Speakers: Kate Kendall, Pam Shein / Chair: Eve Steel
Read more
Abstract
‘This is my tummy…… my tummy is hungry’. A child discovering their own tummy, a hungry body, suggests an emerging desire and recognition that the sensual world does not satisfy. This transformation - a desire to take in, the beginnings of an inside and an outside- has the potential to foster greater openness and development in the mind of the child. Traumatic experiences that occur in early infancy may hamper this development leading to the organization of primitive anxieties and defences that require significant emotional endurance from the analyst to survive, to bear and to contain in the psychoanalytic encounter. When there is no space for bodily separateness, no skin, the terrors of separation and loss are avoided. The analyst needs to find ways to be able to make contact with these patients, to draw them out of their adhesive manoeuvres and into a relational world. In this presentation we would like to explore clinical examples where connections are beginning to be made with the analyst, space is tolerated and representation and symbolisation are beginning to take form. Emerging from these states can bring joy, hope, possibilities, destabilisation, loss and sadness. In the words of one young boy ‘a storm’ which is ‘spooky and scary’
Biography
Dr Kate Kendall is a clinical psychologist and a training analyst of the Australian Psychoanalytic Society. Currently she works with children, adolescents and adults in private practice in Melbourne.
Biography
Pam Shein is an adult and child psychoanalyst and a training analyst of the Australian Psychoanalytic Society. She works with children, adolescents and adults in private practice in Sydney.