Overview
This full-day conference will bring together some of the leading psychoanalytic thinkers on Wilfred Bion to consider his place in current psychoanalytic research and practice.
Bion is one of the giants of psychoanalytic theory, best known for his work on groups, his widely applied concept of container-contained and his rich theory of thinking which places emotional experience at its heart.
His writings continue to be hugely influential, and are drawn on by new generations of therapists. This conference will consider the ways in which his work is used in the consulting room, both in psychoanalytic work with individuals and with couples, and what it can teach us about relationships.
Dr Judith Pickering will be talking about ‘Transformations in Love: an Application of Bion’s Thinking to Work with Couples’, Chris Mawson about ‘Containment: a Misnomer for Bion’s Primary Model of a Maternal Container for Anxiety’, Francis Grier about ‘Narcissism and Containment in Couple Relationships’ and Dr David Hewison about ‘Thinking with Bion and Jung about Container-Contained Processes in the Couple’.
Speakers Biography
Dr Judith Pickering is a psychotherapist and faculty member of ANZAP, a Training Analyst with The Australian and New Zealand Association of Jungian Analysts and a Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Therapist. She has tertiary degrees in Religious Studies, Asian Studies, Music Education (Kodály Institute, Hungary), Musicology, Psychotherapy and Analytical Psychology. She also has a doctorate in Psychology.
She has published and lectured widely in Australia, USA and Europe, including the Society of Psychoanalytical Marital Psychotherapists at the Tavistock Centre London; The International Family Therapy Association, Turkey, The Journal of Analytical Psychology, Oxford, St Petersburg, and Italy, Bion in Boston, and Berlin at The Journal of Analytical Psychology – XIIth International Conference.
Books include: Being in Love: Therapeutic Pathways Through Psychological Obstacles to Love (Routledge, 2008), The Search for Meaning: Spiritual Practice, the Apophatic Way and Bion (Routledge, 2018), and Transformations in Love: Bion and the Couple (Routledge, forthcoming) which applies the clinical thinking of Bion to work with couples.
Chris Mawson is a Training and Supervising Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He trained at the Tavistock Clinic in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children and adolescents, and in psychoanalysis at the British Psychoanalytical Society and Institute.
He worked for nine years in St Mary’s Hospital Department of Child Psychiatry, Paddington Green, in the days when children at that clinic were offered intensive psychoanalytic treatment within the care of the National Health Service. He now works as a psychoanalyst in private practice.
He has a special interest in the work of Wilfred Bion and is the editor of The Complete Works of W R Bion (2014, Karnac, now published by Routledge).
Other publications include Psychoanalysis and Anxiety: From Knowing to Being (2019, Routledge); Three Papers of W R Bion (ed, 2018, Routledge); ‘Interpretation as Freud’s Specific Action, and Bion’s Container–Contained’ (2017, International Journal of Psychoanalysis); ‘Review: Between Mind and Brain: Models of the Mind and Models in the Mind by Ronald Britton’ (2017, International Journal of Psychoanalysis); Bion Today (ed; 2010, Routledge); ‘The Use of Play Technique in Understanding Disturbed Behaviour in School’ (1986, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy); ‘Containing Anxiety in Work with Damaged Children’ in Anton Obholzer and Vega Zagier Roberts (eds), The Unconscious at Work: Individual and Organisational Stress in the Human Services (1994, Routledge, new edition 2019).
Francis Grier is an Associate Editor (UK) of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, a Training Analyst and Supervisor of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and a Member of Tavistock Relationships.
He edited Brief Encounters with Couples: Some Analytical Perspectives (2001, Karnac) and Oedipus and the Couple (2005, Karnac), in which he also contributed ‘No Sex Couples, Catastrophic Change and the Primal Scene’, as part of the Tavistock Clinic Series. His papers include ‘Lively and Deathly Intercourse’ in Sex, Attachment and Couple Psychotherapy: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, (ed. C Clulow, 2009, Karnac), ‘The Hidden Traumas of the Young Boarding School Child as Seen through the Lens of Adult Couple Therapy” in Enduring Trauma through the Life-Cycle (ed. E McGinley and A Varchevker); and ‘Psychotic and Depressive Processes in Couple Functioning’ in Living on the Border, (ed. D Bell and A Novakovic, both published by Karnac in 2013).
‘Thoughts on Rigoletto’ was published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 2011, and ‘La Traviata and Oedipus’ in 2015. Papers on Musicality in the Consulting Room and the music of Beethoven viewed through the prism of gender are forthcoming in the IJP, and a paper on forgiveness in Mozart operas is forthcoming in the Journal of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis.
He has a private psychoanalytic practice in London, and has succeeded Edna O’Shaughnessy in leading a seminar for psychotherapists working in the Fitzjohns Unit in the Tavistock Clinic with patients who would not normally have access to psychoanalytic treatment.
Dr David Hewison, DCplPsychPsych, is a Jungian training analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology and consultant couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist. He joined Tavistock Relationships in 1996 with a background in adult mental health social work and training. He has been involved in all aspects of Tavistock Relationships’ work over the years and is part of the senior management team. He is currently Head of Research and Ethics and programme leader of the Professional Doctorate in Couple Psychotherapy.
He developed couple therapy as a treatment for depression in the NHS and was the lead author of Couple Therapy for Depression: A Clinician’s Guide to Integrative Practice in 2014. He was a member of NICE’s Depression Guideline Development Group 2015-2019. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of Couple And Family Psychoanalysis and was previously book reviews editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. The author of some 60 book chapters, journal articles, research papers and reviews, he teaches and lectures internationally. He has a particular interest in creativity and imagination, and is currently working on developing greater understanding of diversity in analytic work with individuals and couples.
Andrew Balfour is Chief Executive at Tavistock Relationships. A former Clinical Psychologist, he is a Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and an Adult Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist. He worked for many years in the Adult Department of the Tavistock Clinic after completing his training there, and was joint organiser of the course ‘Psychodynamic Approaches to Old Age’. He has a research interest in the area of dementia care and teaches and lectures widely, both in Britain and abroad.
