Jane Ryan

Jane Ryan

Jane Ryan is the founder of Confer and worked as its director until Spring 2022. Confer was created in 1998 to create bridges and communication between different schools of thought in the psychotherapy field. In creating the organisation, she set out to find connections between psychoanalysis and humanism, between the body and mind, spirituality and mental health by putting people with different theoretical perspectives onto panels to speak with each other. Other themes which she has considered crucial to the development of the field have played an important part in the Confer programme, positioning the work of psychotherapy in the context of the problematic external world, particularly with regards to the environmental crisis, child abuse, and racial injustice.

She was joined in the enterprise by Dr Stephen Setterberg in 2017. Together they developed the project and its activities, incorporating the Karnac bookshop and publishing house, converting an old bike shop in Spitalfields into Confer-Karnac premises, and creating Confer Books. This is the organisation’s own publishing imprint, which aims to take psychotherapeutic insights out into the wider world of those interested in emotional, psychological and relational issues. Confer Books was shortlisted for the award of ‘Best Newcomer’ by the Independent Publishers Guild in 2022.

Jane trained as a psychotherapist at the Centre for Attachment-based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (CAPP) in the 1990s. She previously studied at the Canterbury School of Art and then read English at North London Polytechnic and the University of Reading as a mature student. In the 1970s she set up the multi-cultural community centre Kuumba in St Pauls, Bristol (formerly called The Inkworks), which provided a neighbourhood facility for 35 years, including a library, theatre space, restaurant and day nursery. From there she went on to work for 15 years in community development projects in London, including Centerprise in Hackney, before training as a psychotherapist. She is the editor of three books How Does Psychotherapy Work? (Karnac, 2006), Tales of Psychotherapy (Karnac, 2007) and, with Roz Carroll, What is Normal? (Confer Books, 2020). She now lives in Suffolk.

Jane is Patron of The Yellow Heart Trust http://yht.org.uk

Linkedin
www.linkedin.com/pub/jane-ryan/4a/835/876

Publications

How Does Psychotherapy Work?
Publisher: Karnac Books, 2005

Tales of Psychotherapy
Publisher: Karnac Books, 2007

What is Normal?: Psychotherapists Explore the Question
Editor With Roz Carroll – Publisher: Confer Books, 2021

 

Talks On Demand

Past and Current Confer Events

The Race Conversation
Saturday 20 March 2021 - A Live Webinar

 

Being A Psychotherapist
Saturday 12 July 2008

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