5-Week Discussion Group -
Five Current Thinkers in Psychoanalysis 2027
SHORT COURSE from 28 January, 2027
Thursdays 28 January, 4 & 11 February, 4 & 11 March
Ofra Eshel, Dana Amir, Julia Kristeva, Alessandra Lemma & Kessica Benjamin
This short course will look at five further current thinkers in psychoanalysis, following on from the earlier Five Current Thinkers in Psychoanalysis discussion group. Participants will be given an article and further background chapters for each week. The group will use free and open discussion as the method of exploring the ideas of each psychoanalytic thinker. Matthew McArdle and Anne Diamond will facilitate and contribute to these discussions.
Week 1 Ofra Eshel
Ofra Eshel is an Israeli psychoanalyst living in Tel Aviv and a training and supervising analyst of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society. Her writings include The Emergence of Analytic Oneness: Into the Heart of Psychoanalysis (2019) and Reinventing Psychoanalysis for the Great Unknown: The Never-Ending Challenge (2026). Drawing on Winnicott and Bion and reaching beyond them, she explores analytic “oneness” and “witnessing,” radical presence, and how the analyst can survive and work within psychic catastrophe, extreme states and the great unknown of severe trauma.
Week 2 Dana Amir
Dana Amir is an Israeli psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist and poet based in Haifa, a training and supervising analyst of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and a professor at the University of Haifa. Her books include On the Lyricism of the Mind: Psychoanalysis and Literature (2016), Cleft Tongue: The Language of Psychic Structures (2014) and Bearing Witness to the Witness: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Four Modes of Traumatic Testimony (2018). She works at the meeting point of language and psychopathology, exploring the “inner witness,” psychotic and autistic syntax, the language of perversion, and the modes of traumatic testimony.
Week 3 Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French psychoanalyst, linguist and literary theorist living in Paris, and an emeritus professor of the Universite Paris Diderot. Her writings include Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), Tales of Love (1983) and Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987). She explores the abject and the collapse of psychic boundaries, the semiotic and the maternal body that lies beneath symbolic language, and the place of love, melancholia and language in the making and unmaking of the subject.
Week 4 Alessandra Lemma
Alessandra Lemma is a British psychoanalyst living in London, a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London and a consultant at the Anna Freud Centre. Her writings include Under the Skin: A Psychoanalytic Study of Body Modification (2010), The Digital Age on the Couch (2017) and Psychotechnical Becomings: Psychoanalysis, Identity, Desire, and Mourning in the Age of AI and Digital Mediation (2026). She brings psychoanalysis into contemporary life, exploring the body as a canvas for unformulated pain and the ways digital and algorithmic worlds are reshaping identity, desire, embodiment and mourning.
Week 5 Jessica Benjamin
Jessica Benjamin is an American psychoanalyst living in New York, one of the founders of relational psychoanalysis and a faculty member of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Her writings include The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination (1988), Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (1998) and Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (2018). She explores mutual recognition and its breakdown into the complementarity of “doer and done to,” the intersubjective Third, and the place of acknowledgment in healing both individual and collective trauma.
This course is appropriate for mental health clinicians, other health clinicians and professionals with an interest in psychoanalysis. Some previous experience of psychoanalytic thinking would be helpful, but not essential. An open mind to explore new ideas, different ways of thinking and a willingness to reflect on our current ways of practising is essential.
Obviously in the limited time available there will only be an opportunity to have a small “taste” of the richness of each of these thinkers. It is our hope that this short course might inspire the hunger of participants to explore these ideas further.
Interviews will be held from mid November 2026, and applicants will be advised of acceptance into the group by early December 2026.
At this stage it is planned that the group will comprise of up to 15 participants.