The Association for Psychosocial Studies

Psychosocial Studies Online Reading Group: Reanimating the Plague
2021-11-26 16:00 - 18:00 (Europe/London)
Lizaveta van Munsteren and Tom Fielder
Special introduction by Silvia Posocco
After a long summer hiatus, we are incredibly happy to invite you to join us at the monthly APS online reading groups where we will be coming together and discussing topical articles drawn from The Journal of Psychosocial Studies.
This month Lizaveta van Munsteren and Tom Fielder will be presenting their article, “Reanimating the Plague”, which is drawn from a special issue of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies on the Covid-19 pandemic. Silvia Posocco will briefly introduce the article, contextualising it within the special issue it is drawn from.
The article is available to download for free here

Abstract: The idea of ‘plague’ has returned to public consciousness with the arrival of Covid-19. An anachronistic and extremely problematic concept for thinking about biopolitical catastrophe, plague nevertheless offers an enormous historical range and a potentially highly generative metaphorical framework for psychosocial studies to engage with, e.g. through Albert Camus’ The Plague and Sophocles’ Oedipus The King. It is moreover a word which is likely to remain firmly within the remit of public consciousness as we move further into the Anthropocene, to face further pandemics and the spectre of antibiotic resistance. A return to plague also opens up the question of a return to psychoanalysis, which Freud is often cited as having described as a ‘plague’. Psychoanalysis is, like plague, a troubling and problematic discourse for psychosocial studies, but, like plague, it may also help us to work-through the disorders and diseases of Covid-times. In fact, if the recent pandemic has reanimated the notion of plague, the plague metaphor may in turn help to reanimate psychoanalysis, and we suggest some of the analogical, even genealogical resonances of such an implication.
All registered attendees should receive a link to join a Zoom call when registering for the event. A reminder email with the link will also be sent out the day of the event.

Author biographies:
Lizaveta van Munsteren (Zeldzina) is a psychologist with many years of clinical experience both in private practice and institutional settings. She completed her education in Russia and in the UK and currently is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research is dedicated to the vicissitudes of psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia 1930-1980. Apart from her clinical practice experience, Lizaveta is PGTA at UCL and TA and Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. Lizaveta is also a member of the Editorial Board of Vestigia journal.
Tom Fielder is a PhD researcher in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck. His research engages psychoanalysis, history, literature and politics, and is focused on the question of how to think about Brexit. He has published academic articles in History of the Human Sciences and the Journal of Psychosocial Studies.
Dr Silvia Posocco is a social anthropologist with interdisciplinary research interests in gender and sexuality studies and violence, conflict and genocide studies. She have studied ethnographically insurgent movements in Guatemala, the archives of transnational adoption across sites and temporalities, and most recently, forensic archives, bioinformation and cultures of evidence.

Stay in touch
More events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything. Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

APS Online Conference: Psychosocial Bodies
2021-07-01 - 2021-07-10
Agenda and Zoom Link Booklet
Psychosocial Bodies Conference Booklet
Dropbox folder with conference presentation slides

Recordings of Keynote Talks
Invited Speakers:

Ezimma Chigbo
Professor Derek Hook
Professor Elelwani Ramugondo

APS 2020 Conference Committee: Lindsey Nicholls, Poul Rohleder, Julie Walsh, Deborah Wright, University Of Essex; Anthony Faramelli, IoE UCL; Sarah Shorrock, UCLan

Psychoanalysis Culture & Religion: Times of Conspiracy Theories & Fake News
2021-06-10 15:30 - 17:30
Abstract
We live in a time that is characterised by increasing political polarisation, fake news, conspiracy theories and other forms of extremism. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram are often characterised by misogyny, sexism and racism and as lacking in empathy, compassion and love.
This seminar will explore what role psychoanalysis in combination with religion can play in analysing such phenomena, as well as finding possible solutions for them. Recent political developments, such as the Trump presidency, have been credited with an increase in political paranoia and conspiracy theories have spread far and wide on the internet. Contemporary forms of conspiracy thinking, such as QAnon, have led to the establishment of communities which, to a degree, have quasi-religious characteristics.
This seminar asks how our contemporary age can be analysed through the prism of post-Freudian psychoanalysis and religious studies. Do we need a new form of spirituality? What can a psychoanalytic understanding of religion offer in analysing the phenomena described above? What can psychoanalysis and religion learn from each other in the present moment? How do religious understandings of hope, love and compassion figure in times of seeming uncertainty, mistrust and fantasies?

Speakers:
Peter Tyler (St. Mary’s University): Nietzsche and his Influence on Freud and Jung
Mark Murphy (St. Mary’s University): Freud, Lacan and their Approach to the “Mystical”
Anthony Faramelli (Goldsmiths): The Alt-Right and Religion: The Death Drive in American Evangelicalism
Registration
Please note: This session will replace the monthly Reading Group that usually happens on the las Friday of every month.
As always, these reading groups are free to attend and open to all.
All registered attendees will be sent a link to join a Zoom call the day of the event.
Keep Up to Date
Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything . Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.
APS Conference:
Registration for the APS 2021 Psychosocial Bodies Conference is now open. All information can be found here.

