An eight-seminar online CPD course for practitioners already grounded in psychoanalytic ideas

Does psychoanalytic theory need to change to meet how we now think about difference and identity — and if so, what would such change cost?

Psychoanalysis has at times been a genuinely radical force. Freud unsettled settled ideas about sexuality, childhood and the unity of the mind. Psychoanalytic thinking has given us some of our most penetrating accounts of how destructiveness works — the splitting and projection beneath racism and homophobia, the fear of the stranger, the uses a group makes of those it defines as other. Its founding insight, that none of us is fully transparent to ourselves (the "ego is not master in its own house"), remains a profound discovery.

Yet from a twenty-first-century vantage point psychoanalysis can also look conservative. Its developmental theories were built around a norm — of psycho-sexual "maturity", of gender, of the family — and difference from that norm was too readily read as deficit or arrest, regression or "perversion". Its institutions for many years struggled to tolerate internal theoretical disagreement without schism, and until relatively recently treated a homosexual orientation as a bar to training. It has been slow to reckon with power structures, and systemic disadvantage, and it is sometimes uneasy with the ways people now understand and name their own identities.

This course takes that tension seriously, from both directions. It does not set out to defend psychoanalysis against its critics, nor to bring it into line with them. It asks whether, and how, psychoanalytic theory needs to change in response to contemporary understandings of diversity, without losing what makes it valuable. It gives a genuine hearing both to the argument that the theory must change to remain credible and ethical, and to the counter-argument that some of what it is asked to give up is precisely what makes it worth having.

Two ways of knowing a person

The course begins from an observation: psychoanalysis and the contemporary discourse of equality, diversity and inclusion often talk past each other, and they do so because they rest on different assumptions about how a person can be known.

EDI discourse tends to treat a person's own account of their identity and experience as authoritative. What someone says about who they are is, in an important sense, the ground truth of the matter, and the appropriate ethical response is recognition and affirmation. There are strong reasons for this. It corrects a long history in which other people — doctors, clinicians, institutions — claimed to know better than the person themselves, often to that person's harm.

Psychoanalysis starts somewhere else. Its premise is that no one has privileged access to their own mind. What is said conceals as well as reveals; ambivalence is universal; the most important things about us are often the ones we are least able to see. Its ethic is not affirmation but the pursuit of truth, including truths that are unwelcome — an enquiry that proceeds through disturbance rather than reassurance.

Both epistemological positions carry real moral weight, and each has its characteristic failure. Defaulting to affirmation risks foreclosing curiosity. Analytic interpretation risks becoming the authority of the clinician over the patient's meaning. From each vantage point, the other looks like an assault: interpretation looks like a refusal to believe and affirm; mandatory affirmation looks like an enforced suspension of analytic function. Much of the course is spent in the space between these two, asking what each sees that the other misses, and whether these perspectives can be held together and co-exist without one quietly cancelling the other.

Threads running through the course

Each seminar takes up a particular area of difference in relation to psychoanalytic theory, but three threads connect them.

Two ways of knowing. The tension described above recurs in every seminar, in a different form each time — in how we listen to a patient's account of their sexuality or gender, in whether racism is best understood as something in the mind or something in the structure of society, and whether neurodivergence is best understood as diagnosis or as identity.

Theory and practice. Psychoanalysis has always insisted that theory and practice cannot be separated: how we listen expresses what we believe about the mind. Yet it could be argued that much contemporary adaptation proceeds by changing the practice while leaving the theory untouched — becoming more affirming or culturally attuned in the room, while the developmental and metapsychological ideas that shaped practice remain quietly in place. The course asks whether this is genuine modernisation, or a way of holding two incompatible positions at once by keeping them apart. If practice changes, what must theory concede — and if theory holds, what does that require of practice?

Substance, not only framework. It would be easy to conclude that the two traditions simply see the world differently and leave it there. The course resists that. Behind the epistemological question lie real, first-order disagreements — about whether the Oedipus complex describes something true of human development or prescribes a norm; whether gender has an essential psychic core or is socially constructed performance; whether psychoanalytic accounts of racism as projective processes illuminate it or psychologise it away.

The seminars

1. The two discourses — two ways of knowing a person

The opening seminar sets out the course's frame. What does it mean to say the subject is not transparent to themselves, and what happens when that premise meets a culture in which self-description is authoritative? We look at the analytic discipline of not-knowing — the refusal to already know the patient — and ask whether it should apply equally to identity, and to psychoanalysis's own strongly held beliefs. We also look briefly at psychoanalysis's institutional history of intolerance: of dissent within its own ranks, and of difference in those it trained and treated.

