Research Colloquium
Please note – this event is not hosted by the Neuropsychoanalysis Association. For any questions regarding registration please contact Pól Ó’Mórdha at: moorep1@tcd.ie
Research Colloquium
Neuropsychoanalysis Ireland Study Group
in association with
the Irish Neuropsychoanalysis Research Centre School of Medicine,
Trinity College Dublin
4pm – 6.15pm
(Irish time)
Attendance is free.
Please click here to register.
Presentations
Towards an Updated Model of Narcissism: Integrating Psychoanalysis with the Free Energy Principle
Dimitra Chrysoula Christaki
Dimitra holds a BSc (Honours) in Psychology from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She went on to complete an MPhil in Psychoanalytic Studies and an MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Trinity College Dublin. She is currently a senior trainee in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (Object Relations) with the Irish Institute of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (IFPP) in Dublin, Ireland. Dimitra has extensive experience working with vulnerable populations, including refugees and people experiencing homelessness, within a variety of organisational settings.
This presentation introduces an interdisciplinary model of narcissistic rigidity and psychic flexibility, bridging Object Relations Theory with the Free Energy Principle (FEP) and Affective Neuroscience within the emerging field of neuropsychoanalysis. Drawing on Bion’s and Britton’s theories of linking and symbolisation in dialogue with Friston’s predictive coding, it explores how emotional containment and brain connectivity share a common function: the creation and restoration of links that allow meaning to move, evolve, and re-form. At both neural and psychic levels, entropy and uncertainty are inherent conditions of life. The task of the mind, like that of the brain, is not to eliminate them, but to contain and transform them through symbolisation and relational linking. In this way, the neural and psychic systems can be seen to inform and reflect one another as fragmented experiences become meaningful, allowing emotions to be symbolised, thought about, and woven into an evolving sense of self and its relationship with the external world. By tracing parallels between psychoanalytic and neuroscientific models, this presentation redefines narcissistic rigidity not as mere resistance but as a disruption in emotional and epistemic flexibility. It proposes that therapeutic relationships, grounded in containment and creativity through symbolic play, can restore the capacity for psychic movement and integration, enabling transformation and renewed openness to the other.
Summoning the Dream Maker: Symbolic Collapse and the Restoration of Psychic Life in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Melancholic States
Laura Garbatavičiūtė
Laura holds a first-class honours MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy from Trinity College Dublin and is completing her clinical training in the Object Relations tradition. Her dissertation ‘Summoning the Dream Maker’ integrates psychoanalysis, affective neuroscience, and neuroendocrinology to examine how symbolic form emerging in dreams marks renewed coherence between psyche, brain, and body. Informed by two decades of experience in fine arts, creative systems, and organisational leadership, her developing research approaches consciousness as the primary substrate of existence- an organising field that generates and perceives experience through living systems. She is interested in how altered states, ritual phenomena, and analytic process make visible consciousness’s movement toward self-knowledge, and how symbolic form mediates this dialogue between mind and matter.
In this presentation, Laura will share research from her MSc dissertation ‘ Summoning the Dream Maker: Symbolic Collapse and the Restoration of Psychic Life in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Melancholic States’. The study develops an interdisciplinary model that understands melancholia as a secondary failure of symbolisation, bridging psychoanalysis, affective neuroscience, and psychedelic research. Drawing on Bion’s alpha function and Grotstein’s Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream, it reframes melancholia not as a mood disorder but as a temporary suspension of the psyche’s capacity to create symbolic form. Symbolisation is treated here as a structural and embodied process through which affect, temporality, and internal experience are metabolised into image, narrative, and form. When trauma or neuroendocrine imbalance disrupts this process, the mind’s symbolic architecture falters, and experience fragments into imagelessness and stasis. Through a comparative analysis of three published clinical cases, the study examines how containment, dreaming, and altered-state therapies can reactivate symbolic circuits and restore coherence across neural, affective, and relational domains. From this analysis emerges the Dream Coherence Model, which links changes in dream architecture with emotion regulation and physiological integration, offering a framework for observing symbolic restoration in process. Integrating psychoanalytic theory with contemporary neuroscience and endocrine research, the work conceptualises symbolisation as an embodied mechanism of repair, through which the mind re-establishes coherence and affective regulation. Within this framework, dream structure and imaginal form serve as observable indicators of re-emergent symbolic capacity. These findings contribute to a growing empirical framework for neuropsychoanalysis and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, suggesting that the restoration of symbolic form may mark neural re-integration and renewed meaning-making. The model provides both a theoretical scaffold and a measurable direction for future interdisciplinary research into the biological correlates of psychic transformation.
How Wishing Becomes Reality: vmPFC Damage and Its Relationship to Memory-Related Confabulation
Curtis Holt-Robinson
Curtis is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in-training in Vancouver, Canada. Beginning from his psychoanalytic training at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, he continues to pursue his interests in frontal brain damage, memory, emotion regulation, and psychotic symptoms. Curtis is the founding member and coordinator of Vancouver Neuropsychoanalysis, the first NPSA group in Canada.
This presentation explores the relationship between damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and memory-related confabulation. Cognitive models and typical cognitive treatment of vmPFC-related memory-related confabulation will be shared, and their issues will be highlighted. Principles from affective neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis will then be used to offer more sophisticated models of vmPFC-related memory-related confabulation, emphasising the emotional factors motivating confabulation. A neuropsychoanalytic clinical case will then be presented, underscoring possible mechanisms of therapeutic action with these patients. Thus, this presentation seeks to incorporate what we know about the brain from affective & cognitive neuroscience with what we know psychoanalytically about neurological patients, especially as pertains to the vmPFC. Special interest relates to Bionian notions of tolerance of frustration and its connection to symbolisation, and other vital aspects of the psychoanalytic encounter such as transference and the working-through phase of treatment. It is the hope of the presenter that greater care and understanding is afforded to these patients who have often been subject to mis-attuned formulations and treatment plans; this can only be rectified by seriously addressing the emotional dynamics in neurological cases.