1st November 2025 Lecture

Shame and Temporality - Hessel Willemsen

To be held online from 10.00am to 12.00noon on Saturday 1st November 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 

In this presentation thought will be given to temporality and shame, concepts both addressed in psychoanalysis and philosophy. In our recent book (Temporality and Shame - Ominous Transitions), Ladson Hinton and I wrote: A nation or culture cannot thrive, and may not survive, unless its citizens can look forward to a life worth living. Failure to provide a hope for the future, particularly for its youths, foments extreme turbulence, and sometimes a sense of mad disruption: a prospect of ‘Ominous Transitions’. 

Hope for young people’s future is a challenge when thinking about housing, climate change, and a changing work culture due to AI transforming the work environment. The anxieties about future prospects lead to disillusionment with leaders: Further, young people are most positive about democracy under populist leaders of both left and right, and millennials in advanced democracies are more likely to view political opponents as morally flawed.  These are but a few of the dilemmas faced in today’s world. 

But how to address these dilemmas? Awareness of shame goes back as far as Greek mythology and is a corner stone of a functioning society, alongside justice, the rule of law. Shame makes for self-reflection and humbleness and leads to an understanding of limitations and boundaries and in turn to temporality which refers to a structure and experience of time. Shame is about taking note of the truth of our situation. Truth is a basic assumption, a basic ingredient, for a caring world.

Hessel Willemsen is a Training and Supervising Analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology and the British Jungian Analytic Association and a Clinical Psychologist. He works with adults, in private practice, and with children and their families in complex court proceedings, including adoption breakdown, surrogacy and divorce proceedings. He has a keen interest in forensic psychotherapy, current affairs and the overlap of psychoanalysis and philosophy. Ladson Hinton and Hessel edited ‘Temporality and Shame’ (Routledge, 2018) and ‘Temporality, Shame and Social Change – Ominous Transitions’ (Routledge, 2021), which won the 2018 American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize and 2022 Internal Association of Jungian Studies’ Award respectively, for best edited book. A collection of Ladson Hinton’s essay will be published later this year (Routledge 2025). The International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy awarded Hessel the 2021 Gill McGauley Award to recognize outstanding scholarly contribution to the field of forensic psychotherapy. Hessel practices in London and Winchester.