2. Sexuality and the Oedipus complex

Freud's Three Essays is at once one of the most radical and one of the most normalising texts in the tradition. It loosens the tie between the sexual drive and its object, finds polymorphous sexuality in every childhood — and then organises development towards genital heterosexuality as its "proper" normative end. We trace how the Oedipus complex has been reworked, from Klein's earlier and more primitive triangle to Britton's idea (borrowing from Bion) of triangular space as the ground of thinking. The central question: if we remove the heteronormative assumptions, is the theory modernised to better fit our contemporary cultural ideas about sexuality, or stripped of what makes it distinctive and valuable — and what different strategies are available for modernising it?

3. Gender — identity, or the question of a core

Does gender have a psychic core, rooted in biology, established early and largely fixed, or is it something more provisional, assembled and performed? In exploring both essentialist and social constructionist accounts of gender, this seminar sets classical and contemporary psychoanalytic accounts alongside each other, and takes up one of the most charged questions in current clinical practice: the difference between an exploratory and an affirmative stance in relation to gender identity.

4. Race — projection and its limits

Psychoanalysis offers powerful tools for understanding racism: splitting, projection, the fear of the stranger, the idea of an internal racist organisation. But do these accounts illuminate racism or psychologise it, locating in universal infantile processes something that also has a specific history of colonialism, slavery and empire? We ask why particular groups become the recipients of projection rather than others, what is lost when racism is treated as either purely psychic or purely structural, and how these questions live in the consulting room.

5. Class and the frame

Class has received far less attention in psychoanalytic writing than sexuality, gender or race, and that silence is part of what this seminar explores. The charge that psychoanalysis is by and for the middle classes points to real barriers to training and private treatment, but overlooks much of where the work now happens: in the NHS, community services and schools in disadvantaged areas, where it often works well across class lines. The harder question is theoretical. Class has no real place in psychoanalytic theory, so attending to systemic injustice can feel like a departure from the analytic position. Class difference in the room is readily read as transference alone, as envy or phantasy, when it is also a reality that makes itself known long before anyone interprets it.

6. Disability and neurodivergence — the limits of the developmental model

This is where the course's central question is hardest. A theory organised around maturation and integration has real difficulty not reading both disability and neurodivergence as deficit. We follow psychoanalysis's own internal argument — autism understood as defence, then as deficit, and Valerie Sinason's idea of secondary handicap — and set it against the neurodiversity movement's rejection of both. We also question the grouping itself: what is assumed when very different experiences are placed under one heading? The guiding question is a clinical one: how do we hold a person's difference as valid while remaining available to their challenges, when the surrounding discourse sometimes treats those as opposed?

7. What must be given up, what defended?

The course's intellectual reckoning. Which of psychoanalysis's long-held assumptions can no longer be sustained — the developmental ladder, perversion as a diagnosis, the analyst's authority over meaning, certain ideas of neutrality? And which are non-negotiable if psychoanalysis is to remain itself — the unconscious, ambivalence, the refusal to take the manifest as final, the freedom to think analytically about any claim, including claims about identity? Readers who have got this far will not be surprised that the course does not settle this in advance — though it does not pretend that every answer is equally good.

8. Where are we now?

The final seminar is lighter on new reading by design. Its material is what participants have thought and written across the course. Where has each of us arrived, what has shifted, and what remains genuinely unresolved?

How the course works

The course runs as eight 90-minute online seminars, held fortnightly, in a small group. The fortnight between sessions is part of the design: it leaves time for substantial reading and for ideas to percolate.

Each seminar has a short list of essential reading, with further optional reading for those who want to go deeper. Before each session you will write a brief response to the reading — not a summary, but an account of where you found yourself agreeing, resisting or wanting to explain something away. These responses are not shared with the group, but are the starting point for discussion.

Positions are given their strongest form before they are criticised. Psychoanalytic ideas are not defended by default, and contemporary critiques are not accepted by default. Nothing anyone says is held against them as a final position; the course depends on people being willing to think out loud, to change their minds, and to be unsettled.

It is taught in the psychoanalytic tradition, so our own responses to the ideas — including discomfort, irritation and the wish to reach a conclusion quickly — are treated as part of the material. But it is a course about ideas, not a therapy or experiential group. No one is asked to disclose anything about their own life or identity.

Who the course is for

The course is intended for people already grounded in psychoanalytic ideas — practising psychoanalytic psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, child and adolescent psychotherapists, and trainees well into their training. It assumes familiarity with Freud, Klein and the post-Kleinian and object relations traditions, and is not an introduction to psychoanalytic theory.

It will suit those who find themselves caught between the two traditions it examines: clinicians who value psychoanalytic thinking but feel the force of contemporary critiques. It is less likely to suit anyone looking for a course in cultural competence or clinical technique, or for confirmation of a position already held.

Practical details

Format	Online, fortnightly, 90 minutes
Sessions	Eight
Begins	19 January 2027
Fee	£300
Places	Limited
Tutors	Matthew Jenkins and Jemima Phorson

How to apply

To apply, or for more information, contact info@btpp.co.uk. Places are limited, so early application is recommended.