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 will be richly examined by Mary Morgan, drawing on psychoanalytic concepts such as shared unconscious phantasy, projective systems and narcissistic relating. Some couples have challenges that impair their creation of a positive developmental relationship. Here, Stanley Ruszczynski will explore perverse and violent states of mind and behaviour as a consequence of insensibility to each other’s needs and subjectivity.

In a more primitive psychic state, the other is absent and perceived as a threat; or there is an anxiety about separateness, which feels like a betrayal. Such states can be enacted in an attempt to manage threats and a strong theoretical framework for the therapist is needed in order not to be derailed by splitting, unpredictable and hostile enactments.

The talks will be followed by a live supervision session with both speakers.

• Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Wednesday 14 December 2022

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 interpreted but must first be lived in the here and now of the analytic setting.

Patients whose thinking and dreaming capacities are deficient compel us to find new ways for getting in touch with an overwhelming, unverbalisable emotional reality. We are called upon to reach into deeper levels of our own psychic functioning and rely on our psychoanalytic trained intuition in order to make contact with the patient’s as yet unmentalised emotional experience. Thus, we might expand the patient’s and our own capacity to tolerate the pain entailed in the struggle to truthfully apprehend reality.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Thursday 11 June

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 most painful experiences are less often remembered than encoded in wordless somatic and emotional memories.

The body, Janina will propose, also “remembers” the habits of responding that helped us survive painful experiences, even when the reactions are no longer adaptive. Though none of these implicit nonverbal memories can be retrieved voluntarily, they are easily evoked by the subtlest reminders of the past: we suddenly feel frightened, ashamed, enraged, impulsive, or numb without any subjective sense that we are remembering.

Participants at this seminar will learn a new model for understanding memory that focuses less on events and more on the legacy of nonverbal implicit memories that keep traumatic and painful past events alive in the body. This new and cutting-edge approach to memory has different goals than earlier methods. Its purpose is to transform implicit memories by evoking new responses that replace feelings of terror and helplessness with a sense of “power back”. In this work we aim to repair feelings of aloneness, inadequacy, and shame so that clients can at long last construct “a healing story” about their lives.

Using interventions adapted from EMDR, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, clinical hypnosis and mindfulness-based therapies, Janina will demonstrate simple, practical interventions for addressing the effects of past experience rather than the events themselves. Underlying this is an assumption that it is less important to know what happened than to know that the trauma is over and we are finally safe.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Wednesday 15 July

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.

Classical Jungians have maintained it to an extent, but not until the publication of The Red Book in 2009 has it been seen as central to Jungian work. Today there is resurgence of interest in this method as a result of recent studies in the importance Jung himself assigned to the method.

This will be a workshop that introduces the method of active imagination as a contemporary form of “inner work” and as a method of clinical relevance for fostering psychological growth and wholeness. Some comparisons will also be drawn between active imagination as a practice and various types of meditation such as found in Zen Buddhism and contemporary mindfulness training.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Wednesday 15 September

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 be highly effective in addressing the needs of people who have been neglected, abused, or otherwise traumatised in childhood. Studies, particularly by Dr Vincent Felitti and Dr Robert Anda (1998), have established beyond doubt the link between ACEs or “relational-trauma”, and subsequent ill health.

The conference will explore specific mechanisms whereby psychological stress and trauma in childhood take root in the body right down to a cellular level with a special focus on Racism as an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE). The speakers will then address what can be done to minimise the effects of ACEs through Trauma Informed Care, involving the therapeutic provision of highly attuned caring relationships which can heal many of the dysregulating effects of early trauma, improving resilience and life prospects.

Our presenters, including the voices of three survivors of ACEs, will be sharing how TIC can be applied across different settings in the community such as schools, psychotherapy services, and general practice.

• Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Tuesday 12 July

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 how changes in conceptualization 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. A central theme that runs through their work is that mind, from birth onwards, involves the creation of narratives based on embodied memories. They will demonstrate this with exercises throughout the seminar and provide opportunities for embodied supervision with participants.

• This event will not be recorded
• Maximum Participants: 50
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Wednesday 21 September

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 practical exercises and useful tips to make your writing enjoyable, satisfying, and playful.

The spaces therapists and counsellors create with their clients hold many stories, and not just the client’s: those that therapist and client develop together, those that belong to the therapist, and those the therapists tell themselves of their work. We do this narrative work every day in the consulting room, yet for many of us writing itself can seem daunting; hard to start, hard to finish, and worryingly like putting ourselves up for investigation.

This workshop allows you to take meaningful steps towards writing fluently and confidently as therapists. Bring pen, paper, and yourself.

• Includes subtitled recordings of the events and transcripts, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Tuesday 28 February

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 experience energy boundaries and maintenance, clearing emotional and energetic residues of daily client work including releasing the after-effects of challenging session. You will develop presence and learn not to ‘take on’ the energy of your clients, maintaining your wellbeing and building resilience.

In this course we bring together our core facilitators from the Confer Energy Psychotherapy Diploma to offer grounded techniques to support and regulate the therapist’s emotional and energy systems. The aim of this course is to demonstrate how you can tap in to your mind and body’s energy systems creating an astonishing therapeutic synergy and balance.

We will undertake the learning collectively as a group, with a mixture of small talks, demonstrations, group processing and practice with each person working experientially on their own issues. We set up a safe, confidential space with the group, and each session will be ‘held’ in an energy field to maximise the richness, depth, learning and healing for each participant.

• This event will not be recorded
• Closing ceremony on Summer Solstice June 21st
• Tuesday Evenings at 19:00-21:00 BST
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Friday 29 April
• CPD Certificates will be provided for all attendees at the end of the series. If anyone has any questions or special requirements, please contact events@confer.uk.com

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 ceremony on the Summer Solstice.

Participants will learn how to connect with the deepest aspects of themselves, to come into the right relationship with the natural world and the interconnected planet that we all call home.

As psychotherapists, the task is to hold space for our clients, to work with them through their challenges, to provide hope for something new, a vision of a future which holds promise. Given the magnitude of uncertainties and transitions humanity is now undergoing due to climate and socioeconomic changes, we recognize that this is a particularly challenging time. The purpose of this course is to nurture in practitioners a more expanded awareness of that which can be replenishing and regenerative— that which can be considered the sacred. In the sessions, our guides will offer simple ceremonial and healing practices, helping you to develop right relationship with luminous and other allies from the natural world who can serve as resources to you in your life and work. The teachings are those of the Beauty Way, prioritising joy, pleasure, and awe in a world currently dominated by trauma and shadow aspects.

• This event will not recorded
• Attend live webinar OR in person at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
• Bookings close at 9am BST Tuesday 26 April

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 phenomena should be the primary focus of analysis.

John Bowlby was, of course, a psychoanalyst. He trained in an era that was dominated by the Freuds on the one hand and Kleinians on the other. He was also a child psychiatrist and, during WWII, he worked within a child guidance service where he studied the behaviour of maladapted children in relation to their early experiences of caregiving. Here, the first seeds of attachment theory were planted. His observational study into the psychology of these children showed compelling evidence of links between their insecure attachment relationships and challenging behaviour.

Bowlby went on to develop a huge body of work that elaborated and provided empirical evidence for this assertion. Yet, while the value of these insights is so widely embraced today, sections of the psychoanalytic community did not rush to approve. Bowlby’s essentially scientific method was received by many colleagues as an uncomfortable challenge to the intrapsychic approach by privileging the actual relationship. Indeed, so deeply felt was this tension that it still has echoes within our trainings and professional literature, prompting ongoing questions about where attachment theory meets psychoanalysis and where the psychosocial environment is seen as the key to emotional health.

In re-examining this tension, our three speakers will offer distinct but not incompatible ideas about how it might be resolved. On the one hand it will be suggested that neurophysiology, with its insistence on biological reality, conclusively proves the primacy of relationship in relational health. From an alternative perspective, we will consider if it is Relational Psychoanalysis that offers the perfect synthesis between attachment and psychoanalytic schools. Or, alternatively, whether a multi-faceted, integrative theoretical approach inherently dissolves oppositional theoretical positions and allows for the best therapy to occur.

Will this finally conclude the debate, or prompt another?

• Attend live webinar OR in person at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Tuesday 11 January

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.

In this one-day seminar, attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist Linda Cundy will talk about how we can understand avoidant attachment as a self-protective system that guards the self from the risk of repeated rejection, humiliation, and shame.

We will consider the roots of negative self-objects, which are likely to be deeply embedded aspects of the personality, and how venturing towards intimate relating can arouse deep doubts and self-hatred.

In exploring the internal object world of avoidant and dismissing adults, Linda will talk about how therapy can offer another way of relating which develops a greater sense of safety with intimacy and accommodation of the other. People who have learnt to avoid attachment can find therapy disruptive and especially challenging. We will thus consider how to notice and navigate moments when the client might retreat or shut out the therapist. Considering how to work with these defenses, picking up on possible shame and self-doubt as well as anger and frustration, are key therapeutic skills. Therapists should prepare to lose their own confidence in the countertransference, to feel de-skilled and ineffective and such hazards will be considered. Ultimately, we will ask how increased self-acceptance and openness to the risks of loving can be developed, enabling such clients to meet their hidden need for intimacy.

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 when they hold others apart, whether sexual partners, therapists or family members. In this one-day seminar, attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist Linda Cundy will talk about how we can understand avoidant attachment as a self-protective system that guards the self from the risk of repeated rejection, humiliation and shame.

We will consider the roots of negative self-objects, which are likely to be deeply embedded aspects of the personality, and how venturing towards intimate relating can arouse deep doubts and self-hatred.

In exploring the internal object world of avoidant and dismissing adults, Linda will talk about how therapy can offer another way of relating which develops a greater sense of safety with intimacy and accommodation of the other. People who have learnt to avoid attachment can find therapy disruptive and especially challenging. We will thus consider how to notice and navigate moments when the client might retreat or shut out the therapist. Considering how to work with these defences, picking up on possible shame and self-doubt as well as anger and frustration, are key therapeutic skills. Therapists should prepare to lose their own confidence in the countertransference, to feel de-skilled and ineffective and such hazards will be considered. Ultimately, we will ask how increased self-acceptance, and openness to the risks of loving can be developed, enabling such clients to meet their hidden need for intimacy.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Wednesday 30 June

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. Where that sense of self has origins in early childhood, any ensuing self-repulsion may be hard to transcend. A viable defense against shame is, understandably, to avoid intimacy.

When shame occurs in the therapy session, the intensity of that experience is greatly amplified. Shame, of course, is shameful in itself. To feel exposed, uncovered or found out by the therapist, especially when there is an idealized or parental transference at play, can be deeply humiliating. Furthermore, when a shaming event is experienced in the context of a countertransference enactment – in a momentary lapse of empathy or even an attack on the patient – such moments can rupture the therapy. When they overlap with inequalities of power and privilege, that injury is compounded. How can moments be worked through and turned into an opportunity for self-acceptance? Will our speakers agree that one of the goals of therapy is to become shameless?

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?