APS Reading Group: Maggie Long’s “Derry Girls”
2021-05-28 16:00 - 18:00

Psychosocial Perspectives on Contemporary Fascism webinar
2021-05-13 16:30 - 18:00
With Jacob Johanssen, Fiona Murray and Anthony Faramelli. Chaired by Nini Fang and hosted in partnership with University of Edinburgh

APS Reading Group: Book Launch, Nigel Williams’ Mapping Social Memory: A Psychotherapeutic Psychosocial Approach
2021-04-30 16:00 - 18:00

Bion, the Curiosity Drive and Inquisitive Thinking
2021-04-17 10:00 - 14:00
An on-line workshop offered by Institute of Group Analysis (London) and the Association of Psychosocial Studies (APS)

Free of charge.
Saturday 17th April 29th 2021 10:00– 14:00
Presenter: Philip Stokoe, Psychoanalyst & Organisational Consultant.
Chair: Dr Rachel Gibbons, Psychoanalyst, Group Analyst and Consultant Psychiatrist

Philip Stokoe will present a discussion of the work of W.R. Bion in the context of his own recent book The Curiosity Drive: Our Need for Inquisitive Thinking. Philip will discuss the implications of this thinking for how we might understand the healthy organisation.

Philip Stokoe is a Psychoanalyst in private practice working with adults and couples, and an Organisational Consultant, providing consultation to a wide range of organisations.
He worked in the Adult Department of the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust between 1994 and 2012, he was the Clinical Director from 2007. During his career, he has been responsible for the creation of innovative services; designing a treatment system for very dangerous adolescents held in a Youth Treatment Centre; developing a model for understanding organisations called the Healthy Organisation Model from which, he created an innovative intervention for teams and organisations, the short course intervention, which combines teaching and consultation; he designed the Primary Care Psychotherapy Consultation Service (PCPCS), and these ideas have led to a radically different approach to training psychiatric nurses, which has been running at City University. He also designed two Masters courses and was the co-designer of the Couple Psychotherapy Training at the Tavistock Clinic.

The Curiosity Drive: Our Need for Inquisitive Thinking, which forms the base of this presentation, was published by Phoenix Publishing House in November 2020.

The programme will comprise presentations followed by breakouts and plenary discussions

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0lf-ipqjgoHNXSPEeVRULKNsETP4heGs0v

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

APS Reading Group: On Disappointment: promoting ordinary conversation for, an in, extraordinary times
2021-03-26 17:00 - 19:00
Please join us for our monthly online reading groups where we will be coming together and discussing topical articles drawn from The Journal of Psychosocial Studies.
This month Christopher Scanlon’s article, “On Disappointment, Failure and Forgivness: promoting ordinary conversation for, and in, extraordinary times?”
A free copy of the article is available to download here
Abstract
To be disappointed is to be human, to be disappointing is also to be human. This article will invite reflection upon the under-theorised phenomenon of disappointment and its relationship to ‘failure’, to ‘hope’ and perhaps even ‘forgiveness’ (or the lack if it). The central premise is that to engage with ‘disappointment’ in our internal relatedness, and in our interpersonal and social relationships may enable us to re-connect with our own and others’ humanity – and not to do so is to remain stuck, aggrieved, resentful and locked into cycles of reciprocal self- and other-destructive violence and recrimination. The article will seek to explore disappointment as a ‘disturbance of groupishness’ (Bion, 1961, emphasis added), ‘a location of disturbance’ (Foulkes, 1948/1983 emphasis added) and a way of structuring the traumatised organisation-in-the-mind (Armstrong, 2005; Scanlon, 2012). The article will conclude with an invitation for psycho-social practitioners to leave our psycho-social retreats (consulting rooms, libraries, classrooms and the like) and, once again, to engage more deliberatively with conversations in ‘public spheres’ (Habermas, 1968).

Author biography:
Christopher Scanlon is an Independent Psycho-socialist Researcher and Consultant, a Training Group Analyst of the Institute of Group Analysis (London) and the Irish Group Analytic Society (Dublin) and Lecturer in Organisational Consultancy, Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust/University of Essex. Chris is also on the Executive Board of the Association for Psychosocial Studies.
Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything . Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

APS Reading Group: No room at the inn? Re-imagining social inclusion at the intersections between climate change, globalisation, homelessness & human migration
2021-02-26 17:00 - 19:00
Abstract:
There are two dominant and competing ways of conceptualising the psychosocial dynamics of social inclusion. In ‘Metropolitan’ systems, if you’re the wrong side of that line which denotes who’s ‘in’ and who’s ‘out’, you’re excluded and oppressed, but you can ‘come in from the cold’ if you accept the terms of the invitation. In ‘Cosmopolitan’ systems, there are different accounts and practices, but essentially there’s a ‘comprehending circle’ involved, in which all are included by being drawn in towards the centre. Climate disaster threatens to overturn these paradigms. I build upon Latour’s work on the new politics of globalisation, as well as upon my previous (co-authored) work concerning Diogenes of Sinope, who coined the term ‘Kosmopolitēs’. The figure of Diogenes may stand for a third position: a monadic figure beyond system and order. This third position illuminates fraught encounters between imperialist in-groups and colonised out-groups in late modernity. The Keeling Count at Mauna Loa is a register whose implications suggest that, in the Anthropocene, we are all unhoused. Latour’s ‘migrations without form or nation’ of ‘climate, erosion, pollution, resource depletion, habitat destruction’ threaten to make migrants of us all – or, to remind us that once we all were migrants.
Article available here and will be circulated with the Zoom link.

