Category Archives: mental health

28/01/23 CFAR Bristol Lectures: An Introduction to the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real – Christos Tombras

CFAR IN ASSOCIATION WITH BRISTOL UNIVERSITY 2023

An Introduction to the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real

(Or was it the other way around?)

Speaker: Christos Tombras

Christos Tombras is a supervising psychoanalyst with a Lacanian orientation, practising in London. He lectures, runs workshops and facilitates reading groups; his main research interest is in a dialogue between continental philosophy and psychoanalysis.

No prior knowledge of Lacan is assumed and the seminars will all include clinical examples involving the kind of problems and questions common to diverse currents in contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Book Tickets Here: www.eventbrite.com/e/an-introduction-to-the-imaginary-the-symbolic-and-the-real-tickets-486787934817

Bristol University staff & students: free admittance

Venue: Merchant Venturers Building, Room 1.11

Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UB

Date: Saturday 28 January 2023

Time: 10am – 12 midday

Registration: 9.30am on the day

Please address enquiries to

Conor McCormack at cmccormack16@gmail.com

Kurt Lampe at clkwl@bristol.ac.uk

Public Lecture 26 11 2022 – CFAR & Bristol University ‘Who Am I?’ Psychoanalysis and Identity with Astrid Gessert

The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and Bristol University
Public Lecture Series 2022/2023

‘Who Am I?’ – Psychoanalysis and Identity with Astrid Gessert

Astrid Gessert is a psychoanalyst and a member of CFAR and of the
College of Psychoanalysts-UK. She has worked in the NHS, in
private practice and as a supervisor. She contributes regularly to the
CFAR public lecture and training programme and lectures and
facilitates seminars at other psychoanalytic organisations. She has
written articles and edited books on psychoanalytic concepts and
obsessional neurosis.

No prior knowledge of Lacan is assumed and the seminars will all
include clinical examples involving the kind of problems and
questions common to diverse currents in contemporary
psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Attendance Fee: £15; students £10 (cash only) staff and students
at Bristol University free admittance.

Venue: Merchant Venturers Building, Room 1.11
Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UB
Date: Saturday, November 26, 2022
Time: 10am – 12 midday
Registration: 9.30am on the day

Please address enquiries to
Conor McCormack at cmccormack16@gmail.com
Kurt Lampe at clkwl@bristol.ac.uk

Psychoanalyst Darian Leader on the Covid-19 Pandem

Darian Leader - Covid-19

[Read the full article here on the Huffington Post Site]

“I see a lot of people during the lockdown finding isolation more positive than negative in the sense that they want to have space of their own. Again, the socio-economic factors have to be recognised here. For most people in the world, a lockdown doesn’t mean being on your own because you are in a small place with a lot of other people. You might be living in one room with your family or people that you work with, so it’s only a privilege for some to be able to retreat. In terms of my practice, though, a lot of people say they find the lockdown a great relief.”

Saturday 19th October 2019 – Taking the Royal Road: 120 years of working with dreams – Speaker: Christos Tombras

CFAR in association with Bristol University 2019/2020

Interpretation of Dreams

Four public seminars on the theme of Dream Interpretation will take place throughout the year. No prior knowledge of Lacan is assumed and the seminars will all include clinical examples involving the kind of problems and questions common to diverse currents in contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Saturday 19th October 2019

Taking the Royal Road: 120 years of working with dreams  

Speaker: Christos Tombras

A supervising psychoanalyst practicing in London, Christos is a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research.  He lectures, runs workshops and facilitates reading groups.  His book

Discourse Ontology: Body and the Construction of a World, from Heidegger through Lacan (2019) is out from Palgrave.

Attendance Fee: £15; students £10; staff and students at Bristol University free admittance.

Venue: Merchant Ventures Building, Room 1.11

Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UB

Time: 10am – 12 midday

Registration: 9.30am on the day

Please address enquiries to

Elizabeth O’Loughlin at elizaariadne@blueyonder.co.uk

Jill Brown at mjillbrown@hotmail.com  

Kurt Lampe at clkwl@bristol.ac.uk

CFAR & Bristol Uni Lectures 2019-20: Interpretation of Dreams

CFAR IN ASSOCIATION WITH BRISTOL UNIVERSITY 2019/2020

Interpretation of Dreams

Four public seminars on the theme of Dream Interpretation will take place throughout the year. No prior knowledge of Lacan is assumed and the seminars will all include clinical examples involving the kind of problems and questions common to diverse currents in contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Saturday 19 October 2019
Speaker: Christos Tombras

Saturday 8 February 2020
Speaker: Dany Nobus

Saturday April 25 2020
Speaker: Vincent Dachy

Saturday 27 June 2020 (tbc)
Speaker: Julia Carne

Attendance Fee: £15; students £10; staff and students at Bristol University free admittance.
Venue: Merchant Venturers Building, Room 1.11
Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UB
Time: 10am – 12 midday
Registration: 9.30am on the day

Please address enquiries to
Elizabeth O’Loughlin at elizaariadne@blueyonder.co.uk
Jill Brown at mjillbrown@hotmail.com
Kurt Lampe at clkwl@bristol.ac.uk

 Darian Leader – 22nd June 2019 Bristol – Ego-Ideal-Superego: what can we hope for?