This day picks up this question and answers by saying that discontent and unhappiness are inevitable parts of our human experience but there are ways to avoid adding further unnecessary suffering. By becoming mindfully present, accepting and kind, we may enfold what hurts us in a more spacious and meaningful way. Together we will cultivate our ability to be present with emotions felt in the body and maybe get a glimpse of how emotions dissolve in the open space of awareness.

Advanced reading

Nothing to Lose: Psychotherapy, Buddhism and Living Life by Nigel Wellings and Elisabeth Wilde McCormick (Woodyard Publications, 2005).

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Tuesday 30 November

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 bodily experience re-emerge in the shared field of the therapy relationship for both participants.

During the seminar we will examine how such somatic language is felt, registered, and contained by the therapist, and what it reveals. We will see how ways of attending to and being with those sensorial effects in the countertransference can enable deeper access to unformulated knowledge about the patient’s past that would be otherwise impossible to reach. A major theme linking all three presentations is the presence of dissociation in both patient and analyst and how to work with the profound body/mind split that is often linked to early trauma.

• This event will not be recorded

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 Movement, Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing and Organic Intelligence. Here she describes her way of working.

“Here at last I had a means to address the body in one-on-one therapy sessions, to listen to the body’s deep impulses, intuitions and resonances without the need for the client to do floor work and move around in the room to access the body. Through tracking felt sense experience, the client and I could access internal physical sensation, mapping feeling in the body and opening both client and therapist to the embodied imaginal as a result.” (p.23)

This method has the clinical relationship as central with the aim to restore the balance of a dysregulated psyche and nervous system and to activate innate healing capacities.  Through the body and dream work we can see how it is possible to change our default responses to trauma of “fight, flight, freeze” and to create new neural pathways. This methodology is useful for psychotherapists, art, dance and movement therapists, and body workers.

Wendy Bratherton will weave in a practice of Qigong during the day to help facilitate an embodied learning of BodyDreaming.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Tuesday 15 September

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.

W.R.D. Fairbairn recognised that “attachment to bad objects” was a formidable source of resistance to treatment: as the patient develops emotionally in relation to the therapist, their unconscious bond to the parents who neglected them in childhood is threatened by the new relationship, and by the discoveries inherent in the treatment. The loss of their dysfunctional family appears to the patient to be catastrophic because they will have to confront the reality of their mistreatment in childhood. These unconscious loyalties are harboured in two mostly dissociated pairs of ego structures that developed from relational events between parent and child. These were (and are) intolerable for the child or even the adult to remember. Our speaker will demonstrate how to identify and respond to the two pairs of unconscious structures along with the patient’s developmental deficits, while minimising resistance and early termination.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Tuesday 18 January

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.

We will aim to recognise how the current ecological crisis is showing up in their behaviour, preoccupations, dreams, and sense of a future, and to understand their struggle to navigate the tension between hope, despair, action, and nihilism.

The panel will offer interdisciplinary perspectives and young peoples’ views on how the widespread adult denial and disavowal of the climate emergency deepens the burden carried by children. We can see that they are often the most clear-sighted, outspoken, and alive to the subjectivities of the other-than—human. Do children feel and express the pain of the world for many? Do adults find it too hard to hear the child’s perspective and to tolerate their distress because we cannot face reality ourselves?

Asking difficult questions and facing the moral, cultural, practical, and spiritual journey that is needed to transform our behaviour for the sake of all living species, we will ask how adults – who ourselves have to face our own grief, loss, and anxiety – can be most effective in containing and responding to children’s needs in this era. Together we will consider the importance of keeping their interests at the centre of our hearts and minds – in climate emergency conversations, at home, at school and in the clinical setting. Perhaps most importantly, we will look at where hope and resilience relate and reside.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Wednesday 24 February

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, musculoskeletal physician and physiotherapist. Offering distinct but related understandings and techniques, drawing on relational, neurobiological and attachment studies, they will outline the aetiology of chronic pain in their adult patients, and how they work with this.

As a psychoanalyst working relationally, Frances Sommer Anderson will talk about the role of early trauma in this process, elaborating the view that interpersonal trauma takes place within the intersubjective field and how this, in turn, can trigger a cascade of bodily dysfunctions in adulthood. She will demonstrate ways of bringing other techniques into the therapy, including Somatic Experiencing™️ in order to make shifts beyond the reach of the analytic frame. Our other two presenters work directly with the body: Georgie Oldfield, a physiotherapist, and musculoskeletal physician Nick Straiton, will corroborate Frances’ approach by demonstrating the emotional component of physical pain and the need to work on unprocessed emotions in a safe space to recover.

The interweaving of a psychoanalytic stance, the contemporary influence of current thinkers in the field of trauma, and the work of body-based practitioners will give attendees a thorough and holistic grounding in the emotional roots of chronic pain, and how to work with what may lie beneath to enable a client to fully recover and flourish.

• Attend live webinar OR in person at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
• Includes a subtitled recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close 9:00am BST Tuesday 24 May

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.

Paradoxically, the collusive, fused family, couple or parent-child dynamic may also enable a level of functioning for those family members, perhaps even preventing psychic collapse. We will be asking how this pattern can be safely and gently shifted in therapy to allow for a healthy balance between autonomy and intimacy.

Our speakers will incorporate psychoanalytic, attachment, mentalisation, systems theory and trauma theory, as well as Minuchin’s family work, to make sense of the mechanisms of merger. In asking how the client can let go of this need for entanglement, we will examine how therapy can most effectively engender new relational capacities, letting go of the introjects that maintain a dysfunctional bond and allowing new interpersonal patterns to emerge.

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 have posed another challenging question for our speakers to answer: is psychotherapy a relationship or a treatment?

Our aim is to explore the dichotomy between the medical model of assessment, treatment, cure in contrast to its antithesis – a process of exploration between two people, one which focuses on the needs of one but in which each participant draws on their own subjectivities and histories.

Our starting point is that the solution-focused approach rests on the idea that someone enters therapy with a problem which can be assessed and for which a suitable treatment can be offered with specific goals leading, hopefully, to a cure. The latter suggests that the problem the client brings is only a starting point from which the therapeutic couple journey unfolds into a relationship of discovery about the patient’s inner life. These different stances come with quite different values, vocabularies and concepts about what makes therapy useful.

Each speaker will address the question through their own experiences of being in therapy, of being the therapist and of experiencing and witnessing change. We eagerly anticipate their thoughts and invite you to join the discussion.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Wednesday 2 September

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.

This conversation is about what we notice about the human responses to mortal threat, what these tell us about unconscious processes, defense mechanisms and the internal scenarios that we create in order to live with that fate. Our speakers will discuss how we navigate increased uncertainty, prolonged fear in the face of invisible danger, the bigger sense of mortal threat, and the realisation of how little we are able to control.

Working with these insights, we will also be considering what the fear-based and rapid response to the virus tells us about our capacity to make huge mental adjustments, and ask what stops us from applying that capacity to the threat of climate change.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Wednesday 21 April

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 children and experience shame at their relationship’s failure. Feelings of betrayal, abandonment or relief are commonly reported but rarely equally shared between spouses. Whether the separation is wanted or not, both halves of a couple are faced with an overload of uncertainty: where to live; how to live and who they are now. It is not surprising that couples need therapeutic help when confronted by dashed expectations and fear for the future, or when they blame each other and prolong conflict to avoid the pain of ending their relationship.

This day offers an in-depth exploration of separation and divorce, and the help that can be offered by psychoanalytically informed couple psychotherapy. Our four speakers will explore different aspects of separation and divorce, illustrating their talks with clinical material and thoughts about effective therapeutic skills.

A discount will be offered on the book and on the themed issue of the journal, Couple and Family Psychoanalysis on divorce and separation. https://tavistockrelationships.ac.uk/policy-research/couple-family-psychoanalysis

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 of being to another even central to the project of psychoanalysis? If so, what is being shed or left behind, and what is being discovered or gained? In a historical moment when the idea of conversion is being deeply interrogated, we will consider what insights are most useful to help us navigate this territory. As part of this exploration, Adam will also be interviewed by Anouchka Grose, and will discuss his paper with Judy Yellin, providing the space and time for us to examine these questions in depth.

• Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Tuesday 6 December 2022

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 mother and baby home and was relinquished by her mother at the age of two months.  On seeking treatment for a 10-year history of chronic back pain, she engaged a psychoanalyst who specializes in treating chronic pain from a relational, trauma-informed perspective.  At the outset, she experienced “craving” for her analyst, similar to yearnings she had for alcohol and sugar.  Exploration of this desire for body contact with her analyst, led her to initiate a successful search for her birth mother.  Their reunion revealed the complexities of the disrupted early attachment, and it stimulated latent grieving for the loss of mother.

Lucy and her analyst will present the adoptee’s perspective as it unfolded in the safe holding space of psychoanalysis.  Commentary by a neonatologist and pediatrician will elaborate the optimal conditions for mother and baby during pregnancy and discuss the impact on the baby after birth and relinquishment.

We acknowledge that adoption arrangements have changed a great deal since Lucy was adopted in 1962 in London, UK.  There are birth mothers, now called First Mothers by some, surrogate mothers, carrying mothers.   We welcome women, men, and gender non-conforming parents, clients and therapists to join us to learn more about cycles of addiction and chronic pain in cases where there has been early separation.

• Attend live webinar OR in person at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Wednesday 16 March

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.

This event is an opportunity for psychotherapists of all modalities, genders, and sexualities to reflect on their own intersectional identities and how we might make better use of these similarities and differences within our practices.

Intersectionality has become a relatively new buzzword in therapy. The term was coined by an American law professor and activist, Kimberlé Crenshaw, to describe how our social and political identities combine to create different forms of discrimination and privilege depending on the contexts in which we find ourselves. These identities intersect to give us multiple advantages and disadvantages. These can be both empowering and oppressing. We will hear from some of the leading figures in the UK therapy scene who have been engaging with these issues personally and professionally.

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 very challenging, being influenced by the parent’s own attachment histories as well as by evolving models of family and community life. Finding a middle way between permissive and authoritarian approaches to parenting is often difficult when parents do not have their own attachment history as an effective guide. Parents are supported to remain open and engaged with their children while addressing the challenges of family living.

This model of family therapy enables parents to experience within the session itself ways of offering safety, sharing and co-creating experiences and repairing relationship stresses in a way that will transfer effectively to daily life within the home. In this model of therapy known as Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP) the therapist relates consistently with both parent and child in a manner that maintains safety while co-creating stories that reduce the shame or fears present in many family relational patterns. This workshop will also demonstrate this model of family therapy through videos and role plays of treatment sessions. There will be opportunities for discussions and questions.

• This event will not be recorded
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Tuesday 2 February

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 very negative countertransference. Frustration, boredom and feelings of incompetence make it hard to maintain interest in such clients and they may be dismissed as unready or unsuitable for therapy.

