We’re delighted to announce the 2026 MPDT Conference in Manchester (and online) on Saturday 11 July.
We all have to suffer the pain of loss in multiple forms throughout life, from ordinary and expectable developmental and generational losses, to devastating and unforeseen ones. Since Freud’s brilliant paper Mourning and Melancholia (1917), psychoanalytic clinicians and writers have come to understand more about the emotional experience of loss in everyday life and across the lifecycle. We are each are required to grapple with and navigate the painful emotions and anxieties associated with relinquishment and reorientation to a new reality. This psychic work is inextricably linked to the development of mind, including the capacity for symbol formation; how we relate to others; and the evolution of personal meaning. This conference provides an opportunity to hear our presenters’ clinical work and ideas on this most human of experiences, personally, professionally and societally. We welcome you to join us for this conference, in person or online.
This will be a day-long hybrid conference, with delegates attending in-person in Manchester (with lunch provided), or online. We will record the conference sessions for viewing for 14 days after release (please read the statements about confidentiality and filming, below). CPD certificates will be issued after the event.
Todd Hinds is a Fellow and Child Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He works in full-time private practice in Liverpool. Todd is a Child Psychotherapist, drawn to this training from a teaching background in special schools. He works as a consultant to special schools in the Midlands and is particularly interested in the function of school in supporting psychic development.
The First Absence: How an Infant’s Early Loss Resonates Across a Life – Pauline Lee
This paper explores how an infant experiences a parent’s absence and how these early moments begin to take shape within the emerging self. Using clinical vignettes, it follows the emotional worlds of both infant and parent as they move through ruptures in connections and moments when attunement falters. These early losses, sometimes subtle, sometimes more immediate, leave impressions that help form the child’s sense of reality, separations, and longings. The paper traces how these early encounters with loss evolve over time and how their echoes may be felt in adulthood. These may include how the individual seeks closeness, manages separation, and carries the embodied memory of what was once missing.
Dr Pauline Lee is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society and works part-time in private practice. She is also a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and the Strategic Clinical Lead in Parent Infant Mental Health with NHS Greater Manchester. She teaches at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and the International Psychoanalytical Association candidate group in China.
The Irrepressible Brightness of Spring: Life, loss and loneliness in a Looked After Adolescent Boy – Becky Hall
In the seasonal shifts of the life cycle, the developmental task of late adolescence leans towards the autumnal. This period, and its equivalent states, when further efforts are made to separate from earlier identifications and relationships, is characterised by more introjective processes and depressive concerns than the early teenage years. The mourning of childhood brings a further re-working of Oedipal conflicts, the potential for self-awareness and what Margot Waddell (2003) elegantly details as the developing capacity for internal intimacy. Despite the deepening autumn palette of feeling, this time has its own urgency: the last but one chance at working things out before they truly come to an end.
Central to this work is the terror and anguish of loneliness, which for some feels insurmountable. Earlier negotiations of love and loss are vital, the scaffolding of a family hugely helpful and the risk of breakdown a reality. For children in care this time of life is critical. The cold prospect of adult life can harden the dread of internal loneliness and separate the child from the required inner sources of creative help. This paper describes work with a late adolescent boy in care, who has sought to evade autumnal pains by burying himself in an inner situation of wintry solitude. Desolation and yet to be imagined sadness threaten the life of the treatment, but a bright moment of spontaneity that bursts from the therapist caught off guard and is met by her patient provides a dazzling source of hope for change.
Becky Hall qualified as a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist from the Tavistock clinic in 2009 after postgraduate studies in the field of literature and postcoloniality. She subsequently trained as a Psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytic Association (BPA) and now works clinically across the lifecycle. She has worked extensively in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) and has developed a particular interest in fostering, adoption, intergenerational trauma and parental mental health. Alongside her NHS work in a specialist team for Looked After Children and Care Leavers, she has a private clinical practice, supervises, writes, and teaches Infant Observation at the BPA. She is an ACP registered Training Analyst and a Trustee of the Stuart Hall Foundation through which she co-ordinates and provides support for under-represented and disadvantaged students in receipt of bursaries on the Tavistock pre-clinical course and Child Psychotherapy training.
