Eighth AGM of the College

19th November 2011

Presidentʼs Report

Last year the College’s activities were focused around the question of regulation and the HPC. Although there are still major concerns here, there has been less direct campaigning in 2011, following our success at the judicial review preliminary hearing. The discourse of healthcare is still prevalent and risks obscuring the particularity of psychoanalysis, but the College will do its best to try to make the aims and ethics of analytic work clear in the ongoing debates which now revolve around CHRE.

Our conference ‘Is psychoanalysis teachable?,’ held at the Freud Museum in Febuary, was a lively and stimulating event, and marked a welcome return to conceptual-clinical issues. Papers from the conference are available on the College wesbite, and I would like to thank the organisors Anne Worthington and Werner Prall, and Simona Revelli for the web side of things. We hope to continue next year with more events around such issues, and Dorothy Hamilton has kindly volunteered to help organise a study day next Spring where College members can present brief extracts of their ‘work in progress’, followed by discussion.

The College has also been active in the campaign to obtain the release from prison of the Syrian analyst Rafah Nached, and we are pleased to learn that she has been released this week. Many thanks to Simona again for all her work on this, and for keeping the College website updated on the progress of the campaign and, indeed, on College activities and information in general.

I would also like to thank the board’s two departing members, David Henderson and Joe Suart, for all their contributions to our work, and to welcome our new members Peter Nevins and Bruce Scott. Thanks to Julia Carne, our company secretary, who has done a great deal for the College this year and last, and to Anne Worthington for her work on the accounts and in organising College events.

Darian Leader