Identity

For our 2025 programme, Wessex Psychotherapy Society will be focussing on the theme of identity.

What do we mean by identity? Who are we? Is this about how we become ourselves as separate individuals, or which groups we belong to? Is our sense of ourselves always escaping us?

The term identity is not used very much in articles relating to psychoanalytic thinking, as found on Pep-web, before Erik Erikson begins to write about it in the 1950s. Since then writers have equated identity with a sense of the self that is recognisably consistent through time and yet at the same time can develop, suggesting an ability to accommodate change. A Kleinian viewpoint, whilst not directly referencing identity, would encompass the integration of the self through taking back projected feared and unwanted aspects of ourselves, such as our hate and our vulnerability, allowing us to become whole and thereby to experience ourselves as separate, though alone. This is seen to be a huge developmental task.

Many of our patients arrive with similar difficulties and for us to be helpful as therapists, we understand the need to examine our own challenges in relating and to continue this as a life-long endeavour.

As well as “Who am I as an individual?” questions of identity can involve seemingly the opposite striving: a desire to avoid separateness, or an adopting of identifications in order to avoid the depressive anxieties inherent in being separate and alone. Much of today’s so-called identity politics also falls into this category: so much safer to be feel part of a group than to experience the persecutory anxieties of feeling on the outside, or perhaps the reality of being on the outside, as a member of a minority group.

Our speakers this year will help us to think about this topic from a variety of perspectives. We hope you feel inspired to come along and lend the group your thinking, to further our understanding in this area.

Wednesday 15th January 2025, 19.30-21.00

AGM - NB: this meeting will be held by Zoom only

Wednesday 12th February 2025, 19.30-21.00

 Conor McCormack - identity and social change

Wednesday 12th March 2025, 19.30-21.00

Rima Hawkins - sexual identities and relationship diversities

Wednesday 9th April 2025, 19.30-21.00

 Aaron Balick - The Digitally Mediated Self: How Social Media, Algorithms, and AI are Redefining Identity 

Wednesday 14th May 2025, 19.30-21.00

 Professor Michael Rustin - Identity or Identification? Why the Difference Between These Concepts Matters

Wednesday 11th June 2025, 19.30-21.00

Dr Sharon Numa - The Sense of Identity - A Kleinian View

Wednesday 10th September 2025, 19.30-21.00

To be announced

Wednesday 8th October 2025, 19.30-21.00

Nick Spinks - The link between internalised homophobia and suicidality in sexual minority men

Wednesday 12th November 2025, 19.30-21.00

Professor Joy Schaverien - The Dying Patient and Identity in Psychotherapy