Getting to Grips - Unconscious Phantasy Series

Getting to Grips with Kleinian Concepts: Unconscious Phantasy Series 

Our next series of Getting to Grips events will focus on unconscious phantasy. In abandoning seduction theory, Freud recognised that there also had to be a place for fantasy – the unconscious phantasy that accompanies both real and fantasised seductions – and that these phantasies are responsible for imbuing our experiences with meaning as well as creating problems for the developing psyche. But Klein took the concept much further, seeing it as foundational.

In our first series we looked at Klein’s great talent for understanding the unconscious life of young children and the extreme anxieties with which they wrestled. She saw that these could be divined through the child’s play, enabling some understanding of the child’s internal world and object relationships. In her words:

There is in the unconscious a fear of annihilation of life … Thus in my view the danger arising from the inner working of the death instinct is the first cause of anxiety … this source of anxiety is never eliminated and enters as a perpetual factor into all anxiety-situations. (Klein, 1975)

Klein saw that unconscious phantasy was ubiquitous – permeating our everyday life and giving meaning and structure to our emotions and experiences from birth. It sat at the very centre of psychic development and was the psychic expression of the instincts and the way in which anxieties and defences got expressed. As such it was the foundation of internal reality and ego development.

In our clinical work, when analysts talk of treating everything the patient says as a dream, we are talking about finding the unconscious phantasy that permeates our everyday conversation and communications. This is how we understand the patient.

The series will be introduced and chaired by Francesca Hume and there will be papers from some notable Kleinian thinkers on this important subject – linking the development of the concept with modern understanding of related concepts such as symbolic development and the countertransference. We will discuss clinical technique and how unconscious phantasy can be inferred from our enactments.

£30 - general ticket, £15 concession ticket and £10 for BPAS tickets and newly qualified tickets.

All registered attendees will receive a link to the recording following the live event once it has been edited which will be valid for two weeks following the event. These events will be in English

More information coming soon but key information and dates below: 

- 26th of September - David Taylor 

- 7th of November - David Bell 

- 5th of December - Francesca Hume 

- 16th of January - Christine English and Susan Lawrence 

- 27th of February - Cathy Bronstein 

- 20th of March - Plenary Session 

We are a charity, and we rely upon income from events like these to continue our work. However, we do not want the price of entry to be a barrier to anyone keen to attend our online events. If the ticket price is prohibitively high for you at the current time, please email the MKT Administrator at contact@melaniekleintrust.org.uk, who has a number of free places available for each event.

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