Knowing What Psychoanalysts Do and Doing What Psychoanalysts Know

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About

• 20 years
• 1,000 workshops
• 11 questions for self-reflection

‘What do we really know about one another's actual way of behaving as analysts?’ asked James Strachey in 1943, complaining that what goes on in the consulting room ‘continues to be wrapped in an unholy mystery.’  In 2002, realising that many years of meetings and conferences had still not enabled psychoanalysts to share with each other what they actually do in their consulting rooms, the European Psychoanalytic Federation (EPF) created a Working Party on Comparative Clinical Methods to investigate.  The CCM team conducted over one thousand workshops across four continents exploring different analysts’ ways of working using a method designed to promote understanding rather than judgement.  The project’s findings have just been published along with a new framework created to enable structured reflection on clinical work.
 
In this conference, we will share our discoveries about the kinds of assumptions that different analysts necessarily make (1) about the analytic setting, (2) about how the unconscious ideas that patients have are to be inferred, (3) about how those unconscious ideas and impulses create a patient’s troubles, and (4) about how the analytic process brings about change.  We will introduce participants to eleven questions they can ask themselves about any analytic session to clarify and reflect on their own assumptions.  There will be ample time for discussion and networking and those attending in person can participate in clinical seminars road-testing the new framework.

Programme

Further Information

If you have any queries, please contact us at events.psychoanalysis@ucl.ac.uk. 

Cover image courtesy of Carol Ladewig, “Studio Time: Moments: February 2023.” Photo by Dana Davis Photography