About Us

THE MELBOURNE INSTITUTE FOR PSYCHOANALYSIS

The functions of the Institute are to organise outreach activities such as Public Lectures, the Models of the Mind Introductory Course; promote the Scientific life of the Institute members; managee Institute funds through the Treasurer; house the Clara Geroe Memorial Library, administer membership of PACFA & maintain the Institute building at 400 Tooronga Road, Hawthorn.

The function of the Melbourne Branch, under the auspices of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society, is the training of Psychoanalysts.

The functions of  both Branch & Institute relate to the activities of the APAS, whose Constitution includes the objective of enhancing the profile of psychoanalysis in the community.

ABOUT PSYCHOANALYSIS

Psychoanalysts today continue to develop Freud's basic ideas and method for understanding the human psyche. Psychoanalysis has from its inception been a specific method of treating psychic conflict, states of mind and emotional distress, which are apt to disrupt an individual's well being and capacity to fulfil her or his potential.

Freud went beyond the kind of intuitive and common sense recognition, extended creatively by poets and artists, that there is more to us than what we know consciously. By listening carefully to his patients and observing their symptoms Freud noticed that thoughts and feelings, which we banish from our conscious minds, reveal themselves in our mistakes and general behaviour, and in apparently meaningless symptoms, and have their own language-a symbolic one-which can be understood.

Freud also extended the widely held recognition that the child is father to the man by perceiving that children's minds are complex and full of conflicts. He began to explore the passionate nature of children, noticing that they have powerful loving and hating and sexual impulses, which remain often banished from consciousness, as the nucleus of the personality.

As these ideas have been developed, together with advances in psychoanalytic technique, psychoanalysts have begun to work with a broader range of patients, including psychotic and pre-psychotic people. However much remains to be understood about the emotional and intellectual significance of bizarre and apparently meaningless behaviour. From its method of treatment, psychoanalysis has developed a body of theory and a way of thinking that has had a major impact on Western culture.

As a therapy based on investigating the mind in all its complexity and on a constant striving for a deeper understanding, psychoanalysis is unique. It is the only therapy which, when successful, results in lasting changes to the personality. As such, it offers the individual a chance to be freed from what previously had been a solitary struggle to gain understanding, to be helped to develop a capacity to meet future life stresses.

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