Our speakers both have extensive experience of working with children, adolescents and adults who are deeply shut-down, and they will share reflections on the challenge of engaging them in the therapeutic process. Drawing on the psychoanalytic work of Freida Fromm-Reichman and Harry Stack Sullivan, and linking to current critical thinking in the developmental sciences, including Stephen Porges’ vagal theories, they will offer new understandings of the subtle differences in the ways of being unreachable. New concepts will be introduced, such as being not so much withdrawn as undrawn, and the differences between being shut-down due to neglect, and dissociated due to trauma will be discussed.

The early roots of unreachable states, including neurobiological and attachment problems, lead to a theory of deep disembodiment. Here, lack of connection to appetitive body-states is central to this disengaged way of being: the seeking systems, so fundamental to attachment and the taking in of good introjects, is often impaired. Therapeutic effectiveness thus needs to be informed by the therapist’s own felt embodiment and attachment-based countertransference. Anne and Graham will demonstrate how to remain alive to one’s own bodily sensations and vitalised in this work. As well as slides and video-clips, there will be space for an experiential exercises and discussion with your colleagues and speakers.

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 DSM 5. Our speakers will problematise the diagnostic criteria for a wide range of eating issues (Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, Binge Eating Disorder, Pica, Rumination Disorder and Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder) to help us navigate this complex interaction between emotional issues and food. Whether these symptoms can best be understood as an illness, as an expression of relational pain or a response to the demands of our times will be considered. We will examine what makes one eating disorder pathway more compelling than another for the patient/client, and why.

Overall, it might be argued, to have an eating disorder is to have an illness which causes a great deal of damage to the body, mind and soul. Most clients do not understand the seriousness of their food issues, and the profound effects these have on their physiology and mental health. Denial of illness and ambivalence about treatment is one of the major symptoms that therapists may be working with as clients normalise their problem. Often they may have co-existing problematic states of mind, such as depression or bi-polar disorder which provide a layer of complexity to the therapeutic work.

Our speakers come from diverse clinical backgrounds including psychoanalytic psychotherapy, attachment-based psychotherapy, body psychotherapy, dance movement psychotherapy and nutrition. We hope to bring a broad range of ideas for our participants to consider in their clinical work. The day will begin with talks followed by workshops in the afternoon in which you can choose from an embodied, movement based approach or an attachment-based approach with contributions from a nutrition expert.

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 role in our experience of the world and in the formation of our identity?

Is there perhaps something unhelpfully romantic about this way of interpreting neuroscience? Is it even a more subtle form of the mind’s imperialist tendencies, to understand the body’s response as if they were mental ones? And, very importantly, does it help or hinder us in working with trauma?

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Tuesday 29 September

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.

The systemic safety methodology has emotional, physical and relational safety as the highest priority. It works within a working triangle of the connections between the risks of further violent behaviour, helping people to take responsibility, and collaborative practice. The work is never without risk – we know what we know and we know what we don’t know, but we don’t know what we don’t know. We will consider the management of risk in the context of possible further violence.

The work is based on Arlene’s collaboration with Jan Cooper a social worker and systemic therapist and the “Reading Safer Families”, an effective independent family violence intervention service. An integration of trauma, attachment, narrative, and feminist theories with systemic theory and practice, it develops safety plans to help people stop the violence, and then explore the potential for repair, safe contact and safe separation as needed. Most of the family members Arlene and colleagues work with are living with the intergenerational legacies of violence and chronic fear and danger.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Tuesday 22 March

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.

It will be suggested that our psyche is constantly engaged in dreaming, even when we are awake. This activity allows for the discharge of ‘excesses of sensoriality and proto-emotions’ and is precisely what analytic therapy should facilitate. By exploring features of dreaming, Ferro’s theoretical model shifts from a psychoanalysis of contents to one which focuses on the development of the patient’s capacity for thinking and dreaming. Ferro’s work draws upon rich clinical material to illustrate how patient and analyst, by sharing a basic unconscious phantasy, structure an ‘oneiric, holographic field’ that is a function of their own inner lives. Our speakers Fulvio Mazzacane and Elena Molinari will elaborate on their own and Ferro’s thinking in this area.

Giuseppe Civitarese, with reference to the concept of Negative Capability and the post-Bionian theory of the Analytic Field, will elaborate the difficult-to-define, yet important terms of ‘vitality’ and ‘authenticity’. These relate to non-specific aspects of treatment including the importance of who the analyst is and what this might mean for the therapeutic couple. By rediscovering the dreamlike dimension of the session, the analyst will realise that they are always a character in the stories of the analysis and an active dreamer in the session too.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Tuesday 1 December

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. Transference and countertransference enactments can still find expression, and narratives can easily unfold with less inhibition.

However, much is also now absent from the session: the full-body language of therapeutic couple as they respond to each other, the subtle shift of a foot, a stomach rumble or a tightening of the muscles; the ambience, smells, light and textures of the therapy room itself; the sanctuary of that room and the ritual of the journey. Deep within the body we know that intimacy is related to proximity, to bodies synchronising and regulating each other, to the non-verbal, non-conscious minutiae of communication and what this recalls of earliest interactions. By considering the constituents of embodied intersubjectivity, our speakers will explore the extent to which working online has highlighted the need for bodily-based attunement, three-dimensional presence and, conversely, the extent to which the therapeutic couple can find new forms of intimacy.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Tuesday 22 February

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 what Winnicott called “indwelling” – an experience of being present and in contact with oneself within one’s whole body. This produces the sense of oneself as a separate being, at the same time as it facilitates the experience of participating more fully and openly in the reciprocal self/world matrix.

In this workshop, Judith will teach the main practices of the ‘Realization Process’ for inhabiting the internal space of the body. These practices uncover an undivided dimension of fundamental consciousness that is experienced as the authentic ground of one’s being, pervading all of one’s internal and external experience as a unity. Pervading one’s body, fundamental consciousness is the basis of our internal wholeness: our ability to think, feel, sense and perceive at the same time. Permeating our body and environment it is the basis our deepened contact with other people and the world around us. We are able to enjoy enhanced intimacy with other people without losing inward contact with ourselves. We are also able to discern more clearly and release more accurately those trauma-based rigidities in the body that limit our contact with ourselves and others. We shall see how this integrated state can be reached with the help of this therapeutic approach.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Tuesday 8 September

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. Both speakers will demonstrate the power dynamics that pervade all of our interpersonal relationships from an embodied perspective, with the aim of offering insights and confidence in embracing these domains.

• Attend live webinar OR in person at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
• Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Tuesday 20 September 2022

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 behind them.

In this workshop we will examine aspects of how we can work with clients who carry multi-generation trauma, how to work with parents to protect this being passed down to their children. We will also hear about the lived experience of Amber Jeffrey, who has experienced multiple traumas including the death of her beloved mother, and how she can be with this loss and be with her family in the present moment.

• Attend live webinar OR in person at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
• This event will not be recorded
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Wednesday 9 March

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 provide space for expression of the lived experience of working-class practitioners in the world of psychotherapy. Our panel will ask difficult questions about why this experience so often involves a struggle for inclusion and acceptance within our professional community; why people from disadvantaged economic backgrounds on both sides of the consulting room experience a lack of sophisticated discourse to account for the emotional impact of coming from less privileged backgrounds.

How are we to understand the neglect of such powerful subjective experiences given the premium in therapy that is placed on insight? Why does the profession seem to find it so difficult to recognise the effects of the real, external world in which we are formed? Is psychotherapy, perhaps, a politically naïve profession that needs to add the ‘social’ to ‘psycho’?

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, objectification and diagnosis in order to practice therapy as a person-to-person relationship with existential and embodied depth.

This workshop will be of interest to practitioners who are interested in developing a personal practice that has the potential to deepen self-insight and qualities of openness while taking these into our work as practitioners. During the day we will thus explore our own experiences, and those that arise in the therapy session, working towards a therapeutic practice that is a gentle, phenomenological and a more grounded approach than those based purely on theory. Focusing – in contrast to other modalities – begins with the practitioner’s living process, bodily felt sense and an awareness of the implicit in relationship.

The day is designed to proceed at a gentle pace with opportunities for private experiential exploration. Participants are encouraged to take part in a way that feels right to them and there will be many ways to explore the process, while respecting personal differences and sensitivities.

• Attend live webinar OR in person at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Tuesday 10 May
• This event will not be recorded

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 exhibition Frequencies (for healing), where the focus on the vibrant, dynamic agency of nature to which all things human and non-human communicate is seen as an ongoing enactment of the world, constantly in motion, vibrating, oscillating, resonating at varying frequencies.

Joe Cambray, Jungian analyst and author, will be discussing oracular traditions and the intelligences both in and out of nature, through dreams and folkloric descriptions of the non-local psychic field, in which reception can often be impaired by such agitated mediums.

Describing the role of psychoanalyst as ‘interpreter’ – not unlike the role of the artist – both psychoanalyst and artist listen closely to the unconscious, speaking out of or through the material, contacting and connecting to these often invisible yet dynamic agential forces. By discussing the history of oracular traditions, the intelligences in nature and the use of imagination to communicate unseen sentient and environmental material, this conversation will explore a ecological view of the psyche.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Tuesday 28 September

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 attachments and multiple bereavements, he subsequently had to navigate many decades of assaults, ranging from anti-Semitic abuse, to the near-death of his sons during the Great War, to the loss of one of his daughters from Spanish Flu, followed not long thereafter by sixteen years of painful, primitive surgeries for his metastasising oral cancer and, ultimately, by the Nazi occupation of Vienna.

Prof Brett Kahr, drawing upon his many years of archival research and his forthcoming book, Freud’s Pandemics: Surviving global war, Spanish flu, and the Nazis, will help us to understand how and why Freud succeeded in surviving these multiple pandemics when so many others would have succumbed to psychosis or death.

Dr Doris Brothers will consider how aspects of Freudian theory itself might reveal the likelihood that Freud sustained life-changing traumas.

Our two presenters will be joined by Dr Valerie Sinason and Prof Neil Vickers to further elaborate on some of the issues raised.

• Attend live webinar OR in person at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
• This event will not be recorded
• Bookings close at 9am BST Tuesday 19 July

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 development journey in childhood because their parents were frightening or dangerous. They often suffer from complex trauma.

Main and Solomon (1986) first identified fear and the feared object as an important factor as an obstruction to the child’s attachment needs. Working these research findings into what they later called Disorganised Attachment, has given us the framework to see how dominant is the role of fear in clients with complex trauma facing profound difficulties in managing critical areas in their relationships and everyday life.

Some of these individuals were deemed as not being suitable for therapy. Using these insights in the therapeutic relationship requires clinical skill, and the purpose of this workshop is to further professional understanding of the ongoing impact of the client’s attachment trauma as it is displayed in their adaptation to survival. In deepening the understanding of the nature of attachment dynamics invoked in the client – and indeed the therapist – participants will gain understanding of the disorganised attachment state of mind, trauma and dissociative processes.  Orit will demonstrate relational ways to facilitate the challenges of working with clients with complex trauma and the move towards synthesis of traumatised self-states, interpersonal relatedness, and a growing sense of earned security.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Wednesday 26 January

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. Medications may be part of treatment, but they should not be the primary, and never the only line of treatment as symptom-control can actually undermine what should be the long-term goal: neurobiological and psychological development.

