Talking ‘Bout the Unconscious Moya Sarner
Book ticketsOrganised by:
British Psychoanalytical Society (incorporating the Institute of Psychoanalysis)
Description
Join us for our next instalment in our Political Mind series with speaker, Moya Sarner.
Moya Sarner will be talking about the unconscious. She will explore the particular and peculiar experiences, she has had in her dual working lives over the last two years or so, talking about the unconscious in different ways and in different settings. Over this time, she has been writing a popular fortnightly column for the Guardian called ‘How to build a better life’, about what she is learning as a patient in psychoanalysis and in work as psychodynamic psychotherapist. Alongside this, she has been working for a secondary care specialist psychotherapy service in one of the most deprived boroughs in London, which is now being closed down. This is, sadly, representative of the decline of psychodynamic psychotherapy in the NHS more broadly; so how can we respond?
By giving a voice, she will invite the audience to explore what we can learn from these experiences, and how we might hold onto the light in these dark times to find our way to keep talking about the unconscious, because it is a matter of political urgency.
Speaker
Moya Sarner is a London-based psychodynamic psychotherapist and writer whose work sits at the intersection of personal development and the political conditions that shape contemporary adulthood. Before entering clinical practice, she spent years as a freelance journalist for The Guardian, The Times, New Scientist and other national outlets, developing a keen eye for the ways in which social and economic structures intrude upon private life. Psychoanalytic thinking is now woven throughout her journalism.
Her book, When I Grow Up (2022), is a study of adulthood. It is also an examination of what late-capitalist Britain demands of its citizens: stability without security, aspiration without adequate social provision, maturity without meaningful rites of passage. Sarner reveals that these issues are not only personal failings, but the fraying of institutions that once scaffolded ordinary development, secure housing, stable employment, coherent communities and a shared political horizon.
She belongs to a new generation of psychotherapists, who take seriously the proposition that the personal is political. Her writing implicitly challenges the depoliticisation of mental health discourse: the idea that distress resides solely within the individual rather than also arising from systemic stresses, inequality and eroded social safety nets. By giving voice to those whose lives do not match the thin narratives of “success” promoted by neoliberal culture, Sarner’s work offers something politically potent: a reclamation of adulthood as a shared, relational, socially supported achievement as well as a private struggle.
