Friendships are a key factor in the child’s learning to find an identity and a place in the world: this talk is an attempt to look at friendship through the lens of psychoanalysis, using fictional friendships from Elena Ferrante and from Charles Dickens.   Introjection of the other leads to a friendship based on sameness, while the charismatic, “different” friend leads to some tricky power dynamics, of the kind that also present in therapy – around idealisation and boundary confusion, and around some basic assumptions about what relationships are and how to negotiate them.

Alison Lee is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist who trained in Scotland and worked there in private practice before moving to West Oxfordshire.  She did a D.Phil in English Literature and worked in television before becoming a therapist.  She is currently a training therapist with Severnside Institute of Psychotherapy and teaches with the North Eastern Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in Newcastle.