Bpf Wessex Event: Pleasing Sorrows and Grateful Terrors: A Psychoanalytic Dialogue with the Music of Bach

Please arrive at 10:10 am for registration. There will be a break for Tea/Coffee from 12:00 -12:30 pm.

Psychoanalysis, with its explorations into the unconscious workings of the earliest manifestations of psychic life, has the unique capacity to enter the world of music and its creative productions imaginatively. Music on its side, can inform the work of Psychoanalysis, sharing the same emotional fabric and temporal qualities as psychic life and acting as a container for previously unsymbolized experience.

In a rich and thought-provoking paper, the psychoanalyst Anthea Gomez explores the links between the two, using Bach’s Chaconne from the Partita in D minor for solo violin, Hanna Segal’s Theory of Aesthetics and contemporary writings on music and the Unconscious.

Musical illustrations of these explorations will be played by violinist Sara Trickey, who will then perform the Chaconne in its entirety.  There will be a break for tea or coffee after which Hania Porucznik will briefly respond to the paper. The audience will then be invited to participate and ask questions.

Anthea Gomez is a Fellow of the BPAS and a Training Analyst for the Institute of Psychoanalysis.  She was Chair of the New Entry Scheme for many years and is currently part of the Training Staff Committee.  She has a full-time analytic practice in York.  Her background is in music and she studied piano, composition and viola at the Royal Academy of Music.  She enjoyed a first career writing music for the theatre and as an in-house composer for BBC Radio Drama, before training as a psychoanalyst.

Sara Trickey enjoys an exciting and diverse career as a solo violinist and chamber musician.  Recently, she curated her own project Dancing With Apollo as part of the Spitalfields Festival.  This was a multi-media project based on Greek myth, including music for violin and piano, narration, and dance.  She read Classics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and this continues to be a passion.  She also enjoys teaching, primarily at the Junior Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Hania Porucznik is a Psychoanalyst working in private practice in Oxford, and has a particular interest in music and psychoanalysis.    

*If you are a psychotherapist or counsellor residing in an active conflict zone, you are eligible to attend this event free of charge (regardless of whether you are a bpf member or not). Please email membership@bpf-psychotherapy to enquire about a ticket.