Affect Regulation Applied
New Insights for Psychotherapy
Saturday 22 November 2025
A live webinar with Dr Daniel Hill and Jane Ryan (Chair)
CPD Credits: 3.5 hours
- Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
- 20% Off Dan’s latest book ‘Affect, Consciousness and Self: The View from the Bottom of the Mind‘
- Bookings close at 18:00pm GMT Friday 21 November 2025
Over the past thirty years profound changes have occurred in psychoanalysis. Most fundamentally there has been increasing agreement that affect is the central organizing force of mental life. This view embraces a growing appreciation of the clinical importance of consciousness, and a refinement in our understanding of the mind. Importantly, the simple distinction between conscious and unconscious processes is being replaced with more differentiated distinctions between implicit (unconscious) and explicit (conscious) processes. This seminar will offer an updated understanding of how the mind works, the self-organizing function of affect and what this means for psychotherapy.
READ MORE...In the first session, Dan Hill will draw on his book Affect Regulation Theory: A Clinical Model to review affect phenomena and the processes involved regulating our emotions Then, drawing on his new book, Affect, Consciousness and Self: The View from the Bottom of the Mind he will illustrate the role of implicit and explicit processes in organizing consciousness, demonstrating how these create starkly different subjective realities. In the last session, Dan will describe how implicit and explicit processes undertake the primary and secondary management of our relational experiences. He will conclude with an explanation of how they combine to perform key adaptive functions that are integral to mental health: affect regulation, intersubjective relating, agentic acting, and continuous self-development.
FULL PROGRAMME
14.00 GMT
Introductions
14:10
What do we mean by affect regulation?
Dan will begin by elaborating the distinction between primary and secondary levels of affect. He will then discuss affect regulation as the foundational function of the organism that supports the stability and flexibility of the mind and enables us to think and feel clearly and fully. He will also discuss the significance of affect dysregulation in fragmenting or shutting down the mind.
Each session will include ample time for Q&A and discussion with Dan.
15.10
Break
15.20
How the implicit and explicit processes of the mind shape subjective reality
In this session, Dan will review what we understand by the terms implicit and explicit processes. In particular, he will show how they process different kinds of information. He will explore how they process differently, and how as a result they organize starkly different states of consciousness and starkly different subjective realities. Dan will go on to discuss the role of affect in determining which reality is presented to us, and the importance of affect-regulation in allowing us to have access to either, depending on the task at hand.
16:30
Break
16.40
The role of implicit and explicit process in self functioning
In this last session, Dan will illustrate how implicit and explicit processes combine to perform key adaptive functions: the regulation of affect, intersubjective relating, agentic acting, and continuous self-development. He will also discuss why science continues to consider consciousness as the last great mystery and why psychoanalysis has found a definition of self to be so elusive.
18.00
End
SPEAKER
Daniel Hill, PhD is a psychoanalyst, educator and a leading proponent of the affect regulation model. He is the author of two highly acclaimed books, Affect Regulation Theory: A Clinical Model (2015) and Affect, Consciousness and Self: The View from the Bottom of the Mind (2025). His publications include topics ranging from the use of computer mediated psychotherapy to the clinical use of multiple models, to religious fundamentalism. He was the founder/director of PsyBC.com (1996-2017) which produced in-person conferences and online programmes in affect regulation theory.
Dan is in private practice in New York, where he is on the faculties of the National Institute of the Psychotherapies and the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.
GET THE BOOK
Affect, Consciousness and Self: The View from the Bottom of the Mind
(20% Discount code provided when purchasing this event)
This book argues that mental life is organized by and around affect. It proposes a clinical model for understanding how affect influences states of consciousness and self. It illustrates how, from moment to moment, affect determines the world we know, how we are disposed to being in it, and our capacity to function in it.