This lecture will take place on:

*To enable access to the widest possible audience these lectures are planned to be delivered live, but remotely, as webinars. Where we are able, a recording will be made available to all booked delegates although we encourage live attendance wherever possible. Please see the details above to see if this lecture will be recorded and available after the live event.

These lectures will be delivered remotely using Zoom. You will need a device with a suitably fast internet connection. Although mobile devices and tablets can be used, we recommend the use of laptop or desktop PC for the best experience. Some devices provided by employers may have restrictions in place. Please use this test link (https://zoom.us/test) to check your set up before booking.

You will be sent the necessary login link about a week before the course start date. Should you have any concerns about the accessibility of remote delivery please contact us at CPDEvents@tavi-port.ac.uk to discuss how we can best help you.

This is the third and final lecture in the Summer 2026 series.

Lecture 3: Psychoanalysis and the scotomizing of trauma – implications for safeguarding

Thursday 2 July 2026

This lecture will be recorded.

Lecturer: Dr Phil Mollon

Safeguarding concerns external reality. Is this a problem for psychoanalysis? Might there be a tendency to idealise the psychoanalytic method, with its focus on current psychic reality and the transference of the psychodynamic template, whilst denigrating the traumatised patient and the historical determinants? We face the problem of how adequately to address both internal and external reality and their interaction. Current societal, psychological, and neurobiological perspectives recognise both the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse and the pervasive damage it causes, often creating chronic complex PTSD woven into the personality. This contrasts markedly with earlier periods of unawareness in society and in psychoanalysis. The shocking eruption of knowledge of CSA during the 1980s and onwards gave rise to the emergence of the false memory societies claiming false accusations based on Freud-influenced therapies. This mirrored movements at the time of Freud’s early work, with contemporaneous documents showing widespread reports of sexual abuse of children combined with scepticism about their veracity. Freud’s 1896 paper on hysteria is sophisticated and entirely compatible with our current understanding of trauma and memory, but he later repudiated his own findings. In addition to CSA, another prevalent trauma inflicted on children at that time was ‘castration’ and female genital mutilation to deter masturbation. Freud uncovered a scene of female circumcision in the free associations of his main patient, Emma Eckstein. This childhood trauma was replicated in certain ways by the later botched surgery by Freud’s colleague, Wilhelm Fliess. Freud blamed and denigrated Eckstein. Anna Freud censored some of the letters relating to this. Fliess was Freud’s main confidante, or selfobject (in Kohut’s terms). His son, the analyst Robert Fliess, accused Wilhelm of abusing him sexually and in other ways, and described him as suffering from an ‘ambulatory psychosis’. Freud’s professional and social isolation, combined with his relationship with Fliess, appears to have contributed to his abandonment of his sexual abuse theory of hysteria and his alternative focus on the oedipal conflict. Ferenczi’s work could be viewed as an attempt to reinstate the banished and foreclosed realm of trauma into psychoanalysis. Freud and others sought to suppress this. Ferenczi’s dream of a small, severed penis on a plate, just prior to beginning his analysis with Freud, has been portrayed (by Carlo Bonomi) as representing the lost clitoris of Emma Eckstein, the trauma scotomised by Freud’s turning a blind eye to exogenous abuse. Can psychoanalysis find a way to overcome resistances to perceptions of both internal and external shocking realities and also engage with other agencies and disciplines in the service of safeguarding?