Events and Seminars

Event	:	Minding the Body: Clinical and Ethical Challenges in Work with Young People in Contemporary Times
Venue	:	Online
Date	:	17/11/2023 - 19/11/2023
Duration	:	3 Days
Extra Info	:	Psychodynamic Weekend Conference features guest speaker Alessandra Lemma. Co-chaired by Jane Garbose and Karen Sherwood This weekend conference focuses on some of the challenges faced by young people as they negotiate their sexual and gender identities, not least in the digital age and how this requires us as clinicians not only to ‘mind the body’ but also to consider our ethics. We will begin by exploring the challenges of becoming sexual in digital times focusing on the risks and harms of online pornography. I will suggest that the difference between pre-Internet and online pornography is not in any straightforward sense only one of degree. I argue that this is because the online medium changes the young person’s relationship to the sexual materials by providing a virtual space within which sexual desire is gratified quickly and non-reflectively, undermining the capacity to mentalize one’s own sexual desire and that of the other. We will also explore the importance of the natal body in psychic development through the experience of clinical work with transgender youth. Building on Money-Kyrle’s three ‘facts of life’, I propose a fourth one, namely the inescapable fact of our embodied nature, to underscore that our personal history always includes our embodied history, hence the importance in analytic work of working through what the natal body unconsciously represents. More specifically, I will describe the use of photographs during psychoanalytic psychotherapy with young transgender people who have commenced social transitioning, to work through visual representations of the natal body in the service of facilitating the working through, in its psychoanalytic sense, of the natal body’s unconscious narrative. I suggest that deploying this visual mode may be especially helpful in engaging young people on the autistic spectrum who nowadays comprise a significant minority of transgender young people. Consideration of our clinical work inevitably confronts us with our ethics. I will provide a succinct introduction to key ethical principles and then outline a framework for developing and exercising an ethical self-discipline to support critical reflection on our work with patients and to help us to approach the resolution of ethical dilemmas.
Organised By	:	International Psychotherapy Institute
Web Link	:	https://theipi.org/clinical-training/minding-the-body-clinical-and-ethical-challenges-in-work-with-young-people-in-contemporary-times/?utm_source=International+Psychotherapy+Institute&utm_campaign=e2e