The Need to Forget: The Capacity to Remember
Saturday 13 July 2019 - London
With speakers Richard Curen, Dr Ronald Doctor and Katya Orrell
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 ongoing self and meaningful continuity. They can make us feel comfortable with the familiar, and securely connected to the past, while providing a framework for the future; it is our collection of conscious and unconscious memories that, in part, makes us who we are.
READ MORE...But what is the experience of a client/patient, who by repressing, splitting off or disavowing past events which are too painful to bring into consciousness?
What is the cost of that repression? What strains are placed on the embodied psyche by such efforts to block-out reality? How do we enable someone to loosen their defenses and safely allow unacceptable past events to surface into conscious awareness?
This conference will consider how a client/patient who acts-out the past – perhaps even violently – may be acting on an impulse to avoid remembering, and how this person may be caught in painful repetitions of events or somatisation of affects in order to control the unbearable. We will consider whether there is always a need to make the repressed memory come to consciousness and, if there is, how is this process managed safely to contain that which has been unbearable? How does the therapist work most effectively here? What is the role of thinking and language in this process? How is the counter transference experienced? Through talks and live supervisions participants will get first hand insight into this delicate and challenging work.