at a moment of crisis, in some ways familiar – war, pestilence, and greed – but in some ways apocalyptic, as transgressions against one another and against the planet come due. Current media takes on these apocalyptic concerns, in the form of films, video games, and serial dramas that seek salvation by breaking through walls of space and time to imagine a future beyond this universe we have been destroying.

In this panel, we use psychoanalytic. psychosocial perspectives to look at offerings that investigate this realm of apocalyptic terror. One function of art is to disrupt our habituations in ways that lead to learning and growth. We hope, collectively, to construct an offering that moves horror from the cathartic, cheaply-resolved, fright-bump to a scansion, in Lacan’s sense, that breaks into what has become too familiar and yet is proving to be deadly, thereby providing an opportunity for constructive conversation.

Death marks an absolute and complete reality. It looms in the individual and collective imagination, provoked by the ongoing climate crisis, wars, and post-pandemic anxiety. Religion, science, and psychoanalysis offer conceptual frameworks to cope with the imminence of death. Nevertheless, death eludes a unified system of understanding creating considerable space for anxiety, confusion, defense, and frustration. This paper examines the psychic activity related to the loss of another and how language is mobilized to manipulate and circumvent the conclusiveness and unambiguity of death. Adopting a structuralist perspective and using Saussure and Beneviste as interlocutors, I approach Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as a bound text in which language is a system of pure form with neither a positive valence nor inherent value. Psychically, however, language functions as an apparatus that can be deployed to meet the demands of the Ego. Propelled into existence by language, objective reality emerges as the aggregate of subjective experience. Following the death of Percival, the six characters in The Waves continue to verify and establish him as an Object through their circulating and intersecting utterances. In doing so, they demonstrate a force of language that extends far beyond the parameters of the novel form: the potential for language to preserve, resurrect, and pervert those who have died. This process of preservation, resurrection, and perversion demonstrates a foreclosure of the signifier directly related to Lacan’s theory of psychosis. I argue that language of death is fundamentally psychotic, and yet, it is the means by which we grieve, mourn, and persist. In relation to this issue of learning and not learning from experience, I consider the ways in which language offers a structural solution allowing us to live with the problems of our fractured world.

In recent years the issue of gender-based abuse and violence amongst young people in schools has come into sharp focus, in part due to the rise and subsequent arrest of social media influencer Andrew Tate. Movements like #MeToo and Everyone’s Invited have sought to offer a space for young women to speak out anonymously about their experiences of sexual and gendered injustice at school. In the often quite fevered debates that such websites have catalysed, there is arguably a danger that teenage boys can be positioned and pathologized as irredeemably deviant. This paper details and explores a response designed to positively address gender-based violence with boys in schools, named ‘Harm Free Futures’. The programme drew on psychosocial theories of violence to foreground how boys and girls psychologically invest in and perform gender norms through the discursive practices in which they engage. We focus on how as facilitators (1 male and 1 female) we sought to position ourselves in relation to those discursive practices in a sex-positive social pedagogic space designed to explore the harm inherent in gender-based abuse and violence. Taking an in-depth qualitative approach, we seek to convey some of the precise detail of the interactions between ourselves as facilitators and a group of 10, year 9 pupils over a 6-week period. The paper shows how our positioning in relation to the lifeworlds of the boys engendered processes and some outcomes that, if mirrored by teachers and other professionals elsewhere, could have the potential to reduce gender-based violence in schools. The paper links to several conference themes, primarily the evolving politics of gender and psychosocial approaches to digital culture and learning.

The purpose of the presentation is to outline how the use of object relations theory, is valuable for supporting students of the social professions to engage with the content of social justice education. The paper will outline how using fairy tales as ‘transitional objects’ allows students to engage with the emotional work of learning about diversity and difference.

Students of social work must engage with teaching on racism, ableism, gender, and homophobia. As an academic, I use group work to teach this material. The student groups are diverse in nature, and discussions on for example, racism, sexism and or homophobia evoke feelings of anger in students who experience these realities. The anger is focused on students who they view as having privilege. These students share feelings of guilt and shame. These explorations ‘split’ the group, and students withdraw (both emotionally and in person) As an educator, I am interested in narrative and story and drawing on Winnicott’s notion of ‘Transitional object…as a defence against anxiety’, I introduced fairy tales to the group. The rationale is that fairy tales have a universal appeal, and people are comfortable engaging with the narrative. However, tales such as Cinderella, with its stereotyped views on gender, are valuable for exploring diversity. Using stories changed the dynamic of the student group. The students engaged with the stories, exploring how they identified with the content and the feelings it evoked in them. The stories allowed the group to survive and, over time, allowed students to develop different perspectives about self and others. The link to the conference theme on ‘Learning or not learning from experience’ is that stories are transitional objects and can be used in teaching to contain emotion and support learning from experience.

The present study attempts to explore reflexive praxis in university classrooms in India. Case studies of three university teachers’ journeys are presented here, focusing on struggles they faced in the personal and professional space during their teaching career that shaped their pedagogical practices. Bourdieu’s structural parameters and Engestrom’s Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) provided analytical concepts, including reflexivity, to study the pedagogical praxis of these teachers. Data were collected from three teachers from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India using the biographical narrative interview method (BNIM), semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and the written autobiographical accounts of the teachers. Narrative analysis was used to analyse the data. The analysis reveals that as these teachers question their social positioning, academic field and intellectual bias, they experience conflicts and tensions that arise from several disruptions, resulting in pain and frustrations at one level and at another level, shaping their desire and the ability to engage critically and historically with the processes and outcomes of personal and pedagogic interrogations. Their ideological struggles and classroom tensions and contradictions were instrumental in forming their pedagogical praxis. Their willingness to challenge the traditional teacher-student relationship is the driving force towards developing a reflexive pedagogical praxis. The ontogenetic history of a teacher’s lived world lays the materiality of their reflexive classroom pedagogy. Their experiences with caste, class and gender sculpt their reflexive pedagogical praxis. During this process, these teachers also realised that there is no “A” algorithm for developing reflexivity. It takes a lifetime for a teacher to build a reflexive praxis.

This paper inquires into the possibilities and impossibilities of learning from experience within the field of academic work itself, presenting core findings from an interview study based on socio-biographical narratives of 46 academics in Norway, which we analysed along in-depth hermeneutic lines.

In 2014 Maggie O’Neal evoked the notion of “mental space” (Young 1994) to refer to what goes missing in the constant increase of requirements in today’s corporate academia. In this paper we investigate what we see in our material as a conspicuous drive to collude in this demise of “mental space”. Key to this complicity, we hold, is the notion of “privilege.” “It is an absolute privilege to have an academic job and to be paid to do scholarly work,” goes the chorus of practically all our interviewees.

Far from being a mere gesture of modesty, however, the reference to privilege seems to hold a deeper truth. According to the OED, a privilege is the “enjoyment of some benefit […] above the average or that deemed usual or necessary for a particular group” (OED, 2023; emphasis added). Along these lines, a privilege comes to mean something that one does not fully earn or deserve. Hence, the repeated reference to privilege appeared to us as a tacit and often unarticulated sense of indebtedness and guilt attached to one’s occupation and position.

It is this sense of guilt, we argue, which urge academics to collude in the erosion and hollowing out of “mental space” in academia. With academics being under the impression that occupying such space is excessive, it is pushed further and further toward the margins. This uncommoning of mental space may have severe consequences for the ability, vital for creative scientific pursuits, to employ human imaginaries in a ‘subtle interplay’ (Winnicott 1953) with the world.

This paper reflects on the processes according to which academics give an account of their work. Whereas audit-like accountability measures may once have been seen as a means to ensure quality, they have come to be widely perceived as all-consuming ends in themselves, as little more than instruments to turn universities into consumer-oriented corporations, academics and students into little entrepreneurs. That the norms of an audit culture are no longer self-evident has led to searching questions, but this loss of legitimacy has also meant that academic work is now subject to increasingly authoritarian rule: without unquestioned legitimacy, they must be enforced. To grasp how the soft authoritarianism of the university operates, it is instructive to consider what Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose call a ‘decisive event in the genealogy of authority,’ namely, the emergence of ‘psychotherapeutic authority,’ which is being deployed in universities today to apprehend resistance to standardised quantifiable forms of accountability in the interests of ‘wellness’ and ‘self-actualisation.’ The paper offers a reading of a recently published Jung-inspired self-help book co-authored by a university Deputy Vice Chancellor. This isi read against Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, which uses 'psychotherapeutic authority' against itself. To get at why and how Adorno’s ‘melancholy science’ holds greater hope for universities than the buoyant optimism of its managerialist counterpart, I contrast the very different concepts of the unconscious with which they work.

This paper explores the relationship between psychosocial dynamics and gendered inequalities in contemporary academia. Gender scholars have claimed that the shift to ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter and Leslie 1997), and its associated forms of governance and positional competition, instigates subtle and indirect, yet deepened, processes of re-masculinization (Aléman 2014; do Mar Pereira 2017; Lund & Tienari 2019). This paper contributes with an enhanced conception of the psychosocial dynamics involved in these processes. Drawing on a free-association narrative interview study (Hollway & Jefferson 2012) with 48 professors, post docs and PhD candidates in the humanities and social sciences at a research university in Norway we describe how current conditions of academic work promotes splitting (Klein 1932 and 1946; Brennan 2000, 24-26) and excommunication (Lorenzer 1973; see Aarseth, Krüger & Nielsen 2023). We analyse how splitting emerges in our participants’ efforts to handle tensions between subjective emotional processes involved in creative pursuits, on the one hand, and the requirement to do well in the positional competition, on the other. We suggest that further developing a historical materialist feminist conception of Eros is key to conceptualising the gendered power dynamics expressed in the splitting.

Denunciations of conservative extremism, sadism, and conspiratorial thinking are mainstays of contemporary academia. Amid this important work, we may not see how our own structures of desire mirror, prop up, or even directly constitute similar discourses. This paper examines two cases: professors who propagated conspiracy theories about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, and ethnographers who pathologized and denigrated Appalachian serpent handlers to the point of sadistic enjoyment when preachers die.

Conspiracy theorists and serpent handlers are both examples of psychosis in Jacques Lacan’s structural terms. Both compensate for the dissolution of shared symbolic “law” by developing their own idiosyncratic, highly literal symbolic networks which they espouse with absolute certainty. Mainstream academic research looks similar in asserting hidden, omnipresent structures with total conviction and employing styles of “paranoid reading.” The leap between the mainstream careers of Jim Fetzer, James Tracy, “Dr. Eowyn,” and other professors attests to this structural resonance.

Serpent-handlers read the Bible literally, including a passage in Mark 16 which reads “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name…They shall take up serpents.” Anthropologist Weston La Barre employed participant observation and psychoanalytic methods to determine that these people, who he wrongly generalized as illiterate and brutish, were essentially phallus-worshippers. His conclusions of the early 1960s contribute to a more general disdain and mockery of these Holiness believers, including a modern Internet phenomenon where secular leftists (among others) mock their deaths from snakebite.

These strands of sadism and psychosis in academic thought suggest that we might be subject to our own psychoanalytic criticism. Ultimately, I suggest a return to a rhetorical understanding of theory in which we can never be certain, but should instead seek the polysemic opportunities in language where we might otherwise develop structures that, however comforting, sometimes mirror what we seek to oppose.

In this paper I will share my experience of the way in which sustained and in-depth reflexivity during my PhD research illuminated parallel processes, ultimately leading to a greater self-understanding. Shifts in self-identity, tensions between different roles and working through psychosocial defences will be discussed. In particular I will suggest that my own breakthrough and a breakthrough in the data were inter-dependent outcomes.

In this presentation, we will unfold potentials for learning from experience to strengthen researcher reflexivity in a PhD project which aims to develop knowledge about patients’ care needs in a standardized cancer pathway, in the light of significant health policy changes in the Norwegian welfare state. To investigate this empirically, we opted for a psychosocial methodological approach that could both broaden and deepen understanding of cancer patients’ experience, as situated in the intersection between policy and care practice. Specifically, we rely on a biographic narrative interpretive method (BNIM) to generate data material, interviewing ten participants who are cancer patients with different diagnoses and in different stages of the cancer patient pathway.

Since 2020, BNIM has seen a significant development from the original one-person methodology to an “improved and more powerful two-person methodology (Wengraf, 2023). In line with this, reflexivity is now built in as an integral part of the method. We will share our experiences as PhD candidate (Baardsen) and supervisor (Gripsrud) with our implementation of the new “Researcher Reflexivity Track (track III) in BNIM. We illustrate how in Track III the lead researcher not only records the traces of the saying, thinking, and feeling of the interviewees, but similarly documents her own experiences as a researcher in the form of writing free-association notes. We hope to discuss this work with reference to Tom Wengraf’s (2023) claim that the quality of the researcher’s “them- search” depends on the quality of the researcher’s “me-search”.

In this presentation we will unfold potentials from learning from experience related to researcher reflexivity.

*The title is used with permission from Tom Wengraf

All references to Tom Wengraf in the text are related to his yet-to-be published

Handbook BNIM 3.