11.45-12.00 – Chair – comments + questions
Psychic Reality and the Problem of Mourning – Sharon Numa
Loss is an inevitable part of human life, whether we think of loss of an object, loss of cherished ideals, loss of place, of homeland, loss of youth; yet we so frequently rail against it, because it produces mental pain, pain that can be intense and feel unbearable. Grief, fear and even disintegration may threaten the collapse of the patient’s familiar world.
Both the early loss of the breast and the loss that is part of oedipal defeat confront us with the need to surrender infantile omnipotence and to face a painful reality. Stable configurations are formed which influence and structure the development of our internal worlds as we struggle to either accept loss or to deny and evade it. Freud’s seminal paper on Mourning and Melancholia (1917) vividly outlines the pain of losing the loved object and the different responses to it, introducing the idea of identification with the lost object in pathological states of melancholia. Melanie Klein built on this by showing how in depression it is not only the external but also the internal object that is felt to be lost, because the loss of the object leaves a gap in the sense of self. Mourning must struggle with the impact of object loss on the internal world and on our sense of identity, and we know that many obstacles are erected to avoid the associated psychic pain; from fleeting defensive strategies to deeper more pathological and organised defenses. I will try to illustrate some of the problems associated with the failure to mourn using clinical illustrations which outline different defenses against loss and mourning (the manic defense of idealisation on the one hand and the melancholic ‘solution’ on the other). The unconscious phantasies and beliefs about the possibility of reparation not only of the lost object but of the damaged object play a significant role in the capacity to mourn.
Dr Sharon Numa originally trained as a Clinical Psychologist, working in the NHS before undertaking the training in Adult Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic. She subsequently trained at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and is a Fellow of the Institute. She has worked in private practice with adult patients for over 30 years and is a training supervisor for the BPF, and teaches clinical and theoretical seminars in London. She also jointly ran a yearly Klein Workshop in Beijing with Mr. Philip Crockatt and has been involved in teaching Klein to students in Paris.
The Idea of Progress and the Inability to Mourn- Paul Hoggett
In ‘The Inability to Mourn’ (1967) the analysts Alexander and Marguerite Mischerlich wondered whether postwar reconstruction in Germany was fuelled by a manic social defence which enabled its citizens to scotomise their recent Nazi history. In this presentation Paul Hoggett will ask whether the inability to mourn might also provide a key to understanding some of the pathologies of Western civilisation including its restless economic development, and exploitation of nature and other peoples.
Paul Hoggett is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at UWE, Bristol and a retired psychoanalytic psychotherapist. In 2012, with Adrian Tait, he founded the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) and was its first chair. His books include Partisans in an Uncertain World: The Psychoanalysis of Engagement (1992, Free Association Books), Politics,Identity and Emotion (2008, Paradigm) and with Wendy Hollway, Chris Robertson and Sally Weintrobe co-authored Climate Psychology: A Matter of Life and Death(Phoenix, 2022). His latest book is Paradise Lost? The Climate Crisis and the Human Condition (Simplicity Institute, 2023).
In-person delegates – £120
In-person students/trainees – £80
In-person delegate tickets include lunch and refreshments.
Online delegates – £100
Online students/trainee delegates – £70
(booking fees apply)
All those registered for the conference are expected to adhere to the highest professional standards. This particularly relates to the absolute need to respect confidentiality.
If you are joining the conference from an online platform, please ensure that you are logging in from a secure environment where you will not be interrupted or overheard by other people.
If you think you recognise the identity of a patient in any presentation, please leave the session; this applies to remote participants and participants in the room.
Please do not discuss clinical material outside of the conference.
Do not record or disseminate any part of the presentations and discussions on any device. Access to recordings is for ticket holders only. Please do not disseminate any part of the recordings to any other parties or platforms.
By registering for this conference, you are confirming your compliance with these specific conditions.
Please note that we (Manchester Psychoanalytic Development Trust) will be filming a live-stream of the conference presentations and speaker-audience discussions via a private link for event ticket-holders. Fixed cameras will be set up to film the presenters, but not members of the audience.
