Psychotherapeutic Forms of Love: from Eros to Agape
This webinar was recorded and is now available as a Talk on Demand. Click here for more details.
Saturday 30 January 2021 - A Live Webinar
A Webinar with Dr Andrea Celenza, Professor Paul Gilbert, Dr Richard Gipps and Dr Joy Schaverien
- Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
- Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Wednesday 27 January
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.
READ MORE...We considered the many forms and representations of love that might arise in the relational field, from maternal tenderness to erotic desire.
We talked about the wider philosophical, theological question of whether love heals, and whether loving can ever be a deliberate project. We thought about love as a product of the therapeutic frame – which makes it safe to give and receive these deep emotions without fear of consequences.
Clearly these questions raise many pathways of enquiry about what constitutes a deep enough emotional engagement for therapy to be therapeutic. In creating the resulting programme, we asked four author-practitioners to speak about love in therapy. The subsequent conversation is not about erotic transference/countertransference – although it does include that – but about the patient as beloved simply by virtue of being human and seen. Do come and join our conversation and hear their reflections.
FULL PROGRAMME
13.00 GMT (08.00 EST)
Introductions and Zoom Housekeeping
13.05
Dr Richard Gipps
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Therapy helps the patient become, and know herself to be, lovable – so that she may live with dignity and not be lost to loneliness or mental illness. How can we understand this therapeutic love? Discussions tend to turn it into a feeling, focus on parental care or erotic passion, or see therapy as a trade of love for money. But psychotherapists aren’t analogous to prostitutes, surrogates, or foster parents. Instead they’re “love coaches” who disclose the patient’s humanity to him; who promote the value of being known and, in that, being found lovable; and who, in the face of dejection, cleave to the knowledge of love’s value for the truly lived life.
13.45
Q&A
14.00
Dr Andrea Celenza
The Maternal Loving Transference and the Fate of Feminine Signifiers
The maternal loving transference is the site of the earliest experience of love, care, and attention. Sensorial modalities of looking and touching are identified as early modes of receptivity, representative of desires to take in the analyst. Different forms of love will be discussed, including the false dichotomy of identificatory love and object love. In this presentation, I will present my patient Petra to illustrate aspects of unconscious feminine identity and various transformations by receiving love in the analytic process. A transformation in myself, related to experiences with my own dying mother, expanded my containing capacities and opened up new areas of patience, love and receptivity in me.
14.45
Q&A
15.00
Break
15.30
Dr Joy Schaverien
Love and Loss within the Analytic Frame
When we embark on psychotherapy with a stranger the shape the journey will take is always unknown. So it was with a man who was referred to treat the depression that had blighted his life. Then, three months later, with an unforeseen diagnosis of terminal cancer, the analysis deepened, the individuation process speeded up and a transference/ countertransference dynamic, characterised by eros in its many guises, developed. The intense love (and hate) that emerged, alongside the tragic circumstances, put the analytic frame under extreme pressure. Drawings, made by the analyst, will illustrate the personal as well as professional ending we came to.
16.15
Q&A
16.30
Break
16.45
Professor Paul Gilbert
Why Compassion is About Care, Courage and Wisdom
This talk will explore some of the origins of compassion focused therapy. It will highlight how compassion is about three core therapeutic qualities: caring, courage and wisdom. What distinguishes human compassion from caring motives and behaviours in other animals is our ability to have a certain kind of awareness with a knowing intention to be helpful and address suffering wisely. Compassion can be distinguished from love and kindness and we will consider when and why.
17.30
Q&A
17.45
Discussion
18:15
End