Author biography:
John Adlam is a group psychotherapist and independent researcher. He works for the most part in the National Health Service, where he is Consultant Adult Forensic Psychotherapist at Bethlem Royal Hospital and Principal Adult Psychotherapist at Springfield Hospital. He previously worked in the Outreach Service of the Henderson Hospital Democratic Therapeutic Community, for the last seven years of that community’s existence before it was cynically closed down in 2008. He is a founder member of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and a former Vice President of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy. He is co-editor of the two-volume set Violent States and Creative States: From the Global to the Individual (2018); also of Forensic Music Therapy (2012) and The Therapeutic Milieu Under Fire: Security and Insecurity in Forensic Mental Health (2012). He is at the moment working on a new book co-written with Christopher Scanlon on the theme of ‘Unhoused minds and inhospitable environments’.
Twitter: @Diogenesquely Weblog: Barrelblog.org

Upcoming Events
Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything . Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

Screening and Discussion of ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ
2021-01-29 16:00 - 18:00
We are working with the collective Other Ways to Care for a screening of the short film ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ and a discussion with director Sol Prada
ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ (approx. running time, 22 minuets) is part of the investigation of the director Sol Prado, activist in psycho-social disability and ex-irregular migrant, focused on the case of the island of Leros, Greece. This project formulates a study, which mixes theoretical references with videogames techniques, applications to calm the anxiety and distress and videos of ASMR (Autonomous meridian sensory response), a typology of distributed online contents that stimulates emotional dependence when creating audiovisual stimuli. This short film investigates how desires production is a new way of social regulation, which uses images (among other stimuli) to achieve controlled sedation, subject to the mirages of happiness which are related directly to the merchandized consumption of experiences.
These reading groups are free to attend and open to all. All registered attendees will be sent a link to join us on Zoom before the event.
Abstract:
The short documentary ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ [Enclosed] takes us to the Greek island of Leros, a museum of lockdown before the era of lockdown.
Occupied by Italians between the First and Second World Wars, the island became a prison for political detainees during the Greek military dictatorship. In the 1970s, the island was re-functionalized as a psychiatric mental hospital. At present -a symptom of its time- it houses a refugee camp, set as a kind of “Chinese box” in a tourist destination of sun and sand.
The origin of the project can be found in the diary that the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Félix Guattari wrote during his stay on the island in 1989. In it, he denounced the conditions of confinement of psychiatric patients; a reflection of the treatment that European society accords to mad people. The short film is a study based on the director’s personal experience, in which she mixes theoretical references with video games, anxiety calming apps and ASMR videos; artefacts designed for the evasion and dissociation of personal discomfort from the social causes that produce it.
The piece silently and elegantly addresses the architecture of the lockdown, the dead time and the uncertain future. Like a kind of cursed luck, ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ reveals and deciphers through Leros the sensations that would spread to the common sense of the world population during the 2020 pandemic.
Author biography:
Sol Prado is an artist, film director and textile designer. She grew up in Carapachay, Buenos Aires and has resided in Barcelona since 2015, where she arrived to study the MACBA Independent Studies Program and established herself as a designer for the Gratacós textile company. Her artwork addresses madness and psychosocial diversity; faith and religion – which she abandoned after twenty after an evangelical education -; exile and migration. With the gaze of an archivist, her work tends to seek unseen identities, lives that are not counted. Currently, she collaborates with the International Errorista and is part of the board of directors of ActivaMent, a self-managed group of people with psycho-social diversity.
ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ [Enclosed], her debut as a director, premiered as the opening performance of the Loop Festival and has been screened at Olhar do Cinema (Curitiba), ZINEBI (Bilbao) and the Malaga Festival, among others.
Other Ways to Care is a collective that emerged around the will to imagine care alternatives drawn out of activist and collective practices that confront, discuss and move beyond the neoliberal project, or in other words the increasing privatisation and individualisation of mental health care. We draw inspiration from minor psycho-political histories and from politically and socially situated practices of care which operate beyond the medical model and technological models of health and distress.
Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything . Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

APS/JPS Reading Group Event: Lita Crociani-Windland - “On transience and other hatreds”
2020-11-27 16:00 - 18:00
Association of Psychosocial Studies and Journal of Psychosocial Studies
Online Reading Group

Lita Crociani-Windland, “On transience and other hatreds”

Friday 27 November 4 – 6pm

We are pleased to invite you to our fifth in a series of monthly online reading groups where we will be coming together to discuss topical psychosocial issues.

Like everyone, APS members are working under very altered and potentially isolating circumstances and it was with great regret that the we had to postpone our 2020 conference on The Psychosocial Body at the beginning of June. In an effort to keep our community engaged during a time when psychosocial thinking is needed more than ever, we hosted an online summer programme that culminated in our two-day conference Psychosocial Thinking in the Times of Covid-19. However, as the pandemic continues to keep most of us in lockdown condition throughout the winter, we have decided to continue our summer reading groups throughout the year.

This month we will be discussing Lita Crociani-Windland’s article, “On transience and other hatreds”. This article originates in a free associative extended reflection on what the author sees as the many faces of our relationship to transience in Western culture. It begins with the image of plastic flowers in graveyards, wild flowers pushed to verges and marginal spaces, women, migrants and transient communities. Our relation to life, death and their relation to movement and limitation are key aspects being reflected on and taken up for further analysis. The result of the free associative experiment is to invite reflections on the Freudian concepts of Eros and Thanatos and revisit the highly controversial question of whether these should be viewed in terms of a dualist or a monistic understanding. What is being presented here is a way of working with free associations outside the consulting room and group processes, using free associations as a reflexive research tool within a psychosocial hermeneutic approach.