This paper is an overview of the author's debut book based on her doctoral research on holding conversations with people who felt themselves to be possessed by ghosts and spirits.Initially, in these conversations she approached her participants with curiosities about their past experiences which was the language of speaking and listening from the discipline of psychoanalysis.Adherence to one kind of psychoanalysis led her to failure in learning from her experiences.Painstakingly, she learned to relinquish her discipline and be increasingly open to being taught a new language and the unknown experiences evoked in her from her engaged conversations with ghosts and persons who possessed them.

This paper, is in retrospect, an invitation to psychoanalysis to relax its gaze and set aside the blinders that rise when it views spiritual experiences, a tendency to pathologize extreme states and appeals for a response capacity crucial for deep engagement. Inspired by Bion's warning against our tendency to be blinded by theoretical constructions, this paper will highlight moments from the author's work where her analytic "presencing" (Eshel, 2017) opened the intersubjective field to experiences making the two persons engaged in the conversations emerge as 'sublime subjects' (Civitarese, 2017) and ghosts that possessed each of them emerge as gurus or teachers awaiting a receptive student.

This paper explores what contemporary anti-neoliberal revolts can teach us about the desire for change. Scholarly literature seems to bestow the latter with a peculiar straightforwardness that this article seeks to challenge. On the one hand, the influence of affective theory suggests that emancipation is a matter of breaking with our symbolic ties to unleash the potency of bodies. Here, the desire for change coincides with itself. On the other hand, psychosocial scholarship seems theoretically aware of the ambivalence of desire, but focuses primarily on its mobilisation in oppressive settings. Here, the desire for change remains largely underexplored. To counter this, I adopt a Lacanian perspective to argue that the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy is crucial to grasping the nuances of the desire for social transformation. My argument is substantiated through the empirical study of an emancipatory event: the 2019 Chile revolt known as estallido. Based on a larger study exploring the identification of local critical scholars with this event, I interpret one of these experiences to empirically demonstrate the intricacies of the desire for change. Particularly, I reconstruct a fantasmatic framework allowing subjects to navigate the unconscious effects of the revolt’s main motto: ‘Chile woke up’. Consequently, I treat the estallido as an emancipatory organisation of Chilean society rather than its interruption. My interpretation shows that amid this new symbolic organisation of the social, subjective identification with social change is much more ambivalent than often assumed. After a decade of anti-neoliberal uprisings around the world, learning from these experiences is crucial to understanding the complexities of the desire for change.

“It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times.” The first two sentences of Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016, p.1) – widely regarded as the first post-Brexit novel – insist on the continuation of speech in the face of negative experience. If the first sentence of the novel implies an apparently definitive assessment of the state of the nation in 2016 – “It was the worst of times” – the repetition of this phrase also implies a degree of irony: “The worst is not”, as Edgar remarks in King Lear, “So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’” So is this really the worst? The inevitability of negative experience is the bedrock of Autumn: “That’s the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it’s in their nature” (Ibid.). But Smith contains this sense of ontological anomie within the seasonal cycle, in which things “fall apart” so that other things might live: an ecopoetics of mourning and metamorphosis. In this paper, I oppose Smith’s vision of seasonal interdependency to the melancholic isolationism she associates with Brexit. In relation to the conference theme, I suggest that her writing might help psychosocial studies to reflect on the meaning of “learning from experience”, by resituating that experience – specifically of Brexit – in terms of the literary co-constitution of an authentic social otherness. In more traditional philosophical terms, Smith encourages us to think – never without irony – about the inexhaustibility of “the good” as the immanent telos of linguistic exchange.

In addressing the pervasive challenge of information overload, this paper explores the application of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic concept of the point de capiton, alongside his practices of scansion and variable-length sessions, to the current digital age. The point de capiton, analogous to an upholstery button that prevents the stuffing from moving too freely, represents moments where the endless slippage between the signified and the signifier is temporarily halted, producing an illusion of fixed meaning. This concept offers a unique lens through which to view the deluge of digital information, suggesting strategies for identifying or creating quilting points within the continuous stream of data that allow for meaningful pauses and reflections.

Drawing from Lacan's seminars on psychoses, the proposal highlights the significance of these anchoring points in maintaining the coherence of the symbolic order and preventing the psychotic rupture that occurs when such points give way. By applying this analogy to the digital context, the paper posits that strategically identifying or establishing quilting points amidst information can help individuals navigate the overwhelming flow of signification, promoting a more engaged and discerning interaction. This approach aligns with the conference theme "Information Overload: Knowledge Obstructing Thinking" by offering a psychoanalytic framework for understanding and mitigating information overload's psychological effects. The paper will also include preliminary findings from a qualitative study asking psychoanalysts how they employ scansion in the clinical setting. It will extend the themes from this study to delinate how scansion, by disrupting the flow of the analysand's speech and ego defenses, can address the problem of knowledge preventing thinking.

Through this interdisciplinary exploration, the paper aims to bridge psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice with contemporary challenges in information management, presenting a novel perspective on an era defined by excess.

The pain of human condition, structural and social marginalization or catastrophic events that create historic excesses, unleash the need for denial, repression or dissociation to prevent us from recognizing its impact on the mind. Such 'cures' not only affect the individual as an isolate but also intimacies between person, hospitality between groups and political imaginations. One of the challenges of surviving a wounded, polarized or oppresive world is the difficult recovery of stories, histories, myths and praxis that offer a way to hold conflict internally and to host possibilities of a shared belonginess. In this symposium, the presentations will focus on relational moments/ insights embedded in living one's life in the “suchness of one’s condition” that are at once personal but also political. The authors intend to ask, 'what does it mean to learn to live with problems? How is such a living rendered creative and hopeful instead of lapsing into a sense of passivity or despair? How do subjects at the margins of state and society persist, resist or negotiate, tame or untame forces that delegitimize their experiences? Lastly, how do we think of 'living with' problems, in all variations of libinalities, as an aesthetic activity that may connect 'writing', 'doing' and 'belonging' as states of transmutations in service of ordinary growths?

Using practice-based research this paper explores the potential for a schizoid methodology. Starting from the assumption that philosophy and other theoretical work within the psychosocial sphere constitute practices, this research uses artistic practice as a technique to avoid the tendency towards universalism common in post-Enlightenment theoretical discourses. Through collage work, this paper asks the question: what would a schizoid methodology look like? This comes with an array of problems and questions due to the divergences in conceptualisations of schizoid states through the history of psychoanalysis. However, whilst an exacting schizoid methodology may not be achievable due to these differences, this explorative research offers new ideas for practice that can be returned to theoretical modes.

Psychic pain is the experience of overwhelming negative affect, coupled with the profound sense of this emotional state being both unbearable and seemingly unsolvable, and it has been observed as an accurate predictor of suicidal attempts (Lewis, 2020). To measure it appropiately and therefore advance suicide-prevention efforts in historically under-represented populations, it is essential to validate culturally-appropriate measuring tools. In Mexican culture, topics related to psychological struggles are usually avoided, leading to lack of awareness, understanding and support for those experimenting such experiences. The present proyect represents the efforts to validate the Psychic Pain Scale (PPS) for its application in Mexican adults (aged between 18 and 30 years), and reflections on the process. The PPS was originally developed in English by Lewis, Good, Tillman and Hopwood (2020), and it’s been discovered to be a valuable measure of subjective distress associated with outcomes related to suicide and several risk factors.

The investigators of this study individually translated each item of the PPS into Spanish, prior to a consensus discussion led by an expert advisor in which various versions were discussed until reaching semantic and grammatical consensus. An independent bilingual psychologist carried out the back-translation into English of the Spanish version to assess consistency between translations. As a pilotage, a qualitative analysis was conducted using the Spanish version and administered through an online convenience-sampling to 30 participants. This pilotage involved clarifying questions prompting participants to use paraphrasing and specification to further understand their interpretations of the items and verify that they maintain their structure in the target language version. With the data obtained, an analysis using grounded theory was conducted creating categories to find patterns, for example "hopelessness", "overwhelm", as well as the translation of internal experiences and mental contents like feelings into thoughts and concrete expriences.

Psycho-social studies, otherwise known as Socioanalytic studies in countries like Australia, is home to social dreaming work. Social dreaming is a practice involving a group gathering for the sharing of dreams to explore, understand and uncover the unconscious of a society or community. This idea creates an impression that the potential for learning is extended in depth and breadth. Still, the question can be asked “Is the learning only in my imagination?”. The dreaming space involves the aspect of reverie where thoughts flow without any ordering, prompting or direction and through a democratic space which is contrary to the traditional instruction of learning that has preconceived outcomes. Some traditional spaces question whether social dreaming practice counts as science. In this study, student leaders came together to co-construct a learning space about their student leadership by participating in social dreaming. This participation showed student-centred and social justice-orientated leadership learning that can be attributed to social dreaming. At the same time, some of the learning is difficult to account for because of the intangible value of social dreaming. A key finding about the student leader’s social dreaming experience is grounded in what they found to be a humanizing experience. The humanizing experience is embedded in contextual application and practice. In the case of this work, the contextual significance of Africa is highlighted through the use of dreams in conjunction with the use of language such as idioms, storytelling and similar practices. The use of language elevates the meaning emerging from the dreams to deepen learning and to create personal affiliations to experiences acquired during social dreaming. As such, learning or not learning from social dreaming experiences becomes an added advantage while self-led actions of student leadership showed up after sharing dreams, and these have indicated social justice outcomes.

The suggested contribution is a collaborative dialogical reading of Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial theory alongside queer and anti-racist autobiographical and autotheoretical practices that focus on undoing and unbecoming. Ettinger’s concept of ‘metramorphosis’ is defined as a process of change in borderlines and thresholds between being and absence, memory and oblivion, I and non-I. Throughout the re-attuning of distance(s)-in-proximity, metramorphosis creates and is constantly re-created within matrixial interlacing effects of relations-without-relating and separation-in-jointness, in-between presence and absence. The transformative quality posited by Ettinger’s matrixial theory resonates with the work of many queer, anti-racist, black feminists, theorists and writers who have similarly troubled universalistic theorisations of subjectivity grounded on colonial and cisheteropatriarchal normativity. In this paper, we investigate the points of connection, friction, and potentiality running through these theories and life-writing practices.

Additionally, by exploring our own experience of collaboration with each other and other colleagues, we explore how collaborative practices in academia may be inhabited by creative disruption and used as psychosocial research methodologies. Our hypothesis is that concepts such as undoing, unbecoming, severality, borderlinking, and fragmentation can also be used as notional compasses for the generation of new practices and methodologies of reading, writing, researching, and relating within the field of psychosocial studies.

This article discusses the use of free-association as a data production technique in psychosocial research, and how it may interact with the use of personal artefacts as a means to stimulate the emergence of free-associative discourse. While free-association aims to destabilise orderly accounts of the self (Fink, 2007), personal artefacts are used to stimulate the production of meaning-making narratives (Edwards & l’Anson, 2020), in search of coherent interpretations of subjectivity. As both techniques seem to work in opposite directions, the productivity of using them together could be questioned. However, I argue that experimenting with this apparent paradox may open up new ways to explore subjective experience.

To examine this, I look at an artefact-prompted free-associative interview conducted with Amelia, a Chilean early years teacher, in the context of a psychoanalytically-informed empirical study on the intersubjective and unconscious aspects that underlie the production of teachers’ professional identities in a group setting.

Amelia described the act of narrating herself through her personal artefact – which seemed to symbolise past and present relationships with multiple O/others throughout her life – as a confirmation of being a subject. While this subjectifying function of narrating oneself (Butler, 2005) and its enabling of a certain experience of continuity may seem to undermine the decentring aim of free-association, I argue that a free-associative setting is precisely what makes possible for a discourse characterised by contradictions, breaks, gaps and discontinuities to emerge.

The work that gives origin to this paper resonates with the call to reflect on learning from experience, in that the teachers’ relational production of their professional identities in a free-associative group setting seemed to allow them to envision new articulations of their subjectivities. Lastly, it also aims to contribute to a wider discussion on what it means to engage in the co-production of psychosocial research.

On 11th March, 2020, the WHO declared the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak a global pandemic. As our geographies closed down on one another, the gravity of our lived experience in India wasn’t fairly represented. The news said one thing, our lived experience was another. As mental health practitioners, we were left to make sense of this dissonance of our shared reality based on isolated personal experiences. In this reflective piece, we combine the voices of two mental health practitioners in India; (Rhea Gandhi and Smiti Srivastava) as we piece together what it has been like to be in a helping profession whilst living in different parts of India - elucidating the complexity and diversity of our country through our experiences with ourselves and our clients inhabiting different, moving spaces. In documenting this together, we act as mirrors to one another, seeing the missing parts of a shared picture and reflecting on our work in India through the years 2020-2023.

