With Dr Doris Brothers and Dr Jon Sletvold
Recorded Friday 15 July 2022
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 conceptualisation 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.
With Professor Sue Carter, Professor Ruth Feldman and Dr Janice Hiller
Recorded Sunday 26 June 2022
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.
With Candace Orcutt, MA, PhD
Recorded Saturday 18 June 2022
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.
With Siobhán McGee, Jane Haberlin, Dr Oonagh Walsh, Dr Michael O’Loughlin and Kerri ní Dochartaigh
Recorded Saturday 11 June 2022
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.
With Dr David Celani
Recorded Friday 10 June 2022
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.
With Dr Aileen Alleyne, Dr Tamara Feldman, Mark Linington, Dr Arlene Vetere
Recorded Friday 27 May 2022
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.
With Robin E. Sheriff, Lewis Mehl-Madrona, and Laurie Slade
Recorded Saturday 23 April 2022
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.
With Giuseppe Civitarese, Elena Molinari, Fulvio Mazzacane and Andrea Sabbadini
Recorded Friday 25 March 2022
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.
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
Recorded Saturday 19 March 2022
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.
With Donna Jackson Nakazawa
Recorded Friday 18 March 2022
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.
With Dr Barbara Dowds
Recorded Friday 4 March 2022
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.
With Judith Blackstone
Recorded Friday 25 February 2022
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.
With Zack Eleftheriadou, Andrea Sabbadini, and Kristina Schellinski
Recorded Saturday 5 February 2022
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.
With Joseph Cambray
Recorded Friday 4 February 2022
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.
With Dr Gabor Maté
Recorded Saturday 29 January 2022
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.
With Professor Renos K. Papadopoulos
Recorded Friday 28 January 2022
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.
With keynote speakers Caroline Hickman and Sally Weintrobe, Judith Anderson, Jay Griffiths, Anna Harvey, and more…
Recorded Friday 21 January 2022
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.
With Linda Cundy
Recorded Friday 14 January 2022
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.
With Geraldine Godsil, Salvatore Martini and Antonio de Rienzo
Recorded Friday 3 December 2021
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.
With Dr Janina Fisher, Dr Ruth Lanius, and Dr Pat Ogden
Recorded Friday 19 November 2021
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.’
With Janina Fisher, PhD
Recorded Friday 12 November 2021
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.
Without internal coherence or compassion, fragmented individuals are vulnerable to suicidality, self-harm or substance abuse, and often marginalised by the label of “borderline.”
With Ozichi Brewster, Mike Morgan, Sue Stuart-Smith, and Dr Maggie Turp
Recorded Saturday 6 November 2021
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.
With Dr Pat Ogden
Recorded Friday 15 October 2021
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.
With Dr Ruth Lanius
Recorded Saturday 2 October 2021
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.
With Dr Doris Brothers and Professor Brett Kahr, and with discussants Dr Valerie Sinason and Professor Neil Vickers
Recorded Friday 1 October 2021
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.
With Anthea Benjamin, Dr Lucy Carter, Koya Cassandra Conteh, Tiane Graziottin, and more…
Recorded Saturday 18 September 2021
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.
With Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern M.D., Heather Churchill PsyD, Karlen Lyons-Ruth Ph.D, Alexander Morgan M.D. and Bruce Reis Ph.D.
Recorded Saturday 11 September 2021
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.
With Dr Valerie Sinason and discussants Zoe Hawton and Mark Linnington
Recorded Saturday 10 July 2021
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.
With Dr Doris Brothers, Jane Haberlin and Professor Andrew Samuels
Recorded Saturday 3 July 2021
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.
But for someone who has never felt certain of their worth, a minor encounter with personal limitations can feel like a catastrophic reminder of one’s supposed inadequacy: of being insufficient, not quite what’s wanted, unacceptable.
With Joshua Engelman, Anouchka Grose and Mary Morgan
Recorded Friday 2 July 2021
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.
With Eugene Ellis, Siobhán McGee and Dr Maria Pozzi Monzo
Recorded Friday 18 June 2021
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.
With Dr Allan Schore
Recorded Saturday 12 June 2021
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.
With Deb Dana, LCSW
Recorded Friday 11 June 2021
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.
With Lisa Forrell, Cathy Rentzenbrink, Julia Samuel, and Dr Lucy Selman
Recorded Friday 21 May 2021
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.
With Dr Christopher Clulow, Liz Hamlin, Dr Avi Shmueli and Kate Thompson
Recorded Saturday 24 April 2021
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.
With Dr Valerie Sinason
Recorded Saturday 27 March 2021
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.
With Bayo Akomolafe, Amrita Bhohi, Roger Duncan, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Mary-Jayne Rust and Mary Watkins
Recorded Friday 26 March 2021
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?
With Dr Aileen Alleyne, Dr Neil Altman, Eugene Ellis and Jane Ryan
Recorded Saturday 20 March 2021
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.
With Julianne Appel-Opper
Recorded Saturday 6 March 2021
In this embodied and experiential webinar, Julianne Appel-Opper will offer new perspectives to explore and 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. This approach also draws on the research fields of attachment, developmental psychology, neuroscience and somatisation.
