Object relations in the modern era

A full-day event exploring the continuing relevance of Object Relations theory across contemporary culture, politics, and clinical practice.
About this Event

OBJECT RELATIONS IN THE MODERN ERA (IN PERSON ATTENDANCE)

A full-day event exploring the continuing relevance of Object Relations theory across contemporary culture, politics, and clinical practice.

Featuring:

- Presentations

- Panel Discussions

- Q&A

Topics include:

• Arts & Culture

• Global Politics

• Clinical Application

October 31st, 2026

9:00 AM – 5:15 PM

CPD points available.

Arts and Culture Panel

This panel explores how psychoanalysis might help us to reflect on our experiences with the arts and culture, focusing particularly on literature, film and mural art.

• Dr Mary Pyle (Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy) ‘Object Relations and Fictional Characters’
• Dr Noreen Giffney (Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Ulster University, Belfast) ‘At the Breast of Culture’
• Dr Niamh Callaghan (EastSide Partnership, Belfast and Queen’s University Belfast) ‘Murals as Psychic Objects’

Speaker: Dr Mary Pyle, Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Title: Object Relations and Fictional Characters

Description: Rules about how critics may work with fictional characters have changed through the decades from Professor A.C. Bradley, a contemporary of Freud, who embraced psychoanalysis in his examination of Shakespearian characters, to contemporary criticism which posits that characters should not be thought of as real people. This poses a problem as unless readers can relate to fictional characters as real there can be no identification with them. Psychoanalyst Igněs Sodré explores how great writers create ‘true false characters’. In this presentation I look at the difficulty of combining the rules of current literary criticism with Object Relations theory when exploring readers reactions to and identifications with characters who they know to be fictional but to them are real while they are in the liminal space in which author, reader and fictional characters exist.

Bio: Dr Mary Pyle is a founder member of both the Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (IFPP) and the Irish Institute of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (IIPP). She has been a teacher, therapist and supervisor for the IIPP. She gained her PhD, which explored the appeal of the Harry Potter series to adult and child readers through the lenses of both object relations and contemporary literary criticism, from Trinity College Dublin, in 2022. She is the author of ‘Harry Potter, Psychoanalysis, and the Unconscious Dimension’ (Routledge 2026). https://www.routledge.com/Harry-Potter-Psychoanalysis-and-the-Unconscious-Dimension/Pyle/p/book/9781041010203

Speaker: Dr Noreen Giffney, Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Ulster University, Belfast

Title: At the Breast of Culture

Description: I will talk about the making of ‘Cultural Encounters’ (2026; dirs. Noreen Giffney and Allen Fatimaharan; 5 mins, 15 secs), an animated short film about the emotional and psychological nourishment and protection provided by our experiences with the arts and culture. While we might be aware of the short-term impact of a cultural object – how it makes us think or feel in the moment – we are usually unaware of how the ephemeral aspect of this experience stays with us and becomes part of us; the unconscious aspect of the experience in other words. ‘Cultural Encounters’ invites us to reflect on what our encounters with, attachments to and psychological uses of cultural objects might tell us about ourselves. It is underpinned by Kleinian psychoanalytic ideas, particularly the culture-breast, a new psychoanalytic concept I formulated and developed in my book, ‘The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis: Cultural Experiences and the Clinic’.

Bio: Dr Noreen Giffney is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist based in County Donegal in Ireland, and is a lecturer and researcher at Ulster University, Belfast. She is the author of the book, ‘The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis: Cultural Experiences and the Clinic’ (Routledge 2021), and the author and/or editor of additional articles and books on psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, and the arts, culture and mental health. Noreen is the joint editor-in-chief, with Emmanuelle Smith, of ‘New Associations’ psychoanalytic magazine, published three times a year by the British Psychoanalytic Council. She was a member of the creative team, led by Professor Jill Bennett, for ‘World Comes Alive’ (fEEL 2025), the first virtual reality experience underpinned by psychoanalytic thinking. Noreen is an associate member of the performance arts organisation, Bbeyond, and takes opera singing lessons in her spare time. https://www.ulster.ac.uk/staff/n-giffney

