Past events
Events that have already taken place, kept online for the record.
October 2026
This seminar is one session of a short course on the clinical structures of hysteria and obsessional neurosis, examining how psychoanalysis interprets both conditions. Astrid Gessert leads this session, which investigates Freud's classical theories regarding desire, speech, guilt and the body. It is designed for practitioners and students wishing to understand how these distinct neurotic states present in contemporary therapeutic practice.
This seminar examines the decade when psychoanalysis was established, focusing on Freud's work in the 1890s. Anne Worthington presents on key developments of this era, including the transition from neurology to a psychoanalytic model of the unconscious, free association, and the collaboration with Josef Breuer. The session is designed for practitioners and students wishing to understand why these foundational years remain essential to clinical practice.
This introductory lecture explores how the concept of the unconscious evolved from the theories of Freud to the later work of Lacan. Andrew Hodgkiss examines the shift from a system of dreams and symptoms to a structure resembling language. The session is designed for newcomers wishing to understand these foundational ideas and the relationship between these two influential thinkers.
This seminar explores how practitioners can integrate phototherapy and therapeutic photography into their existing clinical practice. With Prof. Del Loewenthal, participants will examine how images such as selfies, photocards and photobooks can help clients express memories and emotions in the smartphone era. The session is designed for psychotherapists and counsellors who want to use visual narratives as therapeutic tools.
An evening marking the second edition of The Care Manifesto, with Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg and Lynne Segal. The argument is that interdependence should sit at the centre of politics and the economy rather than at their margins, and the authors return to it in a period they describe as one of care-stripping and carelessness. For practitioners who think about care as a public question.
September 2026
Ilaria Iacconi Iambrenghi asks what changes when the dead stop leaving only traces and appear to answer. The paper treats conversational systems as an apparatus for mourning, and develops the idea of a dialogic inheritance made of corrections, refusals and habits of thought rather than stored information. Its claim is not that the dead are simulated, but that loss becomes interactive. For clinicians meeting grief shaped by these tools.
This seminar series with William Crouch explores psychoanalytic approaches to understanding and treating self-harm and suicide. Participants will examine relational and emotional aspects of these behaviours through readings, presentations and clinical discussions. The sessions are designed for therapists, psychoanalysts and mental health practitioners, including those in psychiatry, nursing and social work, who wish to apply these theoretical insights to their own clinical practice.
This round table discussion explores how psychoanalysis interprets the origins of creative work and the role of the unconscious in art. With Soukaina Amira, Arturo Bandinelli and Astrid Gessert, the session examines Freud's concept of sublimation, where drives redirect from sexual goals toward intellectual or artistic outputs, alongside the way phantasy shapes unconscious desire. It is designed for practitioners and researchers interested in these clinical and creative intersections.
This day of discussions and talks offers an introduction to the concepts and practices of psychoanalysis. Attendees can explore key themes such as mental illness, mourning, couples therapy, and storytelling. Chaired by Alex Winter and Antonella Trotta, the event is designed for anyone curious about the field, including those considering professional training.
This seminar focuses on the psychological development of premature infants. Judith Jackson discusses how entering the world early affects a baby's relationships, alongside the impact of intensive care technology on the infant, parents, and medical staff. This event is suitable for psychotherapists, analysts, and trainees interested in early-years clinical practice and child development.
Mary Wild reads four Hitchcock films through psychoanalytic terms the films arguably speak already: Vertigo as a study in the death drive, Psycho as the maternal superego made literal, Rear Window as voyeurism structured rather than deviant, and The Birds as feminine jouissance breaking into the natural world. For clinicians interested in how theory travels into the culture that surrounds their patients.
Keith Barrett opens a five-part introduction to Freud with the material psychoanalysis grew out of: Charcot's demonstrations of hypnosis, Breuer's treatment of Anna O, and the early case histories. The seduction theory is followed to the point Freud abandoned it, and the later trauma theory to its bearing on how we now think about post-traumatic diagnosis. For clinicians who want the primary sources rather than the summary.
