Memory and its Vicissitudes

About

According to Freud, memory (along with length of life, life after death, and paternity) is one of the chief subjects upon which all mankind are uncertain. He wrote that ‘we are all in the habit of believing [in memory], without having the slightest guarantee of its trustworthiness.’ 
 
Yet one of the lessons of psychoanalysis is that our sense of self is both shaped and undermined by our memories, and this perspective has been enormously influential. For example, in 1927 Virginia Woolf suggested that we can think of our internal world as ‘a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends…lightly stitched together by a single thread’ and that ‘Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.’
 
This conference will consider psychoanalytic perspectives on the significance of memory and explore the role that remembering plays in transformation and growth through detailed clinical presentations.   

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 Main Speakers and Chairs

Rachel Chaplin (British Psychoanalytical Society)

Biography: Rachel Chaplin is a Training and Supervising Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She has published on psychic bisexuality in the analytic session (Perelberg, R: Psychic Bisexuality: A British-French Dialogue 2018) and on the importance of representational pleasure (IJP 2020, 101: 288-299). She is currently editing a book of essays by British Society analysts on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and she has a forthcoming chapter on the value of de-representation, in an edited collection by Rosine Perelberg on Trauma in Literature and Memory.  She is an Honorary Associate Professor at UCL. Her teaching interests are French Psychoanalysis and the intersection between psychoanalysis and other disciplines, literature in particular.

Abstract: “there drips in sleep before my heart a griefremembering pain”: Transformations of the Memory Screen
There is no psychic life without memory (Roussillon). We spend our days working over our life residues, our past experiences, in a constant ‘dreaming-remembering’ activity.  But there is the remembering we know we are doing, and the remembering we don’t know we are doing, when we repeat.  

In ‘A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad’ (1925), Freud investigates the ‘receiving surface’ of the mind. On this surface, scratched marks are left, ineradicable memory traces, which persist regardless of whether they are attended to. But they are ‘legible in suitable lights’, those of an analysis.

In my paper, I explore what happens when this receiving surface is ruptured, leaving a ‘tear in the fabric of the psyche’ (Green). Experience is inscribed but is not psychic. In the case I bring, it haunts a ‘mad’ body. I report in detail three ‘dream-memories’, which I think show the initial rupture of the memory screen caused by a maternal depression which cannot be remembered, cannot be thought.  As the analysis develops, a tombstone appears, to mark the place where the mother has gone missing, and on which a pictographic image of the infant’s angel-mother is carved. Finally, as the capacity to separate from the primordial object develops, a mystic ‘writing pad’ appears. In the dreams we see that as the receiving surface is repaired, so psychic function develops: from raw perception to pictographic inscription, to a readable and writable verbal text.

Marcus Evans (British Psychoanalytical Society)

Biography: Marcus Evans is a Fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis and consultant psychotherapist and mental health nurse with 45 years of experience in mental health. He was head of the nursing discipline at the Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust between 1998 and 2018. He was also the lead clinician in the adult and adolescent service and one of the founding members of Fitzjohn’s Service for the treatment of patients with severe and enduring mental health conditions and/or personality disorders. 

He has written and taught extensively on applying psychoanalytic thinking in mental health settings. Karnac published the first, ‘Making Room for Madness in Mental Health: The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Psychotic Communications,’ in 2016.  
His second book, Psychoanalytic Thinking in Mental Health Settings, introduces front-line mental health professionals to psychoanalytic thinking and was published by Routledge in 2020. 

His third book, Gender Dysphoria: a Therapeutic Model for Working with Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults, which he has written with his wife Susan, is due to be published this month.

Abstract: Writing Pad to Third Position: Countertransference, Defensive Memory, and the Conditions for Symbolic Experience. This paper explores the psychoanalytic treatment of a patient whose defensive reliance on pseudo-thinking, vigilance, and epistemic control structured the transference around surveillance and exclusion. Within this framework, the analyst was gradually enlisted into a compliant, emotionally disengaged position—one initially experienced as clinical competence but later understood as part of a mutual defence against affective contact. Drawing on Bion (1962, 1970), Steiner (1993), and Britton (1989), I examine how countertransference entrapment may reproduce early relational dynamics and inhibit symbolic functioning. Therapeutic movement emerged not through interpretive insight alone, but through the analyst's capacity to recognise and withdraw from this enactment without rupture. It was moments of affective presence rather than mastery or knowing that marked the analytic turning points, allowing for a gradual shift from psychic retreat toward the possibility of symbolic meaning.

