APAS Child & Adolescent Committee

Saturday 16th May

We would be delighted if you could join us for what promises to be a thoughtful and clinically rich day.

The conference will speak to the contemporary challenges psychoanalysis faces when working with children and adolescents where social freedoms of expression and technology have brought about profound changes to the way we feel, think, work and live.

As professionals working with children and adolescents, we come across these experiences in our place of work, whether in clinical or educational settings. These contemporary ways provide an opportunity re-examine and re-think what we see in our students, patients and ourselves.

GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

The dilemmas of gender in our time unsettle theory, technique, transference and countertransference. This presentation approaches gender not as a stable category but as psychic movement – shaped by phantasy and resistance and encountered through the analyst’s normative inheritances. Dr Brady reflects on how gender surfaces in the clinic: as symptom, identification, or demand. She explores how clinicians reimagine themselves alongside patients expanding gender possibilities. Our discussion can explore ways to meet patient’s psychic elaborations of gender while attending to countertransference, where listening may require learning and unlearning.

WORKING WITH ADOLESCENTS AND PARENTS

The second paper focuses on working with parents of adolescents and the opportunity and challenges of opening a thinking parental space. This space offers a chance to work on and work through the internal and external issues that are confronting the adolescent and the family. The parents are invited to be curious about their internal world and its impact on themselves and their adolescent. Ms Wechsler presents clinical material where she discusses the emotional and functional complexities of family life.

WORKING ONLINE WITH CHILDREN

The third paper centres on what it means to work with a fragile child whose conditions were difficult enough at the start due to environmental circumstances and then with the added complexities created by working remotely. The paper invites us into the consulting room to encounter a real sense of the struggle to simply allow treatment to happen at all; to hear detailed clinical material that includes discussion of the technical modifications and its impact on the analysis. In this moving paper Dr Martini explores the intricacies of transference and countertransference when working with a child online.

Registration is now open.

For enquiries please contact Pam Shein: pamelashein61@gmail.com

16th May 2026. 8:15am - 4:15pm

The View Hotel Sydney, 17 Blue Street,

North Sydney NSW 2060