In this conversational presentation, Gabor – despite the fact that he has been diagnosed with ADD himself – will propose that while genetic predisposition may play a role, it is by no means decisive. Neurobiological research has clearly demonstrated that the development of the human brain is not genetically determined but is significantly influenced and shaped by the environment. An increase in societal and parental stress, affecting the developing, highly susceptible brains of infants, is responsible for the increasing number of cases now being diagnosed among children and adults. Nearly three million children in the US take stimulant medications for this condition, and the prevailing medical model of ADHD is that of an inheritable illness.

This event will run in a conversational style with Eugene Ellis as discussant-chair and will be interactive throughout.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Tuesday 6 October

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 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?

Of learning from others who have faced existential crises how they have survived psychologically? To help us to explore these dynamics, we have invited three speakers with a past experience of collective trauma. Their stories will help us navigate how we can process feelings such as rage and grief around a shared catastrophe in order to recover and adapt in healthy ways – possibly to discover unexpected strengths in ourselves and others, and to protect future generations from intergenerational trauma.

• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Wednesday 18 May
• Натисніть тут для перекладу українською мовою
• З питань підтримки перекладу українською/англійською мовою звертайтеся m.ilyashenko@gmail.com

We invite you to join us at this international event in support of Jungian Analysts in Ukraine – to express our solidarity with those Ukrainian colleagues that are able to join us, to raise money to support those who have lost their homes and livelihoods and to return to our roots and resource our Ukrainian colleagues and ourselves from Jung’s Red and Black Books through a presentation by Ann Ulanov.

This event is open to everyone. Ukrainian analysts and those working on the frontline are invited as VIPs.

All proceeds received will be distributed directly to Ukrainian Jungian analysts and routers (trainees).

An international team of highly experienced Social Dreaming Matrix convenors will first convene a very unique Social Dreaming Matrix. We will run several simultaneous matrices in what we expect to be a very profound experience.

We will then reconvene to welcome our Ukrainian analysts and those working on the frontline with the Ukrainian community. Join us in the Auction Lounge with Donald Kalsched, Sonu Shamdasani, Joe Cambray, Lisa Marchiano, George Hogenson, Susan Schwartz, Ursula Wirtz, Ann Shearer, Dale Mathers and Marian Dunlea.

After the auction Ann Ulanov will present her paper on what we can take for today from Jung’s profound inner journey, undertaken during the First World War and expressed in his Black and Red Books.

There will be simultaneous interpretation into Ukrainian apart from the Social Dreaming Matrix.

Please visit forukrainianjungians.com for further information.

Please help to support Ukrainian analysts so that they in turn can offer support to their fellow Ukrainians.

You don’t need to attend to donate!

Payments will be held by The Guild of Analytical Psychologists, a registered charity no 1058818 and will be distributed to our Ukrainian colleagues as soon as possible after the event.

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 the boy’s emerging sexual identity within the traditional family now requires a fresh theoretical framework to explain the many meanings of fatherhood today, and the developmental task of becoming a man.

This is a vast topic, but this one day series of talks we will touch on some of our speakers’ fascinating experiences of fathers and insights into the role. And we are inviting our audience of psychotherapists to think freshly about new types of fathers and the identities that men are now expected to occupy, many of which are ambiguous, shifting and contradictory. How does the contemporary father, caught in a multiplicity of roles, position himself in relation to society, his children, his own father, or even priest? Do boys still struggle to draw the mother’s love away from the ‘potent father’ and take his place? How does the boy come to identify or dis-identify with the father, both as a symbol of power but also manifestation of uncertainty? Where are men now located within the terms of patriarchy, authority and power, in terms of presence and absence? These are bold questions, but we hope to open up the beginnings of a meaningful conversation about this important domain of life and the consulting room.

• Saturday 20 May 2023: Spring: Invention, New Ideas
• Saturday 15 July 2023: Summer: Bringing to Fruition
• Saturday 30 September 2023: Autumn: Harvesting and Discernment

CPD Credits: 5.5 hours

• Attend in person at Confer’s premises
• Maximum participants: 50
• Booking close at 9:00am GMT Wednesday 1 February
• This session will not be recorded

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 every day in the consulting room, but writing itself can seem daunting; hard to start, hard to finish, and worryingly like putting ourselves up for investigation. We overcome this state through understanding; each workshop will examine a different stage of the writing process, mapping it to the appropriate season and exploring what this seasonal energy can teach us about how to write.

Like the seasons, creativity is cyclical: listening within, ideas blooming, projects maturing or coming to nothing – and then we start again. Along the way we contend with the opposing forces that govern us, as they shift throughout the cycle. Recognising these shifting tensions can free us as writers and enrich our work as therapists.

Following their inaugural writing workshop for Confer, Stella Duffy and Chris Cleave – both therapists, writers and writing mentors – return with this uniquely created series. These workshops aim to replenish the creativity and fluent communication that drive a therapist’s work throughout the year.

Bring pen, paper, and yourself.

• Attend live webinar OR in person at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
• This event will not be recorded
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Wednesday 8 February

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 provide both clients and therapists support to better collaborate relationally, and equip the reflexive practitioner with culturally competent skills to enhance clinical practice.

Forty years on from the iconic ‘Fat Is a Feminist Issue’ by Dr Susie Orbach, and the grounding breaking 2021 tome, Black Women with Eating Disorders: A Clinicians guide by Dr Charlynn Small and Dr Mazella Fuller, the stage is set for an exploration into the symbiotic relationship between eating disorders and its competing rhetoric on the body image of white, black, brown, and indigenous, people of colour. We will consider notions of what is considered to be normal regarding acceptable body types, and colourism, often characterised by media, research, therapeutic treatment, and through the client’s own lived experience. This essentially posits the question, whose body matters in the treatment of eating disorders?

The origins of fat phobia; historical impact of feminism from a black and white perspective is unpacked in research, and storytelling, often unearthing fetishizing of women, amplified through the clients racialised and lived experiences before, during and throughout the treatment process.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Tuesday 19 January

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 intercultural couple relationship are rooted in cultural differences. However, intercultural couples may be faced with unique challenges and there is a growing need for psychotherapists working in multicultural contexts to acknowledge and work with these. Psychotherapy with couples needing help can sometimes reach an impasse when the two people in the relationship feel like intimate strangers. Possibly the very qualities that drew them together are the ones that can lead to chasms of misunderstanding between them.

Drawing on research findings, clinical vignettes and experiential exercises, this webinar will focus on the themes and processes in intercultural couples and the dilemmas these may pose for couples and the clinicians working with them. The webinar will equip therapists with effective interventions, will include consideration of self-reflexivity and therapist’s positioning when working with intercultural couples.

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 makes great sense.

So how does an integrated mental health team rise to the challenge of providing a service that transcends a dualistic mind-body model? The Emek Medical Center in Northern Israel has been trying to answer this question. They find that patients with high levels of anxiety, depression, somatisation and post-traumatic symptomologies benefit greatly from integrative body-mind approaches – psychotherapy offered in combination with complementary
medicine. As a result, they have designed an innovative therapeutic model incorporating Traditional Chinese Medicine, Buddhist and Taoist approaches, reflexology and body-oriented psychotherapy sitting alongside contemporary psychoanalytic theory. And it is proving to be highly effective in both NHS and private settings.

Bringing together an international panel of speakers, this conference will discuss the work of the Emek Medical Centre, what they have found that works, and comparable developments in UK mental health care provisions created by British practitioners exploring therapeutic insights drawn from other healing paradigms, such as incorporating the senses and energy work. Five talks on Day One will be followed by two in-depth workshops on Day Two.

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 will draw on recognised approaches in psychotherapy which focus on embodiment and share ways of exploring the co-created relationship outside the confines of the chair.

In this one day workshop, we will invite curiosity about the experience of moving out of the chair and integrating relational movement awareness. We will explore what holds us back and how to keep the potential for movement alive in every moment of the interaction. We will be considering this from a variety of process perspectives including embodied, somatic and kinetic countertransference. Whilst some of these terms overlap, we will differentiate, track and unpack them individually.

This project is not about having an agenda to ‘get the client out of the chair’ but rather an enquiry into how we, as therapists limit the creative potential of movement in the therapeutic process. We will offer ways through which we can safely experiment with a variety of creative options including working with sensation, images and feelings, introducing art materials or props, designing a Gestalt ‘experiment’, relational improvisation and exploring rhythm and space.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Wednesday 9 June

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 is experiencing a right brain emotional state, the psychobiologically attuned therapist implicitly synchronizes with that regression. In this way, a right-lateralized interbrain synchronization allows for the communication and regulation of both conscious and unconscious affects at a profound level.

In working with re-enactments of early relational trauma and dissociated affect, such neuroplastic changes are vital for adaptive progressions of the client’s right brain emotion processing — for their relational and stress regulating systems. As the co-constructed therapeutic relationship develops, so this capacity in the therapist can become finely tuned.

Although the process of regression may reflect a clinical deterioration, it may also represent a creative return to relational origins that can lead to reorganization, better integration, healthy individuation, and the adaptive capacities of play and intimacy.

• Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Tuesday 1 November 2022

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, oblivion of impact on others… being entitled, reactive and demanding. Grandiose people may often devalue others to support their self-esteem, demand gratification, be unrealistic about ways in which the world will serve them, and aggressive when challenged.

As it is difficult for a grandiose narcissistic to realistically perceive their limitations, or their need for help, they will typically only enter therapy after they encounter a serious breakdown in their relationship with the world of other people. Once in therapy, however, they may quickly restore the defensive strategies of grandiosity as a means of self-protection and be particularly challenging to stay connected to.

From Kohut and Kernberg, to Gabbard and Symington, there is a rich psychoanalytical literature on aetiology and treatment of grandiosity. Our speakers will pick up this discussion, considering what underlies this tendency, how it functions to both protect and limit the self, its roots in childhood and how it can be most effectively worked with to bring that person towards acceptance of their limitations and human vulnerability.

“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 psyche that predisposes them towards either tendency.

We’ll consider aloneness as a source of vulnerability, but also a necessary retreat for reflection and creativity. Our theoretical starting point is that the capacity to be alone is engendered in childhood by the consistent, repeated presence of being with another. This internalisation of “good objects” embeds a sense of the continuation of that intersubjective relationship when the other is absent, and protects the psyche at times of solitude throughout life.

When the “other” has not been installed as loving and safe internal object, what can a therapy relationship provide to counter that deficit? Our speakers will consider if terrifying states of loneliness can be ultimately transformed into an inner sanctuary that the client can use as a resource for reflection, rest and creativity. We will hear how the depressed, anxious and even the psychotic can re-experience solitude as a resource when they discover that they are loveable; when they know that they can safely return to the presence of others.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Tuesday 22 September

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 developed and enhanced through certain forms of psychotherapeutic attention.

