Biographical Notes

Eva Balint is a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist working in private practice in Sydney. She is a member and former president of the NSW Institute of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and a former secretary and treasurer of the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Association of Australasia. Her areas of interest include mother-infant, adolescent and adult psychotherapy, and the application of psychoanalytic ideas to the treatment of severe psychological disorders.

Ruchi Bhalla is a Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist practising in a high-security forensic mental health hospital in Melbourne. She trained in London where she completed a Masters of Arts in Psychoanalytic Studies from the Tavistock Clinic. She has an interest gun the application of psychoanalytic theory to film and literature.

Paul Coombe is a psychiatrist and individual and group psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. Formerly Consultant Child Psychiatrist at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne. He was the Overseas Senior Registrar in -Psychotherapy at the Cassel Hospital, London 1990 to 1993. Past President of the Australian Association of Group Psychotherapists and member of the Victorian Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists. He has published widely in local and international journals including in the areas of family therapy, psycho-analytic aspects of eating disorders, small and large analytic groups, Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy(also included as a chapter in a book), the works of William Shakespeare and recently on Epistemology and the nature of Truth. He has an interest in the works of Norbert Elias, Sociologist.

Elisabeth Hanscombe is a psychoanalytic psychologist and writer living in Melbourne. In 2011, she completed her doctorate on the topic, Life writing and the desire for revenge, and has published several short stories, essays and book chapters in the areas of trauma, shame, psychoanalysis and memory, as well as her childhood memoir, The Art of Disappearing (2017).

Leonardo S. Rodríguez, PhD, is a psychoanalyst, a member of the VAPP and a founding member of the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis and of the International School of Psychoanalysis of the Forums of the Lacanian Field. He teaches at the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis and was a Senior Lecturer at Monash University and at Victoria University. He has presented his work and conducted seminars at different psychoanalytic institutions in Europe and the Americas, and has published Psychoanalysis with Children (London & New York, Free Association Books, 1999) and numerous book chapters and articles in several languages.