EVENT ARCHIVE
2019-2022
Saturday 1 October 2022
A live webinar or in-person event with Graham Music and Sharon Lewis
Much trauma work is focused on the need to provide safety, and for good reason. However, there is a danger in such approaches that we do not help our clients go to places where they are able to face feelings that would enable them to live richer and more emotionally vitalised lives. In this workshop we’ll be looking at trauma through a fresh lens, one in which traumatised clients are supported in courageously facing their defences.
Saturday 24 September 2022
With therapists and award-winning writers Stella Duffy and Chris Cleave
Writing is an integral part of life for therapists – to record experiences with clients, communicate ideas and respond creatively to the work. But for something so valuable, it rarely gets the focused attention it deserves.
This workshop, led by two skilled facilitators and award-winning writers, is an invitation to explore your relationship with writing, in your practice and more broadly.
Friday 23 September 2022
A live webinar or in-person event with Julia Samuel, Emily Samuel and Clover Stroud
When we see clients individually, in couples or families, we will inevitably work with issues that come from their family of origin or the family they are making. Each client will bring their story of love and loss, joy and pain. They come suffering in the present, but their pain is often woven with threads from the past – maybe many generations stacked behind them.
Friday 22 July 2022
A live webinar or in-person event with Orit Badouk Epstein
When faced with a client who arrives to a session feeling depressed, confrontational, or suicidal, the therapist can have a deep sense of helplessness that mirrors something of the state of mind of being defeated and hopeless. The tasks of living that may seem ordinary to the untraumatized and secure person, can be fraught with difficulty for someone who lacked a safe development journey in childhood because their parents were frightening or dangerous. They suffer from complex trauma.
Friday 15 July 2022
A live webinar with Dr Doris Brothers and Dr Jon Sletvold
In this theoretical and experiential workshop, Doris Brothers and Jon Sletvold will present the body-based perspective they are developing in their forthcoming book Re-envisioning Psychoanalysis as Talking Bodies to re-explore some of the most enduring aspects of psychoanalytic theory.
They will attempt to demonstrate how changes in conceptualization of the therapeutic process, and the discourse in which this is described, result in transformations in the therapeutic relationship as well as in the supervisory process.
Sunday 26 June 2022
A live webinar with Professor Sue Carter, Professor Ruth Feldman and Dr Janice Hiller
This conference focuses on the extraordinary neuropeptide oxytocin, and how it enables love, safe attachment and affiliative social bonds to flourish throughout life. Oxytocin supports perceived safety, reproduction and even survival, acting as an anti-inflammatory agent that also protects us from certain diseases. It is a natural medicine and a source of pleasure, connection and passion. Research has shown that oxytocin is crucial for secure bond formation, and this must include a bond between therapist and client.
Saturday 18 June 2022
A live webinar with Candace Orcutt, MA, PhD
James Masterson was a leading figure and innovative thinker in the major psychoanalytic turn from the theory of repressed desires to a focus on relationship and the self. Essential to this shift was the naming and defining of personality disorder, an endeavor that both shaped Masterson’s work and, in turn, was shaped by him. Unwilling to accept his “borderline” patients as “untreatable,” he began an effective synthesis of object relations theory and developmental studies that became the cornerstone of his theory and clinical practice.
Friday 17 June 2022
Celebrating the publication of ‘Primitive Bodily Communications in Psychotherapy’, edited by Raffaella Hilty
Join us online to celebrate the publication of ‘Primitive Bodily Communications in Psychotherapy’. Chaired by Ruth Williams, you will hear from the book’s editor, Raffaella Hilty, and from contributors who offer diverse psychoanalytic approaches in this significant and valuable edited collection.
Saturday 11 June 2022
A live webinar or in-person event with Siobhán McGee, Jane Haberlin, Dr Oonagh Walsh, Dr Michael O’Loughlin and Kerri ní Dochartaigh
From colonial occupation to partition, from the Famine to the Troubles, Ireland has experienced much turmoil and loss. Countless people died in the great hunger, and since 1700, 10 million have emigrated for survival. The scattering of Irish people across the world means that many of us (10m in England) are the descendants of those who experienced the anguished loss of family, history and land.
Friday 10 June 2022
A live webinar with Dr David Celani
One of the most difficult relationship patterns which can be brought to psychotherapy is domestic violence in a couple relationship. To begin with it can be very difficult for someone on the receiving end of abuse to take this step. Victims often resist intervention until they are in desperate emotional or physical danger. Even then, their commitment to the therapy may waver, especially when the abusive partner offers promises of change and attempts to draw them back into the relationship and away from therapy.
Friday 27 May 2022
A live webinar or in-person event with Dr Aileen Alleyne, Dr Tamara Feldman, Mark Linington, Dr Arlene Vetere
In this conference we will explore ways of working psychotherapeutically with those who are drawn into enmeshed adult relationships that inhibit healthy separation and autonomy. Enmeshment as an attachment style may originate with the needs of a narcissistic parent or family culture where personal boundaries are diffused, roles undifferentiated and an over-concern for the other can lead to a failure in autonomous development.
Saturday 21 May 2022
A live gathering on Zoom with Ann Ulanov, Helen Morgan, Inna Kyryliuk (UJA), Analysts from USAP, Laurie Slade, Carola Mathers, Chris Scanlon, Elisabetta Pasini, Alessandra di Montezemolo, Franca Fubini, Carlos Remotti-Breton, Fiona Palmer Barnes, Catherine Cox, Marilyn Mathew, Cinzia Trimboli, Catherine Hinds and various prominent Jungians.
