Here is an opportunity to attend two  seminars, the first about the history of trauma and the second, about Ernst Falzeder’s new book, ‘Psychoanalytic Filiations: Mapping the Psychoanalytic Movement’ ( Karnac), at University College London on 18 July 2015. It is not so easy for Antipodeans, at such short notice, to merely pop on the plane to visit London for a week or so just to attend these events, but if one was in the area….! One could certainly dip into Falzeder’s book! Or, in the light of current historical interest about the Great War and Gallipoli  explore further the way trauma has shaped psychiatry in the Oceania Region.

An interview with Falzeder about his work, published in Cabinet magazine, is located at this link:http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/20/falzeder.php

Falzeder’s work prompts reflection about Australia’s own psychoanalytic genealogy and the way this has shaped the psychoanalytic stance and thought. How has the Hungarian School, Ferenczi and Clara Geroe’s analyst, Michael Balint shaped the approach to analysis in the eastern states? What is the influence of Anna Freud in Western Australia? As the children of Empire returned from England after training as Kleinian analysts  and therapists during the 1970s, another wave of thought washed across the continent. And as psychoanalysts arrived from Argentina in the 1970s, Lacanian analysis provided another trajectory of thought. More recent, perhaps, is the turning to indigenous thought and philosophy for what we can learn about the mind.