Upcoming Events
Child & Adolescent Standing Committee - One Day Conference
Exploring Contemporary Issues from Different Perspectives with Child & Adolescent Work
Saturday 16th May, 2026
In-person conference at View Hotel, North Sydney
Details of the Programme for the day and a full Description of the conference can be accessed here.
Upcoming Events
APAS OPEN DAYS - Adelaide 29-30 August 2026
MINDS UNDER SIEGE: DEHUMANISATION & REPARATION
Saturday 29-30th August, 2026
The conference brings together psychoanalytic reflections on extreme suffering, experiences of endurance, and the conditions under which transformation and redemption may become possible. Across presentations and discussions, it engages with the causes and consequences of turbulent inner lives, drawing on psychoanalytic perspectives to think through its psychic and relational consequences.
The Open Days will feature papers on aspects such as destructiveness and possibilities of reparation through complex processes of listening in psychoanalytic treatment. A special session, "In Conversation", will take place on Saturday afternoon, 29 August 2026.
Paul Williams and J. M. Coetzee will take part in a conversation about the complex psychological terrain explored in Williams’ upcoming novel, Nothing Happened, which addresses themes of dehumanisation, alienation, and redemption. Drawing on their respective disciplines, they will consider how the novel’s main character illuminates the psychic consequences of profound relational injury, known as soul murder. They will explore how the narrative can serve as a site for witnessing and understanding the nature of this injury, and the conditions necessary for an analytic experience of hope and the potential for transformation.
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FEATURED SPEAKERS
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Paul Williams
Dr. Paul Williams trained as a Psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society where he was a Training and Supervising Analyst. He was awarded the Rosenfeld Essay Prize for the treatment of severe disturbance, was joint editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis with Glen Gabbard between 2001 and 2007 and worked as a Consultant Psychotherapist for the British National Health Service in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
He lives and works in Northern California and has published many books and papers on the subject of severe disturbance, including psychosis. He is joint editor of American Psychiatric Publishing’s Textbook of Psychoanalysis. He has published a literary trilogy depicting severe disturbance as seen from the inside: The Fifth Principle, Scum and The Authority of Tenderness. His first novel, ‘Nothing Happened’, depicts the experience of soul murder and the possibility of redemption from it. He was recently awarded the 2025 Haskell Norman Award for Psychoanalytic Excellence by the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.
John M. Coetzee
J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940 and educated at the University of Cape Town and the University of Texas, where he earned his PhD in 1968. During a lengthy academic career, he held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and the University of Chicago, as well as visiting appointments at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, and the Universidad San Martin (Buenos Aires).
He has published twenty works of fiction, as well as literary criticism and translations. Among the awards he has won are the Booker Prize (twice) and, in 2003, the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Adelaide, South Australia, where he is Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide.
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Look out for future emails soon to register.
Past Events
APAS Open Days 2025
Between the Notes: Catastrophe and Creativity
With guest speaker Francis Grier
29th - 31st August, 2025
View Hotel, North Sydney
In-Room & Online
APAS Open Days 2024
The Mind and Body in Turbulent Times
with guest speaker Professor Alessandra Lemma
8th - 9th November, 2024
Melbourne, Victoria
In-Room & Online
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.
"Psychoanalytic atmosphere -
between intimacy and respect"
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
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