We will also explore the contribution of Wilfred Bion to our understanding of the mystical dimensions of psychoanalysis. Bion brought a radical new vision to psychoanalysis, opening our eyes to “things invisible to mortal sight” as Milton put it, a realm of infinite possibility that is utterly transcendent yet also immanent in every analytic encounter. He taught us to listen in the darkness of unknowing with a third ear of intuition to that which is beyond memory, desire and understanding. In so doing, Bion follows in the footsteps of key apophatic mystics such as St John of the Cross, who suggested that ultimate reality, absolute truth cannot be comprehended by intellect, formulations, images or through sensory perception; it cannot be known, only realised.

This workshop aims to enable psychotherapists from any modality to be with unknowing, the fear of uncertainty, to bear with the discomfort and to trust that realisation can emerge in the analytic encounter through these immeasurable processes.

• Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Thursday 23 June

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.

Research has shown that oxytocin is crucial for secure bond formation, and this must include a bond between therapist and client.

Understanding the role of oxytocin in love of all kinds offers access to secrets for optimizing wellbeing and health in a world filled with threat and fear. The brain’s ability to secrete this hormone depends, in part, on sufficient love and care from infancy onwards. We will hear about the consequences of attachment trauma when it disrupts that system, for example in the failure of maternal-infant bond, post-partum depression, premature birth and when sexual partner bonding is problematic. We shall see how a deeper understanding of its effects may enrich the work of psychotherapy.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Wednesday 3 November

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 contribution to this day of action, 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.

The concept of horticulture as therapy has a long history, rooted in the belief that connection with the plant world restores equilibrium and re-engagement with life. It does so through the generative and creative acts of growing from seed, nurturing and bringing to harvest; by reconnecting us with our natural contexts of earth, weather and seasons. In this time of need for urgent climate and environmental action, connection to the needs of our planetary home, our relationship with the soil, plants and land, could never be more relevant. Furthermore, the mental health that such engagement evokes places it at the heart of psychotherapy.

Gardening develops both a sense of agency and transformation and can develop community and mutuality. It reconnects us with life beyond human technology and reminds us of our interdependence with other life forms on the earth.

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. Physiological states that support feeling safe enhance therapeutic opportunities to access both the higher brain structures that enable humans to be creative and generative and the lower brain structures involved in regulating health, growth, and restoration.

The Polyvagal Theory explains how interactions within the therapeutic setting may turn off defenses and promote opportunities to feel safe. The theory provides an innovative model to understand the importance of the client’s physiological state in mediating the effectiveness of clinical treatments. Consistent with a Polyvagal perspective, oxytocin and vasopressin dynamically moderate the autonomic nervous system influencing vagal pathways and anti-inflammatory circuits that help explain the adaptive consequences of love, trust, and social behavior for emotional and physical health. Thus, interventions that target the client’s capacity to feel safe and use the social engagement system to regulate physiological state can be effective enhancements of treatments of mental health disorders that are dependent on defense systems. The workshop will integrate the Polyvagal Theory with current research on the mammalian neuropeptides of oxytocin and vasopressin, which facilitate social behaviors and trust.

• Attend live webinar OR in person at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Wednesday 30 November
• Includes a subtitled recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)

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. Our attachment patterns lay the foundations of unconscious beliefs about ourselves, and expectations we hold of other people and relationships. These belief systems are played out in the therapeutic relationship, affecting transference and countertransference, attitudes to boundaries, and how the therapy is used.

This day will focus on individual therapy with adults, outlining how preoccupied attachment develops and what it looks like in the consulting room. It will highlight difficulties common difficulties that arise in therapy with this client group and propose a specific focus and clear aims for therapeutic work with preoccupied clients. The impact of trauma on those with a Preoccupied core pattern of attachment will also be outlined.

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 cultural pressures to not know what is going on, the psychoanalytic ethic of authenticity stands for the recovery of history, and against concealed repressions and distractions. It insists that emotional cruelty and trauma are as real as physical pain, that the truth matters, and that the deeper truths matter the most.

Psychoanalysis can be a powerful resource for subversive thinking, even if it has sometimes fallen into complacency and been too quick to affirm the prejudices of the cultures within which it has functioned. New developments in the field are affirming the humanism and compassion which was always part of its project. Contemporary psychoanalysis is reaching out beyond its traditional rigidities to affirm the value of relationships and direct responsiveness to basic human needs. Race, gender, history, and political economy are increasingly taken into account in both its theories and practices.

• 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.

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.

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 back to these roots with other psychotherapists to explore different ways in which we can enrich and expand our therapy practice.

Together we will be thinking and experiencing our way back to our ancestral selves in an understanding of the other-than-human world and all that it provides us with.

Our speakers will offer inspiring talks and workshops about integrating our work in the rest of nature; on orienting ourselves within our ecosystem so that we can draw on the self-regulating properties of our bodies, psyches and the world that surrounds us. Body therapy, forest dreaming, Celtic myths, and the use of horses in healing will all be explored in both presentations and experiential sessions. Sessions on foraging and ritual or shamanic practices will also be offered.

We will also be considering what psychotherapy practice means in a time of environmental crisis. How can we draw on these ancient wisdoms to ground ourselves sufficiently to work with environmental anxieties without being overwhelmed? While our young people are directly expressing their fear for their future and the future of our planet, what intelligence and knowledge can the psychotherapy profession bring to help us with this?

“Hemmed round by rationalistic walls, we are cut off from the eternity of nature.” C. J. Jung (Collected Works, Volume 8. Pp 380-381)

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 in the fields of analytic, systemic, person-centred and contemporary psychotherapy, as well as hearing from two British pioneers Dominic Davies, Founder of Pink Therapy and Dr Meg-John Barker, psychologist-activist and author of many books on gender and sexuality.

Do you feel current with the psychosocial issues facing LGBTQ+ people? We’re delighted to have Monty Moncrieff CEO of London Friend presenting some of the latest research and the most common challenges facing LGBTQ+ people and what they need from us as therapists.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Wednesday 18 November

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.

Photographs are removed from albums. Names are deleted from family trees. War records destroyed.

Yet, our panel will propose, such buried truths can never undo what has happened to the former generations of a family, and traumatic histories can never be truly erased. Instead, secrets and lies form an insidious backdrop to family life, which seeps into the collective unconscious of that group. Often these elements become experienced as a free-floating sense of shame or anxiety in future generations that cannot be pinned to any specific event because the truth is unknown.

This conference will consider how a family – either consciously or unconsciously – avoids such knowing, and what happens to the family system when a troubling secret is brought to light. What happens when a child stumbles upon their adoption records? When a DNA result reveals misattributed paternity? Or when a diary reveals a family member committed a violent crime? How can psychotherapy help to bring such secrets to light so they can be integrated into the client’s understanding of who they are, and whose histories they unconsciously carry? And what relief may that bring?

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Tuesday 23 March

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 healing – through ancestry – back to a deeper-known sense of self? And can we rediscover our profound need for interdependence with each other, with all living systems and the land?

Like many of our events, this discussion is an exploration of views between speakers and participants that is designed to open up new thinking through the process of enquiry.

• Attend live webinar OR in person at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
• Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Wednesday 23 November

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, anxiety-provoking, and restrictive. All this occurs whilst managing the impact of trauma in a world where violence against disempowered people exists. How do we stay connected to such clients when there are multiple factors that may force disconnection and re-traumatisation?

The reality of providing psychotherapy when it intersects with the law will be explored from the perspectives of two psychotherapists, an Independent Domestic Violence Advocate (IDVA) , and a criminal Barrister.

Following the International Day to Eliminate Violence Against Women we will aim to encourage discussion where there is often silence and empowerment where there is oppression.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Tuesday 15 June

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 make these more manageable.

By repeatedly returning attention to the patterns of breath and the sensations surrounding these, the mindful practitioner is also reconnected to the body. This, in itself, has a calming and affect-regulating effect.

Reflecting the growing body of scientific knowledge about its effect on the nervous system, mindfulness has understandably become one of the most researched areas in psychotherapy. In fact, it is recommended in the NICE guidelines as a treatment for depression. In this webinar we have invited three therapists from different modalities to talk about their long-term use of his practice in their work. The presentations will reflect its effectiveness as a container, as means of transforming feelings and increasing agency.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Wednesday 3 March

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, developmental psychology, neuroscience and somatisation.

The focus of the webinar will be to explore how therapists might be able to hear and understand stories without words. For example, what is communicated as a still shoulder, a look away or painful tension in the back? You will consider how silence, rhythms and melodies of movements might tell a story. You will learn to work with fear of exposure and shame which often make somatised stories elusive and finally the nuanced experience of the embodied presence between therapist and client will be explored.

This workshop will be experiential with short exercises, sensitising participants into a greater awareness of their own and client’s embodiment and somatisation tendencies with a particular focus on attachment trauma. You will explore implicit body-to-body-communications and movements to open up embodied stories for further exploration and integration.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Tuesday 18 May

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 into the grief-landscape that their clients are occupying, maintaining the deep connection demanded of the therapy without losing their own deep connection to life.

We will also hear from two authors who have struggled with exceptional losses and found modes of recovery from overwhelming grief in acts of creativity. The event attempts to unravel some aspects of the unanswerable question: what can we do about unbearable loss?

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Tuesday 1 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.

In this three-part seminar, we will explore the origins and evolution of the concept of the field, starting with 19th Century discoveries in physics.  Examination of the ongoing adaptation and transformation of field theories in the work of depth psychologists throughout the past century offers an array of tools to detect subtler manifestations of unconscious processes that permeate not only clinical work but also our engagement with nature. Concepts such as transference, countertransference, projective identification and so forth can be envisioned as field phenomena. The addition of the concept of synchronicity can further add to our perceptions and explorations of these fields. Reciprocally, we can revision synchronicity itself in terms of networks and fields associated with complex systems. Following, this we have the opportunity to reconsider various knowledge systems for insights they may offer into contemporary models of the mind, with significant clinical consequences when integrated into practice.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Tuesday 29 June

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 sense to live into the future, after grieving, especially if holding-on causes suffering. Doing so implies a capacity to exist in the future in one’s mind, through acts of imagination, creativity, courage and developing new ways of being — of exercising agency, purpose and optimism. And yet, doing so is rarely straightforward. Letting go of another person also involves foregoing aspects of oneself that could only exist in that relationship; it demands a capacity to tolerate a temporary fracturing of self and reality.

This discussion invites us to think about a range of therapeutic concerns, including the internalization of loved-ones; whether loss can be experienced as an opening, and how we navigate an unknowable future. Our three panellists will offer their views on what makes letting go so problematic, yet so essential for full engagement with life.

A co-production with Stillpoint Spaces Paris

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Friday 27 November

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 locate them in real life experiences. The Black Books also enabled Jung’s paintings post-1916 to be more clearly understood in the context of the evolution of the iconography of his personal cosmology.

In this conversation with Sonu Shamdasani, we will hear more about Jung’s “inner conversation”. The visions, fantasies and imaginations he recorded in the Black Books will be explored, together the relevance of their publication to a contemporary understanding of Analytical Psychology.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Wednesday 8 September

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.

