fPc | The Foundation for Psychotherapy and Counselling |
2025 FPC Annual Conference
The 2025 FPC Annual Conference will be held from 9.45am to 5.00pm on Saturday 15th March 2025 at Resource for London, 356 Holloway Road, London N7 6PA. The speakers are Alessandra Lemma, Narendra Keval and Jay Barlow. The 27th FPC Annual General Meeting will be held during the conference.
The conference is an in-person only event for FPC members only and will count as 8 hours CPD. The presentations will not be recorded and will not be available online. The fee for attending the Annual Conference is £45 to cover the cost of catering. To book a place please email admin@thefpc.org.uk and we will send you an invoice for the fee.
The seductions of identity: thinking psychoanalytically about identity and transgender – Alessandra Lemma
In this paper I outline a conceptual compass to think about identity generally before addressing more specifically the question of transgender identity. I argue that the body has always been, and is ever more so, the place for figurating the self, for finding and substantiating identity, hence the unconscious psychic investments that we have in our bodies are key to our theorising about any kind of identity. I propose that this focus provides a more productive, generative starting point for thinking about transgender identity specifically than any individual developmental theory because it accommodates the heterogeneity subsumed under the umbrella term ‘transgender’.
Alessandra Lemma is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society and a Chartered Clinical and Counselling Psychologist. She is a Visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London and Consultant, Anna Freud Centre. For 16 years she worked at the Tavistock Clinic where she was, at different stages, Head of Psychology and Professor of Psychological Therapies in conjunction with Essex University. She was a recipient of the 2022 Sigourney Award in recognition of her theoretical and clinical contributions to understanding body modification practices, the impacts of technology on psychic functioning and transgender identities as well as for her efforts in developing and disseminating worldwide a brief psychoanalytic intervention for mood disorders. She is the former General Editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis book series and is the current Chair of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis’ Management Board. Her most recent books are: Transgender Identities: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 202), First Principles: Applied Ethics for Psychoanalytic Practice (OUP, 2023) and Introduction to the Practice of Psychoanalytic Therapy – Third Edition (Wiley, 2025).
Exploring the ‘Racial Scene’ in the Clinical Encounter - Narendra Keval
I will be exploring the significance of racial preoccupations as they arise in the clinical situation, encapsulated in what I refer to as the ‘racial scene’ as a psychic organiser for multiple layers of fantasies and feelings. These are present in subtle ways in the privacy of our daily thoughts and feelings, imagination and dream life. However, engaging with the significance of these deep structures of thought and feeling in the consulting room often evokes excessive anxiety that can obstruct thoughtful scrutiny about the nuances of these preoccupations in the unconscious, what is being grappled with and communicated by the patient. I suggest that the functions of these preoccupations differ from one moment to the next, with psychic movements that can flow from a sense of curiosity that signals a wish to explore and deepen the relationship with the self and others, through the creative use of the analytic setting to a misuse which involves a retreat into a racist state of mind where destructive impulses aim to thwart and damage the self and others. The racial scene, therefore, is an investigative tool to situate the various psychic predicaments faced by both patient and therapist in the clinical situation. These states of mind co-exist to varying degrees in individuals, groups and organisational/societal life, creating particular kinds of challenges in how we engage with them.
Narendra Keval is a Psychoanalyst in Private Practice. He previously worked as a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Consultant Clinical Psychologist for over 30 years in the NHS. He has written and taught extensively on race and racism in clinical situations in the UK, Canada, the USA, and South Africa. He is a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society and was a past member of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. His book Racist States of Mind: Understanding the Perversion of Curiosity and Concern was published in 2016 by Karnac Books.
The Umbilical – Jay Barlow
Traditional psychoanalytic approaches view excessive parental, social or relational involvement in human development as an opportunity for linking complex gender and identity experiences. The analyst’s unconscious bias might present an opportunity for interpretation that could resemble something akin to conversion therapy. All of which leaves the patient feeling alienated and confirming their exiled Self. Early relational trauma affects every gender and sexual identity. Each traumatic situation, from inappropriate interference to traumatic abuse, affects how an individual forms and experiences relationships. Gender and sexual identity are fluid agencies of the Self within all human development. For people who are non-normative when it comes to gender, identity or sexuality, evidence of early relational trauma should not unthinkingly be treated alongside mental health struggles. This clinical paper explores once weekly analytic work with a young, exiled transman who lived in a dysregulated state of mind from his early relational trauma. I use images from the artist, Louise Bourgeois, to explore the early development of projective identification and propose that this becomes a way of exiling unwanted feelings into the other with hopes of finding a place of belonging – as if through a psychic umbilical.
Jay Barlow is a Jungian Psychoanalyst member and Director of Training of the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP), London. As a Training and Supervising Analyst, he supervises and teaches on various analytic trainings in the UK and in IAAP developing groups in Europe, Eastern Europe and China. He is interested in an analytic approach to Human Development, how Infant Observation informs the development of an analytic attitude, Early States of Mind, and Unconscious Fantasy in the consulting room. He has an MA in Jungian and Post Jungian Studies, and has worked as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the NHS in an acute unit for Borderline and Narcissistic Personality Disorders. Jay is in full time private practice in South London.
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