Can you talk to ISIS?
Gabrielle Rifkind discusses the subject of her latest book, 'The Fog of Peace' in which she and UN diplomat Giadaomenico Picco call for an approach to conflict resolution which combines the psychological and real politiks, considers cultural narratives, antagonist as individuals and the case for understanding the enemy.
A special issue of the British Journal of Psychotherapy included papers from the Controversial Discussions half day conference.

Introduction
Lesley Caldwell
Abstract: The half-day conference in 2014 at which the following papers were presented was held as part of the Interdisciplinary Programme of the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London, to mark the 70th anniversary of the series of 10 scientific meetings known as the Controversial Discussions held in the British Psychoanalytical Society between 1942 and 1944 (King and Steiner, 1991). The conference and its papers now published here aimed to develop further the detailed histories made available by King and Steiner together with their relevance for contemporary clinicians. The extraordinary resource provided by the gathering of the documents relating not only to scientific controversies, but to the training of candidates, institutional decision making, and the nexus of power relations in psychoanalytic institutes is a profound scholarly contribution for all concerned with the future of psychoanalysis and the place of its past in that future.
Riccardo Steiner
Abstract: My intervention briefly addresses the long, complex debate on technical and educational issues within British psychoanalysis during the late 1930s and 1940s. I hope to show that some of the problems discussed and the resolutions proposed by the Training Committee of the British Society during the years of the Controversies which we are commemorating are still a source of food for thought today, in spite of the fact that they belong to a specific past. I stress the importance of Strachey's ideas about an open psychoanalytic forum. This would not be the solution to all our problems, as crises and dissent are an inevitable part of the development of our discipline. However, the more transparent and the more informed we are about our past, and about the whole internal history of our discipline, including the wider cultural, scientific and socio-political context within which psychoanalysis developed and is developing, the better chance we have of understanding our present.
Remembering, Repeating and Working Through: The Impact of the Controversial Discussions
Ken Robinson
Abstract: Freud's recognition that what cannot be remembered may well be repeated in action is useful for understanding the trauma and aftermath of the Controversial Discussions. I shall be concentrating on disavowal, repeating, working through and remembering in the evolving context of the process of the impact of the Discussions. I suggest that we can distinguish three phases of the impact of the Discussions: the first a silence as if the Discussions constituted something too traumatic or too shameful to speak about; the second a phase of mutual influence between two or more groups which constitutes one form of working through, an attempt to integrate (with its opposite a concentration on irreconcilable differences); and third a further stage of working through which is closer to remembering, treating the Discussions as a historical point of reference in the service of sorting out clinical and conceptual problems.
Seventy Years On: Some Clinical Consequences of The Controversial Discussions
Isabel Hernandez-Halton
Abstract: Seventy years ago with much of the world engaged in a battle for survival in the Second World War, the British Psychoanalytical Society organized a series of scientific meetings to discuss the new theories of Melanie Klein. The paper starts with a historical background to the Controversial Discussions and moves on to discuss some of the main points of the debate. It revisits the concept of unconscious phantasy along with the debates on primary narcissism and the death instinct, also exploring its use and relevance in current clinical practice. Following Bion's idea that psychic change is felt as catastrophic, I attempt to link some of the anxieties and processes that were present during the Controversial Discussions with similar processes present in the psychoanalytic world today.
Controversial Discussions: Independent Women Analysts and Thoughts About Listening to Experience
Barbie Antonis
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to identify central ideas described by Ella Freeman Sharpe, Marjorie Brierley and Sylvia Payne during the Controversial Discussions 1941-45 as presented in their Memoranda on Technique. These women, who have been described as the architects of the Middle Group (later renamed The Group of Independent Psychoanalysts) offer recommendations from their own clinical experience as psychoanalysts. I bring illustrations of their particular approaches relating to patients' history and experience. Each of these women took issue in certain ways with the concepts and assertions brought by Melanie Klein and Anna Freud and in articulating their reservations became positioned somewhat 'independently', bringing different emphases both conceptually and clinically. In the second part of the paper I ask how their ideas and recommendations may have influenced later psychoanalysts within the Independent Tradition such as Marion Milner, Enid Balint, Pearl King and Ann Hayman. My focus concerns the development of a theory of clinical technique that privileges what I term 'listening to experience'. I highlight the contributions made by Michael Parsons whose writing has been central in giving voice to contemporary theorizing on the clinical technique of the Independent Tradition.
The British Journal of Psychotherapy special issue on Marion Milner's work included papers based on the Milner half day conference.

Finding Milner? The Biographical Search
Emma Letley
Abstract: The essay starts from Milner's wish to be intensely private, 'illegible', and poses the question as to how such a subject may be 'found' by a biographer, considering aspects of the search for Milner such as parallel process in the work; ethical dilemmas of confidentiality in writing about a psychoanalyst and the effects on the transference for patients reading about their analyst. Finding Milner involved not only the usual biographic tools (interviews with colleagues and descendants, attention to her books, her habits with documents and texts, her images and objects) but also a kind of unconscious knowing of which certain aspects are discussed. The process also had certain effects on the author's clinical practice. As biographic companion Milner brings with her the 'riches of world culture'. The author suggests that there is further fruitful work to be undertaken on the subject of biography and psychoanalysis.
On Not Being Able to Symbolize
Ken Robinson
Abstract: This paper explores ideas from Marion Milner which the author has found helpful in conceptualizing work with a patient who felt tyrannized by her objects, terrified that she would be swallowed up by them never to re-emerge. Her terror interfered with her capacity to symbolize. The paper looks at the concept of a bodily self and its creative engagement with the world especially in the form of fusion with the object. It places Milner's theory in the larger context of psychoanalytic and neuroscientific thinking from Freud and Winnicott to Damasio as well as relating it to philosophical and Romantic accounts of creative apperception and personal knowledge. Although confidentiality precludes a detailed account of the analysis, the author provides an outline of the gradual development of her capacity to symbolize alongside her growing sense of a continuous self. He further comments on her finding what Milner called 'intuitive images' to bridge intellect and intuition and to allow them to co-exist peacefully. The patient brought drawings to sessions and the paper reflects on these as an index of change as well as on the importance of the process of creating them in relation to her anxiety over the tyranny of objects.
The Milner Experiment: Psychoanalysis and the Diary
Hugh Haughton
Abstract: The paper reviews what I have called Marion Milner's 'experimental autobiographical quartet' of books 'written under the sign of self-analysis',A Life of One's Own (1934), An Experiment in Leisure (1937), Eternity's Sunrise: A Way of Keeping a Diary (1987) and Bothered by Alligators (2012). It explores the relationship between self-analysis and psychoanalysis in Milner's complex, unclassifiable texts built around diary-keeping, diary reading and diary interpretation. It situates them in the context of the modernist notion of what Virginia Woolf called 'moments of being', reading Milner's various meta-diaries as 'experiments' in relation to the work of other modernist women diarists like Woolf, Nin and Mansfield, as well as the writings of British psychoanalysis. It argues that Milner's project is based on a unique commitment to multiple versions of 'experiment', literary and psychological, as well as a conflict between the urge to integration and disintegration played out in psychic and aesthetic terms.
Image and Process: Psychoanalysis or Art?
Lesley Caldwell
Abstract: This paper argues that Marion Milner's contributions to psychoanalytic understandings of art are of interest as comments both on ways of approaching the production of images and their generation of meaning, and on the practice of psychoanalysis in the consulting room. This is supported by discussion of her case history, The Hands of the Living God (1969).