People: Chris Mawson
Chris Mawson, Ch.Clin.Psychol, F. Inst. Psychoanal. represents the Board of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London acting as a trustee of PEP. He was an elected member of the Board of the Institute from 2003-2005.
He is a clinical psychologist and a psychoanalyst. Before clinical training he carried out research into the dreams and the peculiarities of attention found in Manic Depressive patients with unusually short mood-cycles. A Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, he first trained as a Clinical Psychologist and worked initially with adolescents and children, first at the Tavistock Clinic and later in the Child Psychiatry department of the Paddington Green Children's Hospital, in the days when children at that clinic were offered intensive psychoanalytic treatment. He now works in private practice. As well as the clinical practice of psychoanalysis he is interested in the study of groups and organisations from a psychoanalytic perspective, particularly that pursued by the British Group Relations orientation.
His clinical interests centre around issues of enactment, repetition and working-through in the Transference-Countertransference relationship and the study of difficulties of clinical technique in manic and delusional conditions. He is also interested in the difficulties of technique peculiar to 'knowing' patients. Currently he is editing the Complete Works of Bion for Karnac Books, which will include a number of previously unpublished works, and a book in the New Library of Psychoanalysis series, entitled Bion Today.
Publications include: The Use of Play Technique in Understanding Disturbed Behaviour in School (Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Vol 2, No.1; 1986); Containing Anxiety In Work With Damaged Children, (in The Unconscious at Work . Ed A. Obholzer & V. Z. Roberts. 1994. Routledge); Exalting - K: The Cultivation and Idealisation of Mental Disconnection and Unlearning, (presented July 1997. Bion Centenary Conference. Turin . Italy); An escalating perversion re-enacted in the transference, (Presented at a day conference organised by the Melanie Klein Trust held at University College London on 24 April 1999); Pseudo-Free Association: The Sophisticated Analytic Patient and 'As-If' Relating (British Journal of Psychotherapy 18(4), 2002);
Since 2000 Chris has designed and edited the websites of the British Psychoanalytical Society and The Melanie Klein Trust.