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CPD Credits
2
Event Type
Live In-Person Event
Location
Freud Museum, London
Time (UK)
6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Standard
£45.00
Trainee/NHS
£38.25
Friday, September 11, 2026
An Evening of Film & Psychoanalysis at the Freud Museum
With Christopher Clulow, Martha Doniach, Krisztina Glausius, Katalin Lanczi, Perrine Moran, Anne Patterson & Kate Thompson
Come and join us for an evening exploring the relationship between film and psychoanalysis. Like dreams, films can reveal what lies beneath the surface of conscious life: hidden anxieties, conflicts, desires, and defenses. Through image, atmosphere, silence, sound, and narrative, cinema gives form to unconscious processes that are often difficult to articulate directly.
Psychoanalytic thinking allows us to consider not only what characters say and do, but also what is defended against, disavowed, or left unspoken. Films can vividly portray the defensive structures that shape psychic and relational life. For example, The Zone of Interest confronts us with the operation of denial and psychic splitting, showing the capacity to maintain ordinary domestic life alongside the exclusion of unbearable reality. Other films illuminate dynamics within couples and families, including projection, idealisation, dependency, aggression, and the tension between intimacy and separateness.
Observing these processes condensed within a film narrative can deepen our understanding of the complexities we encounter in clinical work. In the consulting room, analytic boundaries protect both therapist and patient from becoming overwhelmed by unconscious material. Watching films, however, allows us to enter emotional and psychic worlds more freely, creating space to reflect on states of mind and relational dynamics from a different perspective.
During the evening, we will present reviews and articles from the special issue of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis on “Couples and Families in Film.” Authors who contributed to the issue will give brief presentations and participate in discussion. Clips from The Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall, Return to Seoul and one other film will be shown and discussed interactively.
We warmly invite the audience to share their own reflections on films that have informed their clinical thinking, and to consider together how psychoanalytic ideas can deepen our experience and understanding of cinema.
Programme
18.00 Welcome and Introductions
Martha Doniach & Perrine Moran
Each film discussion with include clips of the films as well as conversation.
18.10 Anatomy of a Fall
Kate Thompson in conversation with Marth Doniach
Set within a gripping courtroom drama which sees the film’s protagonist being accused of murder, this film gives us a vivid description of a couple who have struggled with the transition to parenting; who are sinking beneath the pressures facing parents of a disabled child; and the resulting toxic couple dynamic in the crucible of these external and internal pressures. The clip and the discussion will focus on conflict between the couple and what it is attempting to communicate.
18.30 Zone of Interest
Krisztina Glausius in conversation with Perrine Moran
Jonathan Glazer's Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest places the Commandant of Auschwitz at the centre of a sunlit domestic idyll. He keeps the horrors resolutely out of frame, confronting us with the disquieting act of disavowal. The central couple thrive in their paradise garden, the annihilation continues, unshown, beyond the wall. Their solution is our dramatic and moral dilemma. What does it mean to look, and to look away? Krisztina Glausius will discuss her recently published review of the film in conversation with Perrine Moran, exploring how Glazer’s cinematic work expresses concepts such as splitting, disavowal, compartmentalisation, or the unconscious breaking through in cinematic language. A film-clip illustrated presentation will examine how the wall between knowing and not-knowing becomes both the film's architecture and its moral challenge.
18.50 Anne Patterson and Katalin Lanczi in conversation
A conversation stimulated by ‘Disruptive losses in three European films about families’, by Andrea Sabbadini.
Andrea Sabbadini (1949-2025), former director of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival (epff) writes about the disruptive force of loss on the family and the parental couple in the films ‘Theorem’, ‘The Son's Room’ and ‘Festen’. Our speakers will be discussing the links between 'The Son’s Room,’ and two of the films featuring in the upcoming European Psychoanalytic Film Festival on ‘Passion': ‘Signs of Life’ (2025, UK) and ‘Orphan’ (2025, Hungary).
19.10 Return to Seoul
Chris Clulow in conversation with Kate Thompson
What might adoption mean for adoptees? The UK knows from past history the damage that can be done when young mothers are forced to give up their babies for adoption. ‘Return to Seoul’ documents a savvy young South Korean woman’s unconscious and ambivalent search for her birth parents. Apparently self-confident and assertive she controls and sexualises the relationships she forms with people along the way, leaving a trail of rejection and destruction in her wake. A clip from this film will focus on how a carefully managed reunion with her birth mother opened the floodgates to unacknowledged loss.
19.30 Panel Discussion
20.00 Drink reception in the Freud Museum
Krisztina Glausius
Krisztina Glausius is an adult- and couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a visiting lecturer and supervisor at the British Psychotherapy Foundation and at Tavistock Relationships where she formerly worked as Head of Clinical Services.
She works analytically with couples and individuals in her practice in South- East London.
Christoper Clulow
Christopher Clulow is a Consultant Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, a Senior Fellow of the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology and Fellow of the Centre for Social Policy, Dartington. He is a past Director of Tavistock Relationships, and until recently was Editor in Chief of the international journal Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. He has published extensively on couple and family relationships, most recently from an attachment perspective, and continues in an emeritus capacity to teach in this country and abroad.
Kate Thompson
Kate Thompson, MA, Pg Dip, Couple Psych. is a couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist with over 25 years of experience working with couples and individuals. For the last 10 years she headed Tavistock Relationships’ (TR) Couple Therapy for Depression training in the NHS and adapted the model for perinatal services and to use with couples coping with substance misuse. Kate supervised TR’s Parenting Service for 9 years and co-edited/co-authored ‘Couples as Parents’ (Routledge 2024). Kate writes and lectures widely, in the UK and abroad. She co-edited ‘Engaging Couples: New Directions in Therapeutic Work with Families’, (Routledge, 2018), and Couple and Family Psychoanalysis on Divorce and Separation, (Phoenix, 2021). Kate is co-Editor in Chief, Journal of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. Registered with the BPC and BACP, her private practice is in South West London.
Perrine Moran
Perrine Moran is a psychodynamic psychotherapist and a couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has taught internationally as well as at Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and the British Psychotherapy Foundation, and is a senior visiting lecturer and supervisor at Tavistock Relationships. She is the Arts Editor for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, and a member of the editorial board of the journal of the International Association for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. She is bilingual, works with individuals and couples in English and in French, and has a private practice in London. She has a particular interest in the links between popular culture and psychoanalysis. She co-edited with Martha Doniach a special issue of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis on “Couples and Families in Film” (Spring 2025) and is the author of a book: Love Songs. Listening to Couples (2025), Karnac. Before training as a psychotherapist, Perrine Moran was a lecturer in French Literature, and an actress in Paris, where she ran a fringe theatre in the basement of a Cuban restaurant.
Martha Doniach
Martha Doniach, MA, UKCP, BPC, is an adult and couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist in independent practice in London. She teaches and supervises at Tavistock Relationships, the British Psychotherapy Foundation and the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, and is a former Principal Psychotherapist at East London NHS Foundation Trust. She serves on the Editorial Board of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis.
Film has been a longstanding personal and professional interest. Martha is particularly interested in the dialogue between cinema and psychoanalysis, and in the capacity of film to deepen our understanding of unconscious life, relationships, and family dynamics. She recently guest co-edited with Perrine Moran a special issue of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis exploring the intersection of film and psychoanalytic thinking.
Anyone interested in film and psychoanalysis!
Your CPD Certificate will be available to download from your TR Together account within 48 hours of the event.