Future of Psychoanalysis in a Changing World

Is clinical psychoanalysis a healthcare system, a distinct discipline, or something else entirely? This conference explores this fundamental question, examining the evolving landscape of clinical psychoanalysis in the 21st century. We will address the tension between preserving core psychoanalytic principles and adapting to new trends in mental health needs, service delivery, and technology. This exploration is crucial for ensuring psychoanalysis’s continued relevance and efficacy.

The conference fosters dialogue between practitioners, scholars, and others creating a space for critical reflection on the challenges and opportunities facing psychoanalysis. A central theme will be whether psychoanalysis is “fit for purpose” in modern society and how it can adapt without losing its essential character. This includes examining its relationship with allied disciplines, such as clinical phenomenology, and critically assessing the contemporary relevance of foundational Freudian texts.

Key Themes:

Preserving the Core, Embracing Change: How do we protect traditional psychoanalytic practice while adapting to evolving demands? This includes exploring shorter-term therapies, integrating psychoanalytic insights into other treatments, and reaching diverse populations. Has psychoanalytic practice kept pace with societal shifts? What is the contemporary relevance of Freud’s work from the 1920s, and can Freudian psychoanalysis survive this century?

Meeting Modern Demand: How can psychoanalysis respond to the rising demand for mental health services while remaining true to its core values? We will examine current trends, including the arguments for so-called evidence-based practices, technology integration, and cultural sensitivity, exploring innovative models of care. Does the ‘standard’ psychoanalytic model still exist?

The AI Revolution: How can we speak about the intersection of AI and psychoanalysis, examining the potential benefits and challenges. Can AI enhance practice, or does it threaten the human element?

The Future of Training and Practice: Why train as a psychoanalyst today? We will explore the challenges and rewards of a psychoanalytic career in the 21st century, and how training programs can prepare clinicians for evolving needs. Is psychoanalysis hindered by dogma? Has it responded to contemporary clinical presentations?

Regulation and Diversity: How can we ensure qualified and ethical care balancing public protection and professional autonomy. How do we preserve diverse analytic traditions amidst potential state regulation and standardization pressures?

Allied Disciplines and Shared Ground: Clinical phenomenology and psychoanalysis share a focus on idiographic understanding, co-created truths, existential rather than predicative truth, and the structure of subjectivity. Despite methodological differences, their shared ground suggests potential for collaboration, especially in advocating for idiographic approaches within medical and psychological training. The emergence of philosophical counselling also raises questions about interdisciplinary relationships and the future of therapeutic practice.

Revisiting Freud: How can we assess the contemporary relevance of key Freudian texts, including The Ego and the Id (examining the superego in modern society), “Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes” (and its implications for gender identity), “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (exploring its historical context and contemporary resonance), and “Inhibitions, Symptoms & Anxiety” (considering its contribution to trauma theory in light of current research).

This conference invites all to join the discussion about psychoanalysis’s future, ensuring its valuable contribution to mental health. We will specifically address the place of psychoanalysis in modern society, if it is being held back by dogma, if analytic practice has kept pace with change, the existence of a ‘standard’ model, its response to contemporary clinical presentations (including online therapy and AI), how to preserve training diversity in the face of standardization pressures, the potential for collaboration with related fields, and the lasting value and interpretation of foundational Freudian texts.

Speaker Bios & Information

Erica Burman: Fanon’s struggle with psychoanalysis: lessons now

Bio: Erica Burman is Professor of Education at the University of Manchester, Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and a United Kingdom Council of Psychotherapists registered Group Analyst (and full member of the Institute of Group Analysis). Erica's work has focused on critical developmental and educational psychology, feminist and postcolonial theory, childhood studies, and on critical mental health practice (particularly around gender and cultural issues). Her recent work addresses the connections between emotions, mental health and (social as well as individual) change, in particular as anchored by representations of, and appeals to, childhood.

In her presentation she will be outlining seven key aspects arising from Fanon’s writings that can inform current psychoanalytic critical thinking and practice. These are: Embodiment, Psychiatry, Institutions, Violence, Culture, Therapy, and Groups.

Darian Leader:

Bio: Psychoanalyst and author of several books, co founder of Centre for Freudian Analysis * Research (CFAR).

Gwion Jones: Does the standard model exist?

Bio: Gwion Jones is a Lacanian Analyst with a private practice in the West Midlands. He is also Assistant Professor in the Clinical Psychology Department at Coventry University and currently Chair of CPJA.

