fPc | The Foundation for Psychotherapy and Counselling |
29th March 2025 Lecture
Varieties of Transference and Transference Interpretation Today. - David Tuckett
To be held online from 10.00am to 12.00noon on Saturday 29th March 2025, 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
What is it that a psychoanalyst or psychotherapist offers to a patient? For Freud what was offered was an undertaking together to investigate those mental processes (and their effects) which were almost inaccessible (i.e. unconscious) in any other way? But, if this is the offer, the next question is how can the analyst reliably infer the processes (for instance, unconscious transference processes) in a way that patients can come to understand them for themselves rather than feel they are imposed by their psychotherapists?
Using the new theoretical framework for comparative analysis of psychoanalytic work (the outcome of a 20 Year European project which was the largest empirical study ever undertaken), I will explore the different ways transference is understood, detected and interpreted by different psychoanalysts practicing today.
I will ask how we can improve the reliability of unconscious inference and so practice by clearer self-reflection, particularly by being clear about the assumptions we make as to the nature of the analytic situation and our procedures for inference.
David Tuckett is a Distinguished Fellow and Training Analyst of the British Psychoanalytic Society as well as Emeritus Professor of Decision-Making and Director of the Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty at University College London (UCL). For 2024-5 he is also a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He founded the New Library of Psychoanalysis (1987), was Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1988-2001) and President of the European Psychoanalytic Federation (1999-2004). The author of books and journal articles in psychoanalysis, economics, finance and sociology, he received the IPA Training Award (2004) and the Sigourney Award for distinguished contributions to the field of psychoanalysis once in 2007 and again (as a CEO of Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing, PEP) in 2018. As well as working in private practice, with colleagues, he researches psychoanalytic practice and training as well as how to apply the fruits of psychoanalytic understanding to strategic decision-making and economic and finance understanding and policy. He has spoken at the Davos meetings and other occasions and is the author of Minding the Markets: An Emotional Finance View of Financial Instability as well as many academic papers. He is the principal architect of Conviction Narrative Theory – a new approach to the foundations of decision-making under uncertainty published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2022 – and senior author of the newly published book “Knowing What Psychoanalysts Do and Doing What Psychoanalysts Know.”