CONFERENCE

The Contemporary Independent Tradition

Hybrid - Online or In Person at 10 Union Street, London Bridge, London SE1 1SZ

This conference will be recorded and available for 2 weeks*

Programme

In the course of this one-day conference, three Independent analysts explore how they continue the tradition of the Independent School, while informed by and expanding on contemporary developments. Each paper will be chaired by an Independent discussant, and the conference will close with a plenary session, reflecting on the day.

Ken Robinson | Introduction

Lesley Caldwell | Affect and emotion in the consulting room

In this paper I describe rethinking the intense bodily responses I had to an analytic patient on two occasions, each lasting about six weeks, at the same time of the year in the fifth and seventh years of an analysis that finished about fifteen years ago. I discuss my speculations about these periods in the context of a wider discussion about patients who cannot participate in ‘the give and take of emotional experience’ and what, if anything, may be done analytically to enable their participation. This was a major interest of Winnicott, but this incomplete analysis remained with me because of the physicality of my responses and the freedom I found much later to consider potential alternative accounts of their significance, stimulated by the courageous work of the Roman analyst, Carla De Toffoli, and my own insertion into the British independent tradition. Discussant Ken Robinson

Angela Joyce | Trapped in the ambivalent gaze of mother: possible consequences for the absence of paternal function in development

In this paper I will use material from my work with an infant and her parents, a latency aged child, and an adult, to explore the potential consequences for the child, sometimes over several generations, of the absence of paternal function in enabling the young child to establish separateness from their maternal object in their development. Discussant Viqui Rosenberg

Sarah Nettleton The borderland: music, dreams and free association

This paper will consider the state of reverie that exists between conscious and unconscious experience. Although it appears relatively little in the literature, and is rarely discussed in training or supervision, this was considered by Freud to be the basis for the work of the psychoanalyst. We shall explore its origins via our early relationship with sound and music, and consider some ways in which this links with the experience of dreaming. It will be suggested that it is in this borderland, the place of non-conceptual consciousness, that we see the most profound potential of psychoanalysis. Discussant Brett Morris

Tickets
Concessions are for candidates/students . Please email lukeperry@psychoanalysis-bpa.org to see if you qualify for a concession ticket.

*In Person – Standard £100 
*In Person/Concession £80
*Lunch included
Online – Standard £80
Online – Concession £65 (available with discount code)

REFUNDS: Tickets are fully refundable until 14 days before the lecture, after which time no refunds will be issued.

We expect those attending, online or in person, to respect confidentiality regarding clinical material discussed in our events. No part of the conference shall be recorded, conveyed or disseminated in any format and participants must not share access to the event with non-registered participants.

Biographies

Lesley Caldwell is Honorary Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London, a Member, now retired, of the British Psychoanalytic Association (BPA) and a Clinical Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS). She is a European representative on the IPA board (2021-5), and currently the European representative on the IPA’s Executive Committee (2023-5). With Helen Taylor Robinson, she is joint general editor of The Complete Works of D.W. Winnicott (OUP 2016). She is a member of the editorial board of the IPA Women and Psychoanalysis (COWAP) book series and on the advisory board of the journal Rivista di psicoanalisi. Recent publications include papers on affect in the consulting room, Winnicott and the unconscious, transitional objects, Marion Milner, loneliness, silence as analytic communication, the dating of fear of breakdown, various contributions on Winnicott and Bion, and a book on the British Independants, published in Chinese in Beijing.

She is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Italian Department at University College London, and has published on the Italian family, Italian cinema, and the city of Rome. She is currently working on Ten Moments that Shaped Rome, a book to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Ken Robinson worked in university in the field of English Literature, philosophy and the history of ideas before training as a psychoanalyst. He is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, an Honorary member of the Polish Society for Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy, and Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis in Northumbria University. Ken is especially interested in the nature of therapeutic action and in this respect he values and enjoys providing consultation to students and colleagues for their work. He contributed to The Collected Works of D.W. Winnicott (2017), and joint edited, with Joan Schächter, The Contemporary Freudian Tradition: Past and Present (2021). Most recently, papers on Ella Sharpe and Pearl King were included in Independent Women in British Psychoanalysis. Creativity and Authenticity at Work, edited by Elizabeth Wolf and Barbie Antonis (2024), and two further studies, "The end of transference" (2022) and "Tracing the unconscious: a plea for the unknown" (2024) have appeared in the German Jahrbuch. He is preparing an essay, written jointly with Julianna Vamos, ‘From birth to couch: “readiness is all”’, which will be published in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Angela Joyce is Fellow, and Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst and Child Psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS). She trained as a child analyst at the Anna Freud Centre, worked there for nearly 20 years, was a founding member of the pioneering Parent-Infant Project applying psychoanalysis to working with babies and their families and jointly led the child psychotherapy service. She has recently retired from full time analytic practice in London.

She is the current chair of the child and adolescent training committee at the BPAS and member of its Education Committee; past Chair and current trustee of the Winnicott Trust; a Trustee of the Squiggle Foundation; and has been an Honorary Senior Lecturer at University College London.

She teaches widely and particularly in Winnicottian studies, child analysis and psychotherapy and she has published in these areas over a number of years. Amongst other publications she has edited together with Lesley Caldwell Reading Winnicott (2011); edited Donald Winnicott and the History of the Present and contributed to the PIP publications Claiming the Baby (2005 & 2015), Early Relational Trauma (2009), and Working with Fathers in Psychoanalytic Parent-Infant Psychotherapy (2019).

Viqui Rosenberg is a psychoanalyst, and a training analyst and supervisor with the British Psychoanalytic Association (IPA); she is a former NHS Psychotherapy Consultant and a teacher of Freud in the UK and abroad. She has lectured and published papers on many psychoanalytic themes, with a special interest in transference/countertransference, the central place of sexuality in the unconscious, and enactment phenomena. She is also the author of Time Secret, a volume of poetic fiction.

Sarah Nettleton is a psychoanalyst in private practice in London. Originally she studied music, working for many years as a piano accompanist. For the past 20 years she has specialised in the work of Bollas, giving lectures and seminars extensively in the UK and Europe, and in Norway, Israel, USA, Turkey, Mexico, India and Ukraine. Her book The Metapsychology of Christopher Bollas: an Introduction was published by Routledge in 2016 and is now available in seven languages. Her particular clinical interests are centred on the exploration of free association and the relationship between conscious and unconscious thinking.

Brett Morris is a psychoanalyst, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and clinical supervisor in private practice in central London. He teaches on, and is a training therapist for, various psychodynamic and psychoanalytic trainings. He has a particular interest in the work of Donald Winnicott, and in clinical process and technique. Prior to training in clinical work, Brett studied at the Royal College of Music, and had a full-time career as a classical musician.

Image: Unpublished painting by Marion Milner's patient 'Susan' from The Hands of the Living God, unpublished, The British Psychoanalytical Society Archive, GB BPASA P01 B.

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