Keywords: transference, psychic deadness, epistemic rivalry, third position, countertransference, symbolic re-experience, memory

Christine English (British Psychoanalytical Society, and University College London) 

Biography: Christine English is a child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst in private practice in South Oxfordshire, UK, and a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS). She is an Honorary Associate Professor of the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London, Archivist of the Melanie Klein Trust, Chair of the Archives Committee of the BPAS, and a member of the Archives Committee of the European Psychoanalytic Federation. She is author of Melanie Klein's Narrative of an Adult Analysis, published by Routledge in 2023.  

Abstract: Intermittences du coeur: On the transformative function of involuntary memory in analysis. This paper speaks to the nature and function of involuntary memory, which has been widely explored in literature, perhaps most seriously by Proust, and which plays a central role in psychoanalytic treatment. Seemingly independent from and unheeding of the patient’s efforts to remember, and sometimes quite incongruous with his conscious recollections, involuntary memories can open a window both to the past, or to lost time; to parts of the self, and to the unconscious. In analysis they may also presage or indeed mark important working through that has already been done, which has brought psychic change. 

Looking first at the role of involuntary memory in the ‘Intermittences du Coeur’ section of In Search of Lost Time, and then in C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, I will connect involuntary memory to the evocation in treatment of ‘memories in feeling’, described by Melanie Klein. These affective experiences, she felt, powerfully revealed the patient’s earliest experiences, wishes and impulses, felt initially in relation to the breast. With reference to some clinical material, I will then show how the appearance of an unbidden and surprising memory pointed to the significant psychic change which an analysis brought about.

Liz Allison (British Psychoanalytical Society, and University College London)

Biography: Elizabeth Allison DPhil is the Director of the Psychoanalysis Unit in the Research Department of Clinical, Educational & Health Psychology at UCL. She is an Associate Professor and Programme Director of UCL’s MSc in Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies. She is a psychoanalyst and Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She is the Editor of the Psychoanalytic Controversies section of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.  She holds a doctorate in English Literature from the University of Oxford.

Carine Minne (British Psychoanalytical Society) 

Biography: Dr Carine Minne is a psychoanalyst with the BPAS and Consultant Psychiatrist in Forensic Psychotherapy at Broadmoor High Security Hospital, West London Trust. She was also based at the Portman Clinic, Tavistock & Portman Trust, for over 30 years. She chairs the IPA Violence Committee in the Community and World and is Editor-in-Chief of the IJFP (International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy). In her work, she brings together the disciplines of forensic psychiatry and psychoanalysis to work directly with offender patients in different settings, and indirectly, via teaching, training, and lecturing to professionals from various disciplines, nationally and internationally.

Panels

Alejandra Perez (British Psychoanalytical Society), Liz McMonagle (British Psychoanalytic Society, and the Northern Ireland Psychoanalytic Society), and Megan Virtue (British Psychoanalytical Society, and University College London) 

Biographies: 

Dr Liz McMonagle (British Psychoanalytic Society, and the Northern Ireland Psychoanalytic Society)
Dr Liz McMonagle is a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society and the Northern Ireland Psychoanalytic Society. She is an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. She is a supervisor and teacher. Her area of special interest is Autism and Attachment and Infant mental health. She is trained in perinatal mental health and she is currently completing her training in Child Analysis at the British Psychoanalytical Society. 

Alejandra Perez (British Psychoanalytical Society)
Alejandra Perez is a psychoanalyst and a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, working in private practice. She also trained and worked as a Psychoanalytic Parent-Infant Psychotherapist at the Anna Freud Centre. Perez supervises psychoanalytic clinical work and gives talks in the UK and internationally on clinical work with parents and infants, psychoanalysis, psychic development, and parenthood. From 2012 to 2024, she was Director of the MSc in Early Child Development and Clinical Applications at University College London/Anna Freud. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming book Perspectives on Early Parenthood and Infancy: A Psychoanalytic, Neuroscientific, Developmental and Cultural Dialogue (Routledge, expected 2026).

Megan Virtue (British Psychoanalytical Society, and University College London)
Megan Virtue is a Fellow, Training Analyst and Supervisor of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and a psychosomatician, Institut de Psychosomatique, Paris (IPSO). She qualified as a clinical psychologist, and later as an adult psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic. Alongside her psychoanalytic private practice, for thirteen years she worked with gastroenterology patients in a hospital setting. She teaches analytic candidates of the Institute of Psychoanalysis and abroad, and is an honorary lecturer at the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London where she coordinates the Lacan and Modern French course. She has published on sexuality, psychosomatics, psychoanalytic identity and education. Currently she is completing the training in Child Analysis at the British Psychoanalytical Society. 

