Due to the coronavirus crisis this event has been cancelled. 

It is hoped that it may re-arranged for some time in 2021.

Farhad Dalal has written to tell us about a lecture which has been added to this year’s programme of Limbus lectures.

On May 2nd, 2020, Adam Phillips will be presenting a talk, On Not Having Experiences. The event will be held between 10.30am and 1pm (arrivals from 10am) at Studio 3, The Space, Dartington Hall, Totnes. The entrance fee is £20 and may be paid at the door or a place can be booked online at
Limbus

Adam Phillips is a British psychoanalyst, essayist and author of a number of well known books, which include amongst many others: On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored; Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life; Winnicott; and On Kindness.
His most recent books are Attention Seeking and The Cure for Psychoanalysis.

Since 2003 he has been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. Joan Acocella, writing in The New Yorker, described Phillips as “Britain’s foremost psychoanalytic writer”, an opinion echoed by historian Élisabeth Roudinesco in Le Monde.

He has always believed psychoanalysis to be closer to poetry than medicine: “For me, psychoanalysis has always been of a piece with the various languages of literature-a kind of practical poetry.” From 1990 to 1997 he was Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. Phillips worked in the National Health Service for seventeen years but became disillusioned with its tightening bureaucratic demands. He currently divides his time between writing and his private practice in Notting Hill. He has been a visiting professor at the University of York English department since 2006

Travel Complications. Please give extra time to drive up to Dartington Hall, because the ‘Lower Drive’ to Dartington Hall is closed. This being the road you turn right into as you drive out of Totnes, past Kevics and ‘Swallowfields’. (you are still able to walk up this road).

To access Dartington Hall, whilst driving out of Totnes on the A385, after Shinners Bridge (A384), turn right at the roundabout in Dasrtington, go straight on at the small roundabout and turn right at St.Mary’s Church..

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Farhad Dalal writes to remind us the next Limbus lecture is on Saturday, February 1st, 2020.

The speaker is Denise Cullington and her subject “Ten Things I Love about Psychoanalysis.”

The lecture start at 10.30 am (arrivals from 10 am) and will be held at Studio 3, The Space, Dartington Hall, Totnes. 

The fee is £20 and payment may be made on arrival or on-line at www.limbus.org.com 

Denise Cullington

Ten Things I like about Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Writing my book The Rough Beast: Psychoanalysis in Everyday Life was like a profound meditation on my craft. What did I have to say to an everyday, curious, suspicious reader about psychoanalysis? What were the most important things to describe – away from the jargon and over intellectualising we can sometimes do? What is psychoanalysis (or less intensive analytically-based psychotherapy)? How does it work? Is there anything in it to offer other professionals too?

Denise Cullington trained at the Tavistock Clinic and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London. Her core profession was Clinical Psychology and before this she lived and painted in the USA and Puerto Rico.

Her first book Breaking Up Blues (Routledge,2008) was described as “by far and away the best book I have ever read on the emotional and psychological cost of divorce. It ….has the uncanny ability to cut through to the heart of the issues” (Heiss, Amazon).

Patrick Casement said of her second book, The Rough Beast: Psychoanalysis in Everyday Life (Routledge, 2018) that it was “so beautifully written some readers may find this book almost impossible to put down……this remarkable book calls out tube read and re-read. There will be more to find and to enjoy with each reading. It is so readily accessible, and yet much of it is so profound.”

A Shared Experience John Cross, his life, thoughts and writing by Charles Sharpe is now published.

Following his National Service, John Cross was heading for a career in politics until, in the early 1950s he arrived as a summer volunteer at Bodenham Manor School, a therapeutic community  established by David Wills, which educated children who had suffered early deprivation. At once John knew that what was going on at the school was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

In 1965, he with others of kindred spirit  founded a therapeutic community where the children and adults lived together. The community flourished until 1992 when the school closed in controversial circumstances and some members of the therapeutic team were put on trial. They were found not guilty but the pain of these events is still felt today.

John Cross knew and conferred with those who were considered pioneers of the therapeutic community movement. He eschewed the role of charismatic leader. He believed in the essential goodness of groups and teams of people. Given what the children, the adults and John achieved in their shared experience, it might be argued that the community of New Barns deserved the accolade “pioneering”.

Throughout his life John enjoyed sustenance and support from his family. He was a Quaker, a psychotherapist and served for many years as a magistrate in the youth justice system. After the closure of New Barns he became the executive of The Planned Environment Therapy Trust at The Barns Centre. John retired in 2011and still spent most of his days helping at the Trust until the his final illness. This book details the story of John’s life and records some of his thinking and his writing.

