Queer Encounters

***Ripping Up the Archive of Psychoanalysis*** ***24 June 2026*** Join Queer Encounters and the Mental Health and Social Justice Network for this creative workshop as part of the Queer Riddles Pride season at the Freud Museum! We will start with a talk about the history of psychoanalysis and queer and trans people, an introduction to the Freud Museum archive, and the hidden queer history of the Freuds’ family home. We’ll then use archival texts – copies of psychoanalytic writing about gender and sexuality, archival texts from Broadmoor, and attendees own writing or art – to make zines. We can rip them up, take them apart, decide which sections to keep, which to throw away, and use this archival material to make something new. Participants will be invited to use their own experiences of talking about gender and sexuality as clients or patients in psychotherapy to create new entries into the psychoanalytic archive. The workshop will then close with a reflective space to think about the experience. The workshop is primarily intended for queer and trans people who have experience as patients in psychotherapy and / or in the mental health system, but all are welcome, including clinicians, trainees, and academics who are interested in queer and trans psychoanalysis. Tickets here and link in bio .uk/event/ripping-up-the-archive-of-psychoanalysis-a-queer-encounter-at-the-freud-museum-with-queer-encounters-and-the-mental-health-and-social-justice-network/#

Dear All Queer Encounters has been quiet for a few months, so I thought I’d write with a quick update. I’ve been busy with work, PhD writing, and just generally surviving in the world, so I haven’t had much capacity for organising. And lots of fantastic things have been happening in other spaces: P-HOLE’s weekly psychoanalytic ‘online liberatory education’, in person events in London with the Mental Health Social Justice Network, seminars with the Rendering Unconscious Center for Psychoanalysis, some great speakers hosted by Liberate Mental Health, presentations of emerging clinical and theroetical work at the monthly Freudian Research Seminar Series, and rich clinical workshops and conferences with the FREEPSY Project. If you haven’t already found them, please do check out these amazing spaces! Next year, Queer Encounters is planning to do zine-making events based around the theme of ‘Ripping up the psychoanalytic archive’ at the Freud Museum and in other spaces, and perhaps one or two other one-off events. If you’re interested in doing something with us, you can still contact us at [email protected]. The Call for Papers for the Association for Psychosocial Studies June 2026 Conference has just been published. This year’s theme is ‘Trust, Mistrust and Community’. We are organising a Zoom call in early December to discuss this topic and brainstorm ideas for papers or workshops from a critical, queer and trans perspective. If you’d like to join, please DM us or mail [email protected]

Queer Encounters visited the archive of the British Psychoanalytic Associating on Friday at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London. The BPA’s 1955 evidence to the Wolfenden report was on display, alongside its report to the commission on corporal punishment. Interestingly, the analysts supported the decriminalisation of homosexuality, on the grounds that decriminalising homosexuality would reduce the anxiety that everyone has about their latent homosexuality, and therefore reduce the amount of overt homosexual activity. So…right answer for the wrong reasons??? #queerpsychoanalysis #history #archives #psychoanalysis

Continuing our theme of queer encounters with psychoanalytic history, we’ve arranged a special interaction with papers shedding light on British psychoanalysts’ responses to the ‘Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution - The British Psychoanalytical Society Archive’ headed by Lord Wolfenden from 1955-1957. This material from the British Psychoanalytical Society Archive includes a memorandum submitted by the Institute to the comittee, as well as material from Klein, Winnicott and others on their clinical work with homosexuality. The archivist, Ewan O’Neill, writes: ‘It’s really great material and interesting to see the prevalent attitudes of the time and also the analysts’ searching around the subject.’ There is also a small exhibit of material next to this from File 3 - Royal Commission on Capital Punishment which gives a bit of broader context. We’ll meet at the British Psychoanalytical Society Archive which is housed at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 112A Shirland Road, London W9 2BT at 2pm, have a short introduction to the archive from Ewan O’Neill, and then have an informal discussion about what we’ve seen and how we relate to it, from a personal and research perspective. Tickets - link in bio 👆👆

Queer Encounters reading group 27/02/2025: Dina Al-Kassim's reflection on Afsaneh Najmabadi's 'Professing Selves' (2013). Join us to discuss the complexities of religion-and state-sanctioned gender transition in Iran, seen through Al-Kassim's Laplanchean lens of the 'enigma of gendered embodiment and desire'. We'll also be discussing Calvin Thomas' hilarious and angry 'Lacanistas in the stalls: Urinary segregation, transgendered abjection, and the queerly ambulant dead'. Both chapters offer tremendous potential for resistance and queer/trans becoming in times of state repression - we look forward to a vibrant discussion! tickets via QR code or link in bio