We invite you to join us at this international event in support of Jungian Analysts in Ukraine – to express our solidarity with those Ukrainian colleagues that are able to join us, to raise money to support those who have lost their homes and livelihoods.
Friday 20 May 2022
A live webinar with Dr Richard P. Brown and Dr Patricia L. Gerbarg
Breath-Body-Mind™ (BBM), is a programme of evidence-based, mind-body practices derived from yoga, qigong, meditation, martial arts, Open Focus Attention Training, and modern neuroscience developed by the holistic psychiatrists Richard Brown and Pat Gerbarg. Their methods have been used to relieve anxiety, depression, and PTSD in survivors of mass disasters, including the 2001 World Trade Center Attacks, Haiti earthquake, Gulf Horizon oil spill, genocide and slavery in Rwanda, South Sudan and Nigeria, Middle East refugees, Rohingya refugee children, and the COVID crisis.
Friday 13 May 2022
A Conversation between Dr Joe Cambray, Ruth Calland and Serena Korda
The Confer – Karnac Art Space is pleased to present its first live in conversation event between Jungian analyst and author Joe Cambray, Jungian analyst and artist Ruth Calland, and the artist Serena Korda. Both Ruth and Serena’s work has been selected to be part of our exhibition Frequencies (for healing), where the focus on the vibrant, dynamic agency of nature to which all things human and non-human communicate is seen as an ongoing enactment of the world, constantly in motion, vibrating, oscillating, resonating at varying frequencies.
Tuesday 3 May – 21 June 2022
A series of live webinar workshops with Sousan Abadian and Brian Anderson
In this seven-week course, our facilitators Sousan Abadian and Brian Anderson will take us on a journey of discovery of ancient restorative practices, beginning on Beltaine and culminating in a communal ceremony on the Summer Solstice. Participants will learn how to connect with the deepest aspects of themselves, to come into the right relationship with the natural world and the interconnected planet that we all call home.
Friday 29 April 2022
A live webinar or in-person event with Professor Peter Fonagy OBE, Catherine Holland, and Professor Jeremy Holmes
Identifying the starting point for the tension between psychoanalysis and attachment theory is complex and to some extent hidden, but to explore this historic friction reveals a fascinating battle of theories that has been a central schism within psychoanalysis: the question of whether intra- or extrapsychic phenomena should be the primary focus of analysis.
Wednesday 27 April – 6 July 2022
A Seminar Series with Linda Cundy, Minna Daum, Charlotte Hastings, Mary-Jayne Rust, Rebecca Smith, Julia Buckroyd, Jenny Riddell, Vincent Felitti, Charles Brown, Jeff Lane, Nailah Husbands and Tamar Posner
Food features in all relationships; between mothers and babies, parents and children, within peer groups, couples and families. The dinner table may be associated with intimacy, pleasure, connection or conflict. Narratives of culture, gender and history influence the relationship with food, as does intergenerational trauma. How we nurture or deprive ourselves may be a re-enactment of how we were once fed by our caregivers, or at least, how we were emotionally nourished or starved.
Saturday 23 April 2022 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar or in-person event with Robin E. Sheriff, Lewis Mehl-Madrona, and Laurie Slade
Freud saw dreams as fundamentally an expression of the inner world of the dreamer. Contemporary therapies and dream science have tended to follow him in this (to the extent that dreams are allowed any significance at all). But Westernised cultures are relatively unique in insisting that dreams are intra-subjective. Indigenous cultures, historically and to this day, have seen dreams as reflecting social, trans-generational and transcendent realities.
Friday 25 March 2022 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Giuseppe Civitarese, Elena Molinari, Fulvio Mazzacane and Andrea Sabbadini
At this event, our presenters will take us into the realms of new thinking about some of the more elusive dimensions of the psychoanalytic encounter, from the waking dream to embodied sensations. Drawing in part on the original theories of Wilfred Bion, James Grotstein, and Madeleine and Willy Baranger’s seminal contributions to contemporary psychoanalysis, our speakers will push our understanding of why these theories are so important in the psychoanalytic process.
Saturday 19 March 2022 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar or in-person event with Dr Syed Azmatullah, Dominic Davies, Alex Drummond, Rima Hawkins, Noemi Lakmaier Eduardo Peres, Michelle Ross-Turner, Joel Simpson, Erin Stevens and Dr Dwight Turner
In the context of our increasing awareness about power, privilege, race and gender politics in society, and the consulting room, Confer invites you to spend a day learning more about the concept of intersectionality, and how it impacts each of us.
Friday 18 March 2022 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Donna Jackson Nakazawa
Recent discoveries in neuroscience tell us that body and brain are constantly responding to perceived threats from our environment, deciding – on a cellular level – whether we are safe or not. How secure we feel in the world around us profoundly affects not only our physical and immune health, but our brain’s immune health, which, in turn, determines our mental wellbeing.
Saturday 12 March 2022 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar or in-person event with Anne Aiyegbusi, Sally Bild, Dick Blackwell, Bob Harris, Malcolm Peterson, Martin Weegmann, and Bridgette Rickett
Although social class is studied in so many disciplines and has been amply addressed in the theoretical literature of psychotherapy, it continues to be an avoided and conflictual issue for many within our professional community in the UK.
Friday 4 March 2022 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Barbara Dowds
What makes depression so complex, and how can therapists best meet its particular demands? Depression is a multifaceted and layered phenomenon – a set of conditions that vary widely in subjective experience and aetiology. It is difficult to work with because the very psychodynamic patterns that underpin it tend to block therapeutic change.
Friday 25 February 2022 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Judith Blackstone
Although many psychoanalysts observe that trauma has somatosensory components such as freezing, numbing parts of the body or fragmentation between affect and cognition, it is less recognised that the mind/body can become integrated when these dissociated organisations of self/other experience are brought to awareness and relinquished.