Speaker: Dr Niamh Callaghan, EastSide Partnership, Belfast and Queen’s University Belfast

Title: Murals as Psychic Objects

Description: This presentation draws on my doctoral research into the emotional and unconscious impact of mural art in the North/Northern Ireland. I will explore murals not only as political symbols or visual texts to be decoded, but as affective public objects that organise feeling, memory, identity, and belonging before meaning is fully available in words. Using Donald Winnicott’s concept of holding and Wilfred Bion’s concept of containment, I consider how public art such as murals can hold unresolved communal anxieties, histories, and identifications, while not necessarily transforming them. I suggest that containment takes place not in the mural itself, but in the research encounter. The presentation will reflect on how murals continue to mediate complex emotional landscapes in a society marked by conflict, and how psychoanalytic and psychosocial methods can help make saturated public images thinkable without simplifying or sanitising them.

Bio: Dr Niamh Callaghan’s work explores how public images shape feeling, memory, and belonging in societies marked by conflict. She was awarded her PhD in Psychoanalysis and Culture from Ulster University, where her doctoral research examined the emotional, unconscious, and embodied impact of mural art in the North/Northern Ireland. Drawing on object relations, her research considers murals as affective public landscapes that hold unresolved memories, anxieties, attachments, and forms of belonging. She is currently the Research, Impact and Communications Officer with EastSide Partnership and Queen’s University Belfast. Niamh has previously worked in trauma support, co-facilitating group workshops on trauma, and takes an ardent interest in painting and drawing.

Clinical Practice Panel

This panel focuses on Object Relations as they show up in the consulting room, and examines how they are played out in the clinic today, and through the narrative of a case from the psychoanalytic literature.

Speakers:

Dr. John O’Connor, Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy; School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin. ‘Two Bodies in a Room’

Dr. Margaret Boyle Spelman, Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy;

‘Susan: A Case of Milner and Winnicott Thinking Together’

Ms. Ann Murphy, Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy; ‘Growing Pains’

Speaker: Dr. John O’Connor, Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy; School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin.

Title: Two Bodies in a Room

Description: In this talk, I explore briefly a thread of interest I have had over the course of my psychoanalytic thinking and practice. This is specifically in relation to what is loosely, though usefully, called the mind-body problem. I outline my more recently developed sense of the importance of our tending to this in our analytic work, including when it is and is not pressing. Our bracketing-off of the body, sometimes something that has been inherent in psyche-focussed fields, can leave one with a skewed sense of the human subject and also limit our access to this as present and thinkable material. I also draw loosely on the process and findings of a range of psychoanalytically-informed research projects in which I have been involved, bridging psychoanalysis and clinical psychology. Hysteria, which is a founding focus for psychoanalysis, continues to be relevant today - including with the body in its physical reality, in its dynamics and movement, in its location as object and subject. The idea of ‘two bodies in a room’ comes from a sense of one of the realities of what we are engaged with psychoanalytically, when we strip back a great deal. A kind of totality of psyche and soma, which offers the potential for an integration in the direction of a total object-subject reality. I briefly consider the work with the client as one involving two bodies in a room, with what is carried consciously and unconsciously transacted both gently and forcefully in this.

Bio: John O’Connor, PhD, is Course Director of the MPhil in Psychoanalytic Studies, and Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology in the School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin. He is a Board member of the Irish Council for Psychotherapy. By training, John is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist and, alongside decades of engagement in training clinicians in these fields, he has worked in a wide variety of public services, as well as privately. He is both a clinical and academic supervisor, and with particular interests in processes of training, the training environment, the psychodynamics of commonly diagnosed states, the intersection between individual and cultural pressures, and the development of contexts for the handling of suffering. He has published widely, often with colleagues in other fields, and is dedicated to the bridging between psychoanalytic and adjacent and wider communities, in association with the HSE, the Irish Pr*son Service, the National Rehabilitation Hospital, Beaumont Hospital, and St. Patrick’s Hospital in recent years, amongst others. He co-chairs a group of clinical psychology trainers across the UK and Ireland engaged in psychodynamically-leaning work and is a member of a special interest group concerned with the sustaining of psychoanalytic teaching within psychology curricula in the United States and beyond. He has been involved in advocating, lobbying, and engaging with policy and practice in the field of mental health. Since 2023, he has been actively involved in advocating for psychotherapy as a profession in the face of threats to this.

