News from Manchester Psychoanalytic Development Trust: updates, upcoming events, opportunities to get involved in new developments, and information about related events and activities.
MPDT is now officially a charity! We are registered with the Charity Commission and our charity number is 1217899. We will be working through what this means for the development of MPDT over the coming months and will be sharing this with you.
Here are our Trustees.
Please do join us on Saturday 11 July at St Thomas Centre, Ardwick Green in Manchester, or online, for what promises to be a rich and thought-provoking day. Visit mpdt.org.uk/conference-2026 if you have not signed up for the conference already, and remind yourselves of the speakers we are delighted to have presenting their papers. The day is also an opportunity to meet with others and experience being part of a psychoanalytic hub in the North West. It is important that our conferences are well attended in order to ensure that we are able to continue providing CPD events across the year.
Here is a brief article by one of our speakers, Paul Hoggett, to give you an idea of what he will be helping us to think about in July.
The Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) was formally established in 2012. It brought therapists from different modalities to work together with researchers and activists to confront the deepening climate emergency.
Climate psychology has tried to throw light upon Western citizens’ complicity and inaction in the face of the climate crisis and promote greater ethical and political engagement with the issue. It has explored themes such as the omnipotent disregard of limits, human exceptionalism and superiority, and the destructive role of psychological defences such as denial, disavowal and splitting.
Despite three decades of increasingly frantic scientific warnings, the natural world continues to be destroyed all about us. In his contribution Professor Paul Hoggett, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and co-founder of the CPA, will explore the relevance of another key psychoanalytic concept – the inability to mourn – to an understanding of both our complicity in this destruction and the pathway to reparation.
If you are interested in finding out more about the CPA visit climatepsychologyalliance.org
Our aim is to offer bursaries to trainees on psychodynamic and psychoanalytic courses to ensure training is affordable and accessible whatever background trainees are coming from. We also want to make sure that our events can be attended by everyone who is interested and wants to learn and engage with psychoanalytic theory and practice and hence we are offering reduced fees or full bursaries for our events depending on need and available spaces. Please do get in touch with us whether you are interested in applying for a bursary for your training, or in relation to our reduced fee/bursary offer for our events.
MPDT is currently planning a series of five clinical seminars for those working in a psychodynamic or psychoanalytic way with adult patients. The seminars will take place in the autumn of 2026 and be led by Kathryn Holland, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and MPDT Trustee. These will be held in-person in a central Manchester location. Details will be circulated later this term. We will be considering holding a series of clinical seminars in the future that are also accessible to child and adolescent psychotherapists.
Are you interested in psychoanalysis and film?
We are looking for volunteers to join a sub-group of MPDT to plan events promoting a psychoanalytic understanding of films. Do get involved with what promises to be an exciting venture. If you have relevant skills, knowledge and interest in this area please contact Faye Brierley and Verity Emanuel with the subject title ‘Film Group’.
Manchester has a rich psychoanalytic history beginning with Sigmund Freud who had family members living in the city. He visited them twice, once in 1875 and then again in 1908. In Peter Gay’s book Freud: A life for our time it is noted that Freud was struck by the “industriousness” of the city and that he had wondered if he might settle there.
Michael Balint lived and worked in Manchester between 1939 and 1945, bringing his Hungarian psychoanalytic training to the British medical system. He took up roles such as the Clinical Director of the Child Guidance Clinic (now known as CAMHS) in Manchester. He worked at the Northern Royal Hospital, was the director of two educational counselling centres in the city, and studied for a postgraduate degree at the University of Manchester. He was also the supervisor and mentor for Esther Bick and Betty Joseph who lived and worked in the city.