This presentation explores the need to understand adolescent identity development from a psychosocial perspective. Much research has relied on a positivistic lens to study this topic, reducing this nuanced and complex developmental phase to a single surface snapshot understood through pre-determined theoretical categories. With psychosocial methodologies, exploring the subjective specificity and complexity of such experiences has become possible. Drawing on The Free Association Narrative Interview Method (FANI) in the study upon which this presentation is based has facilitated the study of the intertwined aspects of young people's external, social world and their internal, intrapsychic landscapes. In interviewing 6 participants, using the FANI method allows each to share a narrative as they choose and direct themselves. Using a psychosocial theoretical framework, interpretation can provide further understanding based on the premise that each person is not purely a rational agent able to dictate a linear composition of their life history. Instead, they will decide which experiences to focus on and which points to reveal and how. Analysis can then be drawn from how and why these choices have been made consciously or unconsciously allowing a more holistic picture.

This paper will encompass a way of harnessing experiential learning in psychosocial and psychoanalytic research methodologies through use of artwork. I will also discuss use of art making in the higher education teaching and learning context with Undergraduate and Postgraduate students in their curriculum, as well as within a student enrichment club model that I have pioneered in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic studies (PPS) at the University of Essex. I will discuss the use of artwork as a methodological tool in the theory building formulation process in my clinical research. As a psychotherapist, academic, artist and illustrator, I use artwork to exemplify my ideas and concepts, as well as to access my unconscious thinking, feelings, countertransference and unconscious dynamics in the clinical work. I will argue that Freud utilised artwork as a way of formulating the unconscious processes of his conceptual models in spatial terms, as an aide to his thinking, as well as a way of illustrating and exemplifying them. I will show a range of my artwork, as well as Freud and Winnicott’s drawings in order to discuss these themes. I will be discussing not only how I use these technique in my own research, as shown in my book ‘The Physical and Virtual Space of the Consulting Room; Room-object Spaces’, but I will also be discussing R. D. Hinshelwood’s method of ‘Case Study Research’ data analyse (Hinshelwood 2013, 2015, Wright 2022 and Kegerreis & Wright et al 2023) that is being used in a pioneering way in the PPS Professional Doctorate programs of which I am Director. I have shown here, that in this paper I will address the conference themes of experiential learning, psychosocial and psychoanalytic methodologies and psychosocial approaches to learning and teaching.

Winnicott saw psychotherapy as founded in the capacity to play. What if we tried to create a playful space for freeing the imagination - in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms a becoming-child, finding the youthfulness of every age in the service of a psychosocial imagining of a different future?

Principles

The principles we wish to draw from for this experimental process are inspired by well-known psychoanalytic concepts from Freud, Winnicott and Bion:

The use of free association

Creating a transitional space where play, imagination and creativity can be fostered

Holding a tension between knowing and not knowing

Holding a tension between past, present and future

Ways of working-process and timings

A host to introduce and hold the frame

Working in tables of 4-6 guests

Triggers and timings and props to be available on each table

Paper on each table for guests to write notes

Maximum number of convivial guests: 20

Working together to free associate and use our imagination in relation to the following two triggers:

What if we started from the idea of a universal nonbelonging, rather than inclusion?

What if we acknowledged our own enjoyment of in-group and out-group dynamics?

Anxious times can find us reaching back to our pasts to find experiential solutions that may help to calm uncertainty and foreboding. In this roundtable, we wish to discuss which experiences we call on and how they are used, consciously or unconsciously, to provide reassurance.

We recognise that nostalgia may be experienced as unconsciously prompted sensational engagement, a brief touch of an evocative surface, a forgotten but familiar sound or smell, or consciously to replay reassuring experiences. As we navigate these challenges, nostalgia emerges as a lens through which people seek solace and certainty in the face of ambiguity; however, does nostalgia offer a retreat to a perceived sense of stability and familiarity, or does it hinder progress by anchoring individuals and societies to an idealised past? To begin we wish to explore recent social phenomena in the U.K. that may have encouraged people to recollect the past and how that has been accessed.

Considering a need to re-experience the comfort, holding, containment and security offered by an environment created by Winnicott’s “good enough mother”, as well as the sense of control offered by Kleinian psychodynamics, we probe the role that imagination, creativity and nostalgia play in providing readily evoked experience that offer a route back to feelings of security; through this round table discussion, we explore how nostalgia can aid in facilitating the transition from past to present. However, it is important to consider whose nostalgia is being accessed; is it a subjective encounter of one’s own past, a collective experience or a personal or collective fantasy?

We hope to foster a deeper understanding of nostalgia as a psychoanalytic phenomenon, shedding light on its functions as a mechanism for holding and containing in times of uncertainty while discussing complex experiences of nostalgia that can be both adaptive and maladaptive.

The English maritime imaginary is intertwined with the notion of an ‘Island nation’ intrinsic to imagined communities. A maritime imaginary is invoked to shore up a nostalgic ideal of English national identity, as England attempts to re-position itself in a changing world order amidst national and international tensions.

English identity has traditionally assumed interchangeability with Britishness within the British Isles, with Wales and Scotland on the fringes. During and after Brexit , ‘Englishness’ came to the fore underpinned by nostalgia and grievance about England’s place in the UK following devolution.Representations of the maritime have been used to reinforce colonial sentiments of national identity and borders, reinforcing fantasies of a ‘them versus ‘us’ dynamic, with the sea used as an emotional container for anxieties about change and intersecting crises at home and abroad.

However, for many, nostalgic narratives of England as a heroic maritime nation that ‘rules the waves’, create feelings of shame about the history and legacy of English identity as a colonial power, linked to slavery and the plundering of other countries' resources. Shame is linked to feelings of misrecognition, and the exclusion from an imagined English community linked to the history of naval power. The maritime imaginary can also conjure other benign images related to memories of seaside, the arts, literature and music.

Can a new maritime imaginary be developed to enable a more fluid and inclusive conception of English identity and nation that goes beyond either/or conceptions of nation and the maritime?

In this roundtable panel, we draw on psychosocial, postcolonial, film and community practice perspectives to explore the feelings and emotions stirred up by images of the maritime and shifting conceptions of English identity and the potential shaping of a new more inclusive maritime imaginary.

Metacognition is understood by Lysaker to be an integrated spectrum of interrelated processes, scoping from basic mental operations like the recognition of mental contents, to the discernment of contextualized experiences, or reaching more nuanced and integrated narratives of the self and of others, that aid in navigating the worlds of intrapersonal and interpersonal conflicts. To further the understanding of theory of mind in clinical populations undergoing inpatient treatment, we conducted dynamic semi-structured interviews and scored them using Lysaker’s Metacognition Assessment Scale- Adapted in a sample of 12 teenage and young-adults with diagnoses of either anorexia nervosa or purgative anorexia.

Among the most notorious findings, we observed interesting discrepancies in the Self-Reflectivity subscale, were the patients scored high thanks to the coherent narratives about their eating disorder. However, none of the patients attained evidences of metacognitive integration, and upon a qualitative content analysis of their verbalizations, it became evident that most high-level narratives repeated cookie-cutter descriptions that some of the patients stated they came to know as true only because the clinical staff insisted they were true, not necessarily because they were hypotheses anchored in their own experiences (e.g. “I understand I developed a biologically-informed mental illness because of the societal pressures to attain a beauty ideal, (…) when I don’t see it that way it's maybe because of the cognitive distortions”.

As restrictive eating disorders are challenging for treatment providers, in great part because of the maternal anxieties they awaken in the counter-transference, but also because of the current primacy of essentialist approaches, collapsing causality to social media or elusive “genes” we haven’t yet found but still fiercely believe in, where is the space for metabolizing the subjective experiences of eating disorders, and to think about anti-carceral mental health interventions even inside institutions?

Social work supervision is heralded as central to the effectiveness of social work practice. Despite this it remains largely under researched, with the majority of studies to date relying on self-reporting mechanisms to understand ‘what happens’ in supervision, and no studies, to the author’s knowledge, exploring the impact of unconscious forces. This paper aims to contribute to this gap in the knowledge base by analysing the conscious and unconscious processes at play in two cohorts of systemic group supervision held in UK children’s services. Hinshelwood and Skogstad’s (2000) psychoanalytically informed observation methodology was employed, involving the researcher being present in the supervision sessions, and this data was then triangulated with audio recordings of the sessions. Bion’s model of thought outlined in Learning from Experience was then used to analyse the data and explore how each group developed its own unique ability to think about challenging child welfare work in light of its ability to contain anxiety. Implications for the social work supervision, supervision leadership and social work practice are then discussed.

This study looks at counselling and psychotherapy as a general discipline from the lens of the caste system of the South Asian communities and its diasporas and investigates if this discipline can address the issue of caste both as a social variable and lived experience. There is currently not much literature on this.

This study was conducted through a qualitative method of study. Data was collected through minimally structured online interviews with participants recruited using a snow-balling method. A thematic analysis has been used to analyse the data.

The study highlights the necessity for therapists, their research community and training modules to be caste informed. It claims that only this can allow therapists to address the issue of caste discrimination as a social variable and lived experience so that clients do not have to spend time in therapy explaining the history and context behind caste discrimination to their therapists.

The UK is home to one of the biggest South Asian diasporic communities in the world. Yet the lived experiences of South Asian people and their voices have often been underrepresented in the overarching field of academia and more specifically counselling and psychotherapy in the UK. The imbalance in power that stemmed out of the colonial past has led to a cultural hegemony of the Global North over the Global South and has effectively left the Global North in charge of determining which narratives are worth representing in academia. Caste discrimination has infused itself within the social fabric of South Asians to the degree that it has been normalised. The following study aims to address this major gap and draw the attention of the global audiences from the person-centred community to the experiences of South Asians, particularly on the issue of caste discrimination.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) estimates forced displacement to have reached 103 million globally by mid-2022 out of which 32.5 million people are refugees. As per Department of Homeland Security reports, 11,454 people were admitted to the US as refugees during 2021 out of which 40 percent were children under the age of 18 (Baugh, 2022). This has exposed many children to the grief and trauma that comes with war and for some, forced displacement. Many children may be exposed to trauma pre-migration (such as life-threatening events, loss of family, war, torture, human rights violations, sexual violence and rape), during migration (such as hazardous refugee camps) and post-migration (stigma and discrimination; Bronstein & Montgomery, 2011). While this is likely to have long-term adverse effects of this on children’s development, there are ways to support their growth in challenging times. Resilience research suggests that upon having such support, children may show tremendous capacity to bounce back from trauma, an ability regarded as the ordinary magic (Masten, 2001). In my paper, relating the conference’s theme of psychosocial approaches to learning and teaching, I will talk about working with children who have experienced trauma from a psychoanalytic lens. I will discuss the impact of violence on psychosocial learning and development among children; common obstacles in working with minors, particularly systemic barriers, and lack of available resources for children in most need—who have had adverse childhood experiences including refugee minors, asylum seekers, and undocumented and unaccompanied minors. This has become more relevant with the current global political climate. I will give examples of how I have used projective techniques of storytelling to process trauma in my work with children in India and America and discuss creative ways of building support systems to foster resilience in children through case examples.

I struggle to speak about what the novel-thesis for which I gained my PhD was about.

Fictioning as a method allowed me to generate a narrative in which the previously unthought and unspoken could be worded, or worlded. As the process unfolded, minor threads became more meaningful, so that the plot skipped, like a needle on a scratched record, focusing on content initially intended as peripheral, and leaving half told aspects of the story to fade into the background. Some things started mattering more than I’d imagined, answering my questions in ways I’d anticipated less. Growing more open, yet becoming more squeezed, the novel folded in on itself as social conditions, real and imaginary, pressed characters and plot into shape. I tried to show something I couldn’t tell, about how society produces certain psychic realities, and about how people may resist. It felt dangerous.

I wonder if the characters’ experiences are believable, or if doubt enters the minds of readers? People reading it say they like this kind of thing or they’re enjoying it so far. I say, ‘thank you’. I want to say, ‘Really? But have you read it?’ Can you tell me what it’s about?’ But conversations remain vague, sticking within the grooves of the good/bad continuum; the actual content remains unspeakable, unthinkable. For me now, the novel is about this very disconnect, and the ways in which it impacts the characters as they strive for relational presence and mutual recognition of the nature of the wider social realities that they’ve tried, and failed, to escape. Things that can’t be spoken, only shown. People think what they’re allowed to think; what feels safe. I am not sure I’ve succeeded in saying anything at all. Only in being difficult; a bad novelist. Showing somehing while saying nothing.

Tàr (2022) and Barbie (2023) emerged amid the clamour of #MeToo backlash. I propose that the two films arrive at a conjuncture where what it means to be an ethical feminist subject is at stake. While ostensibly operating at different ends of the movie market – Tàr as arthouse, and Barbie a blockbuster – they both offer woman protagonists grappling with what it means to be a ‘woman’ and, indeed, a feminist-woman in 21^st century western contexts. Variously positioned as too liberal; too radical; and simply a #Fail, the #MeToo mo(ve)ment has been criticised in feminist media and communication studies, and popular media for its apparent fixation on individual ‘identity’, instead of collective, progressive, subjectivity. So too, have Tàr and Barbie been critiqued in popular media, in terms of how they align with an ethical feminist subjectivity – a subjectivity who is attentive to collectivity and inclusion.

