APPI Annual Congress - Is Trauma Real?

The Key Note address for the APPI Congress will be delivered by Martin J. Daly, Psychoanalyst.

In addition the Congress will include a range of presentations ranging from the trauma of birth, contemporary trauma we see in the clinic and modern presentations of war trauma. The event will also feature art work depicting trauma as well as a poster presentation.

It will conclude with a wine reception and the launch of the FREUD LACAN institute ( FLi ).

Note: Free parking in the hotel car park – please present your ticket at reception for validation

PROGRAMME

10.30 – 11.00a.m. Registration

11.00 – 11.15a.m.

Welcome, Helena Texier, Chair APPI Ltd

11.15 – 12.30p.m.

What is Trauma Really?

Helena Texier – Birth of Trauma: Going back to move on

Tony Hughes - Is Trauma Real?

Nadezhda Almqvist - From Traumatic Hysteria to War Neurosis: How Can Freud Help us with the Suffering Subject?

12.30 – 1.15p.m.

Key note address

Martin J. Daly, psychoanalyst

States of Fear: The Nightmare and The Prisoner

1.15 – 2.15p.m.

Lunch – not included in price

2.15 – 3.30p.m.

Prisoners of Repetition

Laura Tarafás - "I had access to the truth." - From Islam(s) to radicalisation in the psychoanalytic treatment.

Thomas Michael Conlon – The contemporary clinical relevance of Freud’s concept of ‘Nachträglichkeit’

Eve Watson – The Mythification of Memory: Freud, Lacan and Sebald’s Austerlitz (15 min)

John O’Donoghue– Introduce art and posters

3.30 – 4.00p.m.

Coffee break and exhibition

4.00 – 5.15p.m.

Are we just being traumatic?

Rob Weatherill - Has everything become THE TRAUMA OF THE OTHER (15 min)

Marie Walshe - “Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.” A clinical pursuit of the hidden testimony of trauma.

Denise Brett – What is Trauma?

5.15 – 5.30p.m.

Phil Hanlon - Closing comments

5.30p.m.

Wine reception and Launch of Freud Lacan institute (FLi)

Abstracts

Martin J. Daly – KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Title: States of Fear: The Nightmare and The Prisoner.

"Trauma" is a word about whose meaning there is no consensus, a word that everyone uses. Yet it has no fixed meaning on which everyone agrees and the constant use of the word generates the illusion that everyone refers to the same phenomenon whenever the word "trauma" is mentioned. Those in prison are no different than we are. Both Dostoyevsky and Lacan assume that there are no normal people and anyone who makes that claim is, according to Dostoyevsky, a "feeble specimen". We are all neurotic. So does everyone have their own trauma? Do those in prison encounter the traumatic Real in a different way than those outside? I hope to reflect on twenty plus years of working with men serving long sentences in prison.

Bio

Martin has been a prominent figure in Irish psychoanalysis, and in the training and supervision of Irish psychoanalysts for many years. Martin is currently working with ex prisoners. Martin is a Registered Practitioner and a former Chair of APPI, a member of IFPP and a member of ICP. He taught on the Master’s degree courses at St. Vincent’s Hospital School of Psychotherapy, LBS and Dublin Business School for many years. He is currently a practicing psychoanalyst and a supervisor of other practitioners.

Panel 1 – IS TRAUMA REAL?

Helena Texier

Title: Birth of Trauma: Going back to go on

The newspaper reports that a man has been shot in both legs in front of his 10-year-old son who runs to a neighbouring house for help. A man, bundled into a horsebox, is tortured, has his legs broken, the initials of a well-known company are carved into his chest with a knife. In the immediate wake of the Bataclan bombing in Paris, a young mother of two small children is paid a pittance to watch all the disturbing content uploaded by ISIS to the interface of a social media giant, neutralising it before it detonates on our phones. Every week brings another court report concerning years of sexual abuse of young children by those close to them. Every day brings new news of the atrocities that humans have inflicted upon each other.

