APAS Online Seminars May - June
Join us for two online seminars with leading psychoanalysts - Dr Rachel Gibbons, Prof Dana Amir & Prof Merav Roth
Booking details below
Impossibility of Working in Organisations – Institutional Harm & the Loss of Truth with Dr Rachel Gibbons
Thursday 28th May, 8 - 9.30pm AEST
This talk explores how organisations exposed to unbearable human realities can lose their capacity to think, tell the truth, and care. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and clinical experience, it examines how unconscious anxiety hardens into organisational terror, giving rise to defensive cultures of blame, scapegoating, and ritualised accountability. Through case examples from healthcare and mental health services, the talk traces how organisational harm is produced by systems struggling to manage grief, uncertainty, and responsibility. It concludes by considering what makes mitigation possible.
Dr Rachel Gibbons Biography
Dr Rachel Gibbons is a consultant psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, group analyst, and organisational consultant with over 20 years’ experience working across complex healthcare systems. Much of her work focuses on understanding and mitigating organisational harm arising in settings exposed to extreme anxiety, trauma, and moral injury.
She is Vice Chair of the Psychotherapy Faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists and Chair of the College’s Working Group on the Impact of Suicide and Homicide on Clinicians, having previously chaired its Patient Safety Group. Her national leadership has shaped policy and practice on the emotional, ethical, and systemic consequences of adverse events in healthcare.
Dr Gibbons developed two national guidance documents on the pastoral care of clinicians affected by patient suicide and homicide, now embedded within England’s National Suicide Prevention Strategy (2023). She also co-edited Seminars in the Psychotherapies (RCPsych, 2021), a core text in psychiatric training.
Her academic and clinical writing spans suicide and self-harm, psychodynamic psychiatry, organisational defences, and the psychological impact of blame and scapegoating following tragedy. She has published widely and collaborated with leading national and international researchers, including Professor Keith Hawton and the Oxford Centre for Suicide Research. Alongside this, she co-founded and continues to facilitate a long-standing peer support group for consultant psychiatrists affected by suicide and homicide.
Dr Gibbons has worked across inpatient, community, liaison, and forensic settings, including the Halliwick Unit and the Portman Clinic, and was formerly National Therapy Director at the Priory Group. Her organisational work draws on deep psychoanalytic training at the Tavistock, the Institute of Psychoanalysis, and the Institute of Group Analysis, integrating clinical insight with systems-level consultation.
In 2024, she was awarded the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ President’s Medal in recognition of her outstanding contribution to public knowledge, education, policy, and patient care in mental health.
Further resources and writing can be found at www.drrachelgibbons.co.uk.
Mind-Deadness to Mindedness
with Prof Dana Amir & Prof Merav Roth
Thursday 4th June 8 - 9.30pm AEST
In this seminar, two Israeli psychoanalysts — Prof. Dana Amir (PhD) and Prof. Merav Roth (PhD) — will present psychoanalytic reflections written in the aftermath of October 7, 2023 and the following war in Gaza, each approaching the radical impact of trauma from a distinct yet complementary perspective. Both explore the violent assault of catastrophic trauma on the mind’s capacity to sustain love, connection, meaning, and continuity — and the ways these vital functions may be reignited to prevent psychic collapse and promote productive mourning towards a meaningful future.
Prof. Dana Amir Biography
Prof. Dana Amir is a clinical psychologist, supervising and training analyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, a full professor, and head of the interdisciplinary doctoral program in psychoanalysis and the Postgraduate Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program at Haifa University, a poetess and Psychoanalytic researcher. She is the author of 11 literary books and five psychoanalytic books, all published by Routledge. She was awarded literary and academic prizes, among them seven international psychoanalytic awards, including the prestigious Sigourney Award (2025).
Prof. Merav Roth Biography
Prof. Merav Roth (PhD) is a clinical psychologist, a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Israeli Psychoanalytic society and a cultural researcher at the school of therapy, counseling and human development at the University of Haifa. The founder and chair of three philanthropic clinics - Shti-VaErev (“Interweaving”) culturally sensitive therapy center; “The clinic for all” – providing free therapy to disadvantaged populations; and “FLM”, providing free long term therapy for those affected by October 7 atrocity – awarded the PACE award by the IPA. In 2024, Prof. Roth was awarded the international Sigourney Award for her “extraordinary interdisciplinary work on psychoanalysis and literature and her pioneering psychoanalytic study and treatment of trauma”.
Details
When: Thursdays 8.00pm (Sydney time)
Where: Online via Zoom
Cost: $88 for one seminar
$140 for both (GST included)
Discounts available for IPA members & candidates, and full-time students
Recordings will be available for two weeks following each seminar