Friday Open Lectures

More 2025 lectures coming soon …

SATURDAY LECTURES

“Approaching Death and Dying”

Speaker: Elisabeth Dennis

Date: Saturday 14th June 2025

Time: 13:30

Venue: In person at BTPP, Studio 322, Custard Factory, Gibb Street, Birmingham B9 4AA

 

Elisabeth Dennis trained with BTPP as an Adult Kleinian Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and qualified in 2001. She has worked in the NHS and in private practice. She retired from the NHS in 2007 continuing to work in private practice. She is a Training Therapist for the Association of Child Psychotherapists.

Elizabeth Dennis’s purpose in writing this paper was to bring death and dying out of the shadows where it dwells all too often. She had become aware in herself and others a strong impulse to avoid and deny death, which had become medicalized and treated as an object of fear. Death as an intrinsic part of life had been forgotten, occurring out of sight. Through her volunteer work in a hospice, she reached some conclusions about the need for skilled intervention by good external objects to help both staff and dying patients, to connect with a good internal object at times when death was imminent.   

Elizabth Dennis explores the idea of the yearning for Oneness, which may present itself on the approach of death. She considers the Freudian and Post Freudian idea that this is only a negative escape from reality and a desire for a phantasied blissful return to the womb, as limited in scope.  She notes that the womb is not necessarily a blissful space and explores the yearning for Oneness through the work of a variety of mystics across the ages.

This paper is by no means definitive, but a contribution to the study of a profound stage of life, which we would do well to anticipate and prepare for.  

Cost: £35

Register your attendance here

Workshops are open to professionals working with children and adolescents and others interested in working in a psychodynamic way but places must be booked in advance.

Venue: Birmingham Trust for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
Studio 322, Custard Factory, Gibb Street, Birmingham B9 4AA

Tel: 0121 7530413     
Email: info@btpp.co.uk      Website: www.btpp.space
Cost: £30.00 per workshop
Bursaries are available according to need if they are pre-agreed by phone.

ALL THE SPEAKERS ARE EXPERIENCED CHILD PSYCHOTHERAPISTS, ADULT PSYCHOTHERAPISTS OR PSYCHOANALYSTS WORKING IN THE NHS AND IN PRIVATE PRACTICE. 

Previous lectures:

  • A Qualifying Paper: “Come in - Keep Out” : Speakers: Heather Stewart and Natasha Stubbs : Date: Friday 11th April 2025

  • “The dreamer is the thinker: discussion of a dream sequence presented by Donald Meltzer” : Speaker: Meg Harris Williams : Date: Saturday 5th April 2025

  • “Making a Space for Meaning: psychotherapeutic work with autistic children and young people”: Speaker: Matthew Jenkins: Date: Friday 20th December 2024

  • Live Clinical Supervision : Speaker: Robert Caper : Date: Saturday 7th Decmeber 2024

  • The ‘transferential leap’- Weaving the work of Louise Bourgeois and infamous Anansi stories Maxine Dennis (psychoanalyst) describes clinical material illustrating the complex interplay between intergenerational trauma and racialisation: Speaker: Maxine Dennis : Date: Saturday 12th October 2024

  • “Race in the Clinical Encounter: Listening to the Nuances”: Speaker: Narendra Keval : Date: Friday 15th November 2024

  •  “Ali`s wonderland and what she found there: A journey of piecing the unintegrated experience to help the thinking girl build a proper foundation.” : Speaker: Katrina Brailsford : Date: Friday 20th September 2024