Given the revelations of neglect and abuse, physical and psychological - if anyone can tell those apart when they are suffering them - perpetrated by those charged by the Irish State with the care of its most vulnerable citizens, how can the question seriously be posed of whether trauma is real? There is an obvious courting of controversy in the title dreamt up for this year’s APPI congress. A conflict, old as the hills of the history of psychoanalysis itself, is conjured up. This hinges on a moment situated by some as the inaugural moment of psychoanalysis proper, - the ‘abandonment’ by Freud of the seduction theory and the ‘adoption’ of the theory of unconscious phantasy as being the essential aspect of the psychoanalytic conception of trauma. But does psychoanalysis need to get real?

The presenter hopes to ground this question via a brief detour through the work of Jean Laplanche.

Bio

Helena Texier is a psychoanalyst in private practice for nearly thirty years. She has taught psychoanalytic theory in TCD, UCD and DBS, on clinical training programs at Masters’ level and to undergraduates. She has been invited to speak at professional congresses at home in Ireland and internationally. She was for a long time editor of the Irish psychoanalytic journal THE LETTER, has had articles published in English, French and German and contributed to the Edinburgh International Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis. She is currently Chair of the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland APPI.

Tony Hughes

Title: Is Trauma Real?

Is fear of the blank page or canvas the result of trauma or simply an inhibition? What is the difference between these nominations? What is at the root of trauma? Does it find its inception at birth, when the baby is confronted with the external world? Does the human subject, through his/her encounter with language suffer a primordial trauma, which ever-present, can be triggered by impossibility of the missed encounter, resulting in a neurosis such as Freud attributed to war? And where does the uncanny come into being?

Bio

Tony Hughes is a practising member of the Irish School for Lacanian Psychoanalysis (ISLP). He has written a number of papers in The Letter – Irish Journal for Psychoanalysis, and he has developed a particular interest in Lacan’s topological objects – the torus, Moebius strip, Klein bottle, cross cap and the Borromean knot.

Nadezhda Almqvist

Title: From Traumatic Hysteria to War Neurosis: How Can Freud Help us with the Suffering Subject?

Trauma is a word that Freud would have first encountered as a medical student and later as a doctor. His short medical career has certainly influenced his earlier thinking on what trauma is. From the beginning of his career Freud was an independent and brave thinker who often went against popular ideas including his own. The way he thought about trauma during the period he worked with Breuer changed over time especially with the outbreak of the wars. When Freud theorised, it was usually not because he had some purely theoretical point but because he came across something in the clinic that forced him to rethink his theory. This paper will explore the subject’s suffering that Freud discovered in his consulting room and beyond.

Bio

Nadezhda Almqvist is a practicing psychoanalyst in Dublin. She is a member of APPI and Espace Analytique. Since the beginning of her formation Nadezhda has been an active member of the Dublin Lacan Study Group and presented papers at congresses, seminars and reading groups in Ireland and abroad. Recently she co-edited a book with Carol Owens entitled Studying Lacan's Seminars IV and V From Lack to Desire. Nadezhda is currently leading a Freud Reading Group.

Panel 2 – PRISONERS OF REPETITION

Laura Tarafas

Title: “I had access to the truth.” – From Islam(s) to radicalisation in the psychoanalytic clinic

Radicalisation is in fact a frightening and insidious phenomenon: it creeps through teenagers’ computers, mesmerises and infects them through social media, conspiracy theories and video games. By misappropriating the signifier “Islam” it creates a narrative that uses religious precepts, in order to lead young people, in particular, to self-exclusion and the exclusion of everything that isn’t like them (Bouzar et al., 2014, p. 6). The monstrous acts that certain radicalised youth end up committing provokes anxiety in us and hypnotizes our thinking which often leads to the usage of binary concepts such as “the islamisation of radicality” and the “radicalisation of Islam”, “radicalisation” and “de-radicalisation”. These categories mirror the binary thinking that creates breeding grounds for fundamentalism: us vs. them. This presentation attempts to approach the phenomenon of radicalisation from a complex psychoanalytic framework, arguing that the process of indoctrination enslaves young people in very similar ways as drugs enslave the addict. Studies completed by the CPDSI (Centre de Prévention contre les Dérives Sectaires liées à l'Islam) will provide examples to support and illustrate my arguments.

