New Perspectives on Affect Regulation
The significance for psychotherapy
Recorded Saturday 22 November 2025
A live webinar with Dr Daniel Hill and Jane Ryan (Chair)
CPD Credits: 3.5 hours
Over the past thirty years profound changes have occurred in psychoanalysis and counselling. 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 draw’s 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 are different ways of knowing, and result in different things known. In the last session, Dan describe’s 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
Introductions
What do we mean by affect regulation?
Dan begin’s 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 includes Q&A and discussion with Dan.
How the implicit and explicit processes of the mind shape subjective reality
In this session, Dan review’s 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 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.
The role of implicit and explicit process in self functioning
In this last session, Dan illustrate’s 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.
End