Wednesday 27 August – Sunday 31 August 2025

Online & In-room | View Hotel, North Sydney

Taking inspiration from Debussy’s profound observation that ‘music is the silence between the notes’ we explore in-between spaces where ineffable and inchoate states reside. The spaces between absence and presence, words and enactments, the mental and the sensual, the symbolic and the literal, and sounds and silence that engender on-going iterative processes, carrying both the possibilities for meaning and non-meaning making, for creativity and catastrophe. Through reflecting on psychoanalytic intersections with music, art, film, performance practice, play and nonsense, we invite discussion on the challenge to connect emotionally with experiences that are beyond words, and observations on how we can find solace and meaningful resonance in the non-linguistic sphere of existence.

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Speakers   Wednesday Programme   Thursday Programme   Friday Programme   Saturday Programme   Sunday Programme   Registrations

Francis Grier

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Francis Grier is Editor-In-Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and a Training Analyst and Supervisor of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is also a couple psychotherapist. He works in private practice in London. He leads a seminar for the psychotherapists in the Fitzjohn’s Unit of the Tavistock Clinic, which specialises in working psychoanalytically with patients who would not normally have access to psychoanalytic treatment. He has written and edited papers, chapters and two books on couple psychotherapy, including Oedipus and the Couple (2005, Karnac), and papers for the IJP on two Verdi operas (Rigoletto and La Traviata), on a gendered approach to Beethoven, on musicality in the consulting room, on the music of the drives and perversions, and on illusory and evanescent qualities in both music and psychoanalysis. Before training psychoanalytically, he was a professional musician. He gave the first ever solo recital at a Royal Albert Hall Proms concert in 1985, and in 2012 was awarded a British Composer Award. In 2023 new compositions have been recorded by the Choir of the Chapel Royal, Hampton Court, and in 2024 a disc of new organ compositions has been released.

Anjali Grier

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Anjali Grier is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and a member of its Scientific committee. She is a member of the Association of Child Psychotherapists and an accredited training analyst for the ACP. She has many years of experience working in the National Health Service, including Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in the community and in hospital settings, perinatal care, paediatric oncology and adolescent eating disorder services. She has been a Visiting Lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic and teaches and supervises abroad. She is currently in full time private practice in London, working psychoanalytically with adults, adolescents, parents and young children. She has published articles on infant observation.

Xiaochun Shan

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Xiaochun Shan received her PhD from Tongji University and was a visiting scholar at UCLA. She is a psychoanalyst and a member of the IPA and China Study Group in Wuhan. She was an associate professor at Jinggangshan University and now a guest tutor at Tongji University. She conducts private practice in Shanghai, China. She organized the translation a series on Contemporary Freud: Turning Points and Critical Issues including translating three books. Her publications include Freud and Jaspers: Thoughts on Time and War, The Vicissitudes of Femininity in Chinese Legends of White Snake and Green Snake. She has regularly presented at Chinese Psychoanalytic Conferences and IPA Asia Pacific Conferences.

Robyn Shields

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Robyn Shields is an Aboriginal woman have worked in mental health for several years. During this time she has contributed to the development of Aboriginal mental health services, worked on National and State Policies in the past and continues to work in mental health.

Natascha Stellmach

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Natascha Stellmach is an artist with 30 years across an interdisciplinary practice that examines identity, intimacy and vulnerability. Her work incorporates image, text, and performance and is often informed by her therapeutic background and transformational coaching. Stellmach's projects play out on the body, as installations, or artist books. Her projects are “generative”: created over time and developed through research, participation, and collaboration. Her work is held in international collections, has been exhibited at Documenta Kassel, MACBA Barcelona, MAK Vienna, PICA Perth, ACP Sydney etc., and supported by Creative Australia, The Australia Council, Stiftung Kunstfonds, Arts Victoria, Melbourne University, Sidney Myer Fund, NAVA, Sir Edmund Herring and Goethe Institute, amongst others. Government-supported artist residencies include Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin, Cité des Arts Paris, and Goethe Institut/Sana Sanaa Nairobi. Born in Australia to German immigrants, Stellmach has divided her time between coastal Victoria, Australia and Berlin since 2004. From 2012, Stellmach performed THE LETTING GO in museums and private art spaces. Since 2003, she has collaborated with Boris Eldagsen as BORIS+NATASCHA.

