Melanie Klein Trust Conference

Organised by:

Melanie Klein Trust

Description

This year’s conference, ‘Psychic Change: Challenges for Technique’, taking place on 10 June 2023 will be a hybrid event, which means we’ll be offering it both in person at the Royal College of Physicians in London, as well as online via Zoom.

We are delighted to be able to welcome those who can attend in person, and the programme includes plenty of opportunities to meet and talk over coffee, lunch and drinks.

For online participants there will be a live-stream of the sessions plus opportunities to meet informally including a virtual drinks party at the end of the day. The presentations will be recorded and made available to stream for one month after the conference

Our speakers will be David Bell and Catalina Bronstein. The conference will be chaired by Gigliola Fornari Spoto.

Optional online and in person clinical seminars are offered at various times on Friday 09 June in the evening and Sunday 11 June in the morning. These seminars are now open for booking. Places are limited and you are advised to book for these as soon as possible. You may book a seminar on Friday and Sunday, if you wish.

Discounted Tickets and Bursaries are available, please follow the link below for eligibility details and key codes.

Provisional Schedule

9.00-9.30 Registration
9.30-9.45 Introduction by the Chair, Gigliola Fornari Spoto
9.45-10.45 Paper by David Bell – “One is always nearer by not keeping still”: Reflections on psychic change
10.45-11.15 Break
11.15-12.30 Discussion of David Bell’s paper
12.30-2.15 Lunch
2.15-3.15 Paper by Catalina Bronstein – Psychic change: accessing symbolic function. Some technical considerations
3.15-3.45 Break
3.45-5.00 Discussion of Catalina Bronstein’s paper
5.00-5.30 Plenary session
5.30-7.00 Drinks in the garden / online drinks party

David Bell is a Training Analyst and former President of the British psychoanalytic society. He recently retired from the Tavistock, London, where he was Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy and led a specialist unit, the Fitzjohn’s Unit for patients with complex/severe disturbance. He has lectured and published on a wide range of subjects, and throughout his career has been involved in interdisciplinary work exploring the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, philosophy and socio-political theory. He has been deeply engaged in the issue of gender dysphoria in children, trying to keep alive a psychoanalytic perspective in a rather toxic climate. He is also a leading psychiatric expert in asylum / immigration / human rights.

Catalina Bronstein is a Training and Supervising Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and its former President. She is a child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst. She is visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London. For the past 25 years she has worked at the Brent Centre for Young People in London, and chairs a psychotherapy workshop there. She is a former London Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and is now on the journal’s Board. Her published works span a range of analytic themes including Klein and Bion, the body and psychosomatic phenomena, adolescent pathology, and the role of delusion and hallucinations and their connection to early anxieties, unconscious phantasies and symbol formation. She edited Kleinian Theory: A Contemporary Perspective, and co-edited a number of books (Attacks on Linking Revisited, The New Dialogues Klein-Lacan, and On Freud’s The Uncanny, amongst others).

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