Superegos, Ego Ideals and Blind Spots
CPD Credits
3
Event Type
Live Online Event
Location
Zoom & Recording
Time (UK)
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Standard
£80.00
Trainee/NHS
£68.00
Book Tickets
Superegos, Ego Ideals and Blind Spots
Friday, March 27, 2026

Superegos, Ego Ideals and Blind Spots

The Emotional Development of the Clinician

With Vic Sedlak

Bion reportedly said that the aim of psychoanalytical treatment is to introduce the patient to the one person they will spend all of their life with, namely their own selves. This immediately brings to the fore Freud’s great discovery – that we are all, to a greater or lesser extent, unaware of the forces and beliefs that govern our lives and our behaviour. Psychoanalytical work assumes that people who are aware of themselves and who can be helped to bear this personal knowledge are more able to function relatively well in life.

Freud also described how the way we are in relationships will be revealed in the clinical situation, that is, in the transference that the patient forms with the clinician and the clinical setting. This will inevitably put various pressures on the clinician who also has his or her unconscious predispositions to contend with. How the clinician is able to cope with this and the psychoanalytic understanding of this is the main focus of this webinar. In essence I would like to offer some understanding of why as clinicians we are frequently unable to work effectively because of personal difficulties that arise in therapeutic work and which impede our ability to understand the patient.

In trying to understand the countertransferential difficulties that arise in doing our work, I will focus on the clinician’s motivation for choosing psychotherapy as a profession, his/her relationship with their superego and their ideal self and the various ways that supervision and consultation with colleagues can help. Both lectures will contain clinical material to illustrate the arguments presented.

Our seminar leader, Vic Sedlak, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the British Psychoanalytical Society and was its President from 2022-2025. He was Visiting Professor at Kyoto University in Japan and is an Honorary member of the Polish Psychoanalytical Society.  In 2019 he published a book of the same title as this seminar and has also written on the use of countertransference, supervision and dreaming. 

Programme

14.00 Introductions
14.05 On becoming a psychoanalytical clinician

In the first lecture Vic will use his own experience of maturing as a clinician to illustrate the difficulties that we encounter as we do our work.  He will stress in particular the struggle we have to be truthful with our patients while retaining a kindness that might make that truth acceptable and hence transforming.  

15.00 Q&A
15.30 Break
15.50 On being experienced as a bad object

This lecture will continue the themes begun in the previous one but with a particular focus on those frequent situations where the clinician has to accept and struggle with the fact that they are experienced by the patient, and frequently themselves, as a bad object.  

16.40 Q&A
17.00 End

Vic Sedlak

Vic Sedlak is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the British Psychoanalytical Society and was its President from 2022-2025.  He works in private practice in Yorkshire and teaches widely in Europe.  He was Visiting Professor at Kyoto University in Japan and is an Honorary member of the Polish Psychoanalytical Society.  In 2019 he published a book of the same title as this seminar and has also written on the use of countertransference, supervision and dreaming. 

Book Tickets