Upcoming Events
APAS Online Seminar with Maxine Dennis - June 2026
The Maternal Object Lost and Found
In this upcoming APAS online seminar, Maxine Dennis explores the maternal object through questions of racialisation, identity, loss, and psychic recognition.
Drawing from her clinical work and psychoanalytic thinking, she reflects on how racial difference may become intertwined with early experiences of attachment, belonging, longing, and exclusion, both within the internal world and within social reality.
This presentation also engages deeply with contemporary questions surrounding race, maternal subjectivity, and the emotional experience of being seen, misseen, or othered.
Details
When: Thursday 25th June, 7.30 - 9.00pm AEST
Where: Online via Zoom
Cost: $88
Discounts available for IPA members and candidates, and full-time students. Contact apasconnect@outlook.com
Full details including speaker biography can be found at www.psychoanalysis.asn.au
APAS Online Seminars with Anne Alvarez - July 2026
Reclaiming Psychic Life: Clinical Approaches to Empty States and Vitalization
In this three-part seminar series, Anne Alvarez explores forms of analytic work with patients who feel empty, dissociated, unreachable, or cut off from emotional vitality. Drawing on decades of clinical work with autistic, severely deprived and deeply withdrawn patients, Anne will examine the analyst’s role not only in interpretation and containment, but also in processes of vitalization, emotional presence and psychic reclamation. Through this three part series, she will reflect on the levels of analytic work aimed to recover aliveness, the musicality and emotional force of language, and the ways analytic contact may help patients rediscover curiosity, meaning, agency and psychic life.
Seminar One
The Thinking Heart: Three Levels of Analytic Work and Levels of Psychopathology
Seminar Two
The Problem of Empty States of Mind, the Uninteresting Internal Object and Processes of Vitalization
Seminar Three
Prosody, Vitalization and the Analytic Voice
Details
When: Thursdays 16th, 23rd, 30th July, 7.30 - 9.00pm AEST
Where: Online via Zoom
Cost (inc. GST): Individual seminar $88 | Full series $210 discounted
Discounts available for IPA members and candidates, and full-time students. Contact apasconnect@outlook.com
Full details including speaker biography can be found at www.psychoanalysis.asn.au
Past Events
APAS Online Seminars
Holding and Containing: on the specificity of Winnicott’s object relations theory
Professor Jan Abram
Winnicott reads Freud
Thursday 9th April, 2026
Winnicott writes to Bion
Thursday 23rd April, 2026
Online via Zoom, 8.00 - 9.30pm AEST
APAS Public Lecture
Customising the Body: From Omnipotence to Autonomy
Professor Alessandra Lemma
Monday 4th November, 2024 8 - 9.30pm
In-Room & Online at View Hotel, 17 Blue St, North Sydney
Seminar Series August 2024
Donald Meltzer Revisited
Seminar 1
Psychoanalytic atmosphere: Struggles between intimacy and respectPresenter: Clara Nemas
Seminar 2
The aesthetic model in psychoanalytic practicePresenter: Virginia Ungar
Seminar 3
Theory and Clinic of the Claustrum by Donald Meltzer: Intrusive identification at work and the emerging from the ClaustrumPresenter: Angelika Staehle
Seminar 4
Life Space and Intrusive Identification: Thoughts on Identification Processes in the Analysis of a Borderline PatientPresenter: Karen Proner
Seminar 5
In Conversation with Clara Nemas, Angelika Staehle and Karen PronerWhen
Thursday 22 August & 5, 12, 19, 26 September, 2024, 8 - 9.30pm Sydney time.
Where
Online via zoom
Seminar Series February 2024
The Body and the Psychoanalytical Process
The Body of the Analyst and the Analytic SettingPresenter: Alessandra Lemma
Skin Deep: an appealing paradox
Presenter: Virginia Ungar
Metaphoric Metonymic and Psychotic Somatoform Dissociation
Presenter: Dana Amir
The world we inhabit: the phantasy of the mother's body
Presenter: Clara Nemas
Musicality in the consulting room
Presenter: Francis Grier
When
Thursday 15 February to 14 March, 2024
8 - 9.30pm Sydney time.
