Neville Symington will present papers for discussion on ideas and themes that have been important to him throughout his career:

• What is a Person?
• The Creative Principle in the Personality
• Creation of the Person within the Self
• Creation of the Person in the Other
• The Person involves a clinical revolution
• Overview and Discussion

Neville Symington is a psycho-analyst with a special interest in psychosis. He has developed a view that there is an underlying pattern that generates all the different forms of mental illness. He believes that, "We clinicians at the moment are largely failing to heal the deeper level of disturbance because we have not got the right lenses with which to see what is in need of healing".

He studied philosophy, theology and psychology before training as a Psychoanalyst at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London. He was Head of the Psychology Discipline in the Adult and Adolescent Departments at the Tavistock Clinic. In 1986 he migrated to Australia and became President of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society (1999-2002).

He is the author of established psychoanalytic classics including The Analytic Experience; Narcissism – a new theory; Emotion and Spirit; The Making of a Psychotherapist; The Spirit of Sanity; and How to Choose a Psychotherapist. His book A Pattern of Madness, published in 2002 by Karnac Books, is a magnum opus which gives psychoanalysis a new theoretical structure.