Bio

Laura Tarafás holds an MA in Developmental and Clinical Psychology, a PhD in Intercultural Clinical Psychology and is currently completing her training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. She has international clinical experience in working with families from diverse cultural backgrounds. In addition to English, she practises in French and Hungarian. She is working as a Psychotherapist at SPIRASI (Spiritan Asylum Services Initiative) in Dublin, Ireland.

Thomas Michael Conlon

Title: The contemporary clinical relevance of Freud’s concept of ‘Nachträglichkeit’

Freud’s concept of ‘nachträglichkeit’ involves the, belated, assignment of new meaning to memory traces, where a primary event leaves a trace with the initial memory of that event revived by a second event. But is it possible to reconcile this concept with the prevailing psychiatric discourse of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), where the trauma is deemed to be causally linked to the particularities of a single event? My query is based partly on questions emerging from my own clinical practice as well as the fact that Freud’s concept does not feature significantly in the contemporary literature on trauma. The goal of my work was to review the development of the concept of ‘nachträglichkeit’ by Freud and other commentators, and to determine to what extent it can be reconciled with the logic of the diagnosis of PTSD contained in the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). I reviewed the works of Freud, with particular emphasis on the Emma case. I also reviewed Lacan’s (1953) relevant discussion on the Wolfman and the significant work of Pontalis and Laplanche’s (1967) which highlighted the importance of the concept. I then reviewed the work of key contemporary commentators in this area (Verhaeghe, Vanheule, Venderveken, Bistoen), and then subsequently critiqued the DSM perspective. My view, based on my own clinic, is that it is possible to integrate both the psychoanalytic and DSM perspective in a clinical context where subjectivity can be retained as a critical factor in understanding trauma.

Bio

Tom Conlon works as a psychoanalytic therapist in private practice in Dublin and Cork. He is a graduate of the MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Programme at UCD. He is in the final year of the Special Modality Training in Psychotherapy Training in UCD. He also holds a Diploma in Group Work Practice awarded by Irish Group Analytic Society, and conducts support groups in Cork.

He is Programme Director of a research programme, called Tri-Factor Health, which involves a blend of Psychotherapy, Fitness Training and Nutritional Therapy. His research interest is the relationship between obesity/binge eating disorder and trauma, informed by Freud's concept of Nachträglichkeit (or 'afterwardness').

Eve Watson

Title: The Mythification of Memory: Freud, Lacan and Sebald’s Austerlitz

This paper explores the theme of memory and the process of remembering, linked to the inception of psychoanalysis and Freud’s work with his first hysterical patients which taught him that remembering, or rather, reminiscing, forms a crucial part of every analysis. Remembering is imprecise and is therefore of immense significance. What doesn’t fit into the narrative of life is “trauma.” It is what could not be assimilated by the subject and thus it is separated from “memory” (Braunstein, 2010, p. 6). In developing this, I will assess Freud’s early work with female hysterics and his work on technique, as well as Lacan’s elaborations of Freud’s technique in his work in the fifties which instrumentalise the importance of “dialectic” in supporting the analysand’s speech and remembering. What is essential is the “reconstruction” of the past and not simply reproducing it. W.G. Sebald’s compelling novel Austerlitz (2001) serves as a complimentary text in assessing the significance of memory and remembering.

Bio

Eve Watson practices psychoanalysis and lectures in psychoanalysis on various academic programmes. She co-edited the book Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory with Noreen Giffney, and is published on the feminine, sexuality, film, culture, and psychoanalyic practice. She is the editor of the APPI journal LACUNAE and is course director of the Freud Lacan institute (FLi). She is currently reading Hegel in conjunction with Lacan’s early seminars.