This educational series explores fundamental psychoanalytic concepts and their practical application. Suitable for beginners and those wanting to expand their existing knowledge, the programme features presentations by psychoanalysts followed by smaller discussion groups. Participants can study the material over three terms to build a comprehensive foundation, or attend individual terms. The curriculum is supported by reading lists to encourage deeper study.
This clinical paper explores how families cast a child as a scapegoat, focusing on a fourteen-year-old patient with severe anorexia. With speaker Lesley Maroni, attendees will examine therapeutic techniques for engaging young people who reject help and withdraw from life. The session is designed for psychotherapists and mental health practitioners interested in eating disorders, adolescent development, and systemic family dynamics.
This panel discussion explores the physical and mental experience of illness, marking the centenary of Virginia Woolf's essay on the subject. A panel of writers will discuss modern perspectives on disability, care and convalescence. The session is designed for practitioners interested in how creative writing, literature and community support can help patients regain autonomy during times of physical suffering.
An evening symposium marking the publication of CERFI: Analysis Everywhere, on the research cooperative cofounded by Félix Guattari that set out to put analysis at the centre of militant practice. Susana Caló and Godofredo Enes Pereira appear with founding member Anne Querrien, introduced by Raluca Soreanu, and a second panel is moderated by Ana Minozzo. For clinicians curious about analysis outside the consulting room.
Tom DeRose leads a three-week course on the traffic between Freudian thinking and literary modernism: Kafka and Mann on guilt and desire, Proust and Benjamin on memory and fragmentation, Joyce on myth and form. Psychoanalytic texts are read beside the fiction rather than applied to it. For clinicians who want the cultural history their working vocabulary came out of.
A debate with Alexandre Simões, Marcelo Veras and Eva Bruckner, taking as its starting point the documentary Freud, a psicanálise e nós, which Simões directed and which revisits formative places and moments in the life of Freud. Organised with Instituto ESPE for the anniversary programme of the Freud Museum. Conducted throughout in the language of the film, so most useful to lusophone clinicians.
This discussion group, with Irene Stoppoloni, focuses on the novel Milkman by Anna Burns. It offers psychotherapists and colleagues a sociable space to examine thought-provoking fiction and engage in stimulating conversation. The session is suitable for practitioners wishing to connect with peers, share ideas, and earn a continuing professional development certificate.
This discussion group, with Irene Stoppoloni, focuses on the novel Milkman by Anna Burns. The session offers psychotherapists and colleagues an opportunity to examine thought-provoking fiction and engage in sociable, collaborative dialogue. It is designed for practitioners wishing to connect with peers, share ideas, and earn a CPD certificate through informal yet stimulating literary debate.
This seminar examines the historical bombing of Dresden alongside modern violence, exploring how sadomasochism supports totalitarianism. With speaker Jonathan Sklar and chair Giuseppe Caruso, the session uses music to investigate trauma, care, and political terror. It is designed for psychotherapists and trainees interested in how psychoanalysis can address contemporary social fragmentation, authoritarianism, and climate anxiety.
This seminar with Max Karlin explores why some individuals share deep disclosures with artificial intelligence chatbots rather than human therapists. Drawing on phenomenological research, the session examines how the absence of a human presence can offer a sense of safety. It is designed for practitioners wishing to reflect on the therapeutic relationship, client vulnerability, and the implications of digital technology on clinical practice.
Why does the capacity to feel with another matter so much? Jane Shaw draws together evolutionary, psychological and neurobiological accounts of empathy to ask what underpins compassion and social connection, and why fellow feeling has proved so central to the way human beings live alongside one another.
A zine-making workshop that sets psychoanalytic writing on gender and sexuality beside archival material from Broadmoor, and invites participants to take both apart and make something new. With Agnes Meadows, Anna-Peter Magyarlaki, Cate Bailey and Han Dee. Intended first for queer and trans people with experience of psychotherapy or the mental health system, and open to clinicians, trainees and academics.
