Past Events

In 1988, Gregorio and Valli Shaio Kohon founded the Brisbane Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies with the aim of fostering a wider understanding of psychoanalytic thought within the community. The Kohons returned to London in 1994, and the Centre has continued their vision with the ongoing provision of didactic seminars, public lectures, workshops and conferences. In the spirit of past conferences, the focus of this conference will be to draw on contributions both from within and outside Psychoanalysis to enhance our understanding of human experience.

In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Freud argued that evidence for an unconscious mind could be found in dreams and slips of the tongue, and that by analysing these everyday phenomena, the unconscious motivations which give rise to them could become known. More than one hundred years on, psychoanalysis has entered into the language of everyday life and continues to offer a perspective from which to understand psychopathology, both in everyday and more severe and disturbing forms. In this conference, we bring together psychoanalysts, academics, philosophers and others to consider the application of psychoanalytic insights to understanding contemporary versions of psychopathology in borderline subjects and adolescence.

About the Presenters

Gregorio Kohon is a Training Analyst with the British Psycho-analytical Society. He is the editor of The British School of Psychoanalysis : The Independent Tradition (1986) and of The Dead Mother : The Work of André Green (1999). He is the author of No Lost Certainties To Be Recovered : Sexuality , Creativity , Knowledge (1999) and with Andre Green, Love and Its Vicissitudes (2005). His first novel Red Parrot , Wooden Leg was published by Karnac Books in 2007 and will be launched at the Conference. He is also a poet; his next book of poems in Spanish, El Estilo del Deseo, will be published in July 2008 in Buenos Aires. Gregorio Kohon works in London in private practice.

Valli Shaio Kohon is a Tavistock-trained Child Psychotherapist and a Psychoanalyst with the British Psycho-analytical Society. She works at the Portman Clinic, a National Health Service out-patient clinic offering psychoanalytic treatment to individuals suffering from perversion, or who are violent and/or delinquent. She teaches and supervises trainees at the Anna Freud Centre and students on the forensic psychotherapy course at the Portman. She is also involved in ongoing teaching and training programes in Spain and Peru. She works in private practice in London.

John Armstrong is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at University of Melbourne and past Director of the Aesthetics Program at the University of London. He is the author of several books including The Secret Power of Beauty: why happiness is in the eye of the beholder and Love, Life, Goethe – How to be happy in an imperfect world. He is currently concerned with the idea of civilization, elaborating a picture of mental prosperity and exploring notions such as depth (of thought), ‘height’ (as in nobility of mind) and mental space.