Tuesday, 11th December 2018
Presented by Christine English
Biography: Christine is a Psychoanalyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and works in private practice. She is Programme Tutor for the MSc in Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies, Psychoanalysis Unit, UCL, where she teaches many aspects of psychoanalytic theory. Formerly she was clinical lead at South Bucks Counselling, and was for number of years involved in counselling training at Reading University. She worked for a decade with addicted patients in an NHS service, and her PhD, entitled 'Intrapsychic Dimensions of Addiction: The wearing down of help-seeking capacities by cruel and tyrannical objects', drew on this formative clinical experience.
Synopsis: This paper is inspired by Joan Didion's short essay 'Self Respect: Its source, its power', published in American Vogue in 1961. In this essay Didion wrote, ‘to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, [but] it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect’. What did she mean? What does it mean to be driven back upon oneself, and what cost, to achieve genuine self-respect? Though almost certainly she did not intend it, Didion might have been speaking of the sort of psychic work that is part of psychoanalysis, where one may also be helped to learn from (often bitter) experience, and to really find one’s mettle
Drawing on the experience of analytic work with patients who variously possess and fight to hold on to self-respect, or who at times painfully flout any claim to it, I hope to throw light on a concept that isn’t really part of the psychoanalytic vernacular at all, but which nonetheless seems central to a discipline concerned with facing people with themselves, and with helping them take genuine responsibility for their lives.