ABSTRACT
The chapter argues that while the question in its title can be considered from the perspectives of both members and staff, if a staff team is able to explore their own motivation and thinking in respect of their practice, the conference may develop as a fruitful learning experience for all involved. The chapter first considers responses by practitioners to a limited survey and then explores the question itself through the work of several psychoanalytic writers concerning desire, seduction and abjection. The vicissitudes of sexuality impact on the dynamics of the conference which will be experienced in both maternal and paternal guises, and the chapter proposes that, in addition to listening to the transference–countertransference linking conference members and staff, the latter need to consider their own desire and attend to the transference that they themselves exercise towards their own conference-in-the-mind as a phantasmatic third.