Here, I put the two films in dialogue via focusing Gloria’s monologue in Barbie, and the Juilliard scene in Tàr. Both scenes diagnose the “impossibility” of contemporary feminism but offer divergent ways out. In Barbie, we are offered a commodified, neoliberal feminist multiplicity (rather than the singular identity of ‘stereotypical’ Barbie), accessible via the market; while in Tàr, Lydia (at least in the Juilliard scene) holds to a humanist conceit that liberation is achieved via sublimation in high art, with no need for feminism. In short, we are faced with the demand: your money – in the form of commodities in Barbie – or your life – to give oneself over to one’s art in Tàr.

This paper is looks at with how both scenes articulate – that is put together, and attach, particular signifiers in relation to this question of feminism, and in particular ethical feminism in a post-#MeToo media context.

In the complex sociopolitical landscape of Northern Ireland, marked by a traumatic conflict known as ‘’The Troubles’’, spanning from the late 1960s to 1998, mural art transcends mere decoration to emerge as a possible medium for cultural expression and dialogue. I explore mural art in Northern Ireland not just as an artistic phenomenon but as a tool to reflect on community identity, political discourse, and collective memory. I examine how murals unconsciously impact and serve as poignant reminders of historical trauma and reflect the aspirations and struggles of the people.

My talk theorises the role of mural art in Northern Ireland as a powerful form of containment. Murals offer a symbolic space for both the community and individuals to process emotions and memories tied to the region's conflicted past, effectively managing the psychological tensions experienced by those living there. The concept of containment is employed to understand how murals serve as a container to hold and explore these strong emotions, providing a safe space for the integration of difficult experiences. By acting as a form of containment, murals facilitate a dialogue between the inner world and the outer world.

Viewing mural art is a form of experiential learning and a way of engaging with Northern Ireland's collective history. This talk points to the importance of murals as cultural artefacts, in facilitating conversations around learning and understanding in a traumatised post-conflict society. In doing so, it explores how public art serves as a tool in the process of cultural expression and how it facilitates the intricate interplay of trauma, history, and identity.

How are children formed to become adults? The child is expected to fall into constricted roles that avoid questioning the way things are, without forming their own sense of being within society. In this sense, children learn that there are societal “elites” who are put into positions in which they will thrive, while “non-elites” are left out; what can be achieved by children whose system is not set up for them to be successful?

Winnicott believed that there is no such thing as a baby, thus there is no such thing as a therapist or a patient; systemic socialization has led both of these individuals to their current roles within the therapeutic relationship. Therapists who serve disadvantaged children often struggle to feel useful since they are combating an institution that is organized for their clients to fail. It can be difficult for therapists who work within these systems to create context for the child, and it is hard to impact these children because of the complexity that categorizes their lives.

Therapy should provide children the chance to explore their own subjectivity. In the United States, therapy is a privilege reserved for the elites, yet children who have access to therapy are often faced with a sort of intervention that values discipline. Child therapy is often viewed as a means to adjust the child toward conformity, an expectation set by the child’s family and school; there is no opportunity for the child to experience their potential. Vivian Paley discussed play in schools and how the institution of public education places underserved children at a disadvantage due to a poor quality of care. This paper aims to touch upon these systems as they work to produce children who are expected to be systemic conformists while exploring the impact of expressive play therapy.

While numerous studies have highlighted the benefits of incorporating animals into therapeutic settings, there remains a gap in literature regarding the specific role of therapy dogs, particularly in child and adolescent therapy. This paper aims to address this gap and discusses the active and dynamic involvement of therapy dogs in the therapeutic process, by exploring the unique role of therapy dogs in facilitating emotional engagement as well as improving, learning and processing for the patient in the psychotherapeutic setting

Distinguishing the concept of "therapy dog" from broader Animal-Assisted Therapy (AAT), this paper delves into the unique role observed in clinical practice, emphasizing their potential as active participants rather than mere facilitators of physiological benefits. Drawing from insights gathered during therapy sessions with a trained therapy dog, the paper explores how these animals serve as emotional "containers," offering unconditional positive regard and altering therapy dynamics and allowing the patient to better able engage, learn and process. The analysis is contextualized within established theoretical frameworks, including contributions from Levinson, Fine, Grandin, Bion, Lang, Freud, Winnicott, Klein, and Rosenfield, providing a nuanced understanding of the psychodynamic aspects of animal-assisted therapy.

I suggest that this paper will deepen the understanding of therapy dogs' roles in psychodynamic therapy, potentially, offering insights that may inform therapeutic practice, particularly in addressing the emotional, psychological and psychosocial challenges faced by children and adolescents. By elucidating the psychological benefits of therapy animals within the therapeutic relationship, this study underscores the potential for enhanced outcomes to learning and processing through a psychodynamic and psychoanalytic lens.

This paper addresses the conference themes as it discusses the experiential learning of the author in sessions and the observed improvements to the personal emotional learning of patients

From a new perspective the paper revisits maternal ambivalence, which is one of the well-known and often discussed themes of psychoanalysis. On purpose the problematization is provocative, insofar as it claims that the early theorists of psychoanalysis could not provide comprehensive enough framings and adequate interpretations of maternal ambivalence, because – to a greater or lesser extent – they were entrapped by the idealization of motherhood, i.e. by different biased social patterns, meanings and structural constraints of their times. The proposed argument addresses the relevant model of motherhood in our age, the so-called ‘intensive mothering’, which impacts maternal roles, identities, attitudes, behaviors, and praxes in a much more prevalent way than any other model before. These dynamics, of course, have triggering effects on maternal ambivalence, however due to the sweeping idealization of motherhood also guilt, remorse, and repressions are more common among mothers because of their negative feelings. Rozsika Parker was the very first who recognized this problematic link between maternal ambivalence and idealization of motherhood. She criticized the early theorists of psychoanalysis because of their misleading arguments about maternal ambivalence. Her works are pioneer contributions which are more important today than in the years when they were published. The current paper gives an overview of Parker’s theories, which are often cited by contemporary authors who strive to revise, refine, and clarify her arguments.

This individual presentation utilises extracts from a longer, autoethnographical account of a child psychoanalytic psychotherapist’s work in the UK’s public child mental health services during the pandemic; encompassing the first lockdown when fears around the novel coronavirus were great and pervasive, affecting everyone. The presenter recounts his work organisation’s initial reactions to the task of enabling a workforce to continue to care for child patients with mental illness, including attempts at professional shaming, with parts of the organisation succumbing to psychologically disturbed and infantile processes. He takes a reflexive stance to his recollections to try to understand the effect this had on him, tracing a pathography that increasingly reveals the impact of the austere, post-Brexit socio-political climate within which the pandemic occurred. Through the use of autoethnography, experiential learning, and attempts to understand the impact of the socio-political situation on his workplace, the presentation may be deemed suitable for the conference's theme. It especially contrasts helpful (or mindful) attempts to continue to care for child patients with institutional mindlessness.

Scanlon and Adlam (2022) build upon the story of the meeting of Diogenes and Alexander in the ancient Corinthian marketplace to conceptualise the agora as a protected psychosocial space in which there can be encounters and conversations and learning from experience between in-groups and out-groups and the operation of force and power can be interrogated.

Nation states of the contemporary Global North tend to be agoraphobic: public protests are discouraged and increasingly criminalised; spaces that threaten to operate as agoras are quickly shut down. Other spaces, which seem agora-like but in which there is no meaningful encounter or truth-telling, we might think of as 'holographic agoras'.

Members of this roundtable work in various roles in a forensic mental health Medium Secure Unit (MSU) in South London. This is a setting in which the operation of power might at face value be supposed to be overt and manifest. Patients who often have committed very serious acts of violence are detained here behind high walls and locked doors - often for many years. However, there are power dynamics that are harder to speak to (if not necessarily any more subtle).

We will speak to our experiences of developing and seeking to implement two systemic interventions to create agora-like spaces within the MSU in which the dynamics between in-groups and out-groups could be explored: a weekly 'BLM Community Circle' facilitated space for Black patients to explore their shared heritage and a monthly 'Unit-Wide' Reflective Practice Group for staff.

We invite the audience to think with us about the difficulties of creating and sustaining such spaces and how our experience may connect to other agoras - existing, closed down, or yet to be created.

Conference themes:

Psychosocial approaches to learning and teaching

The de-humanization and pathologization of distress

Institutional mindlessness

Trauma and repetition

Introduced by the Coalition government in 2010, the fiscal policy of austerity was reignited under Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2021 and has continued into the current cost of living crisis. At its centre has been the controversial withdrawal of support to some of society's most vulnerable members.

Today in Scotland over one million people live in poverty, with nearly half of those living in what the Joseph Rowntree Foundation describe as "very deep poverty" (Birt et al., 2023).

Expanding on her research of social melancholia, the collective experience of often-marginalised communities when they are deprived of the opportunity to grieve socio-economic losses in the aftermath of political oppression, Dr Stroud will argue for a psychosocial exploration of poverty and its value in examining the effects of austerity.

The losses generated through austerity measures have not been granted full expression within the public domain (McLean, 2023). It is this very deprivation that Dr Stroud connects to the emergence and sustenance of social melancholia.

Without the opportunity to publicly discuss the structural determinants of poverty, neoliberalism leaves little option but to pathologize those on the receiving end of austerity, claiming that these individuals do not have the grit or motivation to get out, and seek to do so instead by scrounging and cheating the system.

Addressing the conference theme of 'Learning or not Learning From Experience...Psychosocial Approaches to Researching and Experiential Learning', Dr Stroud will draw on her work at Station House Media Unit (shmu), an organisation providing film, radio and journalism training to marginalised communities, to explore how far such spaces can mitigate the effects of the current milieu.

This paper takes a critical lens to the organizational structures and processes that perpetuate the school to prison pipeline (STPP) in American secondary public schools. Unlike most analyses/ that focus upon policies and practices, this author explores the interpersonal and relational dimension of the school’s social system as the ‘experience near’ mechanism that operationalize these oppressive practices. By integrating organizational and developmental object relations theory the author shows how policies, systemic prejudices and biases are enacted relationally consciously and unconsciously in daily interactions that deleteriously impact a BIPOC adolescent’s development of self- identity and thus undermine their future. A school-based intervention is presented demonstrating how this negative developmental trajectory can be interrupted, if not reversed.

The paper elaborates work that was shared in the publication, The School to Prison Pipeline: A Failed Holding Environment (2021, Journal of Psychosocial Studies). This paper takes a deep dive into the “intersubjective field” (Stolorow and Atwood) of the inner -city high school, identifying how these relationships shape youth’s self -identity. The author further describes how a “potential space” (Winnicott, Mitchell) was co-constructed with staff to mitigate the harmful impact of the STPP. Particular attention will be given to the role/function of leadership, the importance of collaboration and reflective practices through case example.

These abstract aims to present a fragment of an ongoing doctoral research that seeks to understand the contributions of the Freirean legacy to the process of teaching and learning in a critical-liberating psychoanalytic listening context. The work is grounded in Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) and studies on psychoanalytic theory (Bicudo, 2019, Ferenczi, 1990; 1992, Figueiredo, 1994; 1996; 2003, Freud, 1912; 1914; 1916-1917; 1937, Gaztambide, 2019, Nobus 2022; 2023, Pellegrino; 2006, Soreanu, 2018; 2023), among others. The research is methodologically developed through a qualitative research-training approach, offering a free online course on psychoanalytic listening to contextualize and redefine the learning and the very meaning of listening in a critical-liberating perspective. This course, named "SER MAIS” - Popular Workshop of Psychoanalytic Listening," is distinctive in that it integrates activities in the realms of Teaching and Research. The interventions are rooted in an epistemological field that draws from the legacy of psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, Helio Pellegrino, and contemporary thinkers, as well as the pedagogical contributions of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, as well as philosophers and sociologists such as Karl Marx, Paul Preciado, Franz Fanon, Lélia Gonzalez. These authors help us guide this ongoing problematizing educational process. Therefore, this is an interdisciplinary proposal aimed at contextualizing the development of educational practices that create spaces for listening. Finally, for the conference of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and APCS 2024 we intend to present an analysis of some experiences within the SER MAIS, emphasizing the importance of creating a welcoming environment guided by listening and empathy for an affective experience, essential for the educator-learner relationship and the collective production of knowledge, to help us to reflect on questions and themes such as the following: experiential learning; psychosocial methods and methodologies and psychosocial approaches to learning and teaching.

While the need for ethics approval in research with human subjects is well-established, the process is often reduced to a mere formality or focused mainly on preventing harm. This paper argues that such a procedural reduction overlooks rich learning opportunities, drawing on my empirical doctoral project exploring generational transmissions of sociopolitical violence, classified as risky - both politically and emotionally.

