On October 25, 2025, Bulgarian Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy held a seminar on Psychosomatics titled “Cracks and Ruptures – The Psychic and the Bodily through the Lens of Object Relations Theory,” led by Dr. Petya Petkova – a psychoanalyst and member of the British Psychoanalytical Society.
Dr. Petya Petkova is a member of Institute of Psychoanalysis in London and the British Psychoanalytic Society. She maintains a private psychoanalytic practice in London. She has served as a guest lecturer at Imperial College, the Tavistock Clinic, and the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London. She also teaches and supervises in South Korea, China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Poland, and Bulgaria. Dr. Petkova is a guest lecturer, teacher, and supervisor in the training program in psychoanalytic psychotherapy of the Bulgarian Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.
During the seminar, Dr. Petya Petkova traced how our understanding of the relationship between body and psyche has evolved and deepened – from the notion of a dual human nature to the conception of the human being as an indivisible whole. This remarkable metamorphosis, worthy of observation and reflection, represents a process that opens the door both to integration and to the cracking of the nexus fundamentalis – the subject’s fundamental connection to their own body.
Within the seminar, Dr. Petkova presented the two main approaches to understanding psychosomatic symptomatology in psychoanalysis: that of the Paris Psychosomatic School and that of the Kleinian British tradition. Clinical examples of patients with psychosomatic complaints were also discussed.
The seminar was open to a wide range of professionals and attracted interest from colleagues in various psychotherapy schools, as well as from teams of psychologists and psychotherapists working in hospitals and other institutions related to mental health across the country. Participants included students from master’s and bachelor’s programs in psychology, medicine, and social work.
