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. Understanding what the couple creates together as their own developmental journey...

Our speakers will delve into unrepresentable, ineffable and often unknowable realms of the human mind. Primarily drawing on the thinking of Bion and Meltzer, our speakers Judy Eekhoff and Avner Bergstein will take us into the privacy of their consulting rooms, and the encounter with emotional experience that cannot be verbally communicated and dynamically...

It is not the traumatic events that haunt survivors for decades afterward. It is the impact or legacy of those events in the form of emotional, body and behavioural memories. 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...

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...

We are delighted to be holding this conference curated by the London ACEs Hub.

Applying a Trauma Informed Approach to Adverse Childhood Experiences

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...

In this theoretical and experiential workshop, Doris Brothers and Jon Sletvold will present the body-based perspective they are developing in their forthcoming book A New Vision of Psychoanalytic Theory, Practice and Supervision: Talking Bodies to re-explore some of the most enduring aspects of psychoanalytic theory.

They will attempt to demonstrate...

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. You will be offered...

Energy psychotherapy works deeply, helping to address a wide range of conditions including PTSD, patterns of transgenerational, attachment, in-utero, preverbal, developmental and complex trauma. The techniques offered on this course are direct and gentle, and the teaching is experiential.

In this short course you will learn about and...

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...

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...

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...

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. People who avoid close proximity to others, despite their longing for that closeness, often feel more secure and better able to manage deep feelings...

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:...

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...

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.

In particular, they will explore how the inarticulate emotions lodged in...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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. And so we...

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,...

We are delighted to be holding this conference in association with Tavistock Relationships and the publication of a special edition of the Journal Couple and Family Psychoanalysis on separation and divorce, Spring 2021.

In contemplating divorce or ‘uncoupling’, couples are assaulted with change on multiple levels. They may face separation from their...

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.

The paper will provide a platform for us then to examine what we understand is being changed. Is a process of conversion from one state...

Skin-to-skin contact between the newborn and birth mother helps to lay a foundation for secure embodied attachment. Conversely, dysregulation in the wake of early separation in the form of a suboptimal postnatal environment can predispose the adopted baby to the risk of addiction and chronic somatic pain in adulthood.

Our presenter, Lucy Hill, was born in the early 1960s in a...

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...

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. Parenting is...

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...

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...

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. To treat bodies in this way is clearly preferable to the previous psychotherapeutic approach of ignoring them altogether. But is there a better way to conceptualise their...

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...

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...

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...

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.

In this way, psychological health progresses toward...

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...

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...

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.

This unique conference has been curated to...

This workshop explores the therapeutic and personal advantages of including an experiential dimension in psychotherapy sessions by incorporating the practice of Focusing. Originating in the philosophical work of the Rogerian-influenced American philosopher, Eugene Gendlin, this approach aims to go beyond technique,...

Oracular traditions, intelligences in nature and the role of imagination as a way of communication

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...

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.

Quite apart from his complex childhood, filled with broken...

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 their 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...

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...

How does collective trauma impact states of mind? How does it enter the consulting room? What can we learn about resilience from past catastrophes?

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...

We invite you to join us at this...

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. Written in a time and place radically different from contemporary Ireland, his view of...

CPD Credits: 5.5 hours

This series of seasonal workshops is an invitation to deepen your relationship with writing, in your therapy practice and in your life.

Each day-long session will help you to take meaningful steps towards writing fluently and confidently. Participants are welcome to attend some or all of the series.

Therapists may do narrative work...

This conference will provide a bridge to help pause, reflect, apply interventions, and discuss ways of being, in order to help circumnavigate and decolonize the system in which the eating disordered client is being treated.

The conference will aim to...

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.

It is important to emphasise the strengths and resiliencies in intercultural couple relationships and not to assume that difficulties in an...

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...

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. We...

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.

In heightened affective moments in the therapy session, when the patient...

Working psychotherapeutically with the grandiose is not easy. In this conference we’ll look at clinical and fictional examples of grandiosity, what lies beneath this characterological structure, and how someone with these tendencies can be helped.

Characteristics that mark grandiosity – in contrast to healthy self-esteem – include arrogance, exaggerated self-importance,...

“I’ll never attain any degree of freedom till I’ve learnt to disagree with people—to stand alone—to face up to human loneliness.” Marion Milner (1927)

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...

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:...

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....

Saturday 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; at COP26 the theme for this date is ‘Nature: Ensuring the importance of nature and sustainable land use are part of global action on climate change and a clean, green recovery.’ Planting Hope is Confer’s...

