Irma Brenman Pick was a Distinguished Fellow, Supervising and Training Analyst and former President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.
The contribution of Irma Brenman Pick to the international psychoanalytic community is remarkable both for its longevity and tenacity. Over the years 1975 to 2010 she conducted clinical seminars, often together with the late Eric Brenman, at Institutes in Milan, Rome, Genoa, Berlin, Stockholm, Brussels, Oslo, Copenhagen, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Mumbai, Jerusalem, Seattle, Warsaw - to many of them several times.
She has been instrumental in the continued advancement of psychoanalytic learning, with notable mentions going to her time as Chair of the Student Progress and Education Committees and of the International Psychoanalytical Association’s Committee on Psychoanalytic Education.
To mention but a few of her recent activities, Brenman Pick held a public lecture entitled ‘Countertransference Revisited’ for the Northern Ireland Association for the Study of Psychoanalysis (NIASP), held in Belfast in 2013. The following year she was invited by the New York Psychoanalytic Society to give a series of clinical workshops at the meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA) held in January in New York. By March she was in Berlin presenting a lecture on ‘Working Through in the Counter Transference’ to the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG), in April she was giving seminars to analysts from the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society to mark the opening of the Kleinian Psychotherapy Training at Tel Aviv University, in May she was Florence teaching a group of child psychotherapists, while by September she was back in New York offering clinical seminars on disturbing affective states to a group called Understanding Primitive Mental States (UPMS).
In February 2015 she was in Stuttgart to mark the launch of the German translation of Eric Brenman’s seminal book Recovery of the Lost Good Object with a workshop and clinical supervision. The following week she was in South Africa to give a Keynote paper at the conference of a newly formed IPA Study Group, while in May she will be a Keynote Speaker at the DPG’s Annual Conference in Berlin, with a paper entitled ‘Lurching between Longing and Destruction: Intertwined Snakes’.