Eve Watson

This seminar offers an introduction to the history of psychoanalysis with a special emphasis on the contributions of the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan who emphasized the unconscious as being in speech and expressed in symptoms, dreams and the famous “slips.” The seminar demystifies the unconscious and outlines its importance in our structure and personality, showing its clinical relevance in a variety of applications such as symptoms, dreamwork, parapraxes (mistakes, bungled actions, slips of the tongue) and even jokes. We cannot know ourselves without knowing something of our unconscious motivations and desires!

Marie Walshe

This seminar explores the psychoanalytic approach to identity. Given the explosion of identity politics and gender categories, this seminar considers that far from settling things, identity, while necessary to the ego and a sense of self, is fraught due to its inconclusiveness and does not come close to capturing the entirety of who we are. Identity, which forms during the mirror stage, a concept formulated by Jacques Lacan, is assessed in terms of how history, language and the familial and socio-cultural big Other conspire in a mirroring process to determine selfhood in highly individual and singular ways. Marie Walshe, who has many years of experience in working with children, adolescents, and adults, will explore identity as formative but unfinished, and its significance for the psychoanalytic clinic.

Kevin Murphy

Psychoanalysis since Freud emphasises that sexuality is at the heart of desire, symptoms, human relations, and even reality itself. We don’t even have to be directly sexual for it to find its way into our thinking, our speaking and even our dreaming. When Freud proposed that who we desire is immaterial once there is someone we desire, he revolutionised the popular notion that men desire only women and women desire only men. After Freud, Lacan proposed that gender is based not on biology but on the effects of language, and further revolutionised our understanding of what a man and a woman is. This seminar contextualises these ideas within the enormously varied field of human sexuality and explores how a psychoanalytic approach to sexuality never does so in relation to “normality” but approaches sexuality as unique and determined by an unconscious that is singular to each of us. Kevin Murphy, who is an experienced clinical psychoanalyst and researcher in the field of sexuality, explores the origins of the sex drive, Freud and Lacan’s ideas about how we become desiring beings, how these theories can accommodate gender fluidity and why the human sex drive can often be as problematic as it can be pleasurable.

Harriet Parsons

Diagnosis in psychoanalysis is radically different to that of mainstream psychiatry and psychology which diagnoses in standardized ways using the DSM/ISD manuals. The work of Freud and Lacan advances a small number of general categories of diagnosis which are designed to manage the transference and appropriately direct the treatment. This seminar, under the guidance of Harriet Parsons who has almost two decades of experience working in clinical practice in the public and private sectors, explores hysteria and obsessional neurosis as categories of diagnosis. There will be a special focus on the treatment of eating disorders.

Pauline Twomey

Freud was adamant that when initially agreeing to work with a patient, the clinician should determine if the patient is psychotic or neurotic. While psychoanalytic practitioners might not often work with someone who is psychotic, it is important to have some knowledge of it. This seminar explores what psychosis is, looks at its distinct and unusual symptomatology and how psychoanalysis approaches it as a diagnostic category. Psychoanalysis approaches psychosis differently to how it is approached using the standardised methods of the DSM and ISD. Working with a psychotic client requires careful management so that a therapy can effectively support the client and the transference is managed appropriately.

Maryrose Kiernan

Psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud, has much to say about culture and how the individual psyche is destined to be discontented due to what it sacrifices for the sake of culture and group membership. This seminar explores the history of group work, how groups function, and what their applications are in clinical and non-clinical settings. Everyone, at some stage, invariably finds themselves involved in a group and having knowledge of group dynamics can be important. Drawing upon the work of Freud, Foulkes, Lacan and Bion, experienced group and Lacanian psychoanalyst, Maryrose Kiernan, considers the significance of groups and group work in contemporary settings.