The article is available to download and read for free here

These reading groups are free to attend and open to all. Simply click here to register on Eventbrite. All registered attendees will be sent a link to join a Zoom call before the event.

Author biography:
Lita Crociani-Windland is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Psycho-Social Studies at University of West England, Bristol. Following an early career teaching early years and then leading a specialist residential college for young people with moderate to severe learning difficulties and disabilities, Lita first came to UWE to join an innovative Masters of Science degree in Group Relations and Society, just as Psycho-Social Studies was establishing itself as its own distinctive field and the then Centre for Psycho-Social Studies was launched at UWE. She now leads the Psycho-Social Studies and Therapeutic Practices theme, part of the Social Science Research Group.

Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything. Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

APS Online Reading Group: Frances Cardona's 'Work Matters: Consulting to Leaders and Organisations in the Tavistock Tradition'
2020-10-30 04:00 - 18:00
The APS and IGA are pleased to co-host this special event.
Francesca will be leading a discussion of issues in her new book. Her presentation will weave in experiences of work from her new book, whose topics include leadership beyond the textbooks, organisational and personal shame and working with succession.
This event is free to attend and open to all. All registered attendees will be sent an excerpt from the book and a link to join a Zoom call before the event.
Author biography:
Francesca Cardona is an organisational consultant and executive coach.
She works in a variety of organisational and cultural contexts, helping leaders and organisations to face issues of change, transition and the emotional dimension of organisational life. Her training and work experience across two different cultures has given her special understanding and insights into issues of cultural diversity. She is currently a tutor on the Professional Doctorate ‘Consultation and the Organisation’ at the University of Essex & Tavistock and Portman Trust and Director of The Executive Coaching Programme at Tavistock Consulting (2019-2020).

APS Reading Group: Nini Fang's 'Feeling/ being out of place: psychic defence against the hostility environment'
2020-06-26 17:00 - 19:00
Please join us for our second in a series of monthly online reading groups where we will be coming together and discussing topical articles drawn from The Journal of Psychosocial Studies.
Like everyone, APS members are working under very altered and potentially isolating circumstances and it was with great regret that the we had to postpone our 2020 conference on The Psychosocial Body at the beginning of June. However, we believe that psychosocial thinking is needed more than ever in these times and we have therefore devised a free online programme which includes our summer reading groups and a scaled down online two-day webinar .

Abstract:
What is it like to be an immigrant worker in a ‘hostile environment’ in the UK? How does the form of discursive environment, which sees immigration as a social epidemic, impact on an immigrant worker’s experience of their cultural (dis)localities and subjectivity? In this article, I draw on my personal, psychoanalytically informed voice to explore these questions, by foregrounding the materiality of the hosting environment as the place in which the present relational matrix takes place, in which the internal dynamics of object relations are lived in the present sense, and the idiosyncratic expression of selfhood assumes forms.
The materialised reality of the place matters not least because it is drenched in power relations but also as it is where an immigrant worker seeks to live. The hostile host, in this sense, sees immigrants not simply as its guests (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000), but as unwelcome yet persistent guests to be yoked to their place of otherness and inferiority. By presenting vignettes of my encounters with the Home Office, I call into question the existential conditions of the immigrant worker and the potentiality for object-relatedness on relational grounds problematically punctured by hostile rhetoric. Could an immigrant’s sense of locality ever be anything but – evoking Said ([1999] 2013) – ‘out of place’? To address this, I will explore ‘out of place’ not simply as an emotional, lived experience, but also as a state of being that is embodied, psychically worked on and strategically evoked in resisting the power of the hostile host.

Author biography:
Nini Fang is a lecturer at Counselling, Psychotherapy, and Applied Social Sciences (CPASS) at University of Edinburgh. A lover of bubble tea and democracy at heart, she left her home country Taiwan and came to sunny Scotland in 2012 to train as a psychodynamic counsellor. She enjoyed the weather so much she decided to stay on and did a doctorate, which she finished in 2016 at Edinburgh. Her thesis looked at depression through Scottish theorist Ronald Fairbairn’s work. Her thesis opened her up to psychosocial inquiry towards locating the individual psychic processes within the social, cultural, and political environments. Her being an immigrant worker in the UK has ensured that there is no shortage of psychosocial inspiration and she will be kept on her toes writing.

These reading groups are free to attend and open to all. The reading group will be held on the last Friday of every month. All registered attendees will be sent a link to join a Zoom call before the event.
Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything. Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

APS Summer Programme 2020
2020-05-29 08:00 - 2020-07-31 17:00
The APS is very excited to be hosting a series of topical events and in an array of formats during the summer of 2020. Please click here for more details and free registration links: APS Summer 2020 Programme.