With Velimir B. Popović
Recorded Monday 1 March 2021
Jung’s encounters with the unconscious that he described in The Red Book were especially fruitful for his followers. He described his dialogues with various unconscious images and these developed into the concept of active imagination as a therapeutic technique. Yet, unfortunately, this process was never fully elaborated for future analytical psychologists.
With Dr Frances Sommer Anderson, Georgie Oldfield MCSP and Dr Nick Straiton
Recorded Saturday 27 Februrary 2021
This multi-disciplinary conference 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.
A Webinar with Ashok Bedi
Recorded Monday 22 Februrary 2021
Life is a series of road bumps, detours, and breakdowns. Most of the time, our consciousness can manage these crises with its default mode of operation. However, if our ego consciousness is overwhelmed by the trauma, then the deeper layers of our psyche are activated to master the situation. At such a juncture, our collective consciousness and the cumulative archetypal wisdom of our ancestors triggers the imagination to create a new image or a symbol to help us to navigate such overwhelming situations.
A Webinar with Bayo Akomolafe
Recorded Monday 8 Februrary 2021
Jung’s active imagination is believed to be the heart of his massive contributions to depth psychology and central to his psychotherapeutic enterprise. There are many guides on how to experiment with active imagination – the process of making dreamed images objectively intelligible in a process of healing and transformation.
A Webinar with Maria Grazia Calzà
Recorded Monday 1 Februrary 2021
To Jung, our imagination is the door to divinity: it serves as a symbolic intermediary allowing for the imaging of the imageless divine; images allow mystics to stand in relationship with the transcendent. This seminar will relate Jung’s idea to the numinous images of this “Imaginative Presence” which over-flowed medieval mystic women’s consciousness and was transmuted and grounded in the body.
With Dr Andrea Celenza, Professor Paul Gilbert, Dr Richard Gipps and Dr Joy Schaverien
Recorded Saturday 30 January 2021
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.
A Webinar with Dr Murray Stein
Recorded Monday 25 January 2021
In classical Jungian psychoanalysis, active imagination is one of the key instruments for contacting and working with the unconscious. It has summoned a wave of interest among Jungian practitioners since the publication of The Red Book by C.G. Jung in 2009, demonstrated by the recent publication of four volumes of essays by Jungian scholars in the series titled Jung’s Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul Under Postmodern Conditions.
A Webinar with Dr Reenee Singh
Recorded Friday 22 January 2021
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.
A Webinar with Dr Gabor Maté
Recorded Saturday 16 January 2021
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.
With Dr Aileen Alleyne, Dr Chip Chimera and Professor Arlene Vetere
Recorded Saturday 12 December 2020
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.
With Roz Carroll, Ruella Frank and Margaret Landale
Recorded Friday 4 December 2020
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.
With Dr Françoise Davoine, Trudy Gold, Maya Lasker-Wallfisch, John Simmonds and Dr Reenee Singh
Recorded Saturday 21 November 2020
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.
With Professor Jeremy Holmes, Dr Barnaby B. Barratt and Dr Saadia Muzaffar
Recorded Saturday 14 November 2020
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.
With Linda Cundy, Siobhán McGee and Dr Kathrin Stauffer
Recorded Friday 6 November 2020
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.
With Dr Pierre Cachia, Professor Alessandra Lemma and Dr Jill Scharff
Recorded Saturday 17 October 2020
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.
With Dr Sousan Abadian, Dr Doris Brothers and Dr Jack Saul
Recorded Friday 9 October 2020
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?
Led by Dr Arlene Vetere
Recorded Friday 2 October 2020
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.
With Judith Pickering, Meg Harris Williams and David Henderson. Chaired by Alice Waterfall
Recorded Friday 25 September 2020
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
An Object Relations Approach to Resistance in Treatment – Led by Dr David Celani – Chaired by Alice Waterfall
Recorded Friday 18 September 2020
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.
A one-day exploration led by Carmen Joanne Ablack and Dr Rae Johnson – chaired by Eugene Ellis
Recorded Friday 11 September 2020
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.
For those without a background in activism or anti-oppression work, it can be challenging to know where to begin, how to recognize our privilege, unpack our own history of oppression, and to navigate cultural misattunements with clients with honesty and grace.
Dr Richard Gipps, Professor Paul Hoggett, Dr Merav Roth and Dr Estela Welldon – chaired by Anouchka Grose
Recorded Saturday 5 September 2020
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.
A developmental perspective on pathological narcissism and power
With Professor James Gilligan, Professor Joy Schaverien and Dr Felicity de Zulueta
Recorded Friday 31 July 2020
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? This question relates not simply to specific individuals, their political parties and ideologies but to the mental states of those who are supposed to be offering benign leadership.
A Workshop with Dr Elaine Aron, Dr Art Aron and Dr Michael Pluess
Recorded Saturday 25 July 2020
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).