CFAR IN ASSOCIATION WITH BRISTOL UNIVERSITY 2018/2019

Ego, Ideal, Superego

Four public seminars on the theme of Ego, Ideal and Superego will take place throughout the year. No prior knowledge of Lacan is assumed and the seminars will all include clinical examples involving the kind of problems and questions common to diverse currents in contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Saturday, June 22, 2019 – DARIAN LEADER – Psychoanalyst

 Ego-Ideal-Superego: what can we hope for?

After distinguishing the concepts of ego, ideal and superego, we ask the question of how these can be changed – or not – during an analysis. Is the ego diminished or even abolished? Can the Ideal be challenged or displaced? And does the superego become harsher or less punitive? 

Attendance Fee: £15; students £10; staff and students at Bristol University free admittance.

Venue:  Merchant Ventures Building, Room 1.11, Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UB

Time: 10.00 am – 12.00 midday. Registration: 9.30am on the day

 Please address enquiries to

Elizabeth O’Loughlin at elizaariadne@blueyonder.co.uk

Jill Brown at mjillbrown@hotmail.com  

Kurt Lampe at clkwl@bristol.ac.uk

Darian Leader – Why Cant We Sleep?

In the 1950s, researchers at Edinburgh University conducting a study into sleep concluded that there was little difference in sleep time between using a well-sprung mattress and a wooden board. Try telling that to retailers of £500 multilayered mattresses. For sleep, as the psychoanalyst Darian Leader reminds us in his richly researched and entertaining Why Can’t We Sleep?, has been commodified: it’s big business.

Before advancing reasons for insomnia, and why one in three adults complains of sleep difficulties, Leader delves into the history of sleep research and competing theories about why we sleep, which have culminated in a remarkable inversion of concern: a shift from anxiety causing problems with sleep to the present, where the lack of sleep leads to anxiety.

Some judgments, though, have resisted change. In the 1960s the eight-hour “ideal” sleep was shown by the researcher William Dement to be a “fallacy”, yet today, argues Leader, sleep experts promote eight hours as the desired gold standard – almost as a human right.

Leader rolls his eyes at the zeitgeist of the “new science of sleep”, with its notions of sleep as a self-help curative for ailments ranging from dementia to unhappiness, all achievable “with sensitive temperature control and software that will tailor the environment to their unique circadian rhythm”.

There’s no consensus on the point of sleep. But there is agreement that it is a time for the processing of memories internal body clocks’ association with sleep cycles have long been recognised, but sleep wasn’t always undertaken in one unbroken block. The historian Roger Ekirch argued that prior to the 19th century sleep was biphasic – taken in two parts with an hour or so in between when the person was awake.

With the Industrial Revolution, maintaining nonstop production lines necessitated shift work and changes to patterns of sleep. Today, businesses’ co-option of sleep in enhancing productivity is illustrated by firms such as Aetna offering $25-per-night rewards to employees (monitored via sleep trackers) who manage 20 nights of sleep for seven hours or more in a row.

Goal-oriented sleep research becomes problematic when it approximates the maxim: “What the thinker thinks the prover proves.” We might be inclined to look more closely at conclusions drawn by Nathaniel Kleitman’s classic 1939 study Sleep and Wakefulness, says Leader, when made aware that his university research “was heavily funded by corporate sponsors keen to engineer more productive workers”.

Leader also questions the value of extrapolating into the real world conclusions drawn from experiments carried out in unnatural environments. Contemplating the validity of experiments with patients isolated overnight in sleep clinics using EEG, he observes: ‘They don’t have sex with a bedfellow or masturbate, and yet this entirely artificial subject is the one we expect to give the real facts about sleep.”

[Click here to read the rest of this article on the Guardian Site]

Darian Leader is speaking in Bristol at the CFAR/Bristol University Lecture Series on the 22nd of June 2019.