AGM and Relaunch of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies
2019-12-18 17:00 - 20:00
We are delighted to celebrate the publication of the double re-launch issue of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies. The journal will henceforth be published by Policy Press. This move to a professional academic publishing platform reflects the strength of the journal and growing national and international recognition of the unique place it occupies in the field of psychosocial studies.
More info here

Psychosocial Methodologies: Politicising Research with Narrative and Free Association
2019-07-01 10:00 - 2019-07-03 16:00
A course for psychosocial researchers taking place at UCL Institute of Education and supported by the Association for Psychosocial Studies and the University of Birmingham

Course tutors: Claudia Lapping, Ian McGimpsey, Felipe Acuna, Mohamed Elshirazy
Dates: Mon 1st, Tues 2nd and Weds 3rd July, 10 am – 4pm
Location: UCL Room: B06 Drayton House, 30 Gordon Street, WC1H 0QB

Registration:
UCL students – as usual
Non UCL students: Please contact Claudia Lapping: c.lapping@ucl.ac.uk

Overview: Whenever we are teaching or discussing psychosocial approaches to the analysis of data, we come up against a question: how does a psychoanalytically informed approach differ from narrative analysis or discourse analysis? In this course we want to address this question very directly. We will do this through a combination of theoretical and practical exercises to explore the production and analysis of instances of narrative and/or free association. We will discuss:

The meanings of ‘narrative’ and ‘free association’ within a variety of literary, qualitative research and psychoanalytic frameworks, and in popular culture
Contrasting approaches we might use in identifying or producing ‘narratives’ or ‘free associations’ in the process of research
And the way conceptualisations of ‘narrative’ and ‘free association’ might have implications for the analysis of research data

Some key axes of difference include the ways in which different approaches think about language, subjectivity, the unconscious and the possibility of understanding or (mis)recognition between researcher and researched.
Why is this important? We believe these issues are central to the politics of research, and to the relation between politics and trauma. We have a hunch that narrative and free associative approaches pull in slightly different directions in relation to both the production of subjectivity and the formulation of political strategy and tactics in the field of social research.
Background reading:
Bollas, C. 1999, ‘Wording and Telling Sexuality’, pp. 158 – 166, in The Mystery of Things, Routledge
Butler, J. 2005, Giving an Account of Oneself, Fordham University Press
De Certeau, M. 1988, ‘Walking in the City’ pp. 91-110 of The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press
Fink, B. 2007, ‘Working with Dreams, Daydreams and Fantasies’, pp. 101-125 in Fundamentals of psychoanalytic technique: A Lacanian approach for practitioners, W. W. Norton and Company
Freud, S. 1958, The Interpretation of Dreams, London: Penguin Books (See esp.: Chapter V1 ‘The Dream-Work’ pp. 381-2, ‘The Work of Condensation’,pp. 283 – 411, and ‘The Work of Displacement’ pp. 415-9.)
McQuillan, M, 2000 (ed.), The Narrative Reader, Routledge
Zizek, S. 1989, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso

The 'READING’ CONFERENCE 2019
2019-05-16 10:00 - 2019-05-17 17:00 | Birkbeck College, WC1E 7HX
ASSOCIATION OF PSYCHOSOCIAL STUDIES ‘READING’ CONFERENCE 2019.
At Birkbeck, University of London, Thursday 16th and Friday 17th May 2019
The Psychosocial – reflections and developments

The APS Reading Conference 2019 will create an innovative space for developing the field of psychosocial studies. Over two days, you will have the opportunity to participate in discussion of contemporary and foundational psychosocial texts as well as symposia and workshops exploring cutting edge psychosocial ideas and research on contemporary politics and culture. Our aim is to open up spaces for us to listen to each other and for new ideas and projects to develop.

To register for the conference, please follow this link:
APS Reading Conference 2019

Conference Fees:

£50 – waged non APS members
£40 – waged APS members
£20 – unwaged

Conference Format:
The conference has an innovative format, including:

SCHEDULED SPACES FOR GROUP DISCUSSIONS
To share and discuss ideas from the sessions and to make links to your own work and generate ideas for the future.

READING SESSIONS
To read key texts together: these will be made available to all registered participants prior to the conference, so that the session can focus on discussion. There will also be an opportunity to respond in writing to key texts prior to the conference, using an online conference file sharing system.
Sessions will be lead by:

Ann Phoenix reading ‘On the Postcolony: a brief response to critics’ by Achille Mbembe (2005)
Stephen Frosh reading ‘Birthing Racial Difference: conversations with my mother and others’ by Lewis, G (2009)
Candida Yates reading ‘Something to Do with a Girl Named Marla Singer: Capitalism, Narcissism, and Therapeutic Discourse in David Fincher’s Fight Club’ by Layton, L. (2011)
Kate Kenny reading ‘The explosion of real time and the structural conditions of temporality in a society of control: durations and urgencies of academic research’ by Lapping, C. (2017)
The Activist Research Collective reading ‘Borderline personality disorder, discrimination, and survivors of chronic childhood trauma’ by Andrea Nicki (2016)
Sasha Roseneil reading ‘’Part 1: General Introduction’, Introduction to Group Analytic Psychotherapy: Studies in the Social Interaction of Individuals and Groups’, by Foulkes, SH (1948)
Paul Stenner reading ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’ by Winnicott, D. (1953)
… and more …

CREATIVE PANELS AND WORKSHOPS EXPLORING ART, POLITICS AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

Critical Psychotherapy and Psychosocial Studies: Psychogeotherapy, Risk and Theatre
The Unconscious in the Social World
The Image and the Psyche in Psychosocial Studies
Our Music, Our lives: the emotional and affective experience(s) of popular music
The Group as a Liminal Space: Recognition and Reparation for Political Trauma Survivors
Contributions to Psychosocial Thought and Practice from Latin America
Inconsolable Positions of (neoliberal) Critique in Psychosocial Research
Waiting Times: Psychosocial thoughts on time and care
Feminine Desire and the Postcolonial Condition
The Racialisation of Sexual Violence: some thoughts on discursive repression and projection
Protest
The Body
See it – say it – sort it: Resistance, surveillance and silencing
Same As, Similar to or Different From: negotiating relationships in narrative research

Please register soon to secure a place: APS Reading Conference 2019

Annual General Members' Meeting and Panel: Mental Health and The Emotional Work of the Gig Economy
2018-12-14 15:30 - 18:00 | University of Westminster, Boardroom, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2HW, United Kingdom
3.30-5pm: Panel on Mental Health and The Emotional Work of the Gig Economy
Speakers:
Sally-Anne Gross and Dr George Musgrave (University of Westminster): Can Music Make You Sick?