Through a reflexive exploration of the intricate ethics approval process and messy fieldwork preparation, analysed through psychoanalytic and psychosocial lenses, the paper illustrates how acknowledging the emotive aspects underlying those seemingly procedural initial experiences can shed light on the subsequent stages of a research. The detailed account demonstrates how understanding changes to the study design, making sense of interview interactions, and identifying themes in participant stories and communications related back to and were informed by the emotional and contextual experiences of that foundational phase. Emphasising the interrelated dynamics of research process, the paper showcases how a psychosocial framework bridged seemingly disparate components across different phases of the study. This framework facilitated further insights into the relationship between these research dynamics and the repeating realities about and of the suppressed and violent histories being studied.

This paper presents an empirical example of a research project that is (a) sensitive or even dangerous; (b) personally invested in; and (c) impacted upon by circumstances requiring repeated revisions. Thus, this paper makes a methodological contribution to better understanding for other researchers who might deal with affectively intense and invested research projects in risky circumstances.

Over the last twenty years, I have developed a clinical and research practice with Tunisian couples and families in peri-revolutionary Tunisia (The time around January 2011 when a popular revolt broke out with the dictatorship, marking the beginning of a long, ongoing transition towards democracy). I have witnessed during this practice the struggle of Tunisian couples and families with the political and social changes underway. The phenomenon of globalization has accentuated the issue by reshaping links and subjectivities and redefining the scenery of couples and families in Tunisia, as well as in the rest of the world.
Furthermore, revised metapsychology has imposed a new representation of subjectivity as occurring in a tri-dimensional space: the intrapsychic, the intersubjective, and the trans-subjective areas (Berenstein and Puget, 2008) holding the subject of the unconscious, the subject of the link and that of the culture, respectively. In the present Tunisian context, intersubjective links are formed and unraveled through confrontation between tradition and hypermodernity. These vertiginous socio-political changes have induced polymorphous tensions, which I describe as “Interlocking violence” (Mokdad-Zmitri, 2019). Seeking a tailored approach to such a transitory context, I combined group psychoanalysis and intercultural psychology to further elucidate the field's particularities. I suggest highlighting this reflection with two examples: The first being the impact of political issues on institutions, illustrated by the struggles of the socio-educational subjectivities in Tunisian public schools, and the second being the radical change in gender relations and roles within couples, families, and the community due to the depatriarcalisation of the latter.
The present work aims to show how subjectivities cannot take place without clashing with ambient violence. In such situations, individual, family, and socio-politico-cultural conflicts will inevitably resonate to elaborate traumatic content while contaminating, as little as possible, other areas of subjectivation.

Many generations of people suffer from distress that is a manifestation of broken systems, policies and institutions. Social structures demolish communities and isolate wounded souls. Not enough people dare to ask: who is there for the imprisoned, who are unseen, unheard and left as an afterthought. What does an intolerable internal and external world do to a person!? How do you help those who have already been told they are less than human; that they’re already guilty; that their pathology makes them unable to be helped and incapable of healing. The collateral damage of incarceration grips the lives of the generations that are destined to carry our society forward. The empirical literature has shown that children who are born to parents who have been incarcerated are more susceptible to becoming victims of the system, as they are six times more likely to become incarcerated themselves (Cox, 2009). Angela Davis, an anti-prison activist states that communities composed of people of color have a greater chance of going to prison than receiving a “decent education” (Davis, 2003). Dead and dry places don’t acknowledge human suffering and therefore snuff the hope out of human life. Unfortunately, a correctional facility in a major urban area in the U.S. is the largest mental health institution in the state of New York, and the second largest in the country (nytimes, 2023); however, this psychiatric institution holds little correctional and healing value; as mental health services are not a priority. Within my paper, I hope my words are able to speak to what my eyes and ears have witnessed; and what my body has felt, as a clinician who sought to be there for those needing love and hope within those alienating jail houses that are deemed to be psychiatric inpatient units.

People-to-people work in public welfare services is grounded in a learning approach as one of the imperative understandings of human development and growth – often situated in different forms of collaboration and participation. However, this represents a difficult challenge for a public sector that regimes of New Public Management have regulated for decades, providing limited space for learning. Learning theory, on the other hand, is rich in transformative learning concepts that offer a variety of ways and paths for change - such as experiential and collaborative learning (Mezirow, 2000; Barkley, Cross & Major, 2005), social learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Becker-Schmidt & Knapp, 1987), situated or action learning (Dilworth & Willis, 2003; Cho & Marshal, 2010) as well as more critical concepts like sociological imagination and critical pedagogy (Negt, 1975, 1985; Ziehe & Stubenrauch, 1996; Ziehe, 2001). But learning also reveals another side since it is a potent implementation tool that serves many interventions' objectives.

In Denmark, welfare service professionals, for decades, have been active agents in implementing welfare strategies and societal transformations through interventions and workplace learning (Andersen, 2020,2016; Andersen & Dybbroe, 2011; Diochon & Anderson, 2011; Kamp & Dybbroe, 2015). I suggest that identification, ambivalence, and defence reactions constitute a significant (psycho-societal) analytical grid for studying welfare services. I label this position 'psycho-societal' to stay close to the roots of critical theory developed by the Frankfurter School, accentuating the interrelation and interconnectedness between societal structures and cultures and the formation of subjectivity and identity. Professionals display differentiated ways of understanding, processing and enacting – based on identification with the objectives and goals of neoliberal governance demands. We might label these intersections of significant interaction and meaning 'sticky constructions', as suggested by Britzman, acknowledging the potential bearing of insight into current welfare service work shared by these phenomena (Britzman, 2011).

We have been dealing with multiple and simultaneous losses. We are still experiencing the traumatic effects of the pandemic while witnessing war and environmental devastation in the four corners of the planet. Wendy Hollway, in the 2023 APCS Conference, mentioned international research carried out in 10 different countries, in which 50% of youngsters said they feel anxious about climate issues, and many of them considered that adults are leaving a trail of destruction and death as a legacy. It is also known that suicide rates among young people have increased. Rahel Boraks (2008), a Brazilian psychoanalyst, points out that “experiencing loss demands a sophisticated emotional organization, able to keep the person alive for their own experience of loss”. Nowadays, according to Boraks, many individuals “do not even manage to achieve the experience of being alive and, in face of loss, it is their own self that is shipwrecked”, left to “cultivate an infertile land of desires and emotions as a means of surviving in an equally inhospitable world.” Anne Brun (2018), interested in the clinical nature of cases like these, questions “How to define specific modalities of analytical work when confronted with cases of non subjectified parts of psychic life, or even in the expectation of subjectivation?” From Boraks’ ideas, we will seek to echo Brun’s inquiry in the pedagogical field. Is it possible to formulate a pedagogical theory aimed at youth who are heirs to so much loss and whose psyche has not even reached the experience of being alive? Is it possible for this theory to be guided by the goal of inspiring pedagogical practices able to foment and fertilize the expectation of subjectivation, instead of just helplessly assisting those resigned to psychic survival in infertile lands in an inhospitable world?

The four papers making up this symposium speak to the business involved in what constitutes a learning in the psychoanalytic clinic. Drawing on Bion and on Lacan, the presenters query what kind of learning can be said to take place during a psychoanalysis. The paradoxes of such a learning derive in part from the analyst’s own position as conditioned upon a peculiar form of unknowing, or unlearning, but also from their desire to bring about the conditions in their work for their analysands and patients to ‘learn’ without knowing, or to ‘learn’ without learning. As such the limits to learning in psychoanalysis are brought out in a variety of discussions concerning the ethical dimension to cure, the transference in the work with young people, and a stance of negative empathy.

The Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies is a 50-chapter, 500,000-word enterprise which we have edited over the past three years and which aims to offer a wide-ranging survey of the field. It has appeared in stages as an online resource and is shortly to be published as a print volume. We have encouraged contributions of many different kinds, from formal research reviews to more personal, reflexive writing. Contributors have come from long-established scholars to newly-qualified PhDs. In this presentation, we reflect on the process of editing the work, discussing what we have learnt from it about the current standing of psychosocial studies and what it indicates about its future lines of development.

We receive instruction from Toni Morrison to “dream a little before you think.” In this roundtable, we ground in the tradition of Black feminist thought and its call in to dreaming as a critical pedagogy in our work toward social justice. The speakers in this roundtable are inviting discussion about what it takes to turn toward one another in a deeply divided world that continues to be undone by gendered racial capitalism. The proposed speakers are scholar-practitioners who are joining across continental, professional, and lived experiences, one based in Israel and one in the United States. The speaker based in Israel teaches clinical social work to diverse graduate students who will be working in trauma and recovery for different communities in Israel Amid war and its aftermath. The U.S.-based speaker is leading research into the freedom dreams of foundation executives of color, in which they tap into their radical imagination and share their desires for a just, multiracial democracy. The speakers will reflect on what they are learning and unlearning given their commitments to making space for dreaming in contexts that constrain imagination. Conference participants will be invited to join in discussion about how we can support liberatory possibilities for the individual psyche and for groups in ways that enable our bold and courageous action for social justice.

Social dreaming was originally developed by Gordon Lawrence as a means of consulting to organisations. It can shed light on participant’s experience in all kinds of temporary learning institutions and can be helpful and integrating in terms of conference events. It is an experiential event in which we offer dreams and free associate to them to work towards a collective sense of themes arising from them.

The space for coming together to share and explore our dreams through an associative process is known as the dream matrix. A "host" provides support to the matrix usually in a snowflake pattern of seating that is neither individual or group focused, guiding our journey in sharing and making sense of our dreams by offering connections between them and hypotheses that illuminate their contributions. The word "host" is used to introduce the idea that the matrix is not a group to be facilitated or led but an open space for containing and working with dreams.

The time is spent in two phases, an initial event in which participants share dreams and associations and a reflection event in which participants do sense making of the material that arose during the matrix. The total time of the event is 1.5hrs.

The session offers participants an immersive experience into the operational methodology of the artistic project "Corps Composé.s," (Composite body(ies) i.e Individual Paper) particularly delving into the "incisions" series crafted during an intensive artistic residency within a cancer surgery department of a hospital. It involves using imagery as a narrative vector and a means of self-expression. The session presents a workshop integrating writing and visual arts, grounded in techniques of automatic writing and fragmentary composition inspired by images. Through landscape metaphor, it aims to unveil an alternative lexicon for embodying and reshaping our collective and personal perceptions and imaginaries of both bodies and well-being. The collage of written works, followed by the serendipitous unveiling of fragments, offers insight into our relationship with accumulation, accessibility, concealment, and what is contained within us.

The session will be introduced by a concise overview of the artistic project and its underlying methodology, leading into a sequence of writing and collage exercises from images. Participants will engage in sharing their creations verbally and feedback on the experience and the resultant transformations that will lead to discussions about what could be learned from this experiential time from both sides ; participants and speaker.

This working session aims to introduce doctoral students, early career researchers and anyone interested in publishing for academic journals to some general principles for publishing, and, more specifically, to consider the requirements for publishing in the Journal of Psychosocial Studies. Drawing on the experience of the editors in relation to the requirements of the Journal, and doctoral students, in relation to their own experience of getting published, we aim to engage in a dialogue with prospective contributors to encourage and support this sometime daunting pursuit. We offered a similar session by request online in Dec 2023, which was well attended and deemed useful by participants. We hope this would make a practical contribution to the conference and those attending who might be near the beginning of processes of knowledge dissemination.

My journey into psychoanalysis did not commence with the didactic absorption of theories but unfolded through a deeply personal evolution, an experiential assimilation that transformed my way of being and perceiving. As I traversed the chasms of self-discovery and professional development, I chanced upon a psychoanalytic institute in India, a country where the psychoanalytic community is still emerging amidst a rich tapestry of cultural and social dynamics, which facilitated my becoming – not merely as a therapist but, more fundamentally, a person who thinks psychoanalytically.

This paper aims to weave together the tapestry of my experiential journey with the conceptual threads of Kleinian theory. I will explore how the oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions has been emblematic of my own internal struggles and triumphs as a candidate in a psychoanalytic institute. This duality mirrors the inevitable anxieties and the reparative aspirations I faced while constructing a home within the institution and the broader psychoanalytic community.

Moreover, I plan to highlight how this internal Kleinian process paralleled the clinical encounters with patients, where the tumult and the tranquility of their psychic lives demanded an empathic attunement that only a lived-through psychoanalytic perspective within a certain cultural and social context could afford. The feeling of belonging within the institute was not a peripheral experience but a central one that informs my clinical work.

The presentation will also have a clinical vignette that exemplifies the application of this internalized psychoanalytic lens and will delve into the role of institution as a scaffold that has supported the integration into the psychoanalytic milieu against the backdrop of India’s evolving psychoanalytic landscape. It is through this lens that I could build my relational home within the institute and the broader field, a home that is both a sanctuary and a site of ceaseless becoming.

The suggested contribution is an autotheoretical piece on autotheory and how it can be employed as a psychosocial concept and method for the exploration of self-formation in-between the psychic and sociopolitical spheres. I reflect on my personal experience related to the reception of my published fiction as a disguised autobiography that offers itself (myself) to wild analysis interpretations; to do so, I draw upon psychoanalytic theory and feminist metaphysics. I investigate whether it is important to make a differentiation between truth and fiction, memory and fantasy, and whether the disruption of such separation could offer a new formative psychosocial paradigm of female subjectivity.

