Friday Open Lectures
A Qualifying Paper
Speakers: Heather Stewart and Natasha Stubbs
Date: Friday 11th April 2025
Time: 13:30
Venue: In person at BTPP, Studio 322, Custard Factory, Gibb Street, Birmingham B9 4AA
Cost: £30
Register your attendance here
More 2025 lectures coming soon …
SATURDAY LECTURES
“The dreamer is the thinker: discussion of a dream sequence presented by Donald Meltzer”
Speaker: Meg Harris Williams
Date: Saturday 5th April 2025
Time: 10:30
Venue: In person at BTPP, Studio 322, Custard Factory, Gibb Street, Birmingham B9 4AA
Meg Harris Williams is a writer and lecturer on literature and psychoanalysis and also a visual artist. She teaches internationally and is a visiting lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic and for AGIP (Association of Group and Individual Psychotherapy), London. She is an honorary member of the Psychoanalytic Center of California, and editor of The Harris Meltzer Trust. She has written extensively about dreams, art and literature, particularly in reference to Meltzer and Bion’s ideas. Her books and papers have been translated into many languages
This talk will follow closely the stages in a dream sequence presented by Meltzer in the context of his elaboration of Money-Kyrle's concept of misconception. The sequence delineates residual but significant problems in the final stages of a particular analysis where the standard oedipal interpretations do not properly capture the emotional conflict, but which are elucidated by Money-Kyrle's concept and resolved through a process of dream symbolisation.
Cost: £30
Register your attendance here
“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: £30
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.