Knowing the Unthinkable
Image credit: Edvard Munch (1986)

A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Overwhelming Emotion

The work of Bion and Meltzer

NOW CLOSED

Saturday 17 December 2022

A live webinar with Avner Bergstein and Judy Eekhoff

CPD Credits: 3.5 hours

  • Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
  • Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Wednesday 14 December 2022

Our speakers will delve into unrepresentable, ineffable and often unknowable realms of the human mind. Primarily drawing on the thinking of Bion and Meltzer, our speakers Judy Eekhoff and Avner Bergstein will take us into the privacy of their consulting rooms, and the encounter with emotional experience that cannot be verbally communicated and dynamically interpreted but must first be lived in the here and now of the analytic setting.

READ MORE...

SPEAKERS

Avner BergsteinJudy K. Eekhoff,

FULL PROGRAMME

14.00 GMT
Introductions

14.05
Judy K Eekhoff
The Spark of Life

Some patients do not trust their own experiences. Since they cannot trust themselves, they look to others to show them what to do. Mimicry and “as if” behavior become the means for survival in a world that feels alien to them. Their ability to use personal truth for psychic nourishment is compromised. Desperate and isolated, they deaden themselves in order to get by. Worse still, their deadness may also indicate a developmental deficit that leaves them feeling as if they do not exist. Often, they describe themselves as going through the motions of life, but not living it. Feeling they are not fully alive, they come to analysis looking for what is missing. The analyst must find true life within the mimicry presented.

15.00
Q&A

15.15
Break

15.30
Avner Bergstein
Violent Emotions and the Violence of Life

Avner Bergstein discusses the violence of emotions and the violent retaliation against the mind as a way of protecting oneself against overwhelming pain. Leaning on Bion’s thinking, he suggests that violence may be an outcome of a quantity of excitation that the individual is unable to elaborate mentally. This violence is often dormant, covered by a veneer of civilization. Thus, in analysis we may repeatedly be deluded by the patient’s seemingly non-psychotic functioning. Prenatal experiences that were never mentally registered serve as a model for overwhelming, undreamt and undreamable experience, which may be encapsulated in an unrepressed unconscious. Such unmentalized emotional experience may be forcibly discharged, either outward through physical violence, perversions, addictions, etc., or inward into the body. However, it is not only the overwhelming experience that one tries to expel, but also the perceiving mind itself, which is attacked and fragmented in order to evade awareness of an intolerable emotional reality. Detailed clinical material will illustrate the temptation to remain blind to the violent emotions lurking behind, and the massive forces, in both analyst and patient, working against getting in touch with painful psychic reality.

16.30
Q&A

16.45
Discussion with Q&A

17.30
End

FEES

Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Wednesday 14 December

Live Webinar:

£70 (Member £56)
(Click here to become a member)

Includes a recording of the event

CPD

Certificates of attendance for 3.5 hours will be provided.

To receive the full CPD credits, you are required to attend 100% of the live event. No partial credit will be given.

Please note that if you are unable to attend all of the live event, you will need to undertake our event specific test in order to receive the CPD certification. This will be made available soon after the live event has taken place.

VENUE

Live webinarZoom

Zoom is free to download and use.

For more information about Zoom click here.

To download Zoom free of charge click here.

SCHEDULE

Saturday
14.00 GMT Introductions
14.05 Judy K Eekhoff
15.00 Q&A
15.15 Break
15.30 Avner Bergstein
16.30 Q&A
16.45 Discussion with Q&A
17.30 End

BOOKING CONDITIONS

Regrettably, refunds cannot be given in any circumstances except as follows:

  • You cancel in writing to info@confer.uk.com 60 days before the first date of the event you have booked, in which case you will be entitled to a 100% refund.
  • You cancel in writing to info@confer.uk.com 30 days before the first date of the event you have booked, in which case you will be entitled to a 50% refund.

This does not apply to parts of an event such as a seminar within a series but only to a whole event or complete series. You may give your place to another person if you let us know that person's name at least 24 hours before the event begins.

We reserve the right to change a speaker at one of our conferences without offering a refund. However, if a solo presenter cancels we will offer a full refund OR transfer of your fee to another Confer event. If the entire event is cancelled we will offer you a full refund.

We reserve the right to change our prices at any time. Regrettably, discounts offered after you made your booking cannot be claimed or applied retrospectively.