Panel 3 – ARE WE JUST BEING TRAUMATIC?

Rob Weatherill

Title: Has everything become THE TRAUMA OF THE OTHER.

Has everything become traumatic? Is being in its persistence (conatus essendi) traumatic? Here we will consider the radicality of Levinas and Weil as they consider “IS IT RIGHTEOUS TO BE?” Being afflicted, being traumatised is the “null site” beyond the human and the source of the “ethics beyond ethics”, from which comes our paranoid fear and rage-hate of the proximity of the Other.

Bio

Rob Weatherill is a practicing and supervisory analyst in Dublin, a member IFPP, APPI and IPC. He has a Master’s degree in psychotherapy from St. Vincent’s University Hospital as well as the European Certificate in Psychotherapy. He has taught psychoanalysis on post-graduate courses at St Vincent’s University College Hospital Dublin, Trinity College Dublin and the Milltown Institute of Philosophy and Theology. He has written several books as well as papers and articles exploring the interface between psychoanalysis and culture. His most recent book is The Anti-Oedipus Complex. Lacan, Critical Theory and Postmodernism. (Routledge 2017).

Marie Walshe

Title: “Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.” A clinical pursuit of the hidden testimony of trauma.

The clinic of trauma for psychoanalysis is a clinic of holes - gaps in meaning, lost signifiers, and a lack in being. It is a clinic in which the knotting of time and space have a particular resonance. Trauma in-sists in the unconscious, not tethered to the symbolic co-ordinates of past, present and future but reiterating in the unending real of the drive, in the suffering that Lacan called ‘trou-matisme’. (1974). Bridging these gaps to create a safety net of RSI knots demands a delicate fort-da movement of transference and counter-transference. The analysands of whose treatment I write have experienced the disintegrating effects of abandonment, annihilation, abuse or otherwise traumatic objectification by a psychotic or perverse Other. For them, “the body is bound up in this matter of the phallus - and how - but the phallus, on the contrary, is bound to nothing.” (Lacan 1959).

Bio

Marie Walshe is a psychoanalyst working with children, adults and couples, as Practitioner-Director of the Leeson Analytic Centre in Dublin’s city centre. Previously published in The Letter, The Review and Lacunae, in 2017 she contributed a chapter the adolescent's relation to their body, to a textbook on Lacanian perspectives on child and adolescent psychoanalysis.

Marie is currently interested in contemporary forms of personal testimony, including film, documentary, certain performance art, vlogs and personal testimonies of abuse within institutional and social media frameworks. From the perspective of a Lacanian analyst, such testimonies represent crucial attempts to find signifiers for a disavowed and foreclosed experience in the Real. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, these testimonies are privileged ‘speech events’ which bear comparison to the analysand’s uncensored associations. It is Marie’s hypothesis that they represent a tentative punctuation of our hitherto disavowed relation to certain parts of our cultural legacy. Marie is interested in exploring what Other is addressed by such testimony and the libidinal investment at stake in such articulations at the cultural-personal borderline.

Denise Brett

Title: What is Trauma?

From the moment of entry to this world we experience trauma, when the unborn baby leaves its cocoon of safety and enters the world of noise of harsh lights, strange hands, maybe a forceps and many many beings.

Without Trauma we are not born, we do not enter language. Any choice or change of state requires a trauma, a loss. Do our early structuring choices determine our future rules of engagement vis a vis Trauma? Do they explain why some people are less effected by trauma than others?

It is difficult to consider Trauma on a universal level, what is trauma for one may not be Trauma for another. One person may be traumatised by a look, a word or a touch. Another person might not be as traumatised by an assault. We proceed one by one and cannot make an assumption of what is traumatic, it is so individual; so when we consider the idea of trauma without considering the individual, it is like trying to look at something subjective without the subject.

That said, we can look at the effects that produce a trauma and how they relate to the registers of the real the symbolic and the imaginary.

