Calendar of Forthcoming Events

The B.B.Zeitlyn Trust is pleased to be able to advertise details of forthcoming events to be held in East Anglia that may be of interest to psychotherapists, people who are training or planning to train in psychotherapy, and more widely to those involved in the caring professions.

If you are planning an event and would like to publish details on the Zeitlyn website, please send your virus-free text by email to timfox.gamages@dsl.pipex.com

Thursday 31 May 2018

Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies
Essex University
Colchester Campus

Freud Memorial Lecture 2018

It’s Time to Put It Behind Us: A Psychoanalytic View of Remembering and Forgetting

Speaker:  Karl Figlio

Remembering and forgetting are recurring themes in clinical psychoanalysis, in society and in politics. Victims of historical abuse insist that time does not erode the legitimacy of bringing perpetrators to justice and of restoring their dignity from the shame forced upon them. But they often come up against the reply of the accused that they do not remember the alleged abuse. Think also of recurring commemorations. The demand to remember faces the exhortation that it is time to forget: time to put it all behind us and to ‘remember the future’.  

In a psychoanalytic framework, remembering can be reparative and healing, but can also be anti-reparative and destructive. This complex relationship between remembering and forgetting will be explored with clinical and historical material.

Karl Figlio is Professor Emeritus Professor in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies and founding director of the former Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies. He is a member of the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Association of the British Psychoanalytic Council and Clinical Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, in private practice. He has published widely on psychoanalysis, both as a discipline and in relation to society.

Venue: Essex Business School Room EBS.2.2 
            University of Essex, Colchester Campus

Time :   18:00 - 19:30

Entry is free but you’ll need to register online at:

www.essex.ac.uk/departments/psychosocial-and-psychoanalytic-studies/freud-memorial-lecture

Saturday 23 June 2018

The B B Zeitlyn Psychotherapy Training Fund

Gender Dysphoria and Transgendered States: A view from the consulting room

Speaker: Robert Withers

This talk will explore analytical psychotherapy’s contribution to understanding and working with gender dysphoria (GD) and transgendered states. There is currently no credible biological explanation of gender dysphoria, or reliable way of telling in advance who will and who will not benefit from medical transition. But psychological thinking about GD can be undermined by accusations of transphobia and the fear that working with trans-people psychotherapeutically amounts to conversion therapy. As a result, medicalisation can become the default option, rather than a last resort.

Meanwhile, research into those who ‘de-transition’ because they are dissatisfied with such medical treatment gets closed down on the grounds that it will arouse similar accusations of transphobia. Properly informed decision making is becoming increasingly difficult. This is particularly worrying given the rapidly increasing number of young people identifying as trans at a time before their sense of identity is securely established.

Bob Withers will be arguing that working in a culture that still stigmatises mental illness contributes to a reluctance to acknowledge and explore the psychological dimension in GD. He will be illustrating his talk with three contrasting cases: two from his own Practice and one from Donald Winnicott’s. He will be arguing that Winnicott was able to carry out effective analytic work partly because it was conducted before the medicalisation of transgendered states.

Robert Withers is a member of the Society of Analytical Psychology. His 2015 paper The Seventh Penis, which described some of the difficulties of working psychotherapeutically with people who identify as trans jointly won the Michael Fordham prize. Today’s talk is drawn from his chapter ‘The view from the consulting room’ in Transgender children and young people; Born in your own body. Edited by Heather Brunskell Evans and Michele Moore, published in 2018 by Cambridge Scholars.

Venue: Salvation Army Hall, Abbey Lane, Saffron Walden, CB10 1DE

Time: 11.30am - 2.30pm. Coffee served from 11.00am

Cost is £50 which includes coffee and lunch.

Early booking is recommended as places are limited.

For an application form please click here