IARPP-Australia has just concluded its 2020 seminar program and Annual General Meeting.
We’ve held nine seminars this year, though sadly only the first, our Melbourne Symposium in February, was “live” or in person. The rest were conducted on-line. That first symposium featured Melbourne members Shoshanna Jordan, Tammy Ben-Shaul and Peter Mackay, who’d previously presented their papers at the 2019 Tel Aviv conference. We’d planned to hold a similar event in Sydney but resolved to defer this, hoping we’d be able to return to in person seminars. Unfortunately, this has not yet been possible.
Our video Zoom seminar series began with Robert Grossmark (USA) presenting on The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst, Psychoanalytic Companioning and The Flow of Enactive Engagement. The two seminars were very well attended and received.
Two seminars from Ginna Clark (USA) followed, in August: Primary Speech and the Silencing of Sexuality and Particularizing and Finding Meaning in Pornography. Ginna’s sensitive and complex presentations stimulated lively and engaged discussion.
In October, Steven Stern (USA) joined us for two seminars on Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing and Force Field Transformation and Therapeutic Action. Unsurprisingly, these seminars proved very popular and timely, as the colloquium discussion of Dr. Stern’s Airless Worlds paper began shortly after.
We finished the year with two presentations entitled Moving Forward From Irreparable Harm, from two of our immediate past presidents, Gerard Webster and Roberto D’Angelo. Both drew on psychoanalytic complexity theory to discuss and consider treatment implications in work with two controversial phenomena. Gerard spoke of his work with those who sexually abuse children; Roberto considered different ways of conceptualizing gender dysphoria, transitioning, and de-transitioning. Both presentations were complex, sensitive and very moving.
It is spring now in the southern hemisphere, and we are entering “the silly season,” as we call it, as all the holidays and our long summer approach. At present, there is no community transmission of Covid in Australia, and many of the onerous restrictions on gatherings and travel are being lifted. At the same time, we are all extremely apprehensive about a repeat of the terrible bushfires of the 2019-20 summer.
Annette Conradi, President