Daniel Brass

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Daniel Brass is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and Balint group leader in private practice in Melbourne. He is in psychoanalytic training with the Australian Psychoanalytical Society and has been president of the Balint Society of Australia and New Zealand (BalintANZ) since 2022.

Louise Gyler

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Louise Gyler is a Child and Adult Training Analyst and President of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society. She is president of Asia Pacific Psychoanalytic Confederation and is the Asia Pacific Observer on the IPA Board. She has published papers on the clinical process and gender and authored The Gendered Unconscious: Can gender discourses subvert psychoanalysis? (Routledge, 2010). She is currently editing The Desiring Woman in the Asia Pacific: Ambiguities, Displacements and Contradictions (Routledge forthcoming). She has a private practice in Sydney.

Ken Israelstam

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Ken Israelstam is Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada (In Psychiatry) and a training and supervising analyst of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society. His special interests are in analytical couples therapy, candidate education and the theories of transformation. He has published on these subjects in international journals.

Germaine Leece

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Germaine Leece is a psychotherapist and counsellor working in private practice in Sydney. Prior to this, Germaine worked for a non-government organisation with people who had experienced complex trauma. She also became the resident bibliotherapist with Alain de Botton’s School of Life, Sydney where she would use literature to help people navigate their inner worlds. She co-authored, Reading the Seasons: Books Holding Life and Friendship Together (2021) with Sonya Tsakalakis. Her curiosity about our inner worlds – whether accessed through talking or reading – led her to deepen her practice through psychoanalytic training. She is registered at the Clinical level with PACFA (Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia), is a Victims Services approved counsellor and is currently a candidate with the Australian Psychoanalytical Society.

Matthew McArdle

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Matthew McArdle is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst working in Melbourne. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst of APAS. He is currently the Melbourne Branch and Institute Chair.

Bernardine McDonald

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Bernardine McDonald is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst in private practice in Sydney. She has a particular interest in trauma and the mind/body interface, no doubt due in part to a previous career in Critical Care Nursing (Emergency and Intensive Care). She has recently completed further study into the psychodynamics of leadership and at play in groups and organisations.

Richard Price

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Richard Price completed his psychoanalytic training in Melbourne in 2022. He works in full-time private practice in Kew, working psychoanalytically with a wide range of long-term patients. Prior to this, since 1998, he trained and worked as a psychiatrist, predominantly based in a suburban community mental health service part of Monash Health. He maintains an interest in working with patients with trauma and psychotic illness. For the last 3 years he has been on the committee, as secretary, for CARO, establishing an analytic service for refugees, asylum seekers and front-line workers.

Shahid Najeeb

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Shahid Najeeb is a psychoanalyst that lives and practices in Sydney with an interest in photography and spirituality. His deepening interest in psychoanalysis persuades a transcendence of geography, history and modality, to an ever-expanding appreciation of that many splendored thing called Life.

Pam Shein

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Pam Shein is a Child and Adult Training Analyst with the Australian Psychoanalytical Society. She is the Chair of the Child and Adolescent Standing Committee for the Australian Psychoanalytical Society. She is a member of COCAP- the Committee for Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis for the IPA and is the COCAP representative of the Asia Pacific Region. She is a Visiting Professor and the Infant Observation Coordinator to the Psychotherapy Training Program in the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan. She is in private practice in Sydney, working with adults, children, adolescents, parents and infant observation groups.

Joan Thompson

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Joan Thompson is an Australian, who has lived in London for 29 years. She is a BPA (British Psychoanalytic Association), trained psychoanalyst and member of APAS. She works in private practice and is the Director of the Margaret Street Practice. She founded the BPA Film Society and recently stepped down from the BPA Board. She also supervises clinicians both in the UK and internationally. She has also worked in the film industry for the past 30 years with the writer/producer Allan Scott. She has been involved in a number of productions including Heatbreak High, Water Rats, Oscar and Lucinda (Gillian Armstrong), Flamenco Documentary for Channel 4, (Mike Figgis), The Fourth Angel (John Irving), and Regeneration (Gillies McKinnon) and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (the musical), and The Queen’s Gambit.