The term ‘moving through’ comes from current thinking about embodied communication. It is grounded in action and also encompasses the process of being emotionally moved by the other in relational encounters. In this regard, the embodied moving through process in psychotherapy drives the long developmental trajectory involved in coming to know our own and others’ minds.

• This event will not be recorded
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Wednesday 16 November 2022

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 well enough.

Furthermore, evidence reveals that up to 30% of severe depressive episodes could be prevented if the couple relationship was improved. In our presentations, we will consider how a relationship can cause depression, but can also be the source of recovery. Skills in Couple Therapy for Depression (CTfD) will be explained to demonstrate the effectives of this time-limited approach.

Our presenters will describe how the CTfD therapist formulates a dynamic picture of a couple’s interaction, hypothesising the couple’s unconscious, defensive ‘fit’ that is manifest in the depressive symptoms of one or both partners. The aim is to construct a psychodynamic understandstanding and systemic picture of the couples’s world and history to help them form a new understanding of their relationship. In doing so, the therapist must plot a path – unique to each couple – between facilitating and exploring proactive couple exercises, then stepping back to maintain an overview of the internal worlds of the couple. We will examine the therapeutic expertise and interventions employed in this highly effective approach.

Couple Therapy for Depression, is an evidence based, integrated, time limited couple therapy. Tavistock Relationships trains in CTfD on behalf of Health Education England and has done so since 2010 after being commissioned to create the training programme in 2009.  CTfD is available on the NHS but its provision remains patchy and its availability is largely unknown amongst the general public.  

Tavistock Relationships also offers a short course in CTfD to private practitioners keen to incorporate its competencies into their current skillset.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Wednesday 14 October

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.

Yet, while this shift from the embodied to digital encounter appears to involve significant losses, practitioners have also discovered unexpected forms of connection through the quasi-cinematic intimacy with the other. These, and other interesting phenomena arising from changes to the frame of therapy, the felt-experience of the relationship and its therapeutic potential will form the core of this discussion.

It’s important to note that we are preparing this October event in June 2020. We can’t predict where our therapy practices will be located when it happens. Nonetheless, much will have been learnt about the significance of the location of psychotherapy, and its frame – and explore what might happen (or perhaps what has already happened) when therapist and client are able to meet once again in person.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Wednesday 11 November

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 on his recent book, The Brain has a Mind of its Own: Attachment, Neurobiology, and the New Science of Psychotherapy, Jeremy Holmes will present a contemporary neuroscience perspective. Drawing on Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle, he will show how the co-created psychotherapy projects of transference analysis, dream work and free association disrupt habitual patterns of sensation and thought. This in turn helps re-instate the agency, capacity to change one’s models of the word, and mentalise which are compromised in psychological illness.

Barnaby Barratt is today’s foremost psychoanalytic scholar of free association. He will expound the views encapsulated in his recent Radical Psychoanalysis trilogy, showing how free association, Freud’s greatest discovery, fosters a sense of aliveness that goes beyond and even subverts conventional interpretation and representation.

Saadia Muzaffar is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist with a particular interest in the role of spirituality in therapeutic practice. She will explore the boundary between the security and constraints which spiritual beliefs and practice represent. Spiritual freedom underscores the transformative impact of self-directed spiritual exploration on the troubled mind.

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, visualising possible new and adaptive self-states.

Fresh nuances in the therapeutic relationship may be needed, ones in which greater attention is paid to imagining the full range of our potential multiple selves and their equally multiple social contexts.

In our era of exceptional social fluidity, when we cannot grasp the ways in which our selves are externally moulded, such an approach seems especially important. But it also raises some theoretical questions: is the future an emerging and uncharted space that belongs to the client to discover or one that is co-imagined by the therapy couple?

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Thursday 23 July

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).

Supported by a significant body of university research, our presenters will propose that this is not a psychopathology but a complex attribute, which opens portals to greater depths of processing, emotional responsivity and empathy, as well as awareness of subtleties.

Highly Sensitive People may be super-perceptive, but they also face the considerable and persistent challenges of processing multiple stimuli in depth. They can be easily overwhelmed, including by the therapy relationship itself. To avoid the risk of misdiagnosis – of a borderline or trauma issue, for example – the therapist’s understanding of the SPS’s inner world, and especially how it resonates with their childhood experiences, is crucial. When attachments have been good, the highly sensitive person may flourish; when adverse, they are more prone than others to depression, anxiety and shyness in adulthood. Therapeutic work may need to include dealing with overstimulation and setting boundaries; managing stronger emotional reactions, particularly in relation to criticism; low self-esteem; and the need to reframe even a good childhood and work history.

As well as considering the importance of making accurate differential diagnoses our presenters will also consider many aspects of a highly sensitive person’s needs: how to discuss the trait with them or their families; sensitivity and gender; issues in relationships; challenges at work, and differences in sexual style.
Useful link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_processing_sensitivity

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Wednesday 13 January

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 merely reflect the extreme end of a continuum of addiction, mostly hidden, that runs throughout our society. The book draws on cutting-edge science to illuminate where and how addictions originate and what they have in common.

In this live webinar for Confer, Gabor will discuss how he has come to understand what is often claimed to be the source of addictions. He has discovered that this is not found in genes but in the early childhood environment where the neurobiology of the brain’s reward pathways develop and where the emotional patterns that lead to addiction are wired into the unconscious. Stress, both then and later in life, creates the predisposition for addictions, whether to drugs, alcohol, nicotine, or to behavioural addictions such as shopping or sex.

Helping the addicted individual requires that we appreciate the function of the addiction in someone’s life. More than a disease, he will propose that it is a response to a distressing life history and current life situation. Once we recognise these roots – and the lack the addict strives (in vain) to fill – we can develop a compassionate approach toward them, one that stands the best chance of restoring that person to wholeness and health.

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.

This day will talk us through the latest findings about the biofeedback loops between inflammation, the immune system and states of mind. The role of underlying low-grade inflammation is a rapidly growing and fascinating area of research that might have great relevance to psychotherapy practice.

Our two expert presenters will describe some of the biofeedback loops between stress, inflammation and the immune system. We will discover how inflammation stemming from persistent pathogens may influence the development of mood disorders to a significant extent – actually to a greater extent than inflammation resulting from acute infections. Researchers have found that recurring negative moods are associated with elevated levels of inflammatory biomarkers. These pro-inflammatory chemicals can give rise to physical, cognitive and behavioural changes, typically fatigue and cognitive impairments. They are known to be raised in people who suffer from depression compared to non-depressed ones (Happakoski et al., 2015) and can predict the severity of depressive symptoms.

This seminar will be packed with information about the biology that underpins these insights, as well as practical examples of safe lifestyle interventions that might support psychotherapeutic approaches. Our recommended advance reading is Edward Bullmore’s book, The Inflamed Mind (Short Books, 2019), which explains how and why mental disorders can have their roots in the immune system and how mind, brain and body work together.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 23.30pm BST Tuesday 28 July

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.

To suggest that our leaders are flawed from the get-go by their desire for power is too simple. There is surely a form of benign politician who is dedicated to equal citizenship for all, who can combine strength with care – who is an adult. Perhaps a better question is to explore the developmental maturity of certain leaders. Disturbing, yet obvious, as this idea may be, we need to ask whether huge economies are being controlled by people who have never been able to grow up, and who lack an internal representation of care on which they can model their political decisions.

As the history of populism repeats itself, we will consider the trajectory between unformed minds and uncompassionate politics. Our panel of speakers will look at the childhoods of certain leaders, tracing deficits in their early care to the kind of psychopathologies apparent in the neglect, abandonment and trauma inflicted or allowed in the countries they are elected to govern. With backgrounds in which a toxic mix of privilege, neglect and sadism may have formed their models of the parent-child, do we see this acted out in government with dire consequences?

• Attend online afternoon talks (3 hours) OR in person social matrix + talks (5 hours) at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
• Includes a subtitled recording of the talks and a transcript with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Wednesday 20 April

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, historically and to this day, have seen dreams as reflecting social, trans-generational and transcendent realities.

What does it say about our basic cultural assumptions, that we view dreams in such an individualistic way? How might it affect the way we work with dreams, to view them as multi-dimensional?

We will start by exploring experientially the interface between the personal and the social in dreams, through a social dreaming matrix, private reflection, work in pairs, and communal processing. This will prepare the ground for us to hear more about multi-dimensional approaches to dreaming in indigenous cultures, from Dr Robin Sheriff and Dr Lewis Mehl-Madrona, with time for discussion. In a final plenary session, we will reflect with our speakers on where these explorations take us.

The social dreaming matrix will be available for 50 participants to attend in person, the afternoon lectures are open to all and will be available in person for those attending the matrix and online for those joining us for the afternoon of lectures and discussion. Dr Sheriff and Dr Mehl-Madrona will be participating online.

• Attend live webinar OR in person at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
• Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Wednesday 1 March

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 have become the default modes of care. Born out of the rejection of psychoanalysis and social psychiatric models in the 1980s, the shift was explicitly intended as a biomedical ‘revolution’. With the “decade of the brain,” a new era of enlightened mental health medicine was supposed to ensue. Yet, after decades of research and countless billions of dollars spent, not only has very little of scientific value resulted in terms of treatments, we are increasingly hearing about mental health “crises” and even “pandemics.” At the same time, more and more research has been supporting the centrality of the social and interpersonal factors that have traditionally been neglected by the medical model and medicalised therapies. Could the medical framing have been contributing to the problem? Has the power behind the medical model occluded the issues at hand and contributed to ongoing social injustice? Our presenters will try to address these and other questions in the hopes of starting this important conversation afresh. 

• Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event) 
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Tuesday 31 January

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 girls face and share new evidence that uncovers how and why the mental health crisis facing girls today is a biologically rooted phenomenon that interplays with a society and culture where children seem to grow up earlier and faster. Jackson Nakazawa will speak to how the earlier onset of puberty mixes badly with the unchecked rise of social media and ongoing cultural misogyny, and how this affects girls’ health and well-being. Dr. Njoroge will address how systems of oppression, predominantly racism, affect girls across development. When this toxic biopsychosocial clash occurs during the critical neurodevelopmental window of adolescence for girls, it can alter the female stress-immune response in ways that derail healthy emotional development and harm well-being.  

However, our new understanding of the biology of modern girlhood yields good news, too. Though puberty is a particularly critical and vulnerable period, it is also a time during which the female adolescent brain is highly flexible and responsive to certain kinds of support and scaffolding. Based on the latest science, Jackson Nakazawa will share a series of neuroprotective and healing strategies for how clinicians, parents, and communities can help secure a healthy emotional inner life for girls and young women.

• Fees include a recording of Professor Alessandra Lemma’s and Prof Lesley Caldwell’s talks with access for a year (14 days post the event).
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Wednesday 17 November

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 mind.

All relational encounters include this sense of twoness, but when someone enters psychotherapy, this awareness may be greatly amplified in relation to the therapist’s own embodied self. Developmentally early sensations, primitive anxieties, and desires may be intense. Yet by ‘using’ the body of the analyst as a dynamic variable between them, a deeper exploration of the mind is greatly enriched.

