Transcending History

FULL PROGRAMME

14.00 GMT
Introductions

14:05
Professor Michael O’Loughlin
Regaining a Foothold in History: Reflections on the Unthought Known
Reflecting on my own history and the silences about our family history that I experienced as I grew up in Ireland, I am interested in the occlusions and gaps that render experiences unspeakable, taking the form of what Bollas called the “unthought knowns” in our psyches. I will introduce the ideas of Davoine and Gaudillière in their work History Beyond Trauma and of Abraham and Torok in The Shell and the Kernel, perhaps the two most provocative clinical works that have shaped our understanding of intergenerational transmission of trauma.

I will be asking, ‘How does an individual come to be as a subject, and how might a person experience an awakening “as a subject of history”’? I will explore the havoc that our ancestors’ secrets may play in the minds of the living, how psychotherapy can bring these to consciousness and help to relieve the client of the injury of ancestral wounds.

14.50
Discussion and Q&A

15.05
Break

15:15
Dr Clara Mucci
Embodied Witnessing: From Relational Trauma to Intergenerational Healing
In this presentation, Clara Mucci will examine three levels of relational trauma: neurobiological misattunement and caregiver inability to regulate the infant; maltreatment and abuse, including incest; and mass traumatisation arising from war or genocide. Clara will further consider the consequences of dysregulation and dissociation at each level, giving particular attention to the identification with the aggressor that can occur in the context of abuse, violence and war. She will explore how this identification can generate patterns of repetition towards both self and others, extending across generations.

Clara will propose that trauma can become sedimented in implicit memory and does not require words or conscious recollection to manifest in the emotional lives of subsequent generations. She will examine the mechanisms through which trauma is transmitted, including possible epigenetic processes and the role of relationships and attachment, particularly where caregivers themselves experience disorganised or insecure attachment patterns themselves.

Clara will propose an integrated psychotherapeutic approach that she describes as ‘embodied witnessing’ – a way of addressing the different levels at which trauma is experienced and transmitted while promoting resilience and helping to interrupt patterns of suffering.

16.05
Discussion and Q&A

16.20
Break

16:30
Dr Taiwo Afuape
From Trauma Treatments to Liberation Psychology: Reconnecting Suffering and Oppression
Intergenerational trauma and oppression are deeply interconnected, yet the relationship between them is often obscured or severed. Dominant political and media discourses, systems of power, and even psychological and therapeutic professions can locate suffering within individuals while disconnecting it from the historical, cultural and structural conditions in which it has been produced. Liberation psychology offers a way of reconnecting these severed connections.

This presentation will incorporate personal stories, clinical experience and radical curiosity to deeply challenge taken-for-granted ideas pervasive in mental health and psy professions. It will ask challenging questions and present examples of ‘trauma interventions’ that do not reduce trauma to a technical problem that can be fixed by ‘evidence-based’ technique. Instead, the power of collective processes, social action and creativity will be explored. I will consider what becomes possible when distress is understood not as individual pathology but as resistance – as an intelligible response to histories of oppression and the ongoing structures of harm, exclusion and power.

17.20
Discussion and Q&A

17.35
Panel discussion – all speakers
How can therapy help to disrupt the transmission of trauma to the next generation?

18.00
End

SPEAKERS

Dr Clara Mucci
Clara Mucci, PhD, is Full Professor of Dynamic Psychology at the University of Bergamo, Italy, where she is also Director of the School of Specialization and Psychotherapy in Health Psychology and Co-Director of the Course of Advanced Training for the Evaluation and Treatment of Eating Disorders.
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Professor Michael O’Loughlin
Michael O’Loughlin is Professor in the College of Education and Health Sciences and in the PhD and PsyD programmes in the Derner School of Psychology at Adelphi University, New York. He has authored or edited many books, including, most recently, Precarities of 21st-Century Childhoods: Critical Explorations of Time(s), Place(s), and Identities (2023) and Between Amnesia and Recollection: Environmental, Creative and Clinical Pathways to Memory(Karnac, 2026).
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Taiwo Afuape
Being a Nigerian British-born, working-class, Afrocentric, feminist and socialist woman is central to Taiwo Afuape’s current work as Director of the Institute of Family Therapy and Systemic Social Action (IFT), and as Community Psychology and Trauma-Informed Care Lead at North East London NHS Foundation Trust.
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Jan Ryan
Jane Ryan trained as a psychotherapist at the Centre for Attachment-based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (CAPP) in the 1990s. She subsequently founded Confer and worked as its director from 1999 until 2022. Following a break for further study, she has returned as Programme Director.
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