Autotheory is a genre of writing that has recently been brought into prominence in feminist life-writing but also psychoanalytic theory. It entwines autobiographical narration with philosophy and critical theory; it engages self-narrativisation with the conceptual questioning of the formation of ‘the self’. My hypothesis is that autotheory is not merely a genre; transposing the lived experience of everyday life into the psycho-philosophical examination of subjectivity, it offers a psychosocial medium and tool to study the wider psychic and sociopolitical consequences in and for self-formation.

Does technology ever facilitate relationally satisfying encounters? Can it offer holding or containment in everyday settings to people who are anxious, fearful or vulnerable? Can immersive media assist with loneliness, depression, isolation and immobility? Can robots accomplish physical care and offer reassurance and containment in the process? Can AI ‘companions’ be ‘trained’ to complement psychotherapy? Do such technologies substitute, enhance, complement or threaten human care?

These are urgent questions in the context of the ageing and sickening populations of so-called ‘developed’ societies. Economic and policy-driven interest in this field is often motivated by concern over the ‘burden’ of ageing and the expense of mental health provision intensified by labour shortages in health and social care, where taxpayers are supposedly unwilling to foot the bill, whereas ‘caring machines’ bring cost savings and commercial opportunities. These are powerful drivers to try to find solutions to the crisis and complexity of care. Reactions to new technologies are often polarised leading to manic idealisation or denigrating rejection.

There is a significant amount of work happening at the interface between research on health and Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This experiential and interactive session will consider whether and how Caretech might enable presence as an indispensable aspect of care, viewed from a psychosocial perspective. It will introduce technological developments made by colleagues in the fEEL Lab in Sydney. Participants will be offered the opportunity to engage with a sample of VR, AR, MR, and AI technologies and experience their potentials and limitations first hand. The session will invite participants to consider how these experiential technologies might be used in therapeutic, educational and practice settings.

This creative panel brings together an interdisciplinary collective working on progressive histories and practices in psychoanalysis. We focus on free psychoanalytic clinics, where therapists offer psychoanalysis to marginalised individuals and groups, while also reconsidering the very pillars of psychoanalytic theories and techniques from a psychosocial ground. Drawing on theoretical, historical, ethnographic and artistic work aimed at producing a new figuration of psychoanalysis as a radical form of care, we ask a series of interrelated questions, centred around the processes of learning and unlearning alive in free clinics.

Together we will consider historical and contemporary accounts of re-invention of psychoanalytic praxes, which unfold from the creativity of clinical work conducted in what we broadly call ‘free clinics’. Marginalised from official psychoanalysis historiography in their own way, they are psychosocial from the get-go: ranging from alternative care space for children in the early 20th century England, to 1930s Europe, to a series of collectives offering psychoanalysis on the streets of Brazil in recent years. A significant part of what sustains these spaces is a disposition to interrogate positions of knowing and not knowing in the field of mental health care, re-politicising an understanding of the unconscious, transference, fantasy, symptoms. A commitment to experimenting with pedagogies of unlearning –unlearning some of the blind spots of psychoanalysis on class, race, gender –gives consistency to the possibilities of inventing something new, including new clinical dispositifs.

A sculpture will be displayed during the panel.

Raluca Soreanu: Free psychoanalytic clinics and infrastructural thinking
Ana Tomcic: Healing communities: Un-disciplining the Social Bond in Work with Anti-Social Adolescents 1930-1970.
Ana Minozzo: Psychoanalysis-in-common: The case of Brazilian Free Clinics
Julianna Pusztai: Radical Openings and Psychoanalytic Movements in the 1970s UK: Circulation of Knowledge
Ana Cvorovic: Translucent Walls
Lizaveta van Munsteren: Learning from free clinics: psychosocial implications for the psychoanalytic clinic

How do we come to make “I” statements that feel deeply true, such as “I am a dancer” or “I am a psychologist” or “I am a mother”? How do we come to hold a sense of identity, particularly when it has changed from what it once was? Translator/ thinker Alphonso Lingis discusses the move from “performative to declarative identity,” in which we go from simply presenting an identity to the world to feeling that we are bound to this sense of who we are in a way that defines, complicates, and clarifies who we are. This is a basic question about lived experience, yet one that is sometimes hard to address, particularly as many of our approaches to meaning-making engage how we are defined in a social context but not how we come to feel an identity is truly ours. We are interested in how the political becomes the personal, how the psychosocial can shape and support individual emergence, and how we come to know ourselves when we are increasingly pulled toward polarization and precarity.

In this roundtable discussion, a group of qualitative researchers, students, and clinicians speak and invite conversation about the move from performative to declarative identity by discussing their own experience with declaring an identity and the transitional space that may precede this declaration.

Sources:

Lingis, A. (2017). Crossings: A Conversation with Alphonso Lingis. Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal, 50(1), 289-307.

In his reinterpretation of Marx in Time Labor and Social Domination, Moishe Postone argues that contrary to traditional Marxism, capitalism should not be viewed only as a form of concrete domination (i.e., the exploitation of the working class) but rather as a quasi-objective abstract historical dynamic that constitutes a form of abstract domination. In this paper, I will explore the implications of Postone’s reinterpretation of Marx on our understanding of capitalist subjectivity. I will argue that by viewing capitalism as a historical dynamic that both dominates and creates the subject throough proletarian labor, that capitalist subjectivity is defined by a feeling of helplessness and disempowerment that leads to the embrace of forms of anti-capitalism, which fail to challenge capitalism's core tenets (Such as Commodity and Value Production and Proletarian Labor) and instead reinforce capitalism under different political guises. I will argue that by understanding this, we can better understand the failures of social emancipation movements and formulate an alternative to capitalism to create different political and economic formations.

This paper is situated in the poststructuralist political theories between Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek on their psycholinguistic analysis on empty signifiers in socio-political changes. I argue that during the emergence of empty signifiers there is another psychic event behind what Laclau calls the “demand” – societal trauma. This introduction of the trauma in political life helps to rethink the role and function of empty signifiers in terms of the temporality of revolution. I apply the temporality model concluded by Freudian and poststructuralist psychoanalysis (i.e. Kristeva, Ettinger, Schmukalla) on timeless trauma and unconscious to understand how empty signifiers act as seemingly “timeless” political representations of the societal trauma beyond a singular traumatic event in the linear time, which push forward social changes toward the healing of the “wounds”. In my presentation, I will also illustrate my above ideas via Erik Satie’s music work Vexations (1983) – treating his motif as a metaphor of an empty signifier emerged from his personal trauma and the 840 repetitions as a procedure of revolution along with the empty signifier.

My paper closely responds to the theme of the conference on “learning from experiences”. As social beings, structural violence from different perspectives (e.g. racism, sexism, colonialism, class struggle) induces trauma within us – our experiences are marked by those traumas while we also “learn” from those traumatic experiences to find urge to push forward social changes.

The phenomenon of perversion emerges in most contexts of human societies, it presents itself in both disguised and conspicuous ways, whose hallmark is the transgression of the Law. One of the most extreme forms of a perverse discourse in a particular Mexican context, is religiousness/mysticism and the need for purification, in a criminal sphere. The case of Nazario Moreno and his religious Order, The Knights Templar of Michoacán is of particular interest because it unifies these three elements in one case within Mexican culture and its subjectivity. This exploration aims to analyze the perverse logic of seeking justice through criminal acts acting as arbiters of divine law, virtue and reason; the act of committing atrocities in the name of a tyrannical God, and it also delves into discerning the extent to which we may venture, and where are the boundaries. Moreno weaves an absurd reality for the outside observer, but seen from the inside, it allows us to observe the fragile reality built from a twisted logic that allows the perverse person to subsist in an intersubjective world. We address the discourse of perversion in a criminal context by the use of a construction of a case in psychoanalysis, by making use of Moreno’s autobiography, the moral manifest of the Knights Templar used by the Knights Templar of Michoacán and some other documents. Finally, we compared a different manifestation of perversion in a different culture and discussed the difference between the perverse individual who seeks to impose their order on the world and the perverse individual who reenacts a past scene.

This paper questions an individualistic perspective of the psychopathological phenomena of perversion, in an attempt to understand how an institutionalization of perversion can be created under specific, subjective circunstances, under the cover of religion or other ideological inspirations.

‘’I believe this is where the true aspect of this project comes in. The power of dance. Of sharing. Through experiencing. This round there were less of verbal conversations between me as a project leader and the local people. It was the dance that brought ideas/experiences/emotions to the forefront. When the local children came to the studio for the first time, I felt an urgency to go close to them to share the dance. Not with an intention of forcing anything on them, but rather share my dance and the transmitting of movements.’’

Fieldnotes Mozambique, 4^th Feb 2024

This presentation draws on experiences and reflections in relation to my artistic research project, Dancing Through Grief, where I aim to develop knowledge about shared affects through dance performance(s) as a psychosocial practice space.

I will focus specifically on two residency periods in Mozambique which guided me to experiential learning through the lens of my artistic practice as a choreographer and dancer. I want to share how and why the experiential learning/un-learning/not learning was related to an affect from my dancing body in a psychosocial space. I reflect on which processes and methods gave more accessibility to the ‘experiential-ness’ that is still present and unfolding. I give insight into the evolution of artistry based on a bodily approach that could embrace both the performer’s and the participants’ life experiences with grief. In my experience, the non-verbal and tactile experience of the shared dance becomes a vehicle for understanding, as well as further ways of questioning, the importance of meaning making that is not shared verbally but evoked through the body and expressed through dancing.

The paper resonate with the conference theme in terms of its relation to experiential learning, social memory and its erasure, and imagination.

Her body fits perfectly inside of the door frame.

She is about to leave to eat pizza with her friends when her father enters the room.

His eyes have watered already.

She has never seen him cry before.

Somehow, she knew what was coming but had no clue at all.

This artistic sharing will resonate with the conference theme in terms of its relation to experiential learning, social memory and its erasure, and imagination – all aspects of the psychosocial affects of grief and its aftermath.

Grief is not a stable object of inquiry. Grief can be viewed as a journey, moving from one dance to another. In my artistic research project Dancing Through Grief, I invite myself as a performer and the audience to expand emotional awareness of grief by creating and part-taking in art. I am interested in exploring how affect may be set in motion and circulate through a dancing body in a psychosocial space, where the artistry includes a bodily approach that can embrace both the performer and the audience’s life experiences of grieving/losing a loved one. By applying such an approach creatively, I hone in on the grieving journey both as an object for practice-based research, and as a tool for exploring shared experiences and feelings.

Dreamy memories but at the same time radical experiences. Intentionally honest. Sometimes brutal to the body, but with a gentle acknowledgment of what I call the “fluxual” affects of grief. In this specific dance performance sharing I propose a number of what I call grief invitations to conference participants. It is a collection of physical letters/proposals/invitations that offer reimagining our relationship with grief, through movement and spoken word.

This session gives space to thinking about what might be learnt from revisting thr Habermasian concept of the public sphere and its relationship to violence. Whilst definitions of violence can be controversial and subject to debate, this session aims to explore the idea that there are forms of violence that are that significantly shaped, provoked, or aimed to impact on the public sphere: that mediated world that is the product of modernity. Each of the papers in this session explores a different dimension of ‘public violence’ and the overlaps with more intimate forms of violence.

Whilst there are good reasons to think of terrorism itself as a product of modernity (Miller 2013) incidents of extremist violence have emerged as highly significant sources of public anxiety, especially since 2001. Deepti Ramaswamy introduces her doctoral research that melds psychotherapeutic approaches and more qualitive approaches uses a form Dialogical Narrative Analysis of examines the connections between the very individual narratives (that often involve trauma) and attraction to broader extremist movements.

‘Self-harm’ has morphed from a relatively obscure activity to one that is now much debated and apparently common – across the whole field of psychiatry. Nina Fellows, as part of her doctoral work to better understand ‘self-harm’ as a cultural phenomena, examines the emergence cinematic representations of self-harm and the possible significance of those and their public reception.

David Kaposi has been exploring in detail the famous work of Stanley Milgram whose experiments apparently exposing the ‘willingness’ of ordinary people to carry out fatal violence on their fellow citizens, have themselves become objects of public fascination and consumption. Whilst these experiments, carried out in the shadow of the holocaust, have been understood as testimony to the power of obedience to an abstracted authority - David’s detailed work throws a different light on how those acts of violence can be understood as far more situated within a psychosocial dynamic.

One of the inhibitions to learning from experience is the belief that we can create situations which are immune to shock and the need to change. The search for security is a prominent example, witnessed both in the individual fantasy of total security and in the way social groups, including whole states, can commit themselves to a hunt for security that actually makes them more insecure. In this talk, I raise the issue of fundamental insecurity, linking it to the rupture and repair cycle central to psychoanalysis. To learn from experience, we might have to recognise that vulnerability and unsettledness are basic conditions of human life, recurring in psychoanalysis and society alike.

