Judith Pickering

24th – 28th August 2011: The Current Place of Dreaming in Psychotherapy

admin — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:05:43 +0000

Judith Pickering will be speaking alongside Deidre Barrett and Robert Bosnak at the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) Symposium. The areas of focus will be Dreams as Sources of Creativity and Inspiration, Dream Incubation, Dreams and Physical Illness, Analytic Reverie, Deep Listening and the Intersubjective Dream Space.

The symposium will form part of the 6th World Congress for Psychotherapy, running from 24-28th August 2011.

Click here for registration and further information.

6th October: Bion’s O and Buddhist Dharmakaya; A Clinical Investigation

admin — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 13:08:11 +0000

AABCAP’s 12th Continuing Education Meeting

Wednesday, October 6th 6.30pm

The Buddhist Council of NSW
Level 1, 441 Pacific Hwy
Crows Nest

Cost: $20-$10 Student/Concession (Payment on Arrival)

RSVP: info@buddhismandpsychotherapy.org

Dr Judith Pickering is a Jungian Analyst, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Couple Therapist in private practice, senior faculty member, supervisor and lecturer for ANZAP. She is also a Training Analyst and Vice President of The Australian and New Zealand Association of Jungian Analysts and member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology.

Judith has studied Buddhism for over thirty years. She has published widely, giving papers, lectures and workshops in Australia, USA, and Europe. Her recent book, ‘Being in love: Therapeutic Pathways Through Psychological Obstacles to Love’, (Routledge2008) is described by James Grotstein as ‘sweeping, awe-inspiring, fulfilling, erudite’.

View Flier for More Details

4th and 5th September: Dreaming In The Psychotherapeutic Space

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 02:00:00 +0000

Saturday 4th & Sunday 5th State Library of NSW Macquarie Street, Sydney

In this paper I will discuss the clinical use of dreams in psychotherapy: including the initial dream, dream series, and recurrent images and symbols in dreams, and the analytic session as a form of dreaming activity.

I will discuss how Bion sees the intersubjective space of therapy as an analytic field in which the analyst and patient ‘dream’ together. Here I will draw on Bion’s use of reverie, how images, themes, narratives emerge in the analytic space.

Another vital concept is that of the initial dream, the ways in which the first dream a patient brings to therapy can indicate, in symbolic form, the heart of the issue bringing the patient into therapy. Dreams are multivalent, although often opaque, revealing layers of meaning only over time.

This theme will weave its way throughout a historical overview of the meaning of dreams, including Freud’s initial dream, ‘Irma’s needle’, Jung’s two seminal dreams, and Hobson’s understanding of the initial dream of a patient ‘Sam’. I will also draw on Jung’s Red Book.

19th February: Strangers in our midst: Clinical applications of Levinas’ ethics of alterity and Bion’s ‘without memory, desire and understanding’

Judith — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 04:07:27 +0000

8 – 10 p.m Friday February 19th 2010

British Association of Psychotherapists
37 Mapesbury Road, NW2

Cost: £20 [ £15 for members of BAP; £10 for students and trainees]

For more information or to purchase tickets, please view the Conference Flier

9th February: Bion and the Couple – Talk

Judith — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 03:58:16 +0000

Dr. Judith Pickering, Acting President of ANZSJA, will speak on ‘Bion and the Couple’

Discussant: Penny Pickles.

THE COUPLES CONVIVIUM

The Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships
70 Warren Street,
London W1T 5PA.

14th November 2009: Being in Love – Saturday Afternoon Seminar

admin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:08:45 +0000

Being in Love: Therapeutic Pathways through Psychological Obstacles to Love
Saturday Afternoon Seminar With Author and Couple Therapist Dr. Judith Pickering

Saturday 14th November 2009, 1pm-4pm

Shangri-la Hotel

Cost: $50, Concession $40
Bookings: Phone Kaye on 40 565 999 or email kgersch@netspacenet.au

14th November 2009: Being in Love – Cairns Booklaunch and Talk with Author

admin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:03:46 +0000

Being in Love: Therapeutic Pathways through Psychological Obstacles to Love
Cairns Book Launch and Talk With Author and Couple Therapist Dr. Judith Pickering

Apostrophe Bookshop
The Pier, Pierpoint Road, Cairns

Saturday 14th November 2009, 10am

26th September 2009: Seminar “Love and Couples” - Sydney

admin — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:40:34 +0000

Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies

Seminar “Love and Couples” with Dr Judith Pickering (Sydney)

Saturday 26th September 2009
9.30am – 4.00pm (Registration at 9am)

In this workshop I will explore how Bion’s concept of container-contained can be applied to the area of couple therapy. A long-term couple relationship may be conceptualized as a container for the two partners.

The sense of security, continuity and trust afforded by a mutually made commitment to journey together in a partnership can allow such a relationship to function as a therapeutic space in which partners may re-encounter, confront and rework areas of developmental arrest and come to know and integrate the different parts of themselves more fully.