CFAR / Bristol Uni Lecture 16/02/19 – Christos Tombras ‘Constructing an Ego – Inhabiting an Identity’

CFAR In Association with Bristol University 2018/2019

Ego, Ideal, Superego

Four public seminars on the theme of Ego, Ideal and Superego will take place throughout the year. No prior knowledge of Lacan is assumed and the seminars will all include clinical examples involving the kind of problems and questions common to diverse currents in contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Saturday 16 February 2019: 

CHRISTOS TOMBRAS – ‘Constructing an Ego – Inhabiting an Identity’

Christos is a supervising psychoanalyst, practicing in London.  He is a member of CFAR.  He lectures, runs workshops and facilitates reading groups extensively.  His main research interest is in a dialogue between continental philosophy and psychoanalysis.  His “Discourse Ontology”, a book discussing Heidegger with Lacan, will be out this summer.

Attendance Fee: £15 students £10; staff and students at Bristol University free admittance.
Venue: (NB!) Lecture Room 8, 21 Woodland Road, Clifton (so not at the Merchant Venturers building!Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UB

Time: 9.30 am – 11.30 pm
Registration: 9.00am on the day

Please address enquiries to:
Elizabeth O’Loughlin at elizaariadne@blueyonder.co.uk
Jill Brown at mjillbrown@hotmail.com
Kurt Lampe at clkwl@bristol.ac.uk

Ego, Ideal, Superego: CFAR & Bristol Uni Lectures 2018/2019

CFAR IN ASSOCIATION WITH BRISTOL UNIVERSITY 2018/2019

Ego, Ideal, Superego

Four public seminars on the theme of Ego, Ideal and Superego will take place throughout the year. No prior knowledge of Lacan is assumed and the seminars will all include clinical examples involving the kind of problems and questions common to diverse currents in contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Saturday 20 October 2018
Speaker: Anouchka Grose

Saturday 16 February 2019
(speaker to be confirmed)

Saturday 18 May 2019
Speaker: Berjanet Jazani

Saturday 22 June 2019
Speaker: Darian Leader

Attendance Fee: £15; students £10; staff and students at Bristol University free admittance.
Venue: Merchant Venturers Building, Room 1.11
Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UB
Time: 10am – 12 midday
Registration: 9.30am on the day

Please address enquiries to
Elizabeth O’Loughlin at elizaariadne@blueyonder.co.uk
Jill Brown at mjillbrown@hotmail.com
Kurt Lampe at clkwl@bristol.ac.uk

NB The Venue will be confirmed for each event as there may be changes.

Springsteen: “The Boss” and Psychoanalysis – by Thomas Svolos

Thomas Svolos writes in The Lacanian Review [read the whole article here]: 

“In the United States, many Americans within a generation or two of my age—meaning, many Americans—recognize the musician Bruce Springsteen as “The Boss.”  Springsteen’s songwriting, his lyrics, and his marathon, high energy concert performances have, for decades, attracted fans across the country, critical and popular acclaim, and enormous success.  He has been at the very top of the pop/rock music industry.

Springsteen recently published an autobiography, titled Born to Run, named after his 1975 breakout album.  I recently read this book and was immediately struck by the high level of awareness in his writing.  To me, his songs have always been straight up with a lyrical quality to them that, however, could have easily fallen flat, but—coming through in the songs and in his performances—Springsteen’s internal sensitivities and external perceptiveness elevate them to something very special in the pop/rock world.  This same quality of awareness comes through in the book as well, especially the first half or so up to his achievement of fame and major recognition.  Indeed, he spends a lot of time very carefully describing his background growing up in a tough, blue collar part of New Jersey with a stern and difficult father and the way in which he struggled to find both personal and professional identity (a word he uses often) and in which he developed his passion for the guitar, for playing music, and eventually for singing and writing.  He writes with this great awareness for what he is experiencing internally, as it were, and also the ways in which his relationships and the world he grew up in impacts his playing, the ways in which he works with his various groups, and the very themes of his songs and albums.  One thing he emphasizes is the very determined desire he had—his ambition for himself and for his music.

At one point, he has made it, achieved some serious recognition, and decides that he will travel across the United States—take a road trip—with a close friend.  Driving across Texas, he stops in a small town, watches the small town dance and celebrate one evening, and this, he writes, brings on a deep sense of dread and anguish—”a deeper anxiety than I’ve ever known.” Springsteen is paralyzed.  He talks about being, at that point in his life, forced finally to confront something that he had been defending against all his life (“the defenses I built… outlived their usefulness”), something that his passion, his ambition, and his desire was shielding himself from—something he allusively describes through the book as darkness, depression—what strikes me as some piece of the Real.  And, at that point in the book, some 300 pages in, he writes that he sought out counsel from his manager, a friend, who finds a professional for him to see in California, and that he is eventually referred to Wayne Myers, a New York psychoanalyst.  He writes that he saw his psychoanalyst for twenty five years: “The results of my work with Dr. Myers and my debt to him are at the heart of this book.”

[read the rest of the article here]…