A Shared Experience John Cross, his life, thoughts and writing : by Charles Sharpe, published by Abbeyhill Press, Totnes; ISBN 978-0-9560438-1-8, 327pp £7.95.

To order a copy of this book or to express an interest in it email

goodenoughcaring@icloud.com

Just over a year ago on July 10th, 2017, John Cross, the former Principal of New Barns School and the one time Executive Director of the Planned Environment Therapy died. To mark his life and his ideas, a new book, A Shared Experience John Cross, his life, thoughts and writings is to be published soon. It has been compiled and written by Charles Sharpe who met with John in conversation on a number of occasions during the last eight years of his life. The book is based upon these conversations.

The exact date of the book’s publication will be announced here within the next few weeks.

To express an interest in this book email goodenoughcaring@icloud.com

Farhad Dalal has sent us news of the next Limbus lecture which will be presented on September 15th,  2018 by Rex Haigh and is entitled Therapeutic Communities: The Radical Edge. The venue is  Studio 3  Dartington Hall The cost is £20.

On-line booking    for this lecture is now open.

Abstract

Therapeutic Communities: The Radical Edge Abstract In the 1300s, the village of Geel in Flanders used to welcome ‘mentally afflicted pilgrims’ and supported them to work on the land, saving them from early death as outcasts from society; in the 1790s, William Tuke founded The Retreat in York and started the ‘Moral Treatment’ movement, in which people with mental illness were no longer chained up and kept as animals. In the Second World War, the group therapy experiments with battle-shocked soldiers brought the name ‘therapeutic communities’ into psychiatric practice. All these endeavours challenged the established exercise of power and the traditional nature of relationships. This paper will explain what therapeutic communities are standing up for and challenging in contemporary times: why they are still at the radical edge of psychiatry and mental health services – and need to be. It will cover themes including the politics of data and evidence; biomedical and pharmaceutical dominance; fluid hierarchies; immersive training experiences; how patient safety can become a health hazard; taking control of quality; and toxic environments. Rex Haigh studied social sciences as well as medicine as an undergraduate, being particularly interested in critical theories of psychiatry. After working as a GP, he trained as psychiatrist, then as an NHS medical psychotherapist and group analyst – and became a consultant in Berkshire in 1994, where he has been based since.  He received a mid-career award from the Health Foundation in 2002, and became Clinical Advisor to the English Personality Disorder Development Programme until it closed in 2011. At the Royal College of Psychiatrists, he was the founder of ‘Community of Communities’ quality network in 2002 and the ‘Enabling Environments’ award in 2008. He was on the NICE guideline development group for Borderline Personality Disorder, and is involved with several third sector organisations in the Personality Disorder field. His particular clinical interests are modified therapeutic communities, ecotherapy, critical psychiatry, and service user partnership. The social enterprise he chairs, ‘Growing Better Lives’ won the 2014 sustainability award from the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He was appointed as Honorary Professor of Therapeutic Environments and Relational Health at Nottingham University’s School of Sociology and Social Policy in 2015.

“Every life and every childhood is filled with frustrations; we cannot imagine it otherwise, for even the best mother cannot satisfy all her child’s wishes and needs. It is not the suffering caused by frustration, however, that leads to emotional illness but rather the fact that the child is forbidden by the parents to experience and articulate this suffering, the pain felt at being wounded; usually the purpose of this prohibition is to protect the parents’ defence mechanisms. Adults are free to hurl reproaches at God, at fate, at the authorities, or at society if they are deceived, ignored, punished unjustly, confronted with excessive demands or lied to. Children are not allowed to reproach their gods – their parents and teachers. By no means are they allowed express their frustrations. Instead, they must repress or deny their emotional reactions which build up inside until adulthood, when they are finally discharged, but not on the object which caused them. The forms this discharge may take range from persecuting their own children by the way they bring them up, to all possible degrees of mental illness, to addiction, criminality, and suicide.”*

Alice Miller wrote the above in 1980. Her interpretation of childhood  may have been  open to question even when she wrote these words, but would they hold true now ?  Are children allowed to be their true selves? Certainly some would argue that the nature of parenting and teaching nowadays has become even more prescriptive, giving less space for children to express themselves freely.

*The text quoted  is an extracted from page 254  of Alice Miller’s book For Your Own Good Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearingThe Roots of Violence  published in 1980  by Virago Press, London.

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