Speakers

We are excited to announce Adam Phillips and Patricia Gherovici as our international keynote speakers at the upcoming conference 1st-3rd April 2022.  Crispin Balfour will host an online conversation between these two practitioners, writers, thinkers and speakers on the theme of our conference: Ka Mua, Ka Muri – the concept and experience of time in psychotherapy.

Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor in private practice in Philadelphia, USA. She is the author or co-editor of six books, Including: “Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious” (For which she shared the 2020 American Board of Academy of Psychoanalysis Edited Book Prize), “Lacan on Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t”, “Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism”, “Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference”, and “The Puerto Rican Syndrome” (for which she received both the Gradiva Aware and the Boyer Prize). Originally from Argentina, Patricia is co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group and Honorary Member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), and Founding Member of Das Unbehagen, New York. She specialises in working with trans patients, as well bringing the perspective of South American “psychoanalysis for the people”, which holds the exploration of the unconscious as a radically democratic act.

Adam Phillips is a practicing psychoanalyst in London, UK and a visiting professor in the English Department at the University of York. He initially trained as a child psychotherapist and was formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital. The Times described him as “the Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis” for his “brilliantly amusing and often profoundly unsettling” work.” He is an aficionado of the essay form and has published many essay collections including: “One Way and Another”, “On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored”, “Houdini’s Box”, “On Flirtation”, “Darwins’s Worms”, “Going Sane”, Side Effects”, and most recently “The Cure for Psychoanalysis”. In his introduction to “One Way and Another” John Banville writes “Phillips insists that psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic writing are a kind of poetry … he treats of his discipline not so much in terms of therapy – although he writes always with the authority and insight of a practitioner – but as a strategy for dealing with life, with other people, and with our worldly predicament as creatures who pay an enormous price for the privilege of being able to think, to choose, to remember and to forget.”

Crispin Balfour joined NZAP in 2001 and gained full membership in 2007. Originally from the UK, he followed his maternal roots to Aotearoa/New Zealand for a visit in 1973.  He returned ten years later, before settling here in 1987. He has traversed (brief) careers in engineering, accountancy, architecture, theatre and film, buddhism and sychosynthesis, on his way to discovering a fascination for psychoanalysis. He is in private practice in Auckland working with individuals and groups, and currently training as a Lacanian analyst. He is learning Spanish and hoping to be able to follow his paternal roots to Chile soon, although the climate emergency might require him to sail there. He has been thinking about space and time for many years.

 

Glenn Colquhoun is an award winning poet, essayist, children’s author and medical doctor. He has deep roots in working with Māori communities. On the first night of the conference he will perform poetry, and korero with Waka Oranga’s Wiremu Woodard.  Glenn is humble, humorous, learned, soulful and a delightful performer who sings his poetry in te reo.

You can read Glenn’s full bio here.  It describes an impressive and varied career including writing several books of poetry, many essays, and three children’s picture books while continuing working in the community as a GP with adolescent health.

Glen won the Reader’s Choice prize at the Montana Books Awards, the Booksellers NZ Platinum Award for poetry and he was awarded the Prize in Modern Letters. Glenn won a Fullbright scholarship to Harvard to study Medical Humanities and has many other projects and achievements including being able to successfully perform poetry at schools to teenagers!

 

Wiremu Woodard is an Indigenous therapist, father of four, activist, environmentalist, sometimes contemporary dancer and artist. Wiremu is committed to reducing health disparities for Māori and promoting social justice. He currently works in community practice at KERERU and teaches Psychotherapy & Counselling programmes at Auckland University of Technology. Wiremu is a founding member of Waka Oranga – a group of dynamic Indigenous Māori practitioners committed to emancipatory freedom. Wiremu is the co-editor of Ata.