Thursday 24 February 2022 – Book Launch
Join us to celebrate the publication of Unlocked: Online Therapy Stories by Anastasia Piatakhina Giré
Unlocked tells the stories of ten different people in therapy in various cultural and geographical contexts – from Saudi Arabia to Venice or New York. All therapeutic work described in this book happens online and each narrative explores a unique presenting situation and uncovers the complexities of the therapeutic experience.
Saturday 5 February 2022 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Zack Eleftheriadou, Andrea Sabbadini, and Kristina Schellinski
Families face intense emotional pain when a child has died or gone missing. For complex reasons, this loss and trauma can remain unresolved and unconscious across one or more generations. This powerful psychological atmosphere can impact any other child in the family but it is especially powerful for the child born after the loss.
Friday 4 February 2022 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Joseph Cambray
With more than 120 years of analytic experience, models of the mind have evolved in conjunction with various other disciplines. We are moving towards a new synthesis of knowledge and experience, in which the porosity of subjective and objective states is transcending original binary views. As this opens into a discovery of non-local, distributed aspects of mind and psyche, exciting new therapeutic challenges and possibilities emerge.
Saturday 29 January 2022 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Dr Gabor Maté
In his bestselling book Scattered Minds, Gabor Maté rejects the narrow genetic perspective. Instead, he proposes a biopsychosocial view. This has profound implications for the treatment of AD(H)D and related developmental disorders in both children and adults. During this seminar, Gabor Maté will elaborate how the circuitry and physiology of the brain are affected by the environment, not only during critical periods of early childhood development but throughout the human lifetime.
Friday 28 January 2022 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Professor Renos K. Papadopoulos
Drawing upon years of experience in the consulting room, humanitarian field work, international projects and academic research, Renos Papadopoulos will present refreshing perspectives in relation to work with those who have faced severe adversity due to various forms of involuntary dislocation. These include not only refugees but also those who have been marginalised in society as well as those who experience more relational and internal forms of loss of home.
Friday 21 January 2022 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with keynote speakers Caroline Hickman and Sally Weintrobe, Judith Anderson, Jay Griffiths, Anna Harvey, and more…
Bringing together voices from many backgrounds, this conference aims to provide meaningful insights into the emotional states which are evoked in young people by the environmental crisis. We will explore how the complexity and depth of their feelings – their anger, fear, and sense of abandonment – can be more effectively heard, understood, and responded to by adults.
Saturday 15 January 2022 – Book Launch
Join Josh Cohen ‘in conversation’ with Adam Phillips about his book ‘The Cure for Psychoanalysis’
In the first essay, ‘The Magic of Winnicott,’ Adam Phillips makes clear the subtlety and wisdom of Winnicott’s concept of play. In ‘The Cure for Psychoanalysis’ he works through psychoanalytic theories about cure and instructs us to take most seriously those that free the analyst and patient to wonder and to take pleasure in the unknowable adventure ahead of them.
Friday 14 January 2022 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar or in-person event with Linda Cundy
This day is about the challenges faced by people who were ignored, criticised, rejected or utterly neglected within their families of origin and who thus find it difficult to form close and lasting intimate relationships in adulthood. People who avoid close proximity to others, despite their longing for that closeness, often feel more secure and better able to manage deep feelings when they hold others apart, whether sexual partners, therapists, or family members.
Friday 3 December 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Geraldine Godsil, Salvatore Martini and Antonio de Rienzo
This day will present views on psychotherapeutic experiences which illuminate the bodily basis of intersubjectivity. The speakers will elaborate their understanding of the intersubjective space as a field of ‘mutual unconsciousness’, where the two people in the therapeutic relationships meet and transform.
Thursday 25 November 2021 – Book Launch
Join us to celebrate the publication of ‘Present with Suffering’ by Nigel Wellings and Elizabeth Wilde McCormick, published by Confer Books
What is the place of discontent and unhappiness in human experience and how best can we be with it? There is something about everything that makes it not quite satisfactory. Even things we really love are spoilt by not being quite enough or by going on too long.
Saturday 20 November 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Prof Lesley Caldwell, Prof Alessandra Lemma and Prof Jean Petrucelli
The first impressions of another body, that of the mother, will lay the foundations for all future experiences of the embodied self in relation to another intimately connected person. From immersion in her uterus to the total physical dependency of infancy, this relationship lays down a life-long pattern of an embodied sense of self-and-other, and with that the development of mind.
Friday 19 November 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Dr Janina Fisher, Dr Ruth Lanius, and Dr Pat Ogden
In this final session of “The Trauma Series” our three expert clinicians will come together to answer your questions on their work in the context of working through the coronavirus threats. After a year of intense threats to our survival, coupled with the stress of social distancing, self-quarantine and isolation, most people will suffer some after-effects even when there is a return to ‘normal.’
Friday 12 November 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Janina Fisher, PhD
Disconnection from self in the context of traumatic experience is a survival strategy that allows victims to disown and distance themselves from what is happening. But it comes at a cost: long-lasting shame and self-loathing, difficulty self-soothing, internal conflicts and struggles, and complications in relationships with others.
Saturday 6 November 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Ozichi Brewster, Mike Morgan, Sue Stuart-Smith, and Dr Maggie Turp
As COP 26 begins, 6 November 2021 has been declared a Global Day of Action for Climate Justice in which communities all around the world will come together to build power for systems change. This event is part of our contribution to this day and we are inviting psychotherapists and others to join us in thinking about food, soil, land equity, and the balance of our relationship with the earth in the wider context of the environmental crisis.