Speaker: Dr. Margaret Boyle Spelman

Title: Susan: A Case of Milner and Winnicott Thinking Together

Description: In this short paper I aim for a more balanced recognition of the legacy of both figures in this professional couple: I give glimpses of their shared way of thinking and their particular understanding of object relations based in the stage of the mother and baby dyad.

To illustrate their understanding of Marion’s patient Susan’s journey to becoming ‘real’, I use Marion’s own account of her work with Susan (The Hands of the Living God (1969) London: Hogarth.) in whose care both Marion and Donald were actively involved.

Bio: Margaret Boyle Spelman PhD, AFPsSI, MIFPP, MICP, MEAP, is a chartered clinical and counselling psychologist, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and an organisational psychologist in private practice (www.castleknock-psychoanalysis.ie) in Dublin, Ireland. Margaret completed her PhD by research at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex and has worked for more than four decades as a clinical psychologist in the Irish health services. Over the decades Margaret has spoken at home and abroad and lectured in several universities and institutes. Margaret is an (ex officio) member of the Psychological Society of Ireland, The Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, the Irish Council for Psychotherapy and its Psychoanalytic Section. As well as many peer reviewed papers, Margaret has published two monographs: Winnicott’s Babies and Winnicott’s Patients - psychoanalysis as Transitional Space (2013) and The Evolution of Winnicott’s Thinking – A Study of the growth of Psychoanalytic Thought (2013). She has also co-edited two volumes in the Lines of Development series: The Winnicott Tradition (2014), M Boyle Spelman and Frances Thomson-Salo (eds.) and The Marion Milner Tradition (2023), Boyle Spelman and Joan Raphael-Leff (eds.); both volumes in a book series on psychoanalytic giants originally published by Karnac and now by Routledge.

Speaker: Ms. Ann Murphy, Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Title: Growing Pains

Description: Contact with external and internal reality inevitably brings with it a quantum of frustration and pain, and the capacity to tolerate such pain is fundamental to mental growth. However, whether due to constitutional or environmental factors, many patients seeking therapy may have a poorly developed capacity for bearing painful states of mind. Threatened by intolerable pain, the psyche may protect itself by a retreat and a refusal, leading to a collapse of the transforming chain that generates representation, meaning and thought.

Encountering and working with unrepresented or unbearable states of mind places heavy demands on both patient and analyst, and in this short paper I want to consider what conditions need to be created to assist the passage from unbearable to bearable, so that unrepresented mental pain can be transformed into meaningful experience, capable of being tolerated, and available for thinking, so that the patient may learn from it, use it and be transformed by it.

Bio: Ann Murphy, MSc. MICP; MIFPP; MECP; is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and Visual Artist. She was a founder and Director of the MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Trinity College Dublin, and a founder member and first Chairperson of The Irish Institute of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. Her particular area of interest is in post-Kleinian psychoanalytic thinking, particularly the work of Wilfred Bion. She has lectured for many years on post-graduate courses at Trinity College Dublin, as well as other universities and institutes. She is a training analyst and clinical supervisor, and has a private practice in Dublin. She has presented papers at psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary conferences throughout Ireland and in the UK. She served on the Boards of The Irish Council for Psychotherapy, and the Psychoanalytic Section of the ICP, and as Chair of the Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.

Global Politics and Psychoanalysis Panel

John Foden

Is a psychoanalytic Psychotherapist currently in private practice. John was employed by the HSE for thirty years initially working as a social worker and then as a psychotherapist. John worked with the HSE’s National Counselling Service which specialised in working with survivors of abuse and trauma, including survivors of institutional abuse. He became Director of Counselling for the service with HSE West in 2013, and retired from the service in in 2018.

Synopsis

When Christopher Bollass writes of the democratic mind, he quotes John Stuart Mill who states: “that man [should be] is capable of rectifying his mistakes by discussion and experience”.