This conference will explore how therapy allows space for mutual bodily influence with consciousness, allowing us to explore the bodily aspects of communication in relation to the foundational mother’s body. This may be especially helpful for understanding patients who develop a symbiotic transference and for whom any variance in the analyst’s body is felt to be profoundly destabilizing. These considerations will be illustrated with clinical material.

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.

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.

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 constructed one-day workshop, Professor Brett Kahr will share his extensive forty years of experience, investigating both the pitfalls and the pleasures of this unusual but vital profession. Providing a first-hand glimpse into the entire life cycle of the psychotherapist from the early years of training to preparation for retirement and death, the workshop will offer participants a privileged glimpse into his thinking about the factors which either facilitate or inhibit our creative growth across our working lives.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Tuesday 8 June

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.

In this workshop Deb Dana will offer a polyvagal roadmap for psychotherapists, exploring ways to listen with curiosity and compassion to emerging autonomic states and answer the essential question, “What does the nervous system need in this moment to find safety in connection?”

In the course of the seminar, Deb Dana will describe the autonomic hierarchy and a ‘personal profile’ map. We will learn how neuroception shapes behaviour and discuss how to use the co-regulating pathways of the social engagement system to send cues of safety to the client in therapy.

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 presenter acting as supervisee, we will gain a glimpse into the normally hidden world of supervision. Each session will begin with an outline of our presenters’ understanding of the supervisory role, followed by a brief introduction by their guest supervisee to their case. This will be followed a 50 minute unrehearsed live supervision. Together, each supervisory couple will explore what breakthroughs in the treatment might emerge.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Wednesday 17 March

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.

That this conversation can flow creatively is as important in therapy relationships as anywhere. Our speakers will suggest that although challenging, a deepened conversation about racial hurt can safely emerge. This is one in which the Person of Colour is given the empathic listening needed for fullest possible expression of their lived experience of racism. For the white therapist, a recognition of any fragility, shame and defensiveness in this conversation is a transformative starting point.

• This event will not be recorded
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Wednesday 23 June

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 against the dangers inherent in an intimate exchange – something which requires a tolerance for uncertainty and vulnerability beyond patients’ reach.

In this workshop, Professor Jean Petrucelli will present a detailed, practical exploration of how one works analytically with this group of patients. Such an approach goes beyond symptom alleviation by seeking to understand the plethora of interwoven factors that may lie beneath, such as cultural influences, neurobiology, attachment theory, self and affect regulation, self-states, body-states, and the intergenerational transmission of body image. It allows time for issues of desire, appetite, relatedness, and body obsession to be explored in order to enter this ritual-filled world. The work contains clinical conundrums in reaching these often “unreachable” patients; it examines complicated negotiations between direct interventions, and space for the symptoms to communicate feelings.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Wednesday 2 February

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 Schellinski, a Jungian analyst, will be citing from her book, “Individuation for Adult Replacement Children. Ways of Coming into Being” (2019) and will outline her ideas on the ‘replacement child’ through illuminating images, Jungian literature, and examples of famous historical figures who were replacement children. Andrea Sabbadini, a psychoanalyst, known for his scholarly publications on the experience of loss as depicted in the arts and cinema, as well as through his published work entitled The Replacement Child (in the text Boundaries and Bridges, 2014), will present a psychoanalytic account of the diverse ways the replacement child condition can manifest in adult life.  The speakers will address how replacement child dynamics can leave a person with a confusing and fragmented identity, relational difficulties, and sense of existential insecurity. Through clinical material, we will learn the significance of recognising this condition and how these unconscious themes can be sensitively considered within the therapeutic relationship.

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 patient or client the freedom to freely roam their transferences and projections onto that person. It offers a dependable structure for that relationship, one with a quality of safety and predictability – something that is of great importance to those who suffer from inner or outer chaos in their lives.

The frame creates safety and inhibits the danger of the therapist’s use of the client. It offers a set of limits which, in themselves, can engage the patient with creative boundary pushing which illuminates their unconscious desires and fears. Yet, if held too rigidly, these limits can be experienced as deeply persecutory; they can exclude moments of deeper connection. The email that arrives between sessions, the early arrival for a session, the probing personal question about the therapist’s life: these interruptions may contain great potential for a therapeutic breakthrough if allowed some breathing space.

So, in contemporary psychotherapy, where should the therapeutic frame be placed? Many practitioners are now experimenting with outdoor therapy, loosely timed sessions, calls between sessions and self-disclosure. Do these enhance or hinder the work? After all, Freud took his patients on long mountain walks. Is there a risk that the frame exists primarily to protect the therapist? Or is it a key therapeutic device? We invite our speakers to consider if new and more flexible approaches run the risk of overlooking a key to therapeutic success: containment.

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 experienced serious and ongoing emotional adversity in life. Problematic emotional states can suddenly emerge on giving birth, sometimes fulfilling psychiatric diagnostic criteria such as a “personality disorder” but often in women who do not have any previously diagnosed emotional condition.

Such a new mother can have significant difficulties managing the constant demands that caring for her baby makes on her already depleted emotional resources. Here, unconscious defensive processes are always active and can render a baby at risk.

This is a very extensive problem in our society and as practitioners we can make an important contribution by developing our understanding of how and why the experience of becoming a mother can lead to a sudden deterioration in a woman’s mental health. Participants will have an opportunity to reflect and discuss clinical cases and to gain a better understanding of how theory informs therapeutic formulation and intervention.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Find The Truth about Trauma and Dissociation Part II here
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Wednesday 24 March

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 Dissociation: Everything You Didn’t Want to Know and Were Afraid to Ask.

In this webinar she will describe what she has learnt about hearing, accepting and responding to their accounts. She will take us through the key concepts of trauma and dissociation as they relate to those who have experienced harm or abuse in childhood and offering clinical expertise on therapeutically empowering responses.

Linking extreme childhood adversities in many forms, this seminar is a relational guide to trauma which builds confidence and skill in the therapist, helping us to learn what we need to be able to hear without a loss of feelings.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Wednesday 7 July

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 webinar explores many of the issues outlined in her latest work, Thruth about Trauma and Dissociation: Everything You Didn’t Want to Know and Were Afraid to Ask.

Here, in Part II, she builds on that guide to offer further insight into the nuances of dissociation – a mental state in which people feel disconnected from their sense of self, experience or history. This defense against intolerable stress can lead to depression or anxiety, to derealisation and depersonalisation or ultimately to a serious dissociative disorder.

Joined by two colleagues who work with dissociative patients, Zoe Hawton and Mark Linnington, Valerie will discuss such distinctions as dissociative amnesia, fugue states, and structural dissociation. These are often misunderstood symptoms and study is advisable for mental health practitioners working with patients who have experienced childhood abuse, infanticidal attachment or – in the most extreme cases – ritualised sexual abuse.

This work creates great anxiety in professional networks. Our speakers will share how they have found their way to work sustainably with these complex cases, and the importance of supportive supervision.

• Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Wednesday 15 June

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. His integrative approach drew from the evolving work of Kernberg, Kohut, and Fairbairn to include borderline, narcissistic, and schizoid personality disorders in an overarching concept of disorders of the self.

Masterson’s earlier work explores the possibility that personality disorders may follow a developmental process of their own – a correlation of Margaret Mahler’s developmental subphases with a shadow-side of corresponding disorders in personality. Masterson’s perception of the basically healthy child within the developmental distortion of the patient – the defining of pathology as a normal process gone awry – is a therapeutic concept that goes back to Freud and forward into contemporary neuropsychology.

• Attend live webinar OR in person at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
• Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Wednesday 8 June

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. The proposition of this conference is that this has led to distinct manifestations of intergenerational trauma running through the diaspora.

We know from the growing psychotherapy literature on intergenerational trauma that the unprocessed distress of our parents, grandparents and ancestors finds its way into the minds and bodies of our descendants. This transmission of emotional impact from one generation to the next is thought to be a consequence of occlusion – the hiding of shameful oppressions, humiliation and loss. So long as these affects remain dissociated they will emotionally disturb and unconsciously seep into the inner selves of the next generation. Such feelings are all the more harmful because they are not connected to memory or meaning.

Our goal on this day will be to explore emotional issues that may be particular to people of Irish heritage, which are expressed directly or indirectly in therapy, particularly shame, depression and grief. We will consider what is helpful in in working with those experiences in the consulting room. And, beyond that, we will also be exploring how reclaiming the land, language and the wisdom of the ancient Ireland can transform Irishness into a source of strength, personal knowledge, healing and connection.

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 hateful feelings verbally. But, what about those clients who cannot talk? Or those clients who are capable of talking but carry a complex range of unprocessed embodied feelings that cannot be verbally expressed?

This conference will explore psychotherapy work with severely traumatised and learning disabled patients who must rely on a non-verbal type of language in order to communicate their most dreadful states of mind.

Specifically, it aims to elucidate the little-discussed, yet not infrequent, clinical experience of working with individuals who communicate through the use of their body and bodily fluids, manifesting with this lack of bodily containment and lack of mental containment. The speakers will discuss a number of clinical cases in which they will offer a psychoanalytic approach to describe how these embodied states of mind can be felt, tolerated and, when possible, verbalised, so that eventually these clients can begin to experience greater mental containment as well as bodily containment.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Wednesday 9 December

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, leaving them with an intangible sense of being wrong, unworthy – a disgrace in some way – at the core of their being. Afraid of having this confirmed by others, people with a core sense of shame may fear intimacy and social engagement; their ability to engage with life involves holding themselves apart from others. Anxiety, loneliness and depression may be its painful side-effects. When feelings of shame are compounded by further humiliations, aggression may be triggered.

Every message of a shame-based family, it is suggested, is the re-enactment of trans and intergenerational wounding. Clients may not be aware that they suffer from shame but if these emotions bring a person or family into therapy it can be worked through. This is challenging therapeutic work: underlying dynamics may play out, taking hold of all involved, including the therapist and perhaps supervisor. Our speakers come from psychodynamic and systemic family work and have vast experience working with shame in all its forms and extremities. We will discuss how to manage these dynamics in the consulting room so clients can grow in self-belief and transcend the family pattern.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am GMT Tuesday 3 November

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.

They will seek to bring these deficits to consciousness in such a way as to both validate the client’s distress and to arrive at some level of psychological integration between past and present.

An understanding of the importance of having secure attachments leads us to a further idea: that it may also be possible to acquire these via the therapeutic relationship itself as a reparative experience. If so, we would want to ask what kind of secure attachment would that be? Could it involve a profound shift in the client’s expectation of the other? Or would it be an alternative gain: the capacity to think, empathically, about one’s emotions and the feelings of others without becoming overwhelmed? Underpinning these possibilities is the question: how does psychotherapy enable people to change? Our panel will explore the psychotherapeutic processes they believe lead to “earning security” from a range of perspectives.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Thursday 16 July

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.