Monday 12 April – 18 October 2021 – A Live Webinar Series
With Bayo Akomolafe, Nora Bateson, Michael Boyle, Karen Carberry, Tom Cheetham, Roger Duncan, David Key, Meredith Little, Graham Music, Robert Romanyshyn, Arne Rubinstein, Sue Stuart-Smith
It is impossible to ignore the impact of the environmental crisis we are currently facing.
It is now unequivocally clear the contemporary, industrial model for social development not only has had a fatal impact on many ecosystems of the earth but also a detrimental effect on human mental health and psychological well-being.
Friday 15 October 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Dr Pat Ogden
Traumatic events, attachment failures, and systemic oppression (historical and current) can become the central defining experiences that powerfully influence our implicit predictions and expectations of ourselves, others, and the world.
Established early on, patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting designed to navigate an unfriendly, unsafe or oppressive world are solidified with repetitive use, and become harder to modify as time goes on.
Saturday 2 October 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Dr Ruth Lanius
Developmentally traumatized people frequently feel estranged from their internal and external world. They often do not know where their body is in space, leaving them feeling clumsy, uncoordinated, and unable to engage in purposeful action/agency.
How can we combat such foundational difficulties resulting from developmental trauma in order to facilitate the individual to befriend their internal sensations and transform into an embodied, active agent in this world, who is capable of connecting with others through curiosity, language, and play?
Friday 1 October 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Dr Doris Brothers and Professor Brett Kahr, and with discussants Dr Valerie Sinason and Professor Neil Vickers
Sigmund Freud devoted much of his professional life to the treatment and cure of many severely traumatised patients. But it may well be that Freud actually endured far more trauma in his own private life than most of his analysands.
Saturday 25 September 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Guillermo Julio Montero, Audrey Kavka, and Mi Yu
The need to come to terms with human physical vulnerabilities and impending mortality naturally intensifies as the margin between life and death narrows.
While each person’s journey into age is highly personal and subjectively challenging, ageing is also thought of as a developmental stage with the potential for privileged and deepened states of consciousness, not just a period of catastrophic loss.
Saturday 18 September 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Anthea Benjamin, Dr Lucy Carter, Koya Cassandra Conteh, Tiane Graziottin, and more…
In the wake of COVID, this conference will address the highly topical issue of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and a therapeutic approach, Trauma Informed Care (TIC), which has been found to be highly effective in addressing the needs of people who have been neglected, abused, or otherwise traumatised in childhood.
Saturday 11 September 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern M.D., Heather Churchill PsyD, Karlen Lyons-Ruth Ph.D, Alexander Morgan M.D. and Bruce Reis Ph.D.
In this webinar, our speakers will explore this process of mutuality as a developmental process of moving through and being moved by another’s experience of the self and the world. While psychoanalytic thinking has moved far beyond the neutral analyst and now fully encompasses the mutual influence between patient and therapist, the nature of those two-person influences has only begun to be articulated.
Saturday 10 July 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Dr Valerie Sinason and discussants Zoe Hawton and Mark Linnington
Valerie Sinason is a world leader in the study of traumatology and has pioneered some of the most difficult work in the field. In the first part of this presentation, she focuses on the clinical implications of extreme adverse childhood experiences, disorganised attachment and resulting dissociative identity disorders.
Saturday 3 July 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Dr Doris Brothers, Jane Haberlin and Professor Andrew Samuels
Shame is often felt to be one of the most excruciating emotions, perhaps because it threatens one’s deepest sense of being loveable. For many, a sudden sense of having been inappropriate is embarrassing.
Friday 2 July 2021 – A Live Webinar
A Live Webinar with Joshua Engelman, Anouchka Grose and Mary Morgan
Human existence is maintained by a web of connections, attachments and resources. These are inevitably transient yet held together by a person’s sense of ‘going on being’ with a possible future. People leave or die, relationships end, and a life passes through developmental stages that must involve some shedding of former self-states.
Saturday 26 June 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Professor Jean Petrucelli
When a person struggles with an eating problem, their relationship to food can read like a taboo love affair involving anticipation fuelled excitement, intimacy enveloped in secrecy, and disappointment and emptiness when it is over.
Friday 18 June 2021 – A Live Webinar
A Live Webinar with Eugene Ellis, Siobhán McGee and Dr Maria Pozzi Monzo
Mindfulness is simply the deliberate practice of paying attention to what one is feeling and thinking from moment to moment. Usually, the process involves observing the incoming and outgoing breath, noticing and releasing the thoughts and emotions that inevitably arise.
Saturday 12 June 2021 – A Live Webinar
A Webinar with Dr Allan Schore
Citing his recent volume Right Brain Psychotherapy (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), Allan Schore will discuss the critical clinical role of transient synchronized mutual regressions. He defines these as the process of returning to an earlier stage of development as a conduit to developmental growth
Friday 11 June 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Deb Dana, LCSW
The autonomic nervous system is at the heart of daily living, powerfully shaping our experiences of safety and influencing our capacity for connection. Porges’ Polyvagal Theory provides a guide to the autonomic circuits that underlie behaviours and beliefs. It gives us an understanding of the body-to brain neural highways that give birth to our personal stories of safety and survival.
Friday 21 May 2021 – A Live Webinar
A Live Webinar with Lisa Forrell, Cathy Rentzenbrink, Julia Samuel, and Dr Lucy Selman
In this conversation we bring together a panel of distinguished academics, writers, and psychotherapists to explore together the many ways that the death of a loved one can be accommodated in order to free the bereaved to continue to live their lives.