Feminist and psychosocial scholarship have made significant contributions to the critique of psychoanalytic political and epistemological pillars over several decades. In this presentation I propose the concept of ‘co-poiesis’ to address a horizon of possibility within the risks and ethics of encountering others. In dialogue with feminist theory, ecology and peripheric psychoanalytic practitioners, such as Pierre Fédida and Anne Dufourmantelle, we will think of analytic transference and the politics of encounters in the contemporary psychosocially-informed clinic. Creativity, togetherness and the realm of possibility emerging from necessity are aspects we will consider when honing into anxiety and promises of security in contemporary discourse.

As Sophie Lewis (2022) indicates, “matricentric feminism has recently undergone a revival.” This paper thinks about this recent interest in relation to experiences of in/security. The return of the maternal can be interpreted as a response to the profound insecurities of contemporary life, generated by neoliberal policies over the last fifty years, which scholars have described in terms of the ‘unmothering’ of society (Stephens 2011; Segal 2020). In this regard, the maternal signals the need for forms of holding, containment and care historically associated with ‘maternalist’ policies, experiences that are elusive in contemporary society. At the same time, the maternal represents a horizon of possibility that goes beyond the political ambiguities and gender traditionalism associated with the maternalisms of the past. Current interest in the maternal foregrounds Adrienne Rich’s (1976) distinction between ‘motherhood’ and ‘mothering,’ emphasising mothering as a practice that can and must circulate beyond the nuclear family. This paper explores the idea that imagining a future defined by something other than current forms of ‘unmothering’ involves, at least in part, loosening the links between biological maternity, or motherhood, and the practice of mothering. With this in mind, the paper considers what psychosocial thinking can contribute to the process of mobilising mothering against social insecurity.

The paper revisits Fairbairn’s concept of ‘object-seeking’ and situates it within a discussion of colonial object-relations in their everyday manifestation. Through this, it extends its conceptual significance psychosocially, reshaping the psychoanalytic frame by expanding its capacity to envision new, more political alternatives for working with old concepts. It first reviews Fairbairn’s original concept of object-seeking, which he sees as the primary libidinal aim linking individuals to groups, culture, and society. It then proceeds to demystify and de-romanticise the notion of ‘relationality’ often referenced in relation to his work. Working with the concept psychosocially, it attends to the question of: what are the objects being sought, how are they sought, and most crucially, what forms of relationality is reproduced that serve to maintain dominant social relations, which are captured by qualities of ‘brutalism’ (Mbembe, 2023). Furthermore, this paper exemplifies improvising the psychoanalytic frame to offer new ways of seeing and theorising, arguing that such perspectives can only arise from the radical condition of marginality (hooks, 2015a) – both as sites of oppression and as sites of resistance.

Afro-pessimism represents the most radical analysis of anti-Blackness to emerge for several decades. Perhaps surprisingly, it has drawn on select concepts from psychoanalysis – even if only in a strategic and conditional manner – in its various investigations into the current and historical conditions of anti-Blackness. In this paper I briefly explore how several psychoanalytic concepts - the ideas of jouissance, fantasy and perversion – have been taken up in the Afro-pessimist literature. Not only does this conceptual borrowing (or “hijacking”) extend the critical horizons of Afro-pessimism, it also provides a means of thinking about the project of de-colonizing psychoanalysis itself. A crucial example of the latter is how an Afropessimist artciulation of the Lacanian concept of jouissance implies a type of inheritance of colonial/anti-Black jouissance, which informs the notion of hat some have called a 'colonial transference relation'.

This paper addresses the conference theme of colonial legacies and racism in reference both to psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.

The master signifier ‘Iran’ has been connected to my heart, a vital organ in Persian poetry, more vital for a subject, closer to life and being, than any Lacanian Real. The impetus for this presentation stems from the prevalent dichotomies of east and west in psychoanalysis (i.e., "psychoanalysis in western democracies"), despite Lacanian assertions about the universality of the Oedipus complex. This dichotomous rhetoric is in contradiction with the fundamental premise of our Lacanian clinical praxis. The mOther/Other structures the unconscious, with subjects born elsewhere, the cultural others/Other is overlooked, settling with interpretations based on analysts’ law, religious understandings and rituals within and from their colonial lenses. There is not only ‘one’ road to love (Lacanian woman). In Iran, practices surrounding death, mourning, and guilt hold significant cultural and religious meanings and rituals that should not be conflated with diagnosis, but they have been widely ignored in western case discussions, even in psychoanalytic circles. This problem might arise because most of psychoanalysis and training of analysts have been dominated by psychoanalysts who themselves have been trained within the same cultures, the Anglo-European world, producing more analysts with the same colonial ignorance (i.e., racism, colonial attitudes about women). Luckily, there is a shift towards democratization of psychoanalysis through the online connections in the post-COVID world. Clinical psychoanalysis emphasizes a movement towards desire, away from jouissance, yet western responses to recent world events concerning the master signifier ‘woman’, highlight the complexities of desire, such as listening to interviews with Zizek commending protesters, which is contrary to a Lacanian position. In this paper, by making references to clinical practice, I shall discuss how nurturing a psychoanalytic experience has been made possible beyond cultural ignorance through my own experience of listening as a psychoanalyst.

Understanding how young children construct their ‘racial’ identity within a particular educational context is crucial in promoting mental health, social cohesion, and more inclusive societies globally. In the context of South Africa, given its history of colonisation and Apartheid, and continued difficulties with 'racial' inequalities and tension, research on this topic remains highly relevant. Adopting a psychosocial emphasis, we are interested in both the content of children’s talk about ‘race’ and the processes involved in eliciting this talk: How do children story themselves as ‘raced’? How do we understand what is silenced or unsaid in these stories? What are the meaning-making processes of becoming ‘raced’ in the relational context within which the story is told?

To answer these questions, we propose a data analytic approach that draws on Gilligan's Listening Guide (LG) alongside the lens of mentalization to increase our understanding of the affective work accomplished by the participant and the researcher in interaction. We demonstrate the analytic steps with a case study of a young child and highlight adaptations to the LG. We are interested in the extent to which the analytic approach enables us to investigate ‘racial’ identity construction psychosocially without reproducing binaries while remaining responsive to the needs of the pre-adolescent participant. We reflect on what we learn and do not learn from the interview and analytic experience about being and becoming ‘raced’.

This presentation highlights the progressive awareness of the importance of contextualizing clinical and research practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It traces a clinician and researcher's dissatisfaction with the mismatch between their psychoanalytic frames of reference and their cultural context of origin. Their experience shows that employing a euro-centric theoretical framework without consideration is stigmatizing and pathologizing to the culture, and that swapping the classical intrasubjective model for a more culturally sensitive intersubjective one allows us to no longer see the subjects as "juxtaposed", and to more deeply examine the links between them. Through this reflexive journey, the author came to challenge of reframing theoretical references in order to break the vicious cycle of risks linked to their initial posture, which prioritizes theory over field under the effect of a "ready to think" ideation, leading to hasty and unfounded pathologizing interpretation of accepted cultural practices. This is the dilemma they termed "the epistemology of Procrustes's bed", inspired by the Greek myth of Procrustes who forced travelers to lie on his iron bed, stretch their bodies or cut them until they fit it exactly. To counteract this posture, a process of repositioning is favored, based on the paradigm of the "Equitable encounter", which allows the field to freely express its particularities, thereby re-informing, enriching, and cross-culturizing theory. The contributor goes on to point out a number of possible risks and damaging effects on academic freedom and scientific production in so-called peripheral countries in the event that thinking is not decolonized and freed from stakes of domination and self-censorship, in sync with an ostensibly favorable post-revolutionary context. To support their case, they recount their own learning from experiences and exposes what they term "virtuous intersectionality" to demonstrate paths of resilience/resistance in research.

“Oh God! May I be alive when I die,” Winnicott writes in his unfinished autobiography. Might we, as psychosocial scholars and educators, be alive when we teach? What is it that makes us feel alive in the classroom? And how might we make sense of this feeling in the context of what we know all-too-well: the myriad institutional pressures that deprive us of life?

This roundtable is a call to articulate, express, or otherwise get in touch with the process, felt-sense, or even fantasy of feeling alive in the classroom.

This is not to suggest that aliveness is a desirable state. Indeed, feeling alive to the pain and suffering of self and others is just as possible, maybe more so, as feeling a sense of joy or spontaneity. What happens when we encounter moments in teaching/learning that might be experienced as frightening, alienating, or suffocating? Beyond that, what happens when we are alive to what we don’t know, and how do we survive this in the presence of our students?

From a psychosocial perspective, aliveness seems to require mobilization of dynamics that are always there, yet through an experience of aliveness, shift in some way. We liken this to a gestalt figure-ground shift where the ideas we are teaching/learning find play in the relational dynamics we are experiencing. As a result, we may begin to feel ideas, know them “in our bones” as Winnicott might say, and leave the encounter more enriched, more alive, and less compliant. Perhaps in aliveness the split between thinking and feeling gets worked through, and participants come away with a greater sense of feeling real.

This roundtable addresses the conference theme by tapping into the elusive and contestable, yet vital experience of aliveness.Through this, we hope to stimulate discussion on psychosocial approaches to education.

The presentation draws on my research project ‘When the rainbow ends’, which focuses on separation experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer people in Finland and inEngland, UK. The aim of the project is to explore how the changing social and legal positions of LGBTIQ people and their relationships entangle with the affective processes of break-ups. In order to grasp the affective, lively and often messy realities of relationships, I combine queer theoretical, new materialist and affect theoretical perspectives with psychosocial approaches in my analysis. I approach the becoming of the relationship break-ups through Deleuzo-Guattarian framework as assemblages, where multiple and complex elements conjoin. This approach makes it possible to explore what kinds of relational assemblages allow LGBTIQ bodies to intensify and to thrive – and what kind of assemblages diminish the vitality of these bodies.

In the new materialist framework, the question is not what bodies are or how to define them, but rather what bodies can do – or what they can be made to do as part of an assemblage. Yet, I have often wondered how to think about the the psyche or psychical within this framework. I follow Blackman (2010, p. 172) and Walkerdine and Jimenez (2012, p. 51), who argue that when we continue to work on affect as something that is not consciously known and which can transfer between bodies (human and non-human), it is necessary to take into account the psychic mediation of affect. This is the point where psychosocial thinking can make important contributions to affect theories. In this paper I concentrate particularly in such breakup situations where there is an opacious personal transformation behind a sudden breakup. Psychosocial thinking and awareness of unconscious processes might help in understanding these situations better.

High rates of mental and emotional distress within LGBTIQA+ communities are often explained via narratives of risk and vulnerability. These dominant psy understandings and reliance upon individual treatment responses in the form of talking therapies and psychotropic medications obscure the way socio-cultural factors shape LGBTIQA+ mental health and wellbeing. They reframe isolation, loneliness, and discrimination as individual characteristics rather than seeing them as an affective sensibility through which an unliveable subject position is experienced by LGBTIQA+ people. Queer forms of relationality which include connection, survival, and healing alongside experiences of marginalisation, shame, and erasure are rendered unintelligible through such ‘psy’ framings. This paper adopts a reparative approach to explore the everyday knowledge and social relations LGBTIQA+ people draw on when navigating unwelcoming and hostile environments and attempt to live a fulfilling life. It details findings from a photo-elicitation project exploring LGBTIQA+ identity, experiences of place, connection, and belonging conducted in Victoria, Australia. Participants were recruited using an intersectional framework and invited to take or find photographs representing their identity and experiences of place, connection, and belonging. The photographs then informed an open-ended interview. To understand similarities and differences across LGBTIQA+ communities, data was grouped and thematically analysed according to gender identity, sex, sexuality, age, ability, geographical location, and cultural background to better understand how intersecting socio-cultural factors shaped the mental health and wellbeing of LGBTIQA+ people. Findings trouble monolithic understandings of queer communities and the simplistic conflation of non-normative genders, sexes, and sexualities and poor mental health. This paper provides temporal and relational insights into the way LGBTIQA+ people navigate the complex interplay of identity and place, connection, and belonging in the pursuit of a liveable life and calls for greater attention to the socio-cultural resources that foster mental wellbeing for queer individuals.

“It feels like my mother wants me to suffer exactly the way she did (in her marriage), like she wants me to give up everything I have worked so hard to have. Shouldn’t she stand up for me and ensure that I don’t have to live the life she does?” asks my patient, confused by the dynamics unfolding between her and her mother as she is pushed towards marrying a man chosen by her family. This is the story of many young women in India who enter psychotherapy, overwhelmed by the abruptly hostile shift in their mother's tenderness and affection towards them.

Through this paper I will use my clinical work and conceptualizations by several Indian psychoanalysts to theorize on this shift; elaborating on the psychic impact of delayed marriages in India on the mother-daughter dyad. I will propose that the increasing agency women in Urban India feel over their lives is leading to the manifestation of hitherto latent and concealed maternal envy in the form of a daughter's cruel superego. As the landscape of the Indian woman’s inner-world begins to shift from one of renunciation symbolized by the Sita complex (Kakar 1981; Haq, 2017) to one of self-formation and expression; shame is used as a means to attack the nascent subjectivity of the daughter.