Steven Yeates

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Steven Yeates is a Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst based in Sydney. Alongside a psychoanalytic practice, he has a practice as a medicolegal specialist. In the past, he has specialised in the assessment and treatment of severe personality disorders, traumatic disorders and the psychodynamic treatment of the severely mentally ill. He has worked in psychotherapy education at a major teaching hospital in Sydney and published on assessment, dissociative identity disorder and defining psychopathology. He completed a degree in politics and international relations before studying medicine.

8.45 – 9.00

Welcome To APAS Members’ Conference

APAS President, Louise Gyler

9.00 – 11.00

Illusion, musicality, and evanescence

Presenter: Francis Grier
Chair: Louise Gyler

I explore some similarities between experiences of music and of analytic sessions. I focus on qualities of evanescence, the way that music – in contrast to many other arts – in one perspective only lasts as long as it is actually being played. Then it’s over. Similarly, the analyst-patient discussion in a session. Yet the psychic reverberations of some transient, fugitive moments may last a lifetime. And even when no verbally profound understanding is occurring, nevertheless the patient-analyst encounter is emotionally significant. I illustrate this with a clinical example. I explore transference as illusion, and the relationship between truth and illusion in terms of Bion’s O. I end with thoughts about the paradoxical value of the illusoriness of aesthetics and nature as considered by Freud in his short paper “On Transience” (1916), and the grin of Lewis Carol’s Cheshire Cat, left hanging in the air.

11.00 – 11.30

Morning tea

11.15 – 13.00

Opening Doors

Presenters: Germaine Leece and Daniel Brass
Chair: Louise Gyler

This paper looks at two candidates’ experiences of living with the discovery of their own analytic identities through reworking and creating their consulting rooms. Without dreaming, Ogden (2004) wrote that we can “remain trapped in an endless, unchanging present”. This feeling of stasis is what led to two minds coming together in conversations that made sense of the process of becoming and shaping spaces of their own. It also looks at the ways their rooms acted as containers with their necessary transitional objects until the analytic room became a representation for furnishing an internal analytic space.

13.00 – 14.00

Lunch

14.00 – 16.00

Society Matters (Members only)

Panellists: Gil Anaf, Louise Hird, Matthew McArdle, Julie Meadows, Louise Gyler
Discussion: The personal training analysis and other matters

9.00 – 10.45

Twisted inside-out: the plight of a young child struggling to find a safe place

Presenter: Pam Shein
Chair: Liz Kerr

The author focuses on the psychic states that emerged when violence and abuse were perpetrated on a three-year-old girl. The severe rupture to her body and her mind brought about a breakdown of her personality characterised by distortion of reality, loss of touch with her body and loss of trust in the other. She tried to survive these disruptions with psychotic and perverse reactions. However, at the same time, she was overwhelmed with emotional experiences that were beyond her capacity to process. These states of mind threatened and put in danger her ability to trust herself and her relationships. The role of the analyst was central, initially by repairing the psychic realm through the container function and by protecting the analyst and patient against perversion. Through the transference, the patient began recovering her emotional and psychic unity. The presence of the analyst allowed for the recollection, reconciliation and reconstruction of the split parts. Without the presence of the analyst, the patient might have never come to know and believe what had happened. A lack of processing could have resulted in her archaic anxieties remaining in a malignant confusion, with bits of the perpetrator within, preventing real growth and making her resort to perverse solutions.

10.45 – 11.15

Morning tea

11.15 – 13.00

Creativity and Dialectical Phenomena From Dialectical Edge to Dialectical space

Presenter: Ken Israelstam
Chair: Anne Diamond

The concept of the ‘dialectical edge’ is introduced and described as the pivotal point in the dialectical struggle within core dialectical dilemmas. This is a fluid emotionally evocative threshold, where there is maximal potential for change, as well as for homeostatic stagnation. Drawing on Winnicott, a case is made for the presence of an edge within his ‘potential space’ that has the potential to open up into a creative, reflective space. It is suggested that this however, will depend on the therapist’s capacity to contain/hold at this edge, the arousing and intense affects - such as anxiety, dread, excitement and passion - that are inevitably generated at these pivotal relational moments. This will determine whether the patient will move forward into the lightness of a creative, reflective, dialectical space, or backwards into collapsed, non-reflective darkness, where fluid oscillation is transformed into rigid ossification. A clinical example will be used to illustrate these dialectical phenomena, with a special focus on two clinically relevant dialectics i.e., “ritual versus spontaneity” and “closeness vs. separateness”.