Saturday 24 April 2021 – A Live Webinar
A Live Webinar with Dr Christopher Clulow, Liz Hamlin, Dr Avi Shmueli and Kate Thompson
In contemplating divorce or ‘uncoupling’, couples are assaulted with change on multiple levels. They may face separation from their children and experience shame at their relationship’s failure. Feelings of betrayal, abandonment or relief are commonly reported but rarely equally shared between spouses.
Saturday 27 March 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar with Dr Valerie Sinason
Valerie Sinason is a world leader in the study of traumatology. After decades of working psychotherapeutically with some of the most psychologically wounded people, she has found a way to talk about their unbearable experiences with extraordinary insight, compassion and balance. In this webinar she will describe what she has learnt about hearing, accepting and responding to their accounts.
Friday 26 March 2021 – A Live Webinar
A Live webinar with Bayo Akomolafe, Amrita Bhohi, Roger Duncan, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Mary-Jayne Rust and Mary Watkins
Healing the Intergenerational Disconnection from Ourselves and the Land. In our post-industrial world it is not mysterious that depression and anxiety are so prevalent and that the demand for psychotherapy is increasing. As therapists in this context, how do we understand this collective malaise?
Saturday 20 March 2021 – A Live Webinar
With Dr Aileen Alleyne, Dr Neil Altman, Eugene Ellis and Jane Ryan
This conference invites psychotherapists of all backgrounds to consider the intricate and complex challenge of talking about race, both within and beyond the consulting room. It rests on the premise that examining the subjective experience of inequality across painful racial divides in our society is inevitably a confronting and emotionally charged endeavour: frustrating and saddening for black people; shame laden and unnerving for white people.
Friday 19 March 2021 – A Live Webinar
A one-day workshop with Marian Dunlea and Wendy Bratherton
In this webinar, Marian will guide participants through her embodied therapeutic approach, BodyDreaming. Marian’s approach is the integration of 30 years of dedicated study and clinical work from perspectives including analytical psychology, psychoanalysis, Marion Woodman’s BodySoul Rhythms, Focusing, Authentic Movement, Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing and Organic Intelligence. Here she describes her way of working.
Saturday 6 March 2021 – A Live Webinar
A live webinar led by Julianne Appel-Opper
In this embodied and experiential webinar Julianne Appel-Opper will offer new perspectives to explore and to work with somatisation and embodied communications. Julianne has developed a way of working – “relational living body psychotherapy” – that is theoretically rooted in integrative gestalt psychotherapy and intersubjective psychoanalytic thinking.
Monday 25 January – 1 March 2021 – A Live Webinar Series
With Bayo Akomolafe, Ashok Bedi, Maria Grazia Calzà, Velimir Popović and Murray Stein
This series of talks is a further exploration of the concept and practice of active imagination, a core aspect of analytical psychology. This form of inner work, developed by Jung and elaborated in his work The Red Book, is a way of evoking dream states while awake, thus providing access to dream-like content as a practice.
Saturday 27 February 2021 – A Live Webinar
With Dr Frances Sommer Anderson, Georgie Oldfield MCSP and Dr Nick Straiton
This multi-disciplinary conference, rescheduled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will examine the early foundations of chronic pain and how to work with these conditions therapeutically. The impact of the ongoing pandemic on people who experienced early life adversity will be acknowledged. Our speakers include a psychologist/psychoanalyst, musculoskeletal physician and physiotherapist.
Friday 5 February 2021 – A Live Webinar
A One-Day Exploration Led by Dr Anne Alvarez and Dr Graham Music
Working with someone who cannot respond to the connection to another offered by psychotherapy can be one of the most de-skilling experiences for practitioners. Being with long periods of silence, avoidance of eye-contact, difficulties in showing affect, purpose or even words can be enormously challenging and likely to evoke a very negative countertransference.
Saturday 30 January 2021 – A Live Webinar
A Webinar with Dr Andrea Celenza, Professor Paul Gilbert, Dr Richard Gipps and Dr Joy Schaverien
This project began with a discussion between people working at Confer on whether love of the client is essential for the therapeutic process to work. Some thought it would be strange if a slowly emerging, intimate experience of deeply knowing another, and being known, did not result in love of some kind. Others wondered how a therapeutic stance of being loving might inhibit the client’s need to use the therapist as a hateful object.
Friday 22 January 2021 – A Live Webinar
A Webinar with Dr Reenee Singh
In the UK, 2.3 million people are living with or married to somebody from a different ethnic group, and one in 10 relationships is intercultural. The figures for London are even higher and it is predicted that by 2030, fifty percent of people living in the capital will be foreign-born.
Saturday 16 January 2021 – A Live Webinar
A Webinar with Dr Gabor Maté
For twelve years Gabor Maté was the staff physician at a clinic for drug-addicted people in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where he worked with patients challenged by hard-core drug addiction, mental illness and HIV, including at Vancouver Supervised Injection Site.
Saturday 12 December 2020 – A Live Webinar
With Dr Aileen Alleyne, Dr Chip Chimera and Professor Arlene Vetere
This conference explores the psychotherapeutic challenges of working with shame, one of the most painful yet insidious emotions because of its potential to attack the deepest sense of self. Shaming is often a mechanism of emotional control in dysfunctional families.
Friday 4 December 2020 – A Live Webinar
A One-Day Exploration with Roz Carroll, Ruella Frank and Margaret Landale
As therapists move their practices online, what are we discovering about the significance of embodied presence in the shadow of its absence?
Surprisingly, therapists have reported that certain kinds of connection are actually intensified online. For example, close-up facial expressions provide an immediate intimacy between the two. Transference and countertransference enactments can still find expression, and narratives can easily unfold with less inhibition.