Couples often present for therapy because their marriage has failed to function as a safe space. Therapy may be able to provide a temporary alternative container, the sense of a bounded and safe environment with another caring mind in which thinking and reflection are shown to be possibilities again

This latter situation is very common when the issue is that of containment of unprocessed primitive anxieties or beta elements (Bion, 1962) which have never been worked through, but are split-off, disavowed and evacuated in fantasy into the other through processes of projective identification.

The mindless repetition and compulsive nature of many marital rows is symptomatic of the activation of interlocking systems of mutual projections of beta elements or undigested traumatic material. Each partner has been triggered into their respective unconscious complexes and is swamped by unconscious anxieties, memories of fear, hurt and misunderstanding. Each urgently attempts to lodge unconscious unprocessed beta material into the other in order to rid themselves of its incoherent, chaotic and anxiety-ridden nature.

Couples may experience difficulty when one partner feels him or herself called upon by the other to be a container for the other’s projections. As Colman points out, each will find it difficult to contain the other precisely in those areas where they themselves need most containment (Colman 1993, p. 88).

In couple therapy there are a number of foci: the two partners, the therapist, the therapeutic intersubjective space, the complex networks and dynamics of relations between them and the relationship itself which creates a fluid, interpenetrating and interactive field.

A second order interplay between the marital third exists between the two partners and the analytic third that may exist between the therapist and the couple. Transferences to the therapist, although including individual transferences, represent this thirdness: there is a marital transference. The way that each partner constructs the therapist can give telling information about how the partner feels about their relationship. There is an intricate interweaving between these various transferences and countertransferences.

In couple psychotherapy there are thus various transferential and countertransferential foci, different depths of field. There are the two partners, the complex networks and dynamics of relations between them and the relationship itself, which creates a fluid, interpenetrating and interactive field, the intersubjective marital third. This is revealed by the communications of the individuals, but controlled by neither. It is within this complex of interactions that the work of couple psychotherapy occurs.

Couple therapy from a Bionian perspective

This workshop/seminar will be liberally illustrated with clinical material. It will draw on material contained in Judith’s book Being in love: Therapeutic pathways through psychological obstacles to love, (Routledge, 2008) which suggests that transformations in O is inspired by true love. Becoming who we are is an inherently relational journey: we uncover our truest nature and become most authentically real through the difficult and fearful crucibles of our intimate relationships. Yet becoming in O is a journey of transformation obstructed by numerous psychological obstacles. Judith will outline the interlocking traumatic scene in the couple, mutual projective identifications, shared unconscious phantasies, and other projective processes and therapeutic ways to work with them.

25th September 2009: Being in Love – Lecture

admin — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 06:59:38 +0000

The C.G. Jung Society of Perth presents:

Being in Love: A Path of Transformation:
Lecture

Mary Lockett Theatre, QEII Medical Centre,
Caladenia St, Nedlands
(entrance off Monash Ave and Hampden Rd. round-about)
Parking in Car Park #3. (Road Map: Lecture theatres = Building P)

Friday, 25 Sept. 7:30 pm

Relationships may be notoriously difficult, confusing, disillusioning, but they also have the potential to make us face up to ourselves in alarmingly challenging ways. They may help liberate us from defensive psychological doldrums into new realms of discovery of who we might be and become under all the deceits and disguises we use to cover our own nature and that of our beloved.

The path of true love does not always run smoothly, but goes off course with alarming regularity. Its achievement is never once and for all but requires continual renewal, and is dependent upon how well any two lovers can understand, work through and disentangle the webs of mutual projections and false imputations imposed upon each other. We bring, like ‘a malignant dowry’ (Pickering, 2005), defensive patterns of relating based on traumatic childhood experience which we superimpose upon a new relationship, giving rise to entangled unconscious interlocking scenes. Here both individual analysis and couple therapy can inspire and enhance the capacity to love well and to become fully ourselves in a process of transformation in love.

Judith Pickering, PhD, is a psychoanalytic couple therapist, Jungian analyst and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in East Sydney. She is Vice President of The Australian and New Zealand Association of Jungian Analysts and a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology. She is a senior supervisor on the training faculty of the Australia and New Zealand Association of Psychotherapy. She holds tertiary qualifications in Humanities, Asian Studies, Musicology, Music Education, Psychotherapy, Analytical Psychology and Psychology and lectures widely in the area of couple therapy and psychoanalysis.

Preceding the lecture, at 7:00 pm, will be the:

Perth Book Launch and Sale

Being in Love: Therapeutic Pathways Through Psychological Obstacles to Love by Judith Pickering

4th September 2009: Being in Love – Brisbane Book Launch and Talk with Author

admin — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:05:37 +0000

The C.G. Jung Society of Queensland presents:

Being in Love: Therapeutic Pathways through Psychological Obstacles to Love
Brisbane Book Launch and Talk With Author and Couple Therapist Dr. Judith Pickering

Avid Reader Bookshop
193 Boundary St,
West End

Friday 4 September 2009 at 5:30 – 8 pm