In recent years there has been a growing body of research that has begun to examine the dark side of our relationship to music. The media understandably concentrate on the more sensational aspects of rock and roll; membership of ‘27 Club’, or the recent public declaration of critically acclaimed dubstep producer Benga as suffering from schizophrenia (Hutchinson, 2015). There is then a tension emerging between the notion that artistry is positive both for the economy and for well-being, and a growing awareness that a musical career is a risky business.
‘Can Music Make You Sick?’ surveyed over 2,200 musicians working in the United Kingdom, and interviewed more than 25 musicians and industry professionals, to explore how they are emotionally experiencing working in the music industry in the United Kingdom. This paper presents findings from this project, which seeks to ask challenging questions of music, and specifically musical ambition and aspirations, in the current climate of precarious labour and hyper competition. Is it possible that musical aspirations are potentially making artists sick?

Jack Newsinger (University of Nottingham): Resilience in austerity cultural policy and practice
Resilience is a key theme in austerity Britain, prominent across government policy, popular discourses, business and management thinking and academia. This paper is about the deployment of the concept of resilience in cultural policy and practice. It is based on an extensive engagement with literature, an analysis of cultural policy discourse, and qualitative data drawn from 23 in-depth interviews with freelance cultural practitioners. I adapt Robin James’s (2015) concept of resilience to show how arts leaders and practitioners generate performative narratives that seek to publicly represent their capacity to adapt to austerity, and we explore the different versions of resilience thinking that these narratives mobilise. I argue that resilience in cultural policy and practice draws upon psychological conceptions of resilience which unwittingly produces a discursive surplus which becomes reinvested in institutions, providing subsequent justification for the processes of post-crisis austerity itself.

5-6pm: Annual General Meeting (for APS members)

6pm: Drinks (open to all)

Free registration:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/association-for-psychosocial-studies-agm-event-mental-health-and-the-emotional-work-of-the-gig-tickets-52064771132?utm_term=eventname_text

Psychosocial Methodologies: Politics and Change
2018-06-18 08:00 - 2018-06-20 17:00
Psychosocial Methodologies: Politics and Change

UCL Institute of Education in association with the Association for Psychosocial Studies and the University of Birmingham

Dates: over 3 days
Monday June 18th10am – 5pm
Tuesday June 19th 10am- 5pm
Wednesday June 20thand 10 am – 1.15pm

Tutors: Claudia Lapping, Ian McGimpsey, Maria Jose Lagos, Felipe Acuna

Venue:
UCL Institute of Education, Rooms tbc
20 Bedford Way
Bloomsbury, London
WC1H OAL

Registration:
UCL students – as usual.
Non UCL students: Please contact Bob Grist: r.grist@ucl.ac.uk
For any queries about the course, please contact Claudia Lapping: c.lapping@ucl.ac.uk

Psychosocial Methodologies: Politics and Change

This experimental, intensive, two and a half day course will explore different ways of understanding politics and processes of change. Drawing on selected texts from key theorists in the fields of psychoanalysis, social and cultural theory (e.g. Butler, Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Laclau and Mouffe, Zizek) we will engage with a series of concepts each of which functions as a lens for the analysis of politics or processes of change. Each text provides a slightly different framework for identifying both what counts as change, and for the construction of interventions that might help to provoke or direct subjective and/or political change. Methodologically, these frameworks orient us for the empirical examination of discourse, language, affect or desire, time, regulatory technologies, and relations to individual and institutional o/Others. Sessions will explore:

Processes of subjective and political change
What is sayable? Processes of repression or disguise in discourse
The ethics of researching traumatic events
The event and the limit experience
The question of memorialisation
Trauma, Repetition and memory
Time, politics and the Other

In the sessions we will discuss the frameworks set out in the selected texts and, importantly, explore how these might be applied in the analysis of a concrete instance or piece of data related to a specific political moment. We see the course as an invitation for participants to take part in a project exploring this political moment with us. Through engaging in this project, which involves concrete processes of analysis, we will gain insights into both psychosocial methodologies and the event that is the object of the data we are exploring. As such, participants should be prepared to engage in discussions of recent concrete events that involve loss and the precarity of human life, distributive injustices, and symbolic violence. Participants will be asked to prepare through detailed readings of the core texts in advance of the session.