With Stephen W. Porges, PhD and Sue Carter, PhD
Recorded Saturday 8 June 2019
In this workshop Porges and Carter will demonstrate the clinical applications of their research into Polyvagal Theory and oxytocin and social behavior. Their scientifically validated advancements in neuroscience offer a new way of considering brain-body medicine. Safety is critical in enabling humans to optimize their potential. The neurophysiological processes associated with feeling safe are a prerequisite not only for optimal mental health and social behavior but are also relevant in the clinical setting.
With Stephen W. Porges, PhD and Sue Carter, PhD
Recorded Saturday 18 July 2020
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. Polyvagal Theory provides a perspective to understand the impact of the pandemic on mental and physical health.
With speaker Murray Stein
Recorded Friday 17 July 2020
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.
Therapy In The Time Of Covid-19 Seminar Series
Linda Graham, MFT
Recorded Monday 6 July 2020
Developing Resilience for Clinical Work in Challenging Times
Resilience, the capacities to cope quickly and skillfully with any crises or catastrophe, is especially needed in times of sudden transition and upheaval such as we’re experiencing with Covid-19. This webinar will provide practitioners with the very practical tools they need to help clients manage anxiety, distress and overwhelm and to maintain their own clarity and well-being.
Therapy In The Time Of Covid-19 Seminar Series
Orit Badouk Epstein
Recorded Monday 29 June 2020
From Proximity Seeking to Distance Regulation, a Case Presentation On Working Online with a Client Who Comes from a Disorganised Attachment Style
The abrupt appearance of Covid-19 invading our consulting room has thrown us all into a state of disorientation and forced us to work online only. While slowly adjusting her practice to this new norm, to her surprise, Orit found that not much has changed for those clients who suffer complex trauma with disorganised attachment styles.
A Two-Day Workshop with Dr Janina Fisher PhD
Dr Janina Fisher
Recorded Saturday 13 and 20 June 2020
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.
Therapy In The Time Of Covid-19 Seminar Series
Anna Santamouris
Recorded Monday 22 June 2020
Anna will introduce her talk with psychoanalytic theory as a background to problems of addiction in clients. The talk will address states of narcissism and how these pertain to the addictions, including the mirror transference (mirroring and reflection), a preoccupation with self and inner reality, the imbalance between objective and subjective aspects of the self and the difficult relationship to reality that shows itself in a withdrawal from object relations alongside illusions of self-sufficiency
Therapy In The Time Of Covid-19 Seminar Series
Dr Reenee Singh
Recorded Monday 15 June 2020
Families and couples are under considerable stress during this period of lockdown. At one level, most families experience the more “ordinary” stresses of having to share space, work remotely and supervise virtual schools, while at another level, there are anxieties about health and mortality among immediate and extended family members, which may be exacerbated for migrant families.
Therapy In The Time Of Covid-19 Seminar Series
Dr Aaron Balick
Recorded Monday 8 June 2020
Since the Covid-19 crisis struck in the middle of March, talking therapists have moved their practices online wholesale and globally. While some will have had previous experience of online work, most will have had little to no training and may even have strong prejudices about working in this way. Working online is no longer a choice, but a necessity, and it is the duty of every psychotherapist to do so ethically, responsibly, and critically.
Therapy In The Time Of Covid-19 Seminar Series
Dr Christopher Clulow and Kate Thompson
Recorded Monday 1 June 2020
Couple relationships form a bridge between the internal worlds of each partner and their external environment. As individuals they constitute an important part of their partner’s environment, and as a couple they are affected by the wider environment they inhabit. Threats from any of these sources affect the quality and stability of their relationship, both consciously and unconsciously.
A day with Adam Phillips
Recorded Saturday 14 March 2020
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.
With Antony Haynes and Dr Elisabeth Philipps
Recorded Saturday 1 February 2020
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.
With Lesley Caldwell, Dr Richard Gipps and Dr Akshi Singh
Recorded Saturday 18 January 2020
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.
A one-day seminar led by Nigel Wellings and Elizabeth Wilde McCormick
Recorded Saturday 23 November 2019
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. After years and years of therapy many of us feel as mad as ever. There is no ‘happy ever after’. This all begs the question; what is the place of suffering in human experience and how best can we be with it?
With speakers Shoshi Asheri, Dr Richard Gipps, Professor Dany Nobus, Dr Jay Watts and Judy Yellin
Recorded Saturday 21 September 2019
Last year we asked the thought-provoking question What is Normal? as the topic for our think-tank conference to celebrate our 20th anniversary. Somewhat beyond our expectations, the question generated some brilliant, fresh and new perspectives about the therapy process. And so we have posed another challenging question for our speakers to answer in this event: is psychotherapy a relationship or a cure?
With Patrick Casement
Recorded Saturday 20 April 2013
In his fourth and most personal book Learning from Life Patrick Casement gives us a fascinating insight into fundamental questions concerning the acquisition of analytic wisdom and how personal experiences shape the analyst’s approach to clinical work. In this 3-part recording from a one-day seminar delivered in London he talks to us about how the psychoanalytic self comes into being, and how our own emotional truths consciously or unconsciously shape our practice and theory.