Does the abiding myth of the standard model need to be challenged to suit the modern era? Should contemporary psychoanalytic practice be defined by the use of the couch, a certain frequency of sessions etc, or is there a more adaptive formula that escapes the rigid confines of orthodoxy, as many of the true innovators in the field have done in the past, to bring psychoanalysis into the 21st century to respond to the vagaries of today’s clinical landscape? These and other urgent questions will be posed in this highly discursive paper.

Dmitri Olshansky: Digital transference: change of the Imaginary and Symbolic in online counseling

Bio: psychoanalyst, graduated from the Eastern European Institute of Psychoanalysis in St. Petersburg, fellow member of the Institut des Hautes Études en Psychanalyse in Paris, France, member of the Ukrainian Psychoanalytic Union.

André Green noted that the psychoanalyst often works with the patient's double in his own unconscious. With the transition of psychoanalysis to the online space, his words have ceased to be a metaphor; today we actually work as imaginary doubles of ourselves with imaginary doubles of the patients. Theoretically this should help develop neurosis of transference, but practically we see the collapse of the barromean system – the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic – which in digital space begin to work in isolation. Do we have mechanisms or new “sinthomes” that allow us to integrate the personality?

Michael O'Loughlin: Theorizing an activist, social justice oriented, emancipatory and collective psychoanalysis: A riposte to the movement toward singularity of thought and individualization of subjectivity

Bio: Michael O’Loughlin is Professor in the College of Education and Health Sciences and in the Derner School of Psychology at Adelphi University, New York. He has authored, edited or co-edited many books, including Precarities of 21 st century childhoods: Critical explorations of time(s), place(s), and identities (2023), and Between amnesia and recollection: Environmental, creative and clinical pathways tomorrow memory, forthcoming from Karnac. Since 2018 he has been coeditor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He is also editor of the book series, Psychoanalytic Interventions: Clinical Social, and Cultural Contexts, and co-editor of the book series Critical Childhood & Youth Studies. He directs the Adelphi Asylum Project and he has a private practice for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis on Long Island, NY.

The relationship between psychoanalysis and its Others is vexed and contentious. Jacques Derrida (1981) noted that psychoanalysis is a domain that privileges a European and North American worldview. Ranjana Khanna (2003), and Celia Brickman (2018) have offered incisive critiques of the inherent constitutiveness of psychoanalysis in colonialism, evident, for example, in the unexamined deployment of concepts such as ‘primitive;’ and ‘regression’ in psychoanalytic conceptualization. Attempts to conceptualize a decolonized clinic in psychoanalysis have exposed fissures that mirror the polarization of global political discourse in recent years. Considerable work has been done to understand ancestral and sociohistorical lineages and the catastrophic consequence of the severance of social linkages that results from displacements produced by wars, genocides, and forced migrations. Psychoanalytic theorists understand unmourned losses arising from colonial conquest as leading to racial and postcolonial melancholia (Khanna, 2003, Gilroy, 2005), often manifested clinically in what Abraham and Torok refer to as the demetaphorization of affect. Karima Lazali’s (2021) work in Algeria offers a case study of the kind of incorporation of totalizing ideology and intergenerationally transmitted trauma that leads to “a dispossession of subjectivity” and hence a prohibition on active citizenship and Suely Rolnik’s analysis of interpellation in Brazil raises the provocative question of an insurrectionary unconscious. This work, together with consideration of work by Piera Aulagnier, Judith Butler, and Achille Mbembe are helping form the outlines of a decolonizing practice of psychoanalysis in academia and in the clinic. All of this work stands in contrast to the staid conservatism of the field. Can it serve as a riposte to such conservatism and a call to action for analysts interested in activism, social justice, solidarity and freedom of

thought?

Francesca Brencio and Andrew Hodgkiss: Clinical Phenomenology and its application. A dialogue at the crossroads of experience.

Bio: Dr Francesca Brencio is a philosopher based at the Institute for Mental Health, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham (UK). Director of the Pheno-Lab, a Theoretical Laboratory in Phenomenology and Mental Health.

Bio: Dr Andrew Hodgkiss is a retired Consultant Psychiatrist and Lacanian Analyst. He has a longstanding interest in the history and philosophy of psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

Also check out other Health & Wellness events in London, Workshops in London.