About this event

Dates: Mondays 7:30pm to 9pm UK Time on 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, 29th June, 6th, 13th, 20th July 2026.

This series is hybrid, participants are welcome to join in person or online.

This series will explore connections between literature and psychoanalysis. We will focus on the way the two disciplines depend on acts of listening – to the self, to language – with a particular focus on how writing may be used to tune into the unconscious.

The encounters will touch not only on well-trodden paths towards the unconscious – like free association or parapraxis – but also on its more various manifestations across case history, children’s literature, writing on food, lyric essay and more.

Whether considering historical figures like T. S. Eliot and Mary Barnes, or hearing from contemporary writers like Adam Phillips, Karen McCarthy Woolf and Rey Conquer, the programme privileges practice and what Freud saw as the unique relation writing has to – and how it perhaps even anticipates – the unconscious.

Each lecture can be booked on an individual basis using the links below.

Monday 1st June: Seminar 1 | 'What Happened to You?' Further Adventures in Poetry and Psychology (Glyn Maxwell) 

Monday 8th June: Seminar 2 | How to Live Together (Rey Conquer with Rachel Chaplin) 

Monday 15th June: Seminar 3 | Writing Inner Space (Adrian Chapman with Amy Lineham)

Monday 22nd June: Seminar 4 | Dominique by Françoise Dolto: A Discussion (Eleanor Ivory Weber with Perwana Nazif and Lionel Bailly) 

Monday 29th June: Seminar 5 | Unsafe: Poetry and the Psychology of Enclosure (Karen McCarthy Woolf with Stephen Rudder) 

Monday 6th July: Seminar 6 | Goodbye Chinatown: Migration, Conflict and the Unconscious (Kit Fan with Adam Phillips and Hugh Haughton)

Monday 13th July: Seminar 7 | In Practice: Texts, Transcripts and Tracings in Psychiatry (Adam Hines-Green) 

Monday 20th July: Seminar 8 | Time, not our time, rings the bell: On D.W. Winnicott's Engagement with T.S. Eliot (Tobias Jenkins) 

Each lecture will be recorded and available for 1 week to participants.

© Image: Matthew Kolakowski: Storm Inside

REFUND POLICY: Full refunds are offered for cancellations made before 14 days before the event date or first day of an event or series. For full event booking terms and conditions click here.

Concession tickets are available, for students, BPAS candidates and NHS trainees and nurses. Please email [email protected] if you are unsure if you qualify for a concession ticket.

Views and opinions expressed by speakers are their own and do not represent the views or opinions of the Institute, event organisers or other speakers. We expect delegates to respect the confidentiality of clinical material discussed in our events. The content must not be recorded, conveyed or disseminated in any format and participants must not share access to the event with non-registered participants.

Event prices