The 2026 Maudsley Lectures in Psychoanalysis: Writing the Unconscious will explore connections between literature and psychoanalysis.

This series of talks, readings and discussions explores the self and language, considering how writing may be used to tune into the unconscious.

Featuring poets, writers and clinicians including Adam Philips, Kit Fan, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Glyn Maxwell and Rey Conquer. Both online and in-person events.

This series will explore connections between literature and psychoanalysis. We will focus on the way the two disciplines depend on acts of listening – to the self, to language – with a particular focus on how writing may be used to tune into the unconscious.

The encounters will touch not only on well-trodden paths towards the unconscious – like free association or parapraxis – but also on its more various manifestations across case history, children’s literature, writing on food, lyric essay and more.

Whether considering historical figures like T. S. Eliot and Mary Barnes, or hearing from contemporary writers like Adam Phillips, Karen McCarthy Woolf and Rey Conquer, the programme privileges practice and what Freud saw as the unique relation writing has to – and how it perhaps even anticipates – the unconscious.

Monday 1st June: Seminar 1 | 'What Happened to You?' Further Adventures in Poetry and Psychology (Glyn Maxwell)

Further events take place on:

8th, 15th, 22nd, 29th June, 6th, 13th, 20th July 2026.