Tuesday 1 December 2020 – A Live Webinar
Professor Sonu Shamdasani in conversation with Alessandra di Montezemolo
Jung’s Visions, Fantasies and Imaginations and His Experience of Editing The Black Books
The Black Books present Jung’s explorations of the visionary imagination between 1913 to 1932, his personal transformation and the making of analytical psychology. They chart his evolving understanding, showing how he sought to deepen new insights and locate them in real life experiences.
Saturday 21 November 2020 – A Live Webinar
With Dr Françoise Davoine, Trudy Gold, Maya Lasker-Wallfisch, John Simmonds and Dr Reenee Singh
Many families have needed to shed a past identity in order to build new lives, especially those who have been subjected to social shame or exclusion. Often, unacceptable aspects of that family history are expunged from the family narrative; histories that are considered too painful to recount – either to protect the teller or listener – are deliberately or unconsciously hidden.
Saturday 14 November 2020 – A Live Webinar
With Dr Barnaby Barratt and Dr Saadia Muzaffar
The aim of psychotherapy is freedom: to liberate sufferers from repetitive self-defeating patterns of thought and relationship. Its clients feel stuck, unable to move forward, trammelled by depression, anxiety, physical and/or mental pain and cut-offness.
In this webinar we shall consider psychotherapeutic freedom from three different, but related, viewpoints.
Friday 6 November 2020 – A Live Webinar
With Linda Cundy, Siobhán McGee and Dr Kathrin Stauffer
It is perhaps a given that, whatever someone’s starting point for coming into therapy, they have a wish to change – to suffer less – and that one way of thinking about that is as a desire to be securely attached. Of course, most people don’t come into therapy framing their problem as an incapacity for secure attachment, but psychotherapists who think of emotional suffering as rooted in childhood deficits may view the work through the lens of attachment theory.
Saturday 17 October 2020 – A Live Webinar
With Dr Pierre Cachia, Professor Alessandra Lemma and Dr Jill Scharff
Today’s panel will consider the implications of holding the psychotherapy session in cyberspace – something that most psychotherapists have, however reluctantly, adjusted to during the pandemic. Many have expressed regret at the loss of embodied contact, the familiar physical rhythm of the sessions and the lack of access to non-verbal cues.
Friday 9 October 2020 – A Live Webinar
With Dr Sousan Abadian, Dr Doris Brothers and Dr Jack Saul
While we can’t know the global consequences of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, we can predict that the felt experience of facing this particular existential threat will leave a lasting shock-wave through our emotional systems; that time and space will be needed for grief and anger. But can we also think about this processing as an opportunity for certain kinds of emotional and social enrichment?
Friday 2 October 2020 – A Live Webinar
Led by Dr Arlene Vetere
This webinar will outline the systemic safety methodology for safe relationship therapy when physical and emotional violence is known to have occurred. It is in response to the increase of violence in the home during the lockdown period, and the challenges of working remotely with these clients. It will assist practitioners to assess when it’s safe enough to work relationally, and when to offer alternatives.
Friday 25 September 2020 – A Live Webinar
With Judith Pickering, Meg Harris Williams and David Henderson. Chaired by Alice Waterfall
In this conversation, we will examine the connection between spirituality, mysticism, contemplation and psychotherapy. Exploring the qualities that inspire growth, healing and transformation in the therapeutic journey, the speakers will consider the many qualities that contribute to these less tangible processes: presence, attention, mindfulness, calm abiding, analytic reverie and compassion. We will ask how these contribute to insight and wisdom, and how they can be developed and enhanced through certain forms of psychotherapeutic attention.
Friday 18 September 2020 – A Live Webinar
An Object Relations Approach to Resistance in Treatment – Led by Dr David Celani – Chaired by Alice Waterfall
This workshop will address one of the most frustrating and often repeated events in a psychotherapist’s daily practice, when a client, who seems to be making progress, suddenly begins to aggressively defend his family of origin and angrily abandons treatment. This sudden resistance to therapy is provoked when the patient realises that s/he is pulling away from their family of origin, both internal and external, and cannot imagine surviving alone.
Friday 11 September 2020 – A Live Webinar
A one-day exploration led by Carmen Joanne Ablack and Dr Rae Johnson – chaired by Eugene Ellis
In today’s increasingly complex and polarised social world, many psychotherapists are being called, pulled or pushed into addressing issues of social justice. This is evident in our work with clients, in our relationships with colleagues, and in our own lives.
Saturday 5 September 2020 – A Live Webinar
Dr Richard Gipps, Professor Paul Hoggett, Dr Merav Roth and Dr Estela Welldon – chaired by Anouchka Grose
As the pandemic has brought us all face to face with death, either in reality or in the imagination, we will be talking about how the mind negotiates this gross affront to our sense of survival. The sudden risk of catching a fatal illness brings out some extraordinary capacities, such as adaptation, connection, altruism, but it also amplifies the deepest fear we may have of ceasing to exist.
The Making of Destructive Leader – A developmental perspective on pathological narcissism and powers
Friday 31 July 2020 – A Live Webinar
With Dr James Gilligan, Dr Joy Schaverien and Dr Felicity de Zulueta
In a year of multiple crises in many Western democracies, from the Covid-19 pandemic to the uprisings against racism, to the unfolding economic disaster that is a product of austerity, many will be asking the question: what type of person is governing us?
Saturday 25 July 2020 – A Live Webinar
A Workshop with Dr Elaine Aron, Dr Art Aron and Dr Michael Pluess
We often think of highly sensitive people as having less structured boundaries than others: their heightened responses can be confused with poor ego function, with personality or mood disorders. But in this conference we will be looking at new work with Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) as those who have an innate trait of sensory processing sensitivity (SPS).