This process requires a thinking mind, a mind that can process information, but also emotional experiences in a thoughtful and contained way. Such a state of mind and state of community and “State” requires a culture of thinking, where the dialectical process of thesis and counter thesis can develop and nurture a process of understanding and development, enabling the process of decision making. Democratic processes are undermined and threatened by primitive states of mind where projection and a lack of integration are present and encouraged. Such paranoid schizoid states of thinking are the bedrock of authoritarian regimes and are increasing prevalent throughout the world today and in an insidious way undermine many democracies. We have witnessed the largest democracy in the world gradually succumb to fragmentation and splitting, which we often witness in our patients with severe emotional dysregulation. Thinking is the enemy, whereas action usually based on projective processes is increasingly normalised. Thought based on facts and reality are defended against with venom. How and why is this process gaining momentum. In my paper I will seek to examine the concept of Alienation from a Marxist perspective and from a psychoanalytic perspective, with particular reference to the recent work Bob Hinshelwood, who describes the “alienation of the self and the depersonalisation caused by projective identification [causing] a disrupted experience of oneself”. How can we understand this process from an object relations perspective.

Speaker: David Smith

Title: Abject Relations: Some Thoughts on Mutual Dehumanisation and the Taking of Sides on a Sinking Ship

This paper will reflect from a relational perspective upon the lamentably abject state

of object relations in a modern era characterised by deeply disturbing polarisation,

underpinned by the pervasive employment on all sides of splitting and projective

processes. Such deep, entrenched divisions reinforce persecutory anxieties and

annihilatory impulses, in turn feeding into the shared human insecurities which are a

hallmark of paranoid-schizoid functioning. Responsibility for the current political

climate crisis, getting played out so alarmingly on both local and global levels, tends

to be disavowed and located in the other - with all of us struggling to acknowledge its

co-created nature. Consideration will be given to the emotional and psychological

cost of living in crisis, and to the collectively soul-destroying impact of mutual

dehumanisation. Part of what we share, moving forward, is a vital developmental

challenge: namely, how to rehumanise both ourselves and the other, in the service of

fostering healthier psychic states and intercommunal relations.

Speaker Bio: David Smith is a Belfast-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, and writer, with a background in therapeutic communities. With a particular interest inthe creative use of culture to inform psychoanalytic thinking and clinical practice, hispublished writings include essays on Michael Eigen, Marion Milner, sea swimming,and Northern Ireland, in addition to writing credits for two short psychoanalytic films,The Clearing (2019), and The Blind Sea (2023). David has made clinical presentations in Belfast, Dublin, London, and New York City. He is Chair of the Northern Ireland Institute of Human Relations, and former Chair of the Psychoanalytic Section of the Irish Council for Psychotherapy. Address for correspondence: [email protected]

Eva Molyneux

Is a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist in private practice. She began her training at the

Tavistock Clinic in London before completing her MSc at Trinity College and her

clinical diploma with IFPP. Before that, Eva was employed as a political risk

consultant for 15 years, a role that provided forecasting and analysis of political

trends for global business and NGOs.

Synopsis

Turning a Blind Eye: Object Relations and the Political Shocks of 2016

Ten years on from Trump’s first presidential victory and the Brexit referendum, it is

informative to reflect on how these immense political disruptions blindsided the

political elite and intellectual classes. The focus of this paper is not the voter, about

whom much has been said, but those in power who failed to see what was in front of

them. In what way did their underlying assumptions of the world protect them from

reality?

Object relations theory offers a rich understanding of how uncomfortable truths can

remain unseen. This paper draws on the work of Steiner, Bion and Klein to describe

the processes of disavowal, projection and the evacuation of threatening ideas. The

years prior to 2016 showed how the mainstream political, economic and intellectual

establishment idealised a progressive world picture, while the rage, despair and

shame of those on the other side of the meritocratic divide was kept out of mind. This

arguably defended against having to ask what produced those feelings, and who

benefitted from the arrangements that produced them. Such questions remain highly

relevant in today’s world of weakened democracies, increasingly polarised by

inequality.