Annual Research Lecture 2025

Psychic reality cannot be reduced to either the mental or the physical — the psychoanalytic object has its own characteristics, categories, and laws. Psychoanalytic theories are based on fundamental hypotheses and basic assumptions that have been arrived at through a mixture of clinical experience and self-reflection, speculative intellectual activity and intuition, free-floating attention and deduction, and the attribution of retrospective meaning and abstract representations.

Psychoanalysis does not offer a single, unified, comprehensive theoretical model, nor can it propose an exclusive clinical approach to its object of study. The question of research is confronted by the complex nature of the object of analytic inquiry, reiterating the inappropriateness of any single paradigm. In considering research in psychoanalysis, ontological questions are as relevant as epistemological ones.

The establishment of a particular and unique dialogue between patient and analyst characterises the psychoanalytic discipline. Clinical practitioners are accountable for what they do. In order to define the boundaries and aims of their work, psychoanalysts describe their theoretical ideas and clinical approaches through the study of single cases. 

Gregorio Kohon is a Clinical Psychologist and Distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society. Between 1988 and 1994, he lived in Brisbane, Australia, where he founded, together with his wife, Valli Shaio Kohon, the Brisbane Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies. He has published four books of poetry in Spanish, and a novel Papagayo Rojo, Pata de Palo (2003), which was short-listed for the 2001 Fernando Lara Prize, Planeta, Barcelona, and translated into English as Red Parrot, Wooden Leg (2007/2008). He edited four psychoanalytic books, and published No Lost Certainties to Be Recovered (1999); Love and Its Vicissitudes (co-authored with André Green) (2005); Reflections on the Aesthetic Experience: Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny (2016); and Considering the Nature of Psychoanalysis: The Persistence of a Paradoxical Discourse (2019). He is working on a new book: “How could I have been so stupid?” - Psychoanalysis and the Question of Symbolic Impoverishment.

Alessandra Lemma is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society and Chartered Clinical and Counselling Psychologist, is a Visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London and Consultant, Anna Freud Centre and Visiting Professor, Centro Winnicott, Rome. For 16 years she worked at the Tavistock Clinic where she was, at different stages, Head of Psychology and Professor of Psychological Therapies in conjunction with Essex University. She was a recipient of the 2022 Sigourney Award. She is the former General Editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis book series and is the current Chair of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis’ Management Board. She has published extensively on psychoanalysis, trauma, the body and transgender. Her most recent books are: First Principles: Applied Ethics for Psychoanalytic Practice (OUP, 2023) and Introduction to the Practice of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (Wiley, 2025, Third Edition).