Friday Open Lectures
“Race in the Clinical Encounter: Listening to the Nuances”
Speaker: Narendra Keval
Date: Friday 15th November 2024
Time: 13:30
Venue: Online
Narendra Keval is a Psychoanalyst, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Consultant Clinical Psychologist who has worked for over 30 years in a range of settings in the NHS. He has written and taught extensively about race and racism in the clinical situation, in the UK, New York, Washington and Cape Town, South Africa. He is a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society and Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists His book Racist States of Mind: Understanding the Perversion of Curiosity and Concern was published in 2016 by Karnac Books.
Narendra Keval will be speaking to several themes that arise in thinking about racial preoccupations in the clinical setting. These are always present in subtle ways in the privacy of our daily thoughts and feelings, imagination and dreams. However, engaging with the significance of these deep structures of thought and feeling in the consulting room often evokes excessive anxiety that can obstruct thoughtful and sensitive scrutiny about the nuances of these preoccupations in the unconscious, what is being grappled with and communicated by the patient.
In this talk, Narendra Keval explores the psychic functions of these preoccupations that differ from one moment to the next. These movements can either flow from a sense of curiosity that signals a wish to explore and deepen the relationship with the self and others, through the creative use of the analytic setting or a misuse which involves a retreat into a racist state of mind where destructive impulses aim to thwart and damage the self and others.
Cost: £30
Register your attendance here
“Making a Space for Meaning: psychotherapeutic work with autistic children and young people”
Speaker: Matthew Jenkins
Date: Friday 20th December 2024
Time: 13:30 - 15:45
Venue: In person at BTPP, Studio 322, Custard Factory, Gibb Street, Birmingham, B9 4AA
Matthew Jenkins is a Clinical Director at the Bridge Foundation in Bristol, and Clinical Lead for Bridge in Schools. He trained as a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist at the Birmingham Trust for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and has worked in a range of clinical settings including community CAMHS, inpatient and forensic services, learning disabilities and autism, and infant mental health. He was formerly Head of Child Psychotherapy services and Clinical Director of Birmingham Community CAMHS.
Matthew supervises and teaches psychoanalytic theory; he is also a visiting tutor for the Birmingham Child Psychotherapy training. Matthew first became interested in working with children and young people with autism when training as a music therapist at the Roehampton Institute in London, and his work as a psychoanalytic child psychotherapist is informed by this previous training and experience.
This paper explores psychotherapeutic work with autistic children and adolescents, highlighting some key themes and challenges. Illustrating with clinical examples, Matthew will discuss two distinct groups.
The first group consists of children functioning at early developmental levels, often lacking active language, symbolic play, and typical preverbal reciprocity. The second group comprises adolescents who are highly verbal and capable in some areas, yet have complex support needs and face significant and often painful struggles navigating adolescence, identity, peer relationships, and autonomy.
The paper challenges traditional view of the psychoanalytic process as centred on the interpretation of symbolic meanings generated through the use of words and play. In this clinical context Matthew thinks the process involves offering a space in which the possibility of meaning can emerge over time. His view is that it is the combination of the quality of attention of the therapist, coupled with the containing function of the psychotherapeutic setting, rather than interpretation as such, that enables this emergence.
Cost: £30
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SATURDAY LECTURES
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
Time: 10:00 - 13:00
Venue: In person at BTPP, Studio 322, Custard Factory, Gibb Street, Birmingham, B9 4AA
Maxine Dennis is a Psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and consultant clinical psychologist , who works with individuals, groups and organisations. One of the original founding members of 10 Windsor walk ( which provides psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and training in south London) and a founding member of Black Psychoanalysts Speak. A speaker, lecturer for various psychology, counselling , psychotherapy organisations in the UK and abroad. A training analyst for child psychotherapy and various adult psychotherapy trainings. Her clinical practice is in South London. She has Directed and staffed on numerous group relations conference .
These workshops are delivered as part of the clinical training for Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists, but we would like to welcome qualified Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists and any other professionals working with children and adolescents interested in working in a psychoanalytical way.
Cost: £30
Register your attendance here
Presentation of clinical material
Speaker: Robert Caper
Date: Saturday 7th Decmeber 20244
Time: 14:00 - 17:00
Venue: Online
Further information to follow…
“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
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“Approaching Death and Dying”
Speaker: Elizabeth 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.