About this event

On the Edge of Action: Preserving the Analytic Attitude in Encounters with Self-Destructiveness - Dr Emma Staples Hotopf

Dr Emma Staples Hotopf will be talking about working with patients who are self-destructive, based on her work in the clinical setting of an NHS Self-Harm Psychotherapy Service.  This service offers a psychoanalytically-informed approach to people who engage in serious self-harm and for whom ordinary communication is often disrupted by the use of projective mechanisms and whose bodies rather than minds are centre stage. The way a patient communicates during a psychotherapy session will be explored with a particular focus on the pressures that come to bear and the complex interactions that occur in such clinical work. By looking at the flow of the interactions there will be the opportunity to explore how actions can move to something with meaning and identify the obstacles to that movement.  We will look at the significant pressures that a clinician is under when working with people who harm themselves, but also suggest that it is through retaining an analytic attitude that development can occur, even in more disturbed and destructive clinical presentations.

Dr Emma Staples Hotopf trained in psychiatry at the Maudsley, in medical psychotherapy at the Tavistock, and is a psychoanalyst, Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society.  She is the Clinical Director of 10 Windsor Walk Centre for Psychoanalysis in South London. She has an analytic practice and is a consultant psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, where she leads the Specialist Self Harm Psychotherapy Service and supervises doctors training to become psychiatrists.  She is an honorary Senior Lecturer with King’s MSc Psychotherapy programme at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience and oversees clinical placements.  In 2015 she established the Institute of Psychoanalysis' Maudsley Lectures in Psychoanalysis. 

This lecture will be recorded and available for 7 days after the lecture takes place

© Image: Matthew Kolakowski, 'Storm Inside' 2010

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