'Women Today: Diversity and Identity in a Complex World' was a conference organised to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Women's Therapy Centre in London, and to reflect on the revolutionary changes that have taken place for women in British society over the last twenty five years. In introducing the conference, Tirril Harris, chair of the WTC observed that changes to the structure of society have involved a dynamic interplay between inner and outer world events, and this theme would be explored in greater depth over the two days of the conference.
The conference was organised in four main sessions, which refelcted the multi-layered and complex nature of women's lives in the modern world: Culture, Race and Difference; Body Matters; Dreams, Words and Memory; and Gender Politics and Women's Mental Health.
Speakers in the first session included Barbara Fletchman Smith, author of Mental Slavery, who gave a powerful and moving paper discussing the history of slavery and its link to trauma in patients today; and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writer, broadcaster, columnist, and President of the Family Therapy Institute, who spoke of 'Multiple Identities and Women in a Globalized World'. Later in the morning Angela Powell and Gwen Williams addressed the difficulty and current lack of discussion of race and colour within the psychoanalytic psychotherapy profession. It seems that 10 years after the Freud Museum's pioneering seminars 'Psychotherapy Black and White', the situation has not substantially changed.
Joan Raphael-Leff chaired the afternoon session 'Body Matters'. A psychoanalyst and author of several books including Psychological Processes in Childrearing, she opened with a reminder that we are 'embodied' and have all come out of female bodies - obvious facts which are nevertheless often obscured by the psychoanalytic focus on the mind. Marilyn Lawrence, a psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Clinic, presented a stimulating, and, as it turned out, controversial paper in which she suggested an equivalent to male 'castration anxiety' applying to women. Anne Aiyegbusi, nurse consultant in the Women's Services at Broadmoor, a high security psychiatric hospital, gave a moving talk called, 'Body Language: Working with Women in Secure Care'. She shared her experience of working with this difficult group of severely damaged women who often use their bodies violently to express trauma that cannot be thought about or spoken. Colleen Heenan explored the body as a site for expressing conflict, illustrating her talk with examples from the reflexive research project in which she acted as therapist and researcher in a group for women with eating disorders.
The Sunday morning session began with Margot Waddell's rich and poetic exploration of some of the affinities between psychoanalytic and poetic processes in human development, echoing ideas expressed some months earlier at the 'Being Creative' day. Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Culture and Exit into History, spoke of 'Transculturation', including the psychic cost of suppressing her 'mother tongue'. The final speaker of the morning was Eileen Aird, Clinical Director of the Women's Therapy Centre and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, as well as author of Sylvia Plath and several papers on literature and women's education. In an engaging presentation entitled, "The Light of the Mind': Poetry and Depression', Aird explored the poetry of Sylvia Plath in terms of depression and spoke of Plath's oeuvre as an embodiment both of the state of depression and of the release from it.
In the last main session of the conference Joanna Ryan challenged the historic pathologisation, or at best ambivalence, of homosexuality in conventional psychotherapy. Joy Dalton presented her own innovating strategy for womens' mental health in the NHS, emphasising that there are still many challenges for women and that any strategy must have a political statement that underpins the designs of services and treatment.
At the end of the conference Susie Orbach, co-founder of the Women's Therapy Centre with Luise Eichenbaum, drew together some of her thoughts, saying that the two days had left her full of deep pleasure and exhaustion. Daring to think, to create new possibilities, was what the WTC was all about, and the conference showed that this need is still there.
The 'Women Today' conference was an important event, and a complex one to organise. It was a pleasure to work with Eileen Aird and Ann Byrne on the project and we look forward to working together in the future.