Key Texts – Relevant chapters and extracts will be specified!
Butler, J. 2004. ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’ in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso
Deleuze, G. (1990/1969) Deleuze Logic of Sense. Twenty-First Series of the Event (pp. 169-175) and Twenty-Third Series of the Aion (pp. 186-193). London: Bloomsbury Academic
Deleuze, G. (2004). Difference and repetition. London: Continuum – Extracts
Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through. In Freud, S. (2003). Beyond the pleasure principle. Penguin UK.
Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In Freud, S. (2003). Beyond the pleasure principle. Penguin UK. – Extracts
Foucault, M. (2000/1978) Interview with Michel Foucault. In Power. Essential works of Foucault 1954-1984 (pp.239-297). Edited by James D. Faubion.
Gerson, S. (2009). When the third is dead: Memory, mourning, and witnessing in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90(6), 1341-1357.
Lacan, J. (2006). Logical time and the assertion of anticipated certainty. In B. Fink (Tr), Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The first complete edition in English (pp. 161–175). London: W. W. Norton and Company
Laclau, E. & Mouffe, C. Section of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Verso – Extracts
Wiegman, R. (2000) ‘Feminism’s Apocalyptic Futures’, New Literary Histories, 31: 805-825
Zizek, S. 1989, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso – Extracts

Annual Conference: ‘Psychosocial Reflections on a Half Century of Cultural Revolution’
2018-04-05 08:00 - 2018-04-07 17:00 | University of Bournemouth
Venue:

University of Bournemouth

Date:

5th-7th April 2018

Call for papers

Deadline: 22nd January 2018
Send your abstract of 250–300 words to: APS2018@bournemouth.ac.uk

*Due to popular demand, we have added a new open stream for those who wish to submit proposals for papers, panels or artistic presentations on:
“Current and Future Directions in Psychosocial Studies”

‘Psychosocial Reflections on a Half Century of Cultural Revolution’

Join us to reflect on revolutionary relationships and revolutionary politics which challenged authority then and which influence us now.
The cultural forces and the political movements of 1967 and 1968 aimed to change the world, and did so. Recent development of some populist and protest politics could be seen as a continuation of the revolutionary movements in the 1960s. Hedonistic themes that recall the summer of love suffuse contemporary life, and self-reflection and emotional literacy have also become prominent values, linked towards human diversity and the international community.
We invite you to offer psychosocial analyses of the development and legacy today of the ‘revolutions’ in love, sex and politics. This could be via explorations of contemporary issues in politics, culture and artistic expression, or through historical studies. All proposals for papers must indicate how they address both psychological and social dimensions of their topic.

Send your abstract of 250-300 words to APS2018@bournemouth.ac.uk
Deadline: 22nd January 2018.
(Existing submissions, notified by 1st November).

Send your abstract of 250-300 words to: APS2018@bournemouth.ac.uk

Topics could include:

What happened to hate in the Summer of Love?
Lennon vs Lenin: did 1967 and 1968 announce two divergent trends in contemporary culture, and what has happened since to the psychosocial forces they expressed?
What are the meanings of ‘liberation’ today?
New inequalities in post-industrial societies
The resurgence of religion
The Six Day War, intifadas, and intractability
The planetary environment: fantasies and politics
Trajectories of feminism
The changing nature of ageing
‘The personal is political’ and other rhetoric in historical context
Free minds and free markets
The ethics of freedom: for example, where now for freedom of speech?
From the Manson Family to the Islamic State
Pop music’s global conquest and musical hybridity
Changes in artistic practice, creativity and commodification
The transformation of media
The digitisation of everything
Higher education: democratisation and marketisation
The potential and limitations of theories of narcissism as a major tool for understanding late modern/postmodern cultures
New narcissisms in the 21st century
Therapeutic culture and its critics
Where are they now? Biographical narratives of the revolutionaries
States of mind in pivotal moments: San Francisco 67, Paris 68, and since
The sense of entitlement: narcissism or social justice?
The decline of deference and its consequences
The hatred of government and authority
The sexualisation of culture
Controlled decontrolling or repressive desublimation? Elias and Marcuse on cultural liberalisation
Our bodies ourselves: shifting patterns and perceptions of embodiment.

Annual General Meeting
2017-12-15 16:00 - 18:00
The Annual General Meeting of the Association for Psychosocial Studies.
All members and interested parties welcome.

Friday 15th December, 4.00->6.00pm

Committee Room 3; 30 Bedford Way (Institute of Education/UCL) London WC1H 0AL.

Psychosocial Methodologies: Politics and Change
2017-11-01 17:00 - 19:00
A short doctoral course offered by UCL Institute of Education in association with the Association for Psychosocial Studies and the University of Birmingham

Dates: 5 – 7pm, Wednesdays 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, 29th November 2017
Venue: UCL Institute of Education, Room 537
20 Bedford Way
London
WC1H OAL
Tutors: Claudia Lapping, Ian McGimpsey, Maria Jose Lagos, Felipe Acuna

Registration:
UCL students – as usual.
Non-UCL students: Please contact Bob Grist: r.grist@ucl.ac.uk to register and access course Moodle site.
Max: 25 students
Any queries about the course, please contact Claudia Lapping: c.lapping@ucl.ac.uk

Psychosocial Methodologies: Politics and Change

This series of five sessions will focus on politics and processes of change. Drawing on selected texts from key theorists in the fields of psychoanalysis, social and cultural theory (including: Butler, Deleuze, Freud, Foucault, Gerson, Lacan, Wiegman, Zizek) we will engage with a series of concepts each of which functions as a lens for the analysis of politics or processes of change. Each text provides a slightly different framework for identifying both what counts as change, and for the construction of interventions that might help to provoke or direct subjective and/or political change. Methodologically, these frameworks orient us for the empirical examination of discourse, language, affect or desire, time, regulatory technologies, and relations to individual and institutional o/Others. Sessions will explore:

Session 1: Change
Session 2: Ideology, discourse and the role of the signifier
Session 3: The event and limit experience
Session 4: Repetition and memory
Session 5: Time, politics and the Other

In the sessions we will discuss the frameworks set out in the selected texts and, importantly, explore how these might be applied in the analysis of a concrete instance or piece of data related to a specific political moment. It is through engaging in this process of analysis that psychosocial methodologies will be explored. As such, participants should be prepared to engage in discussions of recent concrete events that involve loss and the precarity of human life, distributive injustices, and symbolic violence. Participants will be asked to prepare through detailed readings of the core texts in advance of the session.