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....

Preoccupied people are anxiously attached and feel chronically insecure. Their relationships are often marked by intense emotion, anger and enmeshed dynamics. They can be passionate but also be experienced as needy, demanding, sometimes manipulative, and have been referred to as “borderline borderline”.

As clients they can be challenging to work with, and therapy often feels stuck or ends badly....

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. Amidst a multiplicity of...

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...

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, the numinous and the wild. This conference is an opportunity to come...

This unique conference will explore the advances made in improving the mental health of gender, sexuality and relationship diverse (GSRD) people in the UK. We have enlisted some of the key figures in British LGBTQ+ psychotherapy to share significant developments...

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 –...

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?

And how do we create new forms of practice that facilitate...

The notion of psychotherapy as a completely private space is negated when working with survivors of sexual or domestic violence who are simultaneously navigating legal systems.

When ethical and legal requirements intersect with therapeutic work, they can be experienced as intrusive,...

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. As patterns of intrusive thoughts become clearer to identify, they reveal underlying anxieties and...

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. This approach also draws on the research fields of attachment,...

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.

Some of the discussion will centre on how therapists can resource themselves to enter empathically...

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...

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.

If an ending occurs, it would seem to make...

A co-production with Stillpoint Spaces Paris

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...

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...

Produced in partnership with Tavistock Relationships

There is a pervasive lack of awareness of the connection between relationship issues and depression. However, research shows that people in unsatisfactory couple relationships are three times more likely to have a mood disorder than those in partnerships that function...

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...

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.

Based...

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 – one in which patient and therapist experiment with, dramatise and dream-up the patient’s future,...

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). ...

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.

In his most recent bestselling book, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, he shows that their addictions do not represent a discrete set of medical disorders; rather, they...

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...

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...

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,...

In the US and UK — and increasingly the rest of the world — our language, thinking, and responses to emotional and psychological distress have become almost completely framed in medical terms in the last few decades.

Along with this shift, psychiatric drugs and limited formulaic psychotherapy...

Anyone caring for girls today knows that our clients, daughters, and the girls next door are more anxious and prone to depression and self-harm than ever before. The question is, why?  

In this seminar, award-winning science journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa and Professor Wanjiku Njoroge will delve into the problems young...

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...

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.

Memories are core to our accumulating experience of life, providing a sense of an...

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. In this specially...

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...

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. By working before the audience with a case...

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...

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.

For sufferers of eating disorders, disavowed longings are experienced as insatiable, powerful, and dangerous, while their symptoms act as a defence...

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.

In this conference, Kristina...

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...

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. In particular, we will focus on women who have...

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.

This webinar explores many of the issues outlined in her latest work, Thruth about Trauma and...

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.

This...

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...

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...

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. Most often these clients will express their...

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.

It works by undermining the individual’s most fundamental sense of worth,...

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...

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....

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...

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...

In this workshop Dr Pauline Boss will share how to work effectively with ambiguous loss, a ubiquitous yet understated phenomena that differs in its effects and expression from unclear loss. An ambiguous loss might arise, for example, from the disappearance of a loved one, declining health or ecoanxiety. It lacks the clarity of a loss through death, divorce or critical illness and its impact on mental...

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.

This workshop will attempt to grapple with these complexities, and ask why...

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,...

Many therapists struggle with their responses when working with clients who engage in kink, fetish, and/or BDSM. However, research suggests that a vast number of people, both clients and therapists, engage in, or fantasise about, BDSM and kink practices and pathologising is...

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. However, attempts to question rigid binary notions of gender or to see gender as something that can be more...

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. Some patients might confess to criminal activities, or might even stalk or terrorise the psychotherapeutic...

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. It is the contact, not...

The menstrual cycle is an integral part of many women’s daily lived experience for around three decades of their life. Each month female hormonal fluctuations result in a range of physiological, physical, and psychological changes that can impact a woman’s identity in a profound way, at bio-psycho-social and...

Join Josh Cohen ‘in conversation’ with Adam Phillips about his book ‘The Cure for Psychoanalysis’ ...

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? ...

Celebrating the publication of ‘Primitive Bodily Communications in Psychotherapy’, edited by Raffaella Hilty (Karnac Books, 2022) ...

Join us to celebrate the publication of Unlocked: Online Therapy Stories by Anastasia Piatakhina Giré ...

Since the time of Freud there has been reluctance in some quarters to pursue the topic of the uncanny. Yet a wealth of practicing therapist authors and literature...