This perspective highlights the important role of the state of the autonomic nervous system in exacerbating or dampening threat reactions to the pandemic. In addition, the theory alerts us to the impact of clinical history (e.g., trauma) on autonomic regulation as an important compounding risk factor lowering the threshold to behaviorally and physiologically destabilize in response to the pandemic. The theory provides a strategy to dampen the adverse reactions to threat (e.g., acute stress disorders) through portals of social engagement that evolved to downregulate defenses to promote calmness and connectedness. Consistent with a Polyvagal perspective, oxytocin and vasopressin dynamically moderate the autonomic nervous system influencing vagal pathways and anti-inflammatory circuits that help explain the adaptive consequences of love, trust, and social behavior for emotional and physical health. Thus, interventions that target the client’s capacity to feel safe and use the social engagement system to regulate physiological state can be effective enhancements of treatments of mental health disorders that are dependent on defense systems. The workshop will integrate the Polyvagal Theory with current research on the mammalian neuropeptides of oxytocin and vasopressin, which facilitate social behaviors and trust. In this workshop Porges and Carter will discuss applications of their research to the current pandemic.

• This event will not be recorded
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Wednesday 22 September

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 loss.

The purpose of this conference is to examine some of the unconscious processes in this ageing journey: the extent to which ageing and ultimately dying can be embraced rather than denied and could be transformative rather than harrowing. Such potentialities will depend upon the client’s unconscious processes and attachments as well as spiritual outlook. Some may have deep relational and existential preparedness for the prospect of letting go of energy, health, and life. For others, the prospect may bring about despair, desolation, and depression – particularly for some in relation to the ageing body and desirability.

Our speakers will explore these dimensions, and ask how psychoanalysis can support the process of growing old in therapy and help to promote the renewing of psychic inner landscapes.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Tuesday 25 January

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 more relational and internal forms of loss of home.

This therapeutic work he proposes, demands a new and radical approach with in-depth examination of epistemological traps that commonly skew conceptualisations of this type of work. The concept of trauma has been beneficial in throwing light on the suffering of many people. However, it has also contributed to the unprecedented proliferation of theories, methods, and techniques, leaving the practitioner uneasy as to where to turn for solid answers.

This workshop will revisit the basics of working with those who have been involuntarily dislocated by offering a sound and innovative epistemological framework. Renos will address how to support the processing of overwhelming experiences without pathologizing or minimising the negative consequences. The emphasis in this particular work is how to ‘be therapeutic’ as opposed to offering a traditional therapeutic approach. Renos’ work focuses on the integration of experience and moving towards adversity-activated development.

• Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9.00am BST Tuesday 4 October 2022

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 health is far less obvious to others.

Often it may be unresolvable, internalized, and difficult to communicate, and the individual’s symptoms can be the sole focus of treatment while the context goes unnoticed.

Pauline however, challenges the idea that we need closure from such losses. Rather, she suggests, people can come to live well with the grief if they can find meaning in it, often in creative ways, and new purpose and joy in life. For such a situation of loss, a therapy based on stress and resilience is required, and the capacity in the therapist to hold the ambiguity deep within themselves is essential. The workshop will provide a road map for working with this kind of loss offering guidance on meaning, mastery, identity, ambivalence, attachment, and a new hope.

• Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Tuesday 1 March

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 such a common and potentially devastating ‘disorder’ has not been eliminated by natural selection.

We will explore how primary origins in childhood adversity manifest in the threat (polyvagal) and stress (cortisol) responses that regulate our reaction to psychosocial and physical challenges. The resulting habitual defensive responses are associated with a wide range of rigid patterns that govern the sense of self-and-other, and the experience of relationships; that cement shame, guilt, grief or anxiety in place, while inhibiting/repressing other feelings such as anger, curiosity or aliveness.

What makes working with depressed clients particularly demanding is that trust, hope and flexibility are at a premium. In the next part of the workshop, we will explore some ways of intervening in these rigid patterns through creative approaches such as parts work, body work and art therapy. This can allay the deepening of the depression and assist in developing therapeutic cooperation, thus clearing the way to address some of the deeper childhood issues.

• Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am BST Tuesday 7 June

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.

The relationship between the ‘abused’ and ‘victim’ is a near perfect demonstration of Fairbairn’s concept of “attachment to bad objects”. In this model the unconscious is populated by dissociated and then repressed memories of traumatic interpersonal events experienced in childhood. These buried relational patterns, unknown to the conscious ego, are re-enacted out of conscious awareness with new partners in adulthood. The intolerable memories of neglect and abuse are grouped and condensed into an internal view of the rejecting parent called the “rejecting object”, who is in a hostile and ungiving relationship to the frightened, disappointed and angry child, described by Fairbairn as the “antilibidinal ego”. These two inner ego structures continue to interact in the unconscious, and relational patterns from childhood are endlessly replayed in adult relationships, most likely until therapy intercepts.

This seminar will explore in depth such child created object-relational structures and how they are reactivated in intimate relationships. We shall also hear how Fairbairn’s model can provide exceptional insights for psychotherapists working with the abused adult patient, helping to free them from ancient object-relational patterns and to create healthy relationships.

• Attend live webinar OR in person at Confer’s premises (Please see our FAQ)
• Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Wednesday 22 February

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 still dominant with therapists reporting not feeling competent with this work.

It has been a number of years since BDSM was declassified from the psychiatric nomenclature, yet knowledge and understanding of how to work with clients with erotic interests, behaviours, and identities is still not commonly found in trainings. In this conference we offer a space for deeper understanding and holding to demystify and de-stigmatise such practices. 

During a therapeutic session with clients that engage in kinks, fetishes or BDSM, the therapist may experience disgust or embarrassment, shame dynamics may take over, and a need to objectify and distance from the client may emerge. They may feel deep concern if fetish activities include rough sex or bondage and not know when, or if, they should intervene.   

Our speakers will address these concerns and consider ways of being with clients in order to create a safe space and understanding, without fear and judgement. We welcome therapists and mental health practitioners of all modalities and disciplines to join us to learn more about how to work in this area. 

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 flexible and fluid are often regarded as highly threatening.

This day will endeavour to clarify what gender is, how it works, and how it relates to the mental health of our clients, drawing on the most recent scientific, historical/sociological, and therapeutic thinking in this area. It will provide a safe-enough space to ask all your questions about this complex, confusing, and fast-changing area. It will consider what gender-affirmative therapy might look like for all clients – cisgender or trans, male, female or non-binary.

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 practitioner, causing great distress.

In this special one-day event, Professor Brett Kahr and Dr. Carine Minne, will present material from their work in both independent and forensic settings, examining the ways in which practitioners can better diagnosis potential clinical “bombs” in advance and, also, exploring how one might better defuse the bombs which patients hurl, inevitably, on certain occasions. The two speakers will not only present some very riveting and, often, shocking details from their own practices but will also provide “live” supervision so that conference participants will have an opportunity to benefit from Kahr’s and Minne’s many decades of professional experience. This conference follows on from the publication of Brett Kahr’s latest book, Bombs in the Consulting Room: Surviving Psychological Shrapnel and with the launch of The International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy for which Carine Minne serves as Editor-in-Chief.

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 pleasure which is primary… Painful feelings, self destructive relationships, self-sabotaging situations, are re-created throughout life as vehicles for the perpetuation of early ties to significant others. Mitchell, 1988 (p:27).

One of the most perplexing psychological problems faced by psychotherapists is the apparently normal patient who seeks out one abusive partner after another.

This common phenomenon, an attachment to “bad objects”, is at the very core of the analytic model developed by W.R.D. Fairbairn (1889-1964). Fairbairn recognised that the child is absolutely dependent on their parents for all of their physical and psychological needs.

The child raised in an uncaring family cannot tolerate “knowing” that they are being neglected or abused as this would endanger their emotional attachment to the desperately needed parents. One psychological solution that they have is to dissociate memories of abuse or neglect, thus preserving the attachments and creating a sense of security. Unfortunately, as we will see, such early dissociated interpersonal experiences – quite unknown to the conscious ego – lie dormant, often to resurface with sexual partners in adulthood in the form of dysfunctional relationships.

Fairbairn also noticed that abused children often create unrealistic fantasies about the possibility of future love from their neglectful parents. These imaginings may create a soothing, temporary reality for the child. However, such hopes inevitably co-exist with repressed memories of abuse – memories that can suddenly emerge from the unconscious. We will see how such children may develop two separate centres of agency in their personality, quite unknown to each other: one hurt and enraged and the other full of hope. Painfully, these sub-egos seek out partners who simultaneously hurt and offer the illusion of love. We will consider how psychodynamic psychotherapy can help someone with the deeply challenging task of integrating a full awareness of their childhood reality in order to, at last, become free from repeating it.

• Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
• Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Wednesday 11 January

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 spiritual levels of experience.

Yet in 2022, many people don’t openly discuss the menstrual cycle in western mainstream culture, and it carries a lingering shadow of shame.

The menstrual cycle has been overlooked and this is most evident in psychotherapeutic theory, research, and training. However, with the rise of the ‘period power’ movement, a new feminist discourse around menstruation is opening outside the therapy room. As psychotherapists, how can we more openly, sensitively, and insightfully dialogue about it inside the therapy room with our clients?

In this conference, we will take a multidisciplinary view to better understand the place of the menstrual cycle in women’s lives. We will hear from a range of speakers from across the globe offering biopsychology, psychoanalytical and humanistic therapy perspectives. While the content will primarily be about women’s experience, we recognise not all women have periods and not all people who have periods identify as women. We intend this to be an inclusive event that recognises subjectivity. We welcome women, men, and gender non-conforming therapists to join us to learn more about how the menstrual cycle may impact clients of all genders in a variety of ways.

We will close with a panel discussion taking a pragmatic lens, to ensure you leave with some ideas of how you can incorporate working with the menstrual cycle in your therapeutic practice.

• A FREE online or in person event
• 15:00 – 17:00 GMT (10am EST – 12pm EST)

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

• This is a FREE online book launch
• 19:00 – 20:15

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?

• A FREE online event
• 18:30 – 19:45pm BST (1:30 – 2:45pm EDT)

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

• A FREE online or in person event
• 18:30 – 19:45 GMT (1:30pm – 2:45pm EST)

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

Food features in all relationships; between mothers and babies, parents and children, within peer groups, couples and families. The dinner table may be associated with intimacy, pleasure, connection or conflict. Narratives of culture, gender and history influence the relationship with food, as does intergenerational trauma. How we nurture or deprive ourselves may be a re-enactment of how we were once fed by our caregivers, or at least, how we were emotionally nourished or starved.

It is impossible to ignore the impact of the environmental crisis we are currently facing.

It is now unequivocally clear the contemporary, industrial model for social development not only has had a fatal impact on many ecosystems of the earth but also a detrimental effect on human mental health and psychological well-being.

This series of talks is a further exploration of the concept and practice of active imagination, a core aspect of analytical psychology. This form of inner work, developed by Jung and elaborated in his work The Red Book, is a way of evoking dream states while awake, thus providing access to dream-like content as a practice.

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 attests to the degree of interest in the uncanny and unconscious communication among therapists. Indeed, the material we will be presenting throughout this series points to a potential paradigm shift towards non-dualistic theorizing about the nature of consciousness itself.