Creative Projects in Psychoanalysis
Panellists: Katharine Frost, Laura Ravaioli, Virginia Ungar
Moderator: Vivienne Elton
This is the first in a series of monthly webinars that celebrate the work of IPA psychoanalysts in the community. Each webinar will showcase a range of different community projects and demonstrate the valuable contribution that psychoanalysis makes to society outside of the consulting room. It is also a way to invite members to renew their connections and exchanges through a series of introductory webinars for the IPA’s 52nd congress.
In this webinar, Katharine Frost and Laura Ravaioli will discuss with Virginia Ungar the community projects that they are involved in.
Katharine will explain the work of the ‘Ububele Baby Mat Project’, a psychoanalytically informed parent-infant mental health community intervention in Alexandra Township, Johannesburg, South Africa. The baby mat practitioners (who wo work as a dyad, as a ‘parental couple’) offer a space to think about baby and parenting concerns.
Laura will discuss ‘Adolescents and Migrants: Poetry of Resistance and Play’, a project coordinated by Cinzia Carnevali, Gabriella Vandi and Laura Ravaioli. Its targets are high school students, young refugees, and the whole community they belong to. At its third edition, a path of laboratories through rap music were proposed, held by professional musicians and coordinated by psychoanalysts, where adolescents and migrants worked towards the development of a subjective identity, freeing their ability to play and examining in depth the themes of diversity and multiplicity in gender, culture, and religion that belong to the marginalised groups.
Virginia Ungar M.D., Training Analyst at the Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association (APdeBA). She specialises in child and adolescent analysis, was the former Chair of the IPA’s Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis Committee (COCAP) and of the Committee for Integrated Training. She received the Platinum Konex Award for Psychoanalysis in 2016.
Virginia is currently the President of the International Psychoanalytic Association.
Vivienne Elton is a Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, Past President and Training Analyst of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society, and the IPA. She is currently Chair of the IPA and Humanitarian Organisations Committee, which includes the Migrants and Refugees, and the IPA and the United Nations sub-committees. She has been a Visiting Professor to the psychotherapy training programme in the Huazong University of Science and Technology, in Wuhan, China where she teaches infant observation.
Vivienne is Past President of the National Association of Practicing Psychiatrists in Australia and is currently the Vice President. She works in private practice in Victoria, Australia as a psychoanalyst and has an interest in working with mothers and babies, infant observation, migrants and refugees, survivors of war and genocide and psychosomatics.
Katharine Frost is an Educational Psychologist and the Director of Ububele Educational and Psychotherapy Trust, a NGO in Alexandra, Johannesburg. Katharine was the Head of the Ububele Parent-Infant Programme. A position she held for 10 years. She developed the Baby Mat Project and has parent and infant mental health as an area of specialty and focus. She has trained and supervised professional and lay counsellors who work in the infant mental health field. Katharine has authored several articles on the infant mental health interventions at Ububele and she has presented Ububele’s work at local and international conferences. She is a co-founder of a driver group member of SAPPIN, a parenting network for South African non-profits.
Ububele Baby Mat Project - Watch video
Laura Ravaioli is Psychologist and Psychoanalyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (Società Psicoanalitica Italiana SPI) and is its editorial board member on Social Networks. She is a member of the IPA Subcommittee for the United Nations, and cooperates within the Italian group PER (European Psychoanalysts for Refugees). She is a past member of the IPA Image Task Force and Public Communication Committee. She is a jazz singer as a hobby.
Download paper PDF - Adolescents and Migrants
Watch video: Adolescents and Migrants (with English subtitles)