Where
Online via zoom
Seminar Series 2023
"Reflections on Memory, Trauma and Time"
"The analyst's identity challenged by the reality of today's adolescents"Presenter: Florence Guignard
"On Winnicott's concept of the 'Fear of Breakdown"
Presenter: Jan Abram
"Internal and External: psychoanalysis as an experience of dialectic reality"
Presenter: Heribert Blass
When
Thursday 15 to 29th June, 2023
8 - 9.30pm Sydney time.
Where
Online via zoom
APAS 50th Anniversary Conference October, 2023
Memory, Mourning & Re-imagining the Future
We are honoured to have three internationally distinguished psychoanalysts reflecting on the impact of trauma on psychic and social life and its transmission which complicates ideas of linear time.
In-room & Online | View Hotel, North Sydney
The APAS is pleased to invite you to our 50th Anniversary Conference. We wish to use this opportunity to remember, mourn and celebrate both our national and psychoanalytic culture. We want to explore how our socio-cultural threads influence the way we are and who we are becoming. To remember Freud, we are interested in understanding the shadows that have fallen upon our ideas and beliefs about psychoanalytic thought and practice. We welcome and invite you to join with us in this dialogue to re-imagine possible transformative developments in psychoanalysis.
Neville Symington Commemorative Conference 25 - 26 November, 2022
In-room & online via Zoom
"Spirited Conversations"
With keynote speaker, Michael BrearleyThe Australian Psychoanalytical Society is pleased to invite you to our special event to commemorate the life and work of Neville Symington (1937- 2019). Symington has left an important and extensive body of work for which he was awarded the prestigious Sigourney Award in 2013. He understood deeply the need to think our own thoughts, the human desire for freedom of thought. We wish to honour his memory with our Conference, Spirited Conversations.
Annual Conference Days 10-11 September, 2022
"Navigating Boundaries: Too close / Too far" - With Professor Glen Gabbard, USA, Guest Speaker (online)
Online via zoomThe Australian Psychoanalytical Society is pleased to announce the Annual Conference Open Days will be on the theme of trauma, boundaries and the ethics of care.
Professor Gabbard is Training and Supervising Analyst at the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute, Houston, Texas and Director of the Baylor Psychiatry Clinic, Baylor College of Medicine. He will present the keynote paper entitled Boundaries in Cyberspace.
Encountering The Infantile In The Analytic Relationship 4 Part Seminar Series 26 March - 30 June, 2022
Online via Zoom
In this series of seminars, three internationally distinguished psychoanalysts discuss their perspectives on the infantile that have evolved through their deep and creative engagement with psychoanalytic thought and practice. The term, ‘the infantile’ covers several ideas including the infantile in the transference / countertransference encounter and the child within the adult. Expressions of the infantile can be silent or noisy in the analytic session but they are ever present both for patient and analyst alike, shaping the intersubjective encounter. Conscious and unconscious infantile aspects of the patient and the analyst can influence the analytic attitude, interpretive approaches and the capacity for play and imagination in both helpful and unhelpful directions.
Presenter: Clara Nemas
"The infantile in psychoanalytic practice"
Presenter: Florence Guignard
"The Surviving and Non Surviving Objects: Intrapsychic subjective objects and their evolution"
Presenter: Jan Abram
Part 1 and 2
APAS Open Days
Our guest speaker Alina Schellekes will present her fascinating paper
Remembering & Retranscripting in Psychoanalysis
This event will will showcase the contemporary nature and relevance of psychoanalysis in today's rapidly changing world. The conference's focus is on how to work with states of mind where there is a poorly developed sense of self.
Alina Schellekes esteemed guest speaker will deliver a paper “When Time Stood Still: Thoughts about Time Dimensions in Primitive Mental States”. In addition Australian keynote speakers will present stimulating papers, and offer an array of workshops for registrants.
When
Saturday 4th & Sunday 5th September, 2021
Where
Online via Zoom
Public Lecture: The Dread of Falling and Dissolving - Further Thoughts
with guest speaker Alina Schellekes
This paper illustrates the way Alina Schellekes works with different kinds of anxieties through her own dreams, art works & short stories. Psychoanalytic professionals and members of the public for all disciplines interested in mental health, are welcome to attend.Alina Schellekes is a senior clinical psychologist and a training and supervising psychoanalyst of The Israel Psychoanalytic Society.
When
Wednesday 1st September, 2021
7.15pm - 9.15pm (AEST)
Where
Live via Zoom