To theorize this I will suggest a framework of Layton’s (2020) work on unconscious attacks on linking and Minerbo’s (2015) work on the constitution of the cruel superego to highlight the thanatic beta elements transmitted from mothers to daughters in micro-aggressive encounters by using marriage as an object to attack the development of the latter's subjectivity.

Through this work, I aim to recognize the unique intergenerational wound women in India carry; the invisibization of which results in painful enactments in the mother-daughter dyad.

This paper is about a narrative and psychodynamic therapy with an adult experiencing difficulties in executive function where I reflect on how the process by which my client and I slowly came to understand and articulate his experience together created a successful therapy.

I used narrative therapy-based questioning to step away from my own life experience, bridge a significant cultural gap and reach closer to the affect and meaning making of my client. From asking if this is “ADHD” and feeling there was something wrong with him, through a focus on the the history of these difficulties in his life, “ADHD” was left behind, and the work became about recognizing his ways of working and the environment that he needed.

I became curious about how this process - of slowly, patiently, teaching me to understand his world - seemed to have helped him to make significant changes!

Another change was our acceptance of the limits of relationships, and it played out in my client choosing to end therapy, and in my accepting his decision without question. This was also in keeping with narrative therapy’s goal of supporting agency. I felt the sadness of ending while holding the joy of connection (Buechler, 2008). This paper is an attempt to explore what may have happened for both relationship partners.

A different take on learning from experience, I suggest narrative therapy as a powerful tool to help us move closer to an unfamiliar network of meanings and experiences and better relate with people different from us. I want to focus on the joy and aliveness that this joining of worlds’ can bring and think about how this can help us counter fear, othering and violence.

References

Buechler, S. (2008). Making a difference in patients’ lives. New York: Routledge.

Learning from experience is fundamental in psychic growth. Often initiated in containing relationships with primary caregivers, this process continues into adulthood, where meaningful connections play a crucial role in digesting experiences. Yet, amid some adversities including socio-political oppression such relationships might lose their containing functions and even end up reenforcing the oppression. On these occasions, opportunities for containment and learning from experience can arise through engagement with films and television series.

In this presentation, I will present pieces of data produced from two Free Association Narrative Interviews with a woman in Iran. Through this data and drawing on a psychoanalytic theoretical framework, mainly of the British Independent group, I aim to show how moving images can transcend cultural boundaries, build connections, and foster containment for some spectators in the Islamic Republic characterized by oppressive state control and censorship.

Through this lens, I will illuminate the dual nature of cross-cultural spectatorship, which can both liberate and confine individuals. On one hand, cross-cultural spectatorship can create a deep sense of connection and recognition and even serve as a catalyst for political resistance, resilience, and informed activism. On the other hand, it can intensify the conflicts and alienation from the reality in which the spectator is living. Building upon these insights, I will highlight the complexities of cross-cultural moving image spectatorship, emphasizing the imperative need for holding and investigating the psychosocial tensions that arise.

This exploration aligns with the conference's overarching theme, which is learning and not learning from experience as I will illustrate how individuals can navigate the complexities of their lived experiences, creating/finding pathways towards emotional growth and societal change, using moving images from another culture for containment but at the same time feel more alienated by these watching experiences.

The famous statue of Laocoön, as he wrestles against the entwining serpents sent to punish his previous actions through his death as well as his two sons, has long been seen as despair caught in stone. Regardless of the conflicting aesthetic politics throughout its history, the statue has always been regarded as a consummate representation of suffering. Yet when we pay attention to Laocoön’s gaze it is not towards the direct cause of pain (the bite of the serpent), nor towards the plight of his sons; it is cast towards an invisibility, an unseen, the lacunal. The genuine source of Laocoön’s misery lies elsewhere. The paper explores the despairing gaze as a metaphor for the lacunae beyond cause and recognition. It takes up Ella Sharpe’s ideas on metaphor, psychical development, and the body, notably in how what she calls spontaneous metaphor “…can reveal a present-day psychical condition which is based upon an original psycho-physical experience”; and how metaphors “…reveal also something of the early incorporated environment”. Along with Lacan’s work on anxiety, Sharpe’s work will be employed to develop the idea that lacunal despair is a version of repression as it seeks to ‘escape’ the body, yet is so often not seen, just as Laocoön’s despair is located elsewhere. Sharpe and Lacan will be drawn on explore these relationships of repression, lacunae, and despair, incorporating ideas of metaphor and experience in these terms. Husserl’s phenomenological concept of embodiment will also be employed to work through experiential despair. In this sense, as much as Laocoön historically, aesthetically, philosophically, and psychoanalytically, stands as a metaphor for an almost universalizing anguish, it also reveals the complexity of managing to see what we are anxious about both individually and at a wider social level.

Possible theme area: The pathologizing and normalizing of despair

This presentation explores the theory and practice of Experiential Groups as a learning model within psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy training programmes. Drawing on the existing literature on Experiential Groups (Miller et al., 2004; Salzberger-Wittenberg et al. 1999), mainly underpinned by the work of W. Bion (1993 [1961]), we aim at challenging and expanding established notions of Experiential Groups as mainly grounded on psychoanalytical theories that place the unconscious dynamic at the forefront of these experiential learning tools. We would like to propose an alternative consideration of Experiential Groups as diffractive events drawing from Posthuman (Barad, 2007, 2012, 2014; Braidotti 2011a, 2011b, 2013, 2019) and New Materialist (Bennett, 2010; Cole & Frost, 2010) theories highlighting the relational agency of objects, artefacts, materiality and other-than-humans at the core of experiential group dynamics.

By bringing together the lived experiences of tutors (Ellis & Bochner, 2016; Richardson & St.Pierre, 2005), the observations of Experiential Groups in practice, reflections on the materiality of rooms, and participants’ feedback, we attempt to rethink the Experiential Group as a space organized by individuals’ unconscious only. With the understanding of group dynamics as driven by psychosocial (Fang, 2023) and the consideration of non-human agents, we propose an alternative view of these experiential learning tools where the materiality of the environment and the agency of objects and of artifacts plays a crucial role in the being-doing-experiencing of the event.

During the presentation we would like to make the participants embody and explore the theory-practice of the Experiential Group by offering an opportunity to live-experience the Experiential Group as an embodied and diffracted activity where unconscious dynamics play a central role in the undoing of the event alongside the agency of the materiality of the event itself and the relationality across humans and other-than-humans participants.

As our societal institutions are ever-more focused on supplying a quick fix to complex population-wide issues, psychoanalysis is poised to offer a contextualizing, humanizing, social justice-oriented perspective that attends to the nuances of these issues. These institutions employ a myopic perspective focused on symptoms rather than root causes, championing quantification to address issues of the human subject, and ultimately resulting in a reductionistic position. Multiple settings face different versions of this issue: in schools, the child is addressed only for their behaviors with little consideration for the underlying causes; in psychiatric hospitals, patients are overmedicated to be made more tolerable by caretakers, dehumanized by the treatment for their responses to trauma; even in day-to-day life, the social media feeds that structure our ever-expanding digital world reflect an existence of surface-level and reactionary engagement. Of interest to this roundtable is stimulating a discussion on the enormity of these pervasive systematic issues between the graduate students and early practitioners that represent the beginning scholars of the field and its established presences. As such, this panel will encourage an interdisciplinary discussion of the present topic with a focus on personal generationally-informed perspectives on these issues that, by their very nature, evolve with current cultural shifts and technological advancements. What is it that connects our thinking, that which we have mutually identified as broken in the way that we approach the needs of humanity? What are the world events, milestones, and cultural shifts that distinguish how we approach these issues as analysts and, first and foremost, as humans? These questions will structure the discussion around the implications of neoliberalism in practice and general living, and how inter- and trans-generational connections can aid in addressing, identifying, and resisting the predominant power structures of oppression.

This paper will focus on the ethics of experience and the centrality of inscription to both the consideration of ethics and the designation of experience, seeking to show how inscription problematises questions of inclusion and neutrality. The paper will return to Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis and, in particular, the figure of Philoctetes, whom Lacan mobilises at the end of the seminar to illustrate his argument for the centrality of the concept of desire to ethical consideration. Rereading Sophocles’ Philoctetes, along with Martin McDonagh’s Banshee’s of Inisherin and Aimé Césaire’s Notes of a Return to my Native Land, the paper will posit the impossibility of neutrality and, through doing so, seek to investigate more critically the place of desire in ethics.

By exploring and staging scenes of reading, this paper poses a question concerning how we may learn from the internalisation of other people’s fantasies: how they may provoke, collide with, and disrupt our own. The paper draws upon Sigmund Freud’s writings, including ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’, and ‘Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva’ to conceive a relation between reading, fantasy, and learning. I relate this to Jean Laplanche’s presentation of the cultural site as the location of “ordinary” transference, an encounter with an enigma: a response to an address. Responding to calls for a ‘Copernican’ criticism (from John Fletcher amongst others), I consider spaces and temporalities of reading.

The paper will take an experiential approach to this by reflecting on two of my own readings of Jane Eyre. The first, when I was eight years old, and later, as a postgraduate student in my twenties. My first encounter with the text appears driven by what I remember as a kind of sensory imprint; the heavy texture of the cream paper, the way in which I sat curled up on our pink velvet armchair, a particular illustration in the book (showing Rochester's first appearance in the story). The slowness of my reading, and the increasing sense of joy in my unique discovery of the text. It is only writing this now that I realise this memory is a repetition, even mirror image, of the opening scene of Jane Eyre itself. Like Freud’s ‘screen memory’, my first reading appears luminous and as a form of concealment. The second scene of reading made conscious much of what was hidden within my first: namely, the loss of my father, and the structure of paternal fantasy which shapes the novel. Through this, I suggest that 'scenographies’ of reading are associated with both learning and mourning.

In September 2023, Lara, an author and comedian, and Camille, an illustrator and graphic designer, collaborated on a joint artistic residency as part of the Transat Program by the Ateliers Médicis, within the gynecological and breast cancer surgery department of the Georges Pompidou European Hospital in Paris.

Their research aims to bring forth new images and narratives of the female body afflicted by illness through a dialogue between visual arts (collages) and the art of language. Viewing the body and identity as a collection of fragments that form a cohesive whole, and illness as an explosion, a disunification of being (cf Claire Marin), they employ collage techniques and fragmentary writing as mediums to reclaim power over affliction and as tools for connection. They delve into the transformative power of the act of creation on lived experience. They will spend three days a week in a hospital room converted into a studio. Yet, in reaching out to patients, are they not ultimately interrogating and transforming their own lived experiences, their own past, their own traumas? What dynamics are at play in this immersive experience?

This presentation aims to bear witness to an experience and its limitations. It serves as an example of experiential learning (creation of tools) and provides a platform for reflection on the potency of images as narrative conduits, on the modalities of encounter, on creation as both a mode of action and thought, and more broadly, on the role of art in both caregiving and crises (of the subject).

After Mai 1968, unions appeared useless to many academics, especially those who saw their strikes as intervening in the radicality of the occupational. This has left research into unions, from a Freudo-Marxist perspective, at the bottom of the agenda for radical action.

While Lenin has become an important touchstone for modern scholars, I shall argue using his remarks and Todd McGowan's theorisation of Universality. We can develop new ways of continuing his universalistic legacy., by repeating his interest in unions.

Could the union, in playing the role of the 'manager of discontent' create a productive relationship with the worker, facilitating non-belonging, seeing their incompatibility with the worker's identity?

While this will not always be the case, more research into union radicalisation from a psychoanalytic perspective could explore whether certain unions create a new worker consciousness with a radical potential.

This panel will examine the 2023 films Occupied City (Steve McQueen) and Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazor) which show two sides of the imaginary: the impossibility of representing war trauma, and the inverse, the way the imaginary is the partner of a defense against subjectivity.

Our panel will explore recent films on the Holocaust that convey an unscreenable real of war to challenge collective delusions. Both films explore the psychological haunting, disavowal, and perversions of memory that accompany an increasingly fascist society.

Occupied City shows the reductio ad absurdum of mimetically screening war. Zone of Interest critiques the uncanny normality of the Höss family living beside Auschwitz and leading a so-called normal life. Both films are adapted from the books Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945 by Bianca Stigter and Zone of Interest by Martin Amis. The crimes of the Third Reich hover as an absent presence in both films.

McQueen’s 4.5-hour film is guided by a narrative voice over that moves with a meandering camera building by building, street by street to unearth vanquished crimes that occurred during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. The only cut is the word “Demolished,” which is repeated when there is a camera shift from one site of violence to the next.

Zone of Interest concerns the plotless daily life of a normal German family, growing up cooking and sewing and gardening, just beside the gas chambers and crematoria. The film ends in Auschwitz today, the museum it has become, and asks questions about how we live alongside horror and what we do with that horror.

These war films open an opportunity for non-mimetic reflection on the ordinary and unnamed courage or cowardice of events not recorded in history. By zoning in on the effaced, wandering, and quotidian, these films make a nonrepresentational art of screening the unscene, like what Jacques Lacan calls Sinthomatic creation.