August 2026
Tom DeRose, Research Manager at the Freud Museum London, takes up Freud's long preoccupation with the figure of Moses, and the curious decision to publish his study of Michelangelo's sculpture without his name on it. The talk reads that choice against Freud's ambivalence towards his Jewish heritage. Useful for clinicians interested in how a founder's private attachments shape the theory he leaves behind.
July 2026
How much of Freud stands up when tested against what we now know about the brain? Mark Solms puts that question at the centre of this talk, weighing the psychoanalytic account of the mind against the findings of neuroscience and asking what, if anything, survives as clinically useful today.
June 2026
Owen Hewitson takes up a question that sits close to the origins of psychoanalysis: how the history of a family conditions the present of the person in the consulting room. Working from a Lacanian frame, he argues that transmission, rather than trauma, may be what is passed down first, and shows how each of us assembles a place within a generational line. Clinical material anchors the argument throughout.
March 2026
Marking the launch of his new book, Anastasios Gaitanidis speaks with Luisa Bloom about what psychoanalysis can bring to the climate crisis. He treats wilderness as both a place and a state of mind, traces how ideas of it have shifted since the Enlightenment, and sketches a wild psychology built on deep attention and reciprocity between people and the living world.
February 2026
Leon Brenner reconsiders how transference works when the patient is psychotic. Rather than treating it as a weaker version of the neurotic case, he approaches psychotic transference as a distinct clinical configuration with its own logic and its own risks. Drawing on Freudian and Lacanian thought, the lecture looks closely at how the analyst positions themselves and holds a workable distance.
November 2025
The seminar turns to Francoise Dolto, the French paediatrician and analyst whose clinical writing is only now reaching many English readers. Lionel Bailly, Sharmini Bailly and Nick Blackburn discuss a recent retranslation of one of her case histories, and make the case for why her attention to childhood and the body still speaks to Lacanian and non-Lacanian practitioners alike.
This opening seminar in the series marks the English publication of Pierre Fedida's Psychopathologies of Living. Its translators, Patrick Ffrench and Nigel Saint, join Ana Minozzo to discuss Fedida's standing in French academic psychoanalysis and the particular difficulty of carrying his thinking across into English. It is a study in what survives, and what shifts, when psychoanalytic writing is translated.
October 2025
The Site's 2025 annual conference asks what psychoanalysis has to say about hope and utopia. Across the day, speakers weigh whether hope works as a structuring force in clinical analysis or as a fantasy that can mislead, and consider how the wish for an ideal state both contains suffering and keeps desire in motion. It gathers a wide range of voices around a single difficult question.
March 2025
This panel forms around Yael Pilowsky Bankirer's book on matricide, a killing psychoanalysis has often formulated and then hidden from view. Reading Freud's case of Little Hans, she treats circumcision as a kind of key fossil for tracing masculine identity, and the discussants set her argument against Lacan, Kristeva and Butler. The result is a close look at what Oedipal theory leaves unsaid about the mother.
February 2025
Leon Brenner looks at the particular seriousness with which many autistic people treat language, approaching words with a precision and intent that the clinic too often mishears. Drawing on autobiography, research and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and on his own work with autistic patients, he asks how practitioners and caretakers might adjust their listening so that language becomes a means of autonomy rather than correction.
October 2024
This conference examines the relational turn that has reshaped psychoanalysis since the 1980s, once a direct challenge to American orthodoxy. Its speakers ask whether relationality, drawing on feminism, queer theory and postcolonial thought, has itself hardened into a new orthodoxy, and what discontents lie inside relational models of practice. The framing is deliberately self-questioning rather than celebratory.