13.00 – 14.00

Lunch

14.00 – 16.00

Writing Workshop

Presenters: Daniel Brass and Xiaochun Shan
Chair: Francis Grier

The papers to be discussed will be circulated at least a week before the workshop so that members have the opportunity to consider them.

From 19.00

Members’ Dinner

Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, Kirribilli

9.00 – 13.00

APAS AGM (Members Only)

View Hotel, North Sydney

9.30 – 11.30

Candidate Seminar with Francis Grier

Lavender Room, View Hotel, North Sydney

13.00 – 14.00

Lunch (Members only)

14.45 – 15.00

Welcome to APAS Conference

Louise Gyler on behalf of the Scientific Committee

15.00 – 17.45

PARALLEL SESSIONS

IN-ROOM AND ONLINE

Film Screening of “The Piano”

‘The Piano,’ directed by Jane Campion in 1993, offers a compelling psychoanalytic exploration of identity, desire, self-expression and repression. Set in 19th century New Zealand, it follows Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), a mute woman whose complex inner world is expressed through her piano music. The film delves into her arranged marriage to Alasdair Stewart (Sam Neill), and the complex relationship she develops with George Baines (Harvey Keitel), a neighbour who acquires her piano. This intense and evocative film examines themes of communication and the deep

Film discussion
Chair: Joan Thompson
Discussants: Michael Mormanis, Louise Gyler, Richard Price

14.30 – 17.30

PARALLEL SESSIONS

IN-ROOM ONLY

Two Way Workshop

Placing Psyche: Practising Psychoanalysis in the Uniquely Australian Context

Conveners: Rise Becker, Matt McArdle
Facilitators: Craig San Roque, Robyn Shields

This workshop will be a facilitated group discussion exploring the uniqueness of our Australian context and how this shapes our minds, lives and the practice of psychotherapy. Using the methodology of previous Two Way workshops we will examine these themes through group-facilitated discussion. Indigenous artwork will be presented as a stimulus for conversation. Sitting around the artwork, we will share experiences and responses. Craig San Roque and Robyn Shields will facilitate the workshop. We will be joined by others, Indigenous and non- Indigenous people, who will share their stories and experiences of living and working in and on this unique continent of Australia. “The ‘placing of psyche’ speaks both to the powerful outer, sensate realities of the actual landscapes of Australia and to the equally powerful metaphoric, inner landscapes of the multiple psyches of Australian culture……. There is a ‘different sensibility’ that is required of living in Australia, but getting the feel of it can be unsettling.” San Roque et al (2011).

18.00 – 20.00

IN-ROOM ONLY

Cocktail Reception

8.30 – 9.00

Welcome To Country

Welcome APAS President

9.30 – 11.30

Musical creativity in the line of fire

Presenter: Francis Grier
Chair: Louise Gyler

Music and war is a vast topic. This essay limits itself mainly to compositions of Western classical music written in response to World War II. I examine two masterpieces: A Ceremony of Carols (1942), by UK pacifist, Benjamin Britten, composed on a ship menaced by U-boats as he returned from voluntary exile to face the war; and the Quartet for the End of Time (1941), by the Frenchman, Olivier Messiaen, interned in a German prisoner-of-war camp, where 400 prisoners and German officers attended its premiere in freezing conditions. I refer also to Bion’s wartime experiences. War is studied as a magnification of hatreds and rivalry within families, focusing on the biblical lament of David for the killing of his son Absalom, set to music in masterpieces down the centuries. Finally, Britten’s War Requiem is explored, as a modern testament to the horrors of war, avoiding pomp and emphasising ambivalence and ambiguity. I consider these pieces from the perspective of Bion’s theories of L, H, K and O, and suggest they bear out not only Winnicott’s theory of transitional space but particularly Segal’s theory of artistic creativity emanating from the depressive position with its depiction