Abstract: Laying the foundations of memory: The role of the body, representation, and play in child analysis.
This panel explores the development of memory within the child analytic process, with a focus on how early experiences become represented, stored, or disavowed in the developing mind. The concept of memory in psychoanalysis is complex – spanning from bodily sensation to mental representation, from symbolic play to unconscious enactment.

From a developmental perspective, the infant begins with raw, sensory and bodily experiences that gradually become represented and integrated. The child analytic setting provides a unique space – a container and a stage – where these early experiences can be enacted, played out, and emotionally processed. This then offers the possibility for these experiences to be shaped into mental representations and stored as memory.

However, this process is not always linear. Psychosomatic presentations in children, adolescents, and adults may reflect how an excess of drive stimulation or emotional overwhelm can bypass the ego's capacity for representation, leaving experience unprocessed and lodged in the body. In other cases, more ordinary forms of disavowal – expressed through play, narrative distortion, or suspended reality – reveal the fragile, fluid boundaries between experience, memory, and representation.

Through clinical presentations and discussion, this panel will examine how child analysis contributes to the foundational processes of memory formation – where experience can be tolerated, shaped, and internalised before it can be remembered. The discussion also aims to consider how these insights from work with babies, children, and adolescents can deepen our understanding.

Daniel Pick (British Psychoanalytical Society), Josh Cohen (British Psychoanalytical Society), and Fakhry Davids (British Psychoanalytical Society) 

Biographies: 

Josh Cohen (British Psychoanalytical Society)
Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice and Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is Emeritus Professor of Literary Theory at Goldsmiths University of London, and the author of numerous essays, papers and books on psychoanalysis and literature, including How to Read Freud, The Private Life, Not Working, Losers and All the Rage.

Fakhry Davids (British Psychoanalytical Society)
Fakhry Davids qualified and worked as a clinical psychologist in Apartheid South Africa before moving to London to train at the Tavistock Clinic and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. He is in full-time private practice in London, and supervises, lectures and teaches widely. He has written on a number of psychoanalytic topics and is best known for his work on the psychodynamics of racism, which he links with in-group identity (Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). He has in the past been involved in experiential work on the aftermath of collective trauma such as Apartheid, the Holocaust and the Nakbah (www.p-cca.org).

Daniel Pick (British Psychoanalytical Society)
Daniel Pick is a psychoanalyst and historian. He is a training psychoanalyst at the BPS. He works in London in private practice and is professor emeritus at Birkbeck College. He was a recipient of the Sigourney Award in 2023. His books include ‘Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control’ (Profile 2022), ‘Psychoanalysis: A Very Short Introduction’ (OUP 2015) and ‘The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts’ (OUP 2012). 

Abstract: The impact of traumatic histories on the analytic situation
In this panel, chaired by Daniel Pick, Josh Cohen and Fakhry Davids explore the impact of traumatic histories in the psychoanalytic encounter.  Josh Cohen discusses Freud’s account of the vicissitudes of identification in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and considers how identifications can come to function as defences against self-interrogation.  He shows how this type of defence may be shaped by traumatic memories and describes how a psychoanalytically informed critique of violence requires awareness of the contingency and fragility of our identifications.  Fakhry Davids addresses the challenge of working with collective trauma in the clinical situation. He draws on his experiences analysing a Jewish patient in the aftermath of October 7 and reflects upon both the analyst’s and patient’s in-group identities, and how these may operate in such highly charged circumstances. His paper focuses upon the working through that is required of the analyst, in the countertransference.  

 The Clinical Seminars

Evening Clinical Seminars

Friday 28 November, 18.00 – 19.45 (GMT)

Locations: Senate House and online

The clinical seminars offer an opportunity for small groups to explore the processes of some real-life clinical material with input from experienced analysts leading the seminars.

Clinical Seminar Leaders include Rachel Chaplin, Christine English, Marcus Evans, Peter Fonagy, Daniel Pick, David Taylor, and Heather Wood

Short Contributions

Short Contributions

The Conference Delegate Pack will include synopses of a selection of the thought-provoking work you send us, which for reasons of space or thematic continuity cannot be included in the programme. Often these come from younger contributors and/or contributors from other disciplines – although equally, they may be established and well-known to us all. We benefit greatly from both categories.
 
Please note that the deadline for submitting short contributions has now passed. We will be contacting all who submitted contributions for inclusion in the Conference Delegate Pack in early November.

A complimentary conference ticket will be provided to the authors of accepted contributions.

Image Credit: Photo by Intricate Explorer on Unsplash