Bio

Denise Brett is a practicing Psychoanalyst since 2002. She also works as an exam and study coach, primarily with adolescents. She holds an BA in Psychology and an MSc in Clinical Psychotherapy. Denise has 4 years post masters clinical training: APPI’s 2 year POF and a further 2 years in Child Psychoanalysis with Analysts from Espace Analytique and Analyse Freudienne. She also has an Advanced Diploma in hypnotherapy. She is a regular contributor at Analyse Freudienne conferences in Paris, and is published in Irish and French Psychoanalytic Journals. She has many interests including Lacan’s use of topology. She is a member of APPI and ISLP.

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VISUAL ART and POSTER DISPLAY

Visual Art

We are pleased to present a number of pieces of original art work by HICHEM

HICHEM is a self-taught artist from North Africa. His work represents the trauma experienced first-hand through drawing and painting. Escaping systematic dehumanisation including being tortured by an oppressive regime he embarked on a long and difficult journey before finding safety and security in Ireland. Through art he gives form to the imprints left by this experience while the very act of painting and drawing becomes a testimony of the subject. For Hichem, every piece which is never a completion always aims at the transmission of pain.

Posters

Kamila Jelinkova and Laura Tarafas

Poster title: 'Holding at Bay: Trauma of Asylum-Seekers through the Lens of Specular Phenomena, Mourning and Melancholia'

The number of asylum-seekers in Ireland showed a significant increase in 2018. However, this number only represents a small percentage of the total number of applications in the EU. Most asylum-seekers are likely to have suffered traumas in their home country, throughout the journey and in the host country as well. This poster is an attempt to grasp something of the unspeakable Real of trauma, by linking subjective experiences of traumatised subjects to psychoanalytic concepts, such as the specular phenomenon, identification, mourning and melancholia.

Bio

Kamila Jelinkova completed a BA (Hons) in Psychology and is currently studying an MA in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. Kamila has experience working with clients living with chronic illness, and as a part of her studies trained within the areas of perinatal mental health and a homework club initiative. She is presently working for Centric Health, a provider of primary and urgent health care in Ireland and the UK.

Laura Tarafás holds an MA in Developmental and Clinical Psychology, a PhD in Intercultural Clinical Psychology and is currently completing her training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. She has international clinical experience in working with families from diverse cultural backgrounds. In addition to English, she practises in French and Hungarian. She is working as a Psychotherapist at SPIRASI (Spiritan Asylum Services Initiative) in Dublin, Ireland.

Chloe Graham and Hillary White

Poster title: Life against Death: The Suicidal Subjects’ Trauma

Suicide is an act with meaning and has a purpose, both manifest and unconscious. Suicide occurs in states where affect cannot be moderated, when floods of anguish, rage, loneliness and self-loathing sweep through the mind. When the subject experiences this, it cannot be controlled and these effects become excruciatingly painful which is traumatic, and a traumatic anxiety is aroused. Intolerable emotional suffering can damage the ego and lead to withdrawal of the inner influences that protect it ordinarily. Through the works of Freud, Lacan and others, on the areas of self-destruction, the collapse of the ego, break-up of the self and the suicidal body, this poster will explore the different elements of what can create trauma for the suicidal subject and their surviving families.

Bio

Hilary White completed a BA (Hons) in Early Years and Childhood Studies followed by a HDip in Psychotherapy Studies. She is now currently studying an MA in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. She is presently working as a Preschool teacher and she also enjoys working with children who have additional needs.

Chloe Greham completed a BA (Joint Honours in Psychological Studies and Philosophy) followed by a HDip in Psychology. She is currently in her second year on the MA Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy programme. She is currently working in supported living services for NUA Healthcare experiencing a wide range of disorders and mental illness with the service users.

Wine reception and launch of the FREUD LACAN institute ( FLi ) will conclude the Congress.

This event is open to members and students from all psychotherapy modalities, psychiatrists, medical doctors and anyone working clinically. It is not open to the general public.