Queer Encounters at the Freud Museum - panellists and chair from our two events yesterday (31.01.2025) and today (01.02.2025) Noreen Giffney @ralucasoreanu45 @meadows_knits @harrietmossop (@patriciagherovici you were with us in spirit, and @hzea I think you were buying a begonia at this point so we missed you😂😂😂)

Queer Encounters with Psychoanalytic History at the Freud Museum - 31.01.2025 Thanks everyone for coming, for being a warm and appreciative audience, and for sharing your questions and thoughts about Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham’s long relationship, and how it is represented in the Museum space. See you at 2pm today for our online symposium with the wonderful @patriciagherovici @hzea @ralucasoreanu45 Noreen Giffney @meadows_knits @harrietmossop @freudmuseum

I’m enjoying ‘The queerness of psychoanalysis’ so much! Edited by @renderingunconscious Vanessa Sinclair, Elisabeth Punzi, and Myriam Sauer Some highlights here but honestly every chapter is such a gem…. What an expansion and celebration of how we can think queerness and transness and psychoanalysis together! Buy it, read it…. And hopefully we will read it together in the Queer Encounters network soon 😊@queer_encounters

We’re so happy that people are interested in our special tour of the Freud Museum about Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham! Thank you all for booking. If you haven’t got your ticket yet, it looks like now is the time…..£10 bursary tickets available from the Freud Museum (link in bio)

Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham were both child psychoanalysts, central to the creation of what is today the Anna Freud Centre. They had a close personal and professional relationship for more than 59 years. And lived together in the house that is now the Freud Museum in London for nearly 40 years. The recent movie Freud’s Last Session showed their relationship as lesbian But what do we really@know about their relationship? And how can we think psychoanalytically and psychosocial about it today? Join Agnes Meadows, Harriet Mossop and the Queer Encounters network on 31st January 2025 for a special tour at the Freud Museum, London, focusing on Anna and Dorothy’s personal and professional life together Join Patricia Gherovici, Noreen Giffney, Hannah Zeavin and Harriet Mossop with chair Raluca Soreanu for a symposium around the portrayal of Anna and Dorothy’s relationship in ‘Freud’s Last Session’ online on 1st February 2025 Tickets from the Freud Museum - link in bio @queer_encounters @meadows_knits @freudmuseum @patriciagherovici @ralucasoreanu45 @hzea #queerpsychoanalysis #psychoanalysis #freud #annafreud

🔥🔥 Queer Encounters with psychoanalytic history at the Freud Museum: two events to consider the relationship between Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham on 31st January 2025 6:30-8pm (in person) and 1st February 2025 2-4:30pm (online) Speculation about the nature of the five-decade-long personal and professional partnership between Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham is not new. However, early twenty-first Century culture is turning its “queer eye” onto the relationship in particular ways in the context of more open – although not always more accepting – social and psychoanalytic attitudes to non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality. Two events at the Freud Museum, London in early 2025 will explore how their relationship was portrayed during Freud and Burlingham’s lifetime, by their biographers in the 1980s, and in the film Freud’s Last Session (2023), as well as recent research which sheds light onto how more personal elements of their relationship were omitted from the archive. The events will be an opportunity to reflect on how cultural representations of their relationship have changed in the 40 years since Anna Freud’s death, and to relate this to work in the psychoanalytic clinic with different expressions of gender and sexuality. There will be a special tour of the Freud Museum focusing on Anna and Dorothy’s life together in the house and the archive of their letters, on 31 January 2025, and an online symposium discussing the portrayal of their relationship in the movie Freud’s Last Session on 1 February 2025. Tickets are available at bit.ly/QE202425 or the Freud Museum website. Links in bio. Bursaries are available. Many thanks to the amazing @patriciagherovici @hzea Noreen Giffney @ralucasoreanu45 @harrietmossop and @meadows_knits and friends at the @freudmuseum for their time and support for these events 🔥🔥

📖Queer Encounters reading group: 5th December📖 Join us to discuss Tiresian myths, Bracha’s matrixial feminine, and familial ruptures. Link in bio. ****** The figure of Tiresias has something to teach us about what Ettinger calls the Other (Feminine) sexual difference as distinct from Lacan’s sexuation. Tiresias offers an important supplement to an otherwise limiting focus on Oedipus in the psychoanalytic ...Oedipus the King involves the dangers of disavowing the Ettingerian feminine dimension. This is a dimension of being where others...are not strangers but internal to the partial-subject in a matrixial web.... ....patricide and incest do not cause Oedipal trauma but are a response to it. Oedipus is, in the first instance, traumatized by a rupture in his familial web. Sheila L. Cavanagh, 2022, Tiresias and the Other Sexual Difference #queerpsychoanalysis #freud #bracha #thefeminine