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Margaret Rustin: has worked for many years in the Trust as a Child Psychotherapist, and in other roles, and Michael Rustin has for many years held a Visiting Professor post with particular responsibility for the development of the Trust's university accredited courses, They are authors of Mirror to Nature: Drama Psychoanalysis and Society,, and have together for many years taught a joint course on drama and psychoanalysis for one of the Trust's postgraduate courses.

Gwyn Daniel is a systemic psychotherapist, supervisor and trainer at the Tavistock Clinic and in private practice in Oxford. She is co-author of Gender and Family Therapy and Growing up in Stepfamilies. She has a special interest in applying systemic ideas to drama, literature and politics and has given many presentations on systemic understandings of Shakespeare's tragedies.

Psychoanalytic and Systemic Therapists have for many years worked closely as clinicians and researchers at the Tavistock Clinic, yet debate between their different theoretical perspectives, for example at Scientific Meetings, is less frequent. Shakespeare's plays, containing, like Cleopatra herself, "an infinite variety" offer fertile ground for such debates.

At this meeting we propose to bring together, in dialogue, contrasting psychoanalytic and systemic approaches to the play. In what way, Margaret and Michael Rustin will ask, does a psychoanalytic perspective offer any distinctive insight into the meaning of the play? Gwyn Daniel will interrogate how a systemic approach can provide connections between the play's multiple levels. All three of the speakers believe it is beneficial for similarities and differences between approaches so central to the Trust's work to be more actively and creatively explored.

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