Esther Bick came to Manchester as a wartime refugee from Poland in 1939. She worked in wartime nurseries and day centres in Manchester and Salford. Esther Bick went onto invent the infant observation model that is still used today in the training of psychoanalysis, her work and observations in Manchester nurseries was pivotal to this. She began her own analysis in 1941 with Michael Balint and he supported her application to train with the Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Betty Joseph moved to Manchester in 1940 when she was 23 and lived here until 1945. At the time, Manchester was one of the only places in the UK outside London that offered both a university and practicing psychoanalysts. She had decided to undergo her own analysis to help her work as a psychiatric social worker. She began her analysis in 1940 with Michael Balint. In 1944 she interviewed for a formal analytic training
Hanna Segal lived in Manchester between 1940 and 1943 after fleeing Nazi occupied areas across Europe. Her time in the city was dedicated to her medical training which she completed at Manchester University in 1943. It was during her time in Manchester that she was first exposed to the British Psychoanalytic Society.
In March 2026 MPDT was delighted to welcome Professor Rosine Perelberg to speak at a seminar on Female Sexuality. Throughout her career, Rosine Perelberg has developed Freud’s ideas in particular, to take specific account of the centrality of a girl’s relationship to her mother and her mother’s body in her psychic development. In this context difficulties in relation to the body, somatic concerns, can be seen as attacks on the maternal object, and may also be associated with melancholic states. Rosine Perelberg’s writings show how such preoccupations emerge in psychoanalysis, often in part-object terms; involving the breast, the anus, the ovaries and the uterus. In this she locates a woman’s struggle in a pre-verbal sensorial domain, and she expects this to be re-experienced in the ‘apres-coup’ of the analytic session.
The concept of the ‘apres-coup’ is something that Rosine Perelberg has written about extensively. She sees sexuality as inevitably traumatic. This can be understood to mean that infantile sexuality, in Freudian terms, with its excessive drives, requires representation and symbolic functioning in order for the adult woman to metabolise previously unbound traumatic states. In her writings Rosine Perelberg articulates a hope that through the force of the repetition of such early experiences in the transference relationship, new meaning can be found, and importantly, this is not an intellectual process. Instead, the analytic relationship can support a need to find an object, a relationship within which something that has never before been put into words, can be experienced emotionally and named. As part of the event, some clinical work was presented for live supervision which vividly illuminated many of these themes. The seminar was a rare opportunity to hear Rosine Perelberg speak about her work in an engaging and accessible way. Her ideas were brought alive and explored by the audience, adding to our further understanding of female sexuality and the work of psychoanalysis.
Are you interested in training as a psychoanalyst? The Northern Training plans to run a further cohort beginning in Autumn 2028. Training to be a Psychoanalyst with the Institute of Psychoanalysis is a rigorous and deeply rewarding experience. Founded in 1913, the Institute of Psychoanalysis (also known as the British Psychoanalytical Society) is a charity dedicated to enhancing lives through the intensive talking therapy that is psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts trained in the British Society have the highest professional standards and qualifications and the training process is world renowned.
Since 2014 the Institute has offered the Northern training programme from its dedicated premises in Leeds. This training corresponds in its content and requirements to the training offered in London and UK wide. The training is in working in five times a week psychoanalysis with adults. It comprises personal analysis five times a week, theoretical seminars, and five times a week clinical psychoanalytic work with patients.
You can find out more about the training at psychoanalysis.org.uk/training. If you would like to think further about applying to train, please contact the administrator Rohima Alam, who will arrange an initial informal discussion with one of the analysts involved in the Northern training.
HPC (hpc.scot) is a partner organisation doing great things in the North West of Scotland. Do look at their work online and support them if you can. Like us, they are building a psychoanalytic hub in a region and promoting psychoanalytic ideas and practice. They are also building clinical services for young people.
Please consider supporting MPDT financially so that we are able to continue providing training bursaries and reduced fee places at our events. To date we have awarded seven bursaries. Details of the criteria for bursary applications and how to apply are available at mpdt.org.uk If you wish to make a charitable donation you can do this via our website, and if you are considering leaving a legacy please get in touch with us.
Thank you for reading this and we hope to see you in July.