11.15 – 11.45

Morning Tea

11.45 – 13.00

The Case for Nonsense

Presenter: Shahid Najeeb
Chair: Mark Howard

This paper is an exploration and elaboration of the following quote from Louise Gluck “The case for nonsense is not the same as the case against meaning. It belongs, in literature, to the holy fool and cryptic sprite; in religion, to the visionary or the seer; in philosophy, to the Sphinx and the Zen master. It is animated not by an objection to meaning, which it intends and reveres, but by a refusal of the restrictive governing of meaning by will and logic. For the tools of reason, it substitutes the resources of magic; against the rigidity of the absolute, it suggests the hypnotic power of the evanescent; for narrative, it offers collage or prism; for conclusion, hypothesis.” Neglect of nonsense can conceivably lead to catastrophe, while cultivation lies at the heart of creativity.

13.00 – 14.00

Lunch

14.00 – 15.30

The Letting Go

Presenter: Natascha Stellmach
Discussant: Matthew McArdle
Chair: Rise Becker

THE LETTING GO is a performance practice developed by Natascha Stellmach, informed by interdisciplinary intersections of visual art, psychotherapy, somatic practices, Buddhism, and ritual tattooing. Its method includes tattooing without ink (a bloodline tattoo) to address a personal obstacle and initiate an intimate enquiry. In response to the question, “What would you like to let go of?” the practice includes identifying, naming, embodying, and experiencing healing and impermanence in the body. From 2012 to 2020, Natascha performed over 120 sessions with individuals in galleries and privately, including herself. Through Natascha’s research, alongside a Melbourne University Master, it became apparent that this holistic experience encourages self-awareness and empowered vulnerability.

15.30 – 16.00

Afternoon tea

16.00 – 17.30

Panel: Observations and Reflections

Panellists: Steven Yeates, Robert Gibson, Francis Grier, Bernardine McDonald
Chair: Pam Shein

17.30 – 17.45

Closing remarks

APAS President

9.00 – 10.30

The Superego in Infancy and Young Childhood: Some Benign and Pathological Developments

Presenter: Anjali Grier
Chair: Pam Shein

In this paper I reflect on some benign and pathological developments of the superego in infancy and young childhood, in the context, primarily, of Kleinian and post Kleinian theories. To illustrate this, I discuss three varied clinical vignettes from my experience of working psychotherapeutically with parents and infants in a perinatal service, and two young children in private practice. In the first vignette, I describe the impact of hostile maternal projections on the development of a three-month-old infant who was able to use a perinatal group experience to make a shift towards life. In the second vignette I describe a more pathological trajectory in a four-year-old and in my third vignette I explore the rapid oscillation between persecutory and depressive anxieties as they unfold in the drawings of a six-year-old, in one session.

10.30 – 11.00

Morning Tea

11.00 – 12.30

Sound and silence in group psychotherapy with nursery aged immigrant children

Presenter: Anjali Grier
Chair: Louise Gyler

I will look at the experience of sound and silence as it was expressed within a group I ran, some years ago, at a nursery school. This group was set up to try and facilitate the integration of children from a minority immigrant community, into the nursery, where the majority of the children were white and from middle-class backgrounds. All the children referred were between the ages of four and six years old. A third of the referrals over a period of four years were of children experiencing elective mutism. Others were extremely isolated and socially withdrawn, or experiencing communication difficulties, and problems with aggression and disruptive behaviour. Of particular significance was the complex issue of language that contributed to the group dynamics. The meaning and significance of language, and the fact of not having one fluent common language was a painful ongoing theme, creating a soundscape which could, at times be noisy, volatile, dissonant, cut into by silences that were frozen, hostile. In my paper I discuss the case of an electively mute child and her engagement initially individually with me, and then in the group, and her gradual movement from silence to the use of verbal communication. I discuss the significance and meaning of language, in the context of the intergenerational experience of separation, loss and trauma.

12.30 – 13.45

IN-ROOM ONLY

Working Lunch:

This will be an opportunity to share experiences and reflections about working with children