Reasons to be cheerful or manic hope? Thoughts on the general election
2017-07-04 18:00 - 20:00
Tuesday 4 July, 6-8pm – The Tavistock Centre, Belsize Lane, NW3

A roundtable discussion organised by the Tavistock Clinic Policy Seminar, the Association for Psychosocial Studies, and the BSA’s Sociology Psychoanalysis and Psychosocial Study Group.
The result of the recent general election took many of us by surprise. Labour’s unexpected surge in the polls and the loss of 13 Conservative seats indicate that large sections of the electorate are weary of austerity, reject the populist ‘Little England’ and anti-immigration sentiments that helped fuel the Brexit vote, and are either sceptical about a ‘hard’ Brexit or oppose leaving the EU altogether. After nearly 40 years in which neoliberalism has dominated British politics, is there now an opening for a social democratic or socialist vision of Britain’s future? If so, what might that vision
look like and how would we get there? And what can a psychosocial perspective contribute to our understanding those questions? This roundtable discussion will explore the potential lessons of the general election and consider possibilities for the renewal of social democracy in the 21st century.
Speakers Georgina Blakeley, Jon Cruddas MP and Michael Rustin

Georgina Blakeley is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the Open University. She has published widely on citizen participation and urban governance. Her co-authored book The Regeneration of East Manchester: A Political Analysis was published in 2013.
Jon Cruddas is MP for Dagenham and Rainham, and was Policy Coordinator for the Labour Party between 2012 and 2015.

Michael Rustin is a Visiting Professor at the Tavistock Clinic, and a founding editor of Soundings. A paper by him on the election is online at:
https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/blog/ge2017-corbyn-labour-what-next

Attendance is free but bookings can be made here:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/reasons-to-be-cheerful-or-manic-hope-thoughts-on-the-general-election-tickets-35728334410

Narcissism and Destructive Leadership
2017-06-16 09:30 - 17:00 | The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, London, London, SE11 5RR, United Kingdom
The idea that there are ‘narcissistic’ individuals who can wreak havoc when in positions of leadership and power has been receiving considerable public attention. Stories from political arenas, corporate boardrooms and public organisations tell of the damage done by particularly destructive individuals who gain positions of power.
Superficially at least, the fit between the clinical formulations of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and the behaviour of a number of prominent individuals seems strong. The seemingly overwhelming confidence in their own ability, the very grand sense of their own importance, alongside the disparagement, and aggression aimed at those who threaten their persona appears to fit well with the clinical accounts that emerged from psychoanalytic accounts of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ some decades ago.
Of course, serious questions have been raised about the utility of such psychological concepts to understand what might be better understood as more complex sociopolitical phenomena. Should we also be thinking more about the attraction of such personalities, and the organisations and cultures that promote them? Perhaps we need further analysis of the sociocultural conditions that create or encourage such states of mind? It is now over 35 years since Christopher Lasch published his stinging indictment of ‘post industrial’ American society – Culture of Narcissism. How much relevance does that analysis of social conditions have today?
This seminar will examine the status and utility of conceptualisations of narcissistic personality disorder and narcissistic cultures.

PSYCHOSOCIAL CONNECTIONS: PRACTICE, POLICY AND RESEARCH
2014-12-16 - 2014-12-17
1st Annual Conference of the Association for Psychosocial Studies
16-17 December 2014
hosted by the Psychosocial Research Unit, University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR12HE
MORE INFORMATION and CALL FOR PAPERS TO FOLLOW
Abstract Submission deadline will be 1-07-2014

THE PSYCHOSOCIAL IMAGINATION
2014-06-13 10:30 - 18:30
A symposium to celebrate the launch of
The Association for Psychosocial Studies
Friday 13 June 2014
10.30am – 6.30pm
at The British Library Conference Centre
St Pancras, London
with talks, responses and contributions
from a wide range of psychosocial thinkers, practitioners and researchers including:
John Adlam (NHS), Caroline Bainbridge (Roehampton), Karl Figlio (Essex), Stephen Frosh (Birkbeck), Paul Hoggett (UWE), Wendy Hollway (OU), Gail Lewis (Birkbeck), Sasha Roseneil (Birkbeck), Mike Rustin (UEL), Paul Stenner (OU), Valerie Walkerdine (Cardiff)
Chaired by:
Lynn Froggett (UCLAN), Liz Frost (UWE) & Tom Wengraf
Organised in collaboration with the
Social Sciences Department of the British Library
Limited places – registration essential.
Cost, including morning and afternoon tea & coffee, lunch and a celebratory wine reception with canapés:
Members: £40
Unwaged members: £25
Non-members: £70
Unwaged non-members: £35
To register, click here
