Object relations in the modern era

A full-day event exploring the continuing relevance of Object Relations theory across contemporary culture, politics, and clinical practice. OBJECT RELATIONS IN THE MODERN ERA (IN PERSON ATTENDANCE) A full-day event exploring the continuing relevance of Object Relations theory across contemporary culture, politics, and clinical practice. Featuring: - Presentations - Panel Discussions - Q&A Topics include: • Arts & Culture • Global Politics • Clinical Application October 31st, 2026 9:00 AM – 5:15 PM CPD points available. Arts and Culture Panel This panel explores how psychoanalysis might help us to reflect on our experiences with the arts and culture, focusing particularly on literature, film and mural art. • Dr Mary Pyle (Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy) ‘Object Relations and Fictional Characters’ • Dr Noreen Giffney (Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Ulster University, Belfast) ‘At the Breast of Culture’ • Dr Niamh Callaghan (EastSide Partnership, Belfast and Queen’s University Belfast) ‘Murals as Psychic Objects’ Speaker: Dr Mary Pyle, Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Title: Object Relations and Fictional Characters Description: Rules about how critics may work with fictional characters have changed through the decades from Professor A.C. Bradley, a contemporary of Freud, who embraced psychoanalysis in his examination of Shakespearian characters, to contemporary criticism which posits that characters should not be thought of as real people. This poses a problem as unless readers can relate to fictional characters as real there can be no identification with them. Psychoanalyst Igněs Sodré explores how great writers create ‘true false characters’. In this presentation I look at the difficulty of combining the rules of current literary criticism with Object Relations theory when exploring readers reactions to and identifications with characters who they know to be fictional but to them are real while they are in the liminal space in which author, reader and fictional characters exist. Bio: Dr Mary Pyle is a founder member of both the Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (IFPP) and the Irish Institute of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (IIPP). She has been a teacher, therapist and supervisor for the IIPP. She gained her PhD, which explored the appeal of the Harry Potter series to adult and child readers through the lenses of both object relations and contemporary literary criticism, from Trinity College Dublin, in 2022. She is the author of ‘Harry Potter, Psychoanalysis, and the Unconscious Dimension’ (Routledge 2026). https://www.routledge.com/Harry-Potter-Psychoanalysis-and-the-Unconscious-Dimension/Pyle/p/book/9781041010203 Speaker: Dr Noreen Giffney, Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Ulster University, Belfast Title: At the Breast of Culture Description: I will talk about the making of ‘Cultural Encounters’ (2026; dirs. Noreen Giffney and Allen Fatimaharan; 5 mins, 15 secs), an animated short film about the emotional and psychological nourishment and protection provided by our experiences with the arts and culture. While we might be aware of the short-term impact of a cultural object – how it makes us think or feel in the moment – we are usually unaware of how the ephemeral aspect of this experience stays with us and becomes part of us; the unconscious aspect of the experience in other words. ‘Cultural Encounters’ invites us to reflect on what our encounters with, attachments to and psychological uses of cultural objects might tell us about ourselves. It is underpinned by Kleinian psychoanalytic ideas, particularly the culture-breast, a new psychoanalytic concept I formulated and developed in my book, ‘The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis: Cultural Experiences and the Clinic’. Bio: Dr Noreen Giffney is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist based in County Donegal in Ireland, and is a lecturer and researcher at Ulster University, Belfast. She is the author of the book, ‘The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis: Cultural Experiences and the Clinic’ (Routledge 2021), and the author and/or editor of additional articles and books on psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, and the arts, culture and mental health. Noreen is the joint editor-in-chief, with Emmanuelle Smith, of ‘New Associations’ psychoanalytic magazine, published three times a year by the British Psychoanalytic Council. She was a member of the creative team, led by Professor Jill Bennett, for ‘World Comes Alive’ (fEEL 2025), the first virtual reality experience underpinned by psychoanalytic thinking. Noreen is an associate member of the performance arts organisation, Bbeyond, and takes opera singing lessons in her spare time. https://www.ulster.ac.uk/staff/n-giffney Speaker: Dr Niamh Callaghan, EastSide Partnership, Belfast and Queen’s University Belfast Title: Murals as Psychic Objects Description: This presentation draws on my doctoral research into the emotional and unconscious impact of mural art in the North/Northern Ireland. I will explore murals not only as political symbols or visual texts to be decoded, but as affective public objects that organise feeling, memory, identity, and belonging before meaning is fully available in words. Using Donald Winnicott’s concept of holding and Wilfred Bion’s concept of containment, I consider how public art such as murals can hold unresolved communal anxieties, histories, and identifications, while not necessarily transforming them. I suggest that containment takes place not in the mural itself, but in the research encounter. The presentation will reflect on how murals continue to mediate complex emotional landscapes in a society marked by conflict, and how psychoanalytic and psychosocial methods can help make saturated public images thinkable without simplifying or sanitising them. Bio: Dr Niamh Callaghan’s work explores how public images shape feeling, memory, and belonging in societies marked by conflict. She was awarded her PhD in Psychoanalysis and Culture from Ulster University, where her doctoral research examined the emotional, unconscious, and embodied impact of mural art in the North/Northern Ireland. Drawing on object relations, her research considers murals as affective public landscapes that hold unresolved memories, anxieties, attachments, and forms of belonging. She is currently the Research, Impact and Communications Officer with EastSide Partnership and Queen’s University Belfast. Niamh has previously worked in trauma support, co-facilitating group workshops on trauma, and takes an ardent interest in painting and drawing. Clinical Practice Panel This panel focuses on Object Relations as they show up in the consulting room, and examines how they are played out in the clinic today, and through the narrative of a case from the psychoanalytic literature. Speakers: Dr. John O’Connor, Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy; School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin. ‘Two Bodies in a Room’ Dr. Margaret Boyle Spelman, Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy; ‘Susan: A Case of Milner and Winnicott Thinking Together’ Ms. Ann Murphy, Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy; ‘Growing Pains’ Speaker: Dr. John O’Connor, Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy; School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin. Title: Two Bodies in a Room Description: In this talk, I explore briefly a thread of interest I have had over the course of my psychoanalytic thinking and practice. This is specifically in relation to what is loosely, though usefully, called the mind-body problem. I outline my more recently developed sense of the importance of our tending to this in our analytic work, including when it is and is not pressing. Our bracketing-off of the body, sometimes something that has been inherent in psyche-focussed fields, can leave one with a skewed sense of the human subject and also limit our access to this as present and thinkable material.