Saturday 18 July 2020 – A Live Webinar
With Stephen W. Porges, PhD and Sue Carter, PhD
The spread of the SARSCov2 virus presents an unprecedented event that rapidly introduced widespread life threat, economic de-stabilization, and social isolation. The human nervous system is tuned to detect safety and danger, integrating body and brain responses via the autonomic nervous system.
Friday 17 July 2020 – A Live Webinar
With speaker Dr Murray Stein
Active imagination is one of the pillars of Jungian psychoanalysis. Along with the developmental concept of individuation, the activation of transference in the therapeutic relationship, and the interpretation of dreams, active imagination is a key component that constitutes the essence of Jungian clinical work. Paradoxically, however, active imagination has been neglected as a method by many Jungian psychoanalysts since Jung’s death in 1961.
Monday 1 June – 13 July 2020 – A Live Webinar Series
With Dr Christopher Clulow, Kate Thompson, Dr Aaron Balick, Dr Reenee Singh, Anna Santamouris, Orit Badouk Epstein, Linda Graham, MFT and Laurie Slade
This series of seminars examines the impact of the current Covid-19 crisis on individuals, couples and families through the eyes of practitioners as we navigate this unprecedented and surreal shift in our lives.
Friday 26 June 2020 – A Live Webinar
Led by Frank Bock, Sandy Gee and Dr Greg Madison
This workshop explores the therapeutic and personal advantages of including an experiential dimension in psychotherapy sessions by incorporating the practice of Focusing.
Saturday 13 and 20 June 2020 – A Live Webinar
A Two-Day Workshop with Dr Janina Fisher PhD
In this workshop, we will look at how the neuroscience and attachment research of the past twenty years has transformed our notions of “memory”. We now know that “the body keeps the score,” that our most painful experiences are less often remembered than encoded in wordless somatic and emotional memories.
Saturday 14 March 2020 – London
A day with Adam Phillips
This one-day discussion focuses on the question of what constitutes an acceptable picture of change in psychoanalysis. We will begin with a talk by Adam in which he will explore the uses of the word “conversion” in psychoanalytic discourse and the idea of change within the thinking of key theorists.
Saturday 7 March 2020 – London
With Roz Carroll, Dr Cherionna Menzam-Sills, Dr Kathrin Stauffer, Nick Totton
This conference attempts to scrutinise the often-repeated claim that bodies remember events, speak the truth, keep the score, and do other things that were previously seen as the province of minds.
Saturday 29 February & Sunday 1 March 2020 – London
With Benjamin Fry, Dr Nuri Gene-Cos, Dr Phil Mollon, Dr Alon Reshef and Dr Yorai Sella
Previous notions of health and disease have tended to separate the mind from other organic processes. However, when we start to think of the mind as an entity that spreads throughout the body in a highly complex network of feedback loops between thoughts, feelings and chemicals then a holistic model of mental health care makes great sense.
Friday 7 February 2020 – London
A Cafe Psy discussion led by Janice Hiller
Developing and maintaining an intimate relationship is often a driving force throughout life, combining intense joy and huge disappointment. As a relationship progresses we go through different stages, underpinned by brain states that neuroscientists have begun to explore in recent years.
Saturday 1 February 2020 – London
With Antony Haynes and Dr Elisabeth Philipps
Many of us, including our psychotherapy clients, may suffer from unexplained symptoms of debilitation, and of depression, without a clear context. In fact, general practitioners say that about 25 per cent of their consultations are with patients for whom they cannot give a medical diagnosis or treatment and this can be a key issue in psychotherapy.
Saturday 18 January 2020 – Dublin
With Lesley Caldwell, Dr Richard Gipps and Dr Akshi Singh
Why is it that some people never experience the emotion of loneliness, while others feel excruciating anxiety in solitude? This conference will attempt to understand aspects of an individual’s psyche that predisposes them towards either tendency. We’ll consider aloneness as a source of vulnerability, but also a necessary retreat for reflection and creativity. Our theoretical starting point is that the capacity to be alone is engendered in childhood by the consistent, repeated presence of being with another.
Saturday 14 December 2019 – London
With Dr Maria Luca, Prof Alistair Ross, Maktuno Suit and Nick Totton
The therapeutic frame has evolved over 130 years, from being a practical appointment system for a meeting between analyst and patient, to a key component of the practitioner’s skill. Traditionally, it has been seen as providing consistency, reliability, confidentiality; of preserving a screen of anonymity around the psychotherapist, which allows the patient or client the freedom to freely roam their transferences and projections onto that person.
Saturday 7 December 2019 – Dublin
A Special One-day Event with Brett Kahr and Dr. Carine Minne
Although the vast majority of psychotherapy patients conduct themselves with great honourability and pose no physical or emotional threat to the clinician, a small number of individuals will, from time to time, hurl “bombs” into the consulting room.
Saturday 7 December 2019 – London
With Roz Carroll, Yeva Feldman & Sissy Lykou
How often do you feel ‘stuck’ in the chair when working with a client? Would you like to bring in other elements that support a transition into using the space? Many practitioners lack a sense of permission or training to know how to track micro-movements and to use kinaesthetic empathy to enable the client to take these further.
Saturday 30 November 2019 – London
With Yeva Feldman, Morit Heitzler and Susie Orbach
This conference will be grounded in the most up to date thinking on eating problems, as well as offering some substantial and inspiring assistance to those working with this challenging client group. Traditionally, the term “eating disorder” is a medical expression encompassing the various psychiatric diagnoses referred to in the DSM 5.
