30 November 2024 Lecture

The Sense of Identity: A Kleinian View - Sharon Numa

To be held online from 10.00am to 12.00noon on Saturday 30th November 2024, by Zoom. Attendance is free of charge for all FPC members and will count as 2 hours CPD. The lecture will not be recorded. To book a place please email admin@thefpc.org.uk 

The concept of identity is an unwieldy one which makes it difficult to encapsulate in a simple way. A number of psychoanalytic schools have developed ideas about identity – from ego psychology to current relational trends in America. What I aim to do is to give some idea of how we might think about the building blocks of identity from within the British object relations school, and particularly using a Kleinian perspective.  In an attempt to formulate a theoretical framework that might begin to fill what we saw as a gap in Kleinian theory, a number of analysts (of which I was one) working together in John Steiner’s Workshop drew on our clinical work to investigate the many ways in which the development of personal identity can be subverted or imperilled, while also interrogating what can facilitate the development of a reasonably stable identity. Identity brings to mind issues of self-worth, self-image, self-love or self-hatred, pride and shame – a myriad of emotions within the privacy of one’s self, and between self and object.  Our sense of identity involves feeling ourselves to be a distinct entity. However, there are some profound and recurrent themes that came to light as we considered the impact of early development on the potential for cohesion or fragmentation of the self – the bedrock of identity formation. I will outline these themes, using clinical material to illustrate them and to look at the deepest conflicts around self and identity as they emerged and were relived in the transference relationship. 

Dr Sharon Numa originally trained as a Clinical Psychologist, working in the NHS before undertaking the training in Adult Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic. While at the Tavistock she completed a clinical PhD on the topic of Shame.  She subsequently trained at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and is a Fellow of the Institute.  She has worked in private practice with adult patients for over 30 years and supervises a number of therapists.  Dr Numa is a training supervisor and therapist for the BPF, and she teaches clinical and theoretical seminars in London.  She also jointly ran a yearly Klein Workshop in Beijing with Mr. Philip Crockatt and has been involved in teaching Klein to students in Paris.  

Dr Numa convenes a study group at the British Psychoanalytic Society on Psychoanalysis and Race.  Her publications include an early publication on Countertransference and Containment in a Patient with a Psychotic Mother (1992) and a paper in a journal collection on the impact of the analyst’s pregnancy, Pregnancy: An Unthinkable Reality (2004).  This year she published an article in the International Journal on Psychoanalytic contributions to understanding racism.  She recently edited a book which was published in 2022 by The New Library of Psychoanalysis/Routledge on the early building blocks of identity entitled “On Being Oneself: Clinical Explorations on Identity from John Steiner’s Workshop” in which nine authors explore identity in the light of Kleinian theory.