July 2024
Jennifer Cox and Andie Newman discuss Cox's book on women and anger, and the argument that anger women are not permitted to voice turns inward and makes them ill. Cox, a psychotherapist who founded Women Are Mad, offers ways of recognising and naming long suppressed frustration. Newman, an analyst trained at the Site, draws the conversation toward what the consulting room hears when that anger finally surfaces.
June 2024
A gathering, across two days, on feminism and psychoanalysis, past and future. Its organisers argue that patriarchy persists even inside analytic spaces, and that a feminist psychoanalysis to come must make room for what has been pushed out, the feminine, the animal, the racialised and Indigenous other, the sexual dissident. The programme reads psychoanalysis as a political and ethical project rather than a neutral technique.
Jamieson Webster follows Freud's changing view of humour, from something charged with sexual and aggressive tension to something subversive, able to unsettle the super-ego that drives it. Of all the unconscious formations, she notes, humour is the most social, always addressed to someone, and never quite free of a repeated violence. Through the treatment of an adolescent boy she tracks how jouissance is transformed.
February 2024
Around his book On Giving Up, Adam Phillips talks with Francesca Joseph about the many things the phrase can mean, from quiet renunciations to outright collapse. The conversation turns on a deceptively simple question he poses: what is it that we might have to give up in order to feel more alive? Joseph draws him out on the gaps, and the connections, between these forms of giving up.
September 2023
Marking twenty five years since the Site was founded in 1997, this day of panels looks back at an organisation built to keep psychoanalysis critical, reflective and open to argument. Speakers trace its history and follow the thresholds it has crossed into ecology, feminism, race and the arts, and consider what it means to practise psychoanalysis well beyond the clinic. It is part celebration, part stocktaking.
A screening of the film Husband, followed by conversation between its makers, Devorah Baum and Josh Appignanesi, and the psychoanalysts Francesca Joseph and Douglas Gill. It belongs to the Site's occasional series pairing contemporary artists with analytic thinking, on the wager that the two have a great deal to say to each other even when their practices stay distinct.
March 2023
Avgi Saketopoulou presses on a belief psychoanalysis rarely examines: that trauma is only ever damage to be removed. Against this traumatophobic picture she sets traumatophilia, the idea that returning to the site of the traumatic can put its stalled energies back into circulation. Taking the fraught case of racial fetish as her example, and drawing on queer of colour critique, Black feminisms and Laplanche, she asks what a traumatised subject might make of their trauma.
February 2023
Two psychoanalysts who are also writers, Adam Phillips and Josh Cohen, sit down for a wide ranging and largely unscripted conversation about their shared discipline, and open it out to the audience. With no set paper to deliver, the evening follows the turns of their thinking about what psychoanalysis is and what it is for.
January 2023
The critical psychologist Robert K Beshara examines how Islamophobia gets recast as a private psychological matter, and reads that move through Lacan's discourse of the university. Bringing in Said, Dussel and Mignolo, he argues for a decolonial psychoanalysis that keeps the political and historical in view. The talk draws on his book on critical Islamophobia studies.
November 2022
Dany Nobus asks how gender is made, and whether we still need it. Treating gender as a knot of lived experience and socio-cultural convention, he questions its standing as a source of self-knowledge, engages Paul Preciado's challenge to psychoanalytic binaries, and follows the thought experiment of giving up the concept altogether to see what would remain of identity.
September 2022
A round table on Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel's book bringing birth into a conversation usually organised around death. Where much Western thought fixes on mortality, the discussion follows birth as a figure across religion, art and philosophy, drawing on Jewish sources, and lingers on the maternal, the womb and what one speaker calls the Bionian no-thing.
December 2021
An evening given over entirely to questions. With no set talk, the audience puts its own to Adam Phillips, one of the most widely read psychoanalysts writing today, in an exchange hosted by Chris Oakley as part of the Site's occasional events. The form is the point: what surfaces when a room, rather than a lecturer, sets the agenda.