Saturday 23 November 2019 – London
A one-day seminar led by Nigel Wellings and Elizabeth Wilde McCormick
There is something about everything that makes it not quite satisfactory. Even things we really love are spoilt by not being quite enough or – the opposite – going on too long. People entering psychotherapy want to feel better – more authoritative, less anxious or depressed, more whole – and although it can help, an enormous amount of difficult and painful emotions continue to arise.
The Pleasures and Perils of a Psychotherapeutic Career: How to flourish in the impossible profession
Saturday 2 November 2019 – London
A One-Day Workshop with Professor Brett Kahr
The psychotherapist can help restore broken marriages and mend shattered families. The psychotherapist also has the potential to save people from killing themselves. Yet the burdens of working psychotherapeutically can be immense, not only emotionally, but, also, medically across the life cycle.
Saturday 19 October 2019 – Ireland
Led by Dr Meg-John Barker
We are in the midst of a massive moral panic about gender. We know that it is closely related to mental health struggles such as high rates of suicide, addiction, and violence among men, and high rates of depression, anxiety, body image, and self-esteem issues among women.
Saturday 12 October 2019 – London
With Prof Mary Hepworth (previously Mary Target), Prof Jeremy Holmes and Ann Shearer
This day will provide a unique opportunity to discover the extent to which different psychotherapists diverge in their theory and technique when we compare them through the lens of live supervision. Our three presenters have been chosen both for their extensive experience as therapists and supervisors.
Saturday 5 October 2019 – Ireland
A one-day conference with Dermot Bolger, Andrew Samuels, Ross Skelton, and Brendan Staunton SJ
The theme of this day is, in part, inspired by Sigmund Freud’s observation that the death of the father is the most significant moment in a man’s life. This must surely be true for many, but Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex is now considered problematic.
Friday 27 September 2019 – London
A One Day Workshop with Dr Dan Hughes
The theories and research of attachment, intersubjectivity, and neurobiology have created a strong foundation for a model of family therapy that creates both the safety needed for parents and children to be openly present in the sessions as well as the patterns of engagement and exploration needed to create new family relational patterns.
Saturday 21 September 2019 – London
With speakers Shoshi Asheri, Dr Richard Gipps, Professor Dany Nobus, Dr Jay Watts and Judy Yellin
Last year we asked the thought-provoking question What is Normal? as the topic for our think-tank conference to celebrate our 20 anniversary. Somewhat beyond our expectations, the question generated some brilliant, fresh and new perspectives about the therapy process.
Saturday 14 September 2019 – London
A one-day seminar with Dr David Celani
The superordinate need of the child is not for pleasure or need gratification, but for an intense relationship with another person… If only painful experiences are provided, the child does not give up looking for pleasurable experiences elsewhere, but seeks pain as a vehicle for interaction with the significant other.
Saturday 15 June 2019 – London
With speakers Dr Gwen Adshead and Dr Amanda Jones
This seminar aims to elaborate the significance of the mother’s emotional capacities on her baby’s forming mental health. Our two presenters will consider how far attachment, systemic and psychoanalytic theories can help us to support psychologically fragile mothers so they can grow in their capacity and confidence in offering maternal love
Saturday 22 June 2019 – London
With speakers Dr Meg-John Barker, Leah Davidson, Dominic Davies, Pamela Gawler-Wright, Amanda Middleton, Monty Moncrieff, David Richards, Laurie Slade, George Taxidis and Judy Yellin
This unique conference will explore the advances made in improving the mental health of gender, sexuality and relationship diverse (GSRD) people in the UK.
Saturday 29 June 2019 – London
With speakers Mary Morgan and Stanley Ruszczynski
This conference, inspired by our speaker Mary Morgan’s new book A Couple State of Mind (Routledge, 2019) for psychotherapists who are looking for further insight into couple relating and concepts for working with couple relationships.
Saturday 29 June – Dublin
A one-day seminar Led by Linda Cundy
This day is about the challenge faced by people who were ignored, criticised, rejected or utterly neglected within their families of origin and who thus find it difficult to form close and lasting intimate relationships in adulthood.
Saturday 6 July 2019 – London
With speakers Gabrielle Brown, Raffaella Hilty, Professor Brett Kahr, Dr Valerie Sinason and David O’Driscoll
Every psychotherapist practitioner will know only too well what it means to experience the rage and hatred of one’s most vulnerable clients and the challenges that this raises in countertransference work.
Saturday 13 July 2019 – London
With speakers Richard Curen, Dr Ronald Doctor and Katya Orrell
At this seminar we will consider two possible relationships to past traumatic events: remembering, and working-through on the one hand; repressing, disavowal and acting-out on the other, and how the tension between these can be skilfully managed in the therapy relationship.
Thursday 25 July 2019 – London
Dr Stephen Seligman in interview with Dr Anne Alvarez
Psychoanalysis has fallen on hard times. It’s unpopular among psychiatrists, leftists, and rightists alike, and the main attention it gets in universities is from a handful of literature professors. But the analytic sensibility offers a foundational ethic for the construction of a more humane, communicative society.
Saturday 27 July 2019 – London
With speakers Dr Galit Atlas, Dr Susie Orbach and Professor Andrew Samuels
In this conference, our speakers will explore the challenging proposition that holding our future selves in mind needs to be considered a central aspect of the psychotherapeutic dialogue…
Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 September 2019 – Ireland
With speakers Angela Cotter, Mike Delaney, Marian Dunlea, Shirley Gleeson, Joanne Hanrahan, Matthew Henson, Lucy O’Hagan
For millennia people have travelled to “the valley of the two lakes” to deepen their connection with nature, a beautiful place in the Wicklow Mountains that inspires a sense of ancient worship…
