Events and Seminars

Event:UCL Conference: Re-visiting Psychotic Aspects of the Personality: Conference POSTPONED until 3-5 December 2021
Venue:TBC. UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6XA
Date:27/11/2020 - 29/11/2020
Duration:From 3:30 pm Friday – 1:00 pm on Sunday
Extra Info:Further information will be available in early 2020, and registrations will open in June 2020. For any queries, please contact us at events.psychoanalysis@ucl.ac.uk

What do we mean when we speak of a psychotic area or part of the personality? The idea is invoked in relation to so many conditions of such widely different severities and kinds. For example, we can encounter something like it as part of a seemingly otherwise functioning personality: if unaddressed, it seems to maintain a strict limit on the change possible; but to address it seems to risk a total breakdown. As all who work in the mental health services will know, there are other cases in which this relationship is found in reverse: the patient is controlled by psychotic beliefs, but substantial areas of normal functioning can operate alongside - but only as long as the ruling position of the psychosis is not threatened.

It has been said that “Even a little bit of madness goes a long way”. But what precisely is this madness to which we refer? There have been many valuable psychoanalytic contributions that help to understanding these situations and to help with them clinically – but only to a degree. Nearly always, there remains a sense of some purpose – and some level of profound mental pain - that eludes our understanding, our grasp, and therefore our remedy.

This UCL Psychoanalysis Conference will present detailed psychoanalytic work seeking to describe and further understand these fundamental problems in the context of their occurrence in a wide spectrum of psychopathology - from the apparently normal and mildly neurotic to the most overtly and grossly disturbed - and across the life cycle: in children, adolescents, adulthood.

Keynote Speakers:

Catalina Bronstein (British Psychoanalytical Society, UK);
Kate Pugh (British Psychoanalytical Society, and Central and North West London NHS Trust, UK);
Helga Skogstad (British Psychoanalytical Society, UK).
Organised By:The Psychoanalysis Unit, UCL
Web Link:https://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychoanalysis/events/2020/nov/re-visiting-psychotic-aspects-personality
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