November 2021
In this earlier statement of the idea, Avgi Saketopoulou argues that real psychic transformation can come from working at the site of trauma rather than around it. She introduces limit consent, the charged territory where freedom and constraint fold into each other, and uses the histories of slavery and racism to test what expanded psychic freedom might mean for those the past has marked.
October 2021
A two day conference on how race runs through psychoanalysis even where the field denies it. Held with Goldsmiths to coincide with Black History Month, it asks what race does to the clinic, to theory making, to who can reach treatment, and to the institutions that train analysts. Achille Mbembe and Adam Phillips are among a large group of speakers pressing the question of a psychoanalysis yet to come.
July 2021
The artist Niya B reworks the myth of Tiresias, changed into a woman for seven years, into what she calls a transgender mythopoesis. Titled after the shedding of reptile skin, Ekdysis moves through ritual, sound and a single channel film to think about ecology, gender and equity in mental health together. The screening and talk sit within the Site's In Relation series, where artists meet analytic thinking.
Two women in long conversation about mortality and motherhood. Jane Haynes, a Jungian analyst and founder member of the Site, talks with Jutta Laing, who once worked as R.D. Laing's assistant and now works through the body and the breath. Part of the In Relation series, it is a personal exchange about loss, attention and what it means to celebrate a life that ends.
Shalini Masih describes what happens to psychoanalysis when it travels to India. Working as a researcher at a temple known for its rituals of exorcism, she found ordinary analytic language failing her, and had to improvise another one, still carrying the spirit of psychoanalysis but able to meet a possessed person where they actually were. The talk is a study in listening across very different worlds.
June 2021
After his father died suddenly in 2018, Nick Blackburn found himself researching Chernobyl, work that became his book The Reactor. Reading from that and from other writers, he traces lines between psychoanalysis and the figure of the hysteric, between artworking, trauma and the law. It is a talk about psychoanalytic writing as its own kind of thinking, made under the pressure of grief.
Angela Kreeger begins, disarmingly, with Olive Oyl, who only wanted to be a conversationalist, and finds in that a description of her own work as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Taking up Adam Phillips's remark that analysis lets both patient and therapist live more fully, she reflects on why the work stays so absorbing and testing across a career. The talk belongs to the Site's In Relation series.
Laura Chernaik takes a line from Buber, that whoever says You has nothing but stands in relation, and turns it on collective life. Does a We keep genuine relation with a Them, she asks, or does it defend against negation, as Andre Green might suggest? A Site member in private practice, she brings a way of listening that moves between Freudian, Ferenczian, Lacanian and relational traditions.
October 2020
Kate Gilbert draws Susie Orbach into conversation about a body of work that reshaped how the culture thinks about bodies, appetite and the therapeutic relationship. They turn in particular to her book In Therapy, and its unusual attempt to open the consulting room to a wider public without flattening what happens inside it.
June 2020
In the second session Philip Hill turns to truth and interpretation. What is the ego's relation to the truth, he asks, and can an interpretation be true, and would it matter if it were? Setting Freudian and Lacanian theory against object relations, he follows the ties between trauma, language and image, and takes up countertransference as a clinical problem. Again no prior knowledge of Lacan is assumed.
May 2020
Philip Hill opens a clinical introduction to Lacan with two provocations: that suffering may be necessary and enjoyment compulsory. Working through the symptom, he sets torture beside orgasm, sorts subject from object, and draws the fine distinctions between demand, love and desire that shape a treatment. Pitched at those with no prior Lacanian reading, the seminar keeps returning to the ethics of the clinician and the good of the other.
An open evening introducing the Site's UKCP registered training in psychoanalysis. What sets it apart, the organisers suggest, is the weight it gives to the historical, philosophical and political contexts in which psychoanalytic ideas were formed, so that students meet not only the different traditions of thought but the social practices that produced them. A short presentation opens onto discussion.
Vestibola is not the organiser of any event listed here and takes no booking, fee or responsibility for it.