This study group will be delivered via Zoom online.

How could Kleinian perspectives help you in your practice? Perhaps you’ve looked at the work of people like Hanna Segal, Wilfred Bion, Betty Joseph, John Steiner and Ron Britton in training. Coming back to these with greater clinical experience allows you to explore what they offer in more depth – to get hold of connections and understand better what goes on in and beyond the consulting room.

This study group is concerned with developments in Kleinian theory and practice over the past seventy years – what has remained central, what has been discarded, what has become better understood and what is contentious today. It is designed to work at different levels, offering food for thought to those unfamiliar with psychoanalytic thinking as well as to those who wish to extend and enrich their understanding and use of Kleinian approaches.

The group has been popular and successful in previous years and is generally fully subscribed. The 2020-2021 course will be entirely online, allowing those who live outside London to take part.

Session 1: The development of the mind and the inner world: primitive mechanisms, 25 September 2020
Session 2: The development of the mind and the inner world: separation and integration, 30 October 2020
Session 3:Pathological organisations of the personality, 27 November 2020
Session 4: The development of the capacity to think, 18 December 2020
Session 5: The facts of life and the Oedipal triangle , 29 January 2021
Session 6:The central importance of transference/countertransference , 26 February 2021
Session 7:Envy and the death instinct, 26 March 2021
Session 8:The blocking of insight, learning and growth, 30 April 2021
Session 9:Sexuality, 28 May 2021
Session 10: Difference, 25 June 2021
Session 11:What is distinctive about Kleinian work?, 23 July 2021

2021 marks the centenary of Melanie Klein’s first psychoanalytic publication, ‘The development of a child’, in which she argued for the liberating effect of responding honestly to children’s questions. Since then, Klein and her associates have played a major role in the development of psychoanalytic thinking and practice. Much that was once considered innovative and controversial in her approach has been taken up by those with reservations about her basic tenets. Lively debate continues among those more sympathetic to Kleinian ways of seeing and working.

It is possible to attend individual sessions, but there is much to be gained by revisiting material that may seem familiar and through involvement in an ongoing process. In previous years there has been a lively dynamism in the group. Members have found a space to share impressions, responses, puzzlement, realisations and insights, with an emphasis on clinical issues.

The readings include earlier and later practitioners, clinical and theoretical considerations. We refer back to Freud and Klein as we consider how thinking and technique have developed, aiming to replicate the analytic cycle of learning and working-through. Detailed notes are provided to help contextualise the readings and support engagement with them.

By participating in this study group, you can expect to gain:

1. A deeper understanding of projective and identificatory processes in work with clients.
2. A broader conception of how internal and external worlds interact and affect each other.
3. Greater clarity about where you stand in relation to key theoretical and ethical issues.
4. An overview of what the Kleinian tradition has contributed to British Object Relations.

There will be a different paper for each session. The programme centres on readings from key figures in the Kleinian tradition – Freud, Segal, Rosenfeld, Bion, Money-Kyrle, Meltzer, Joseph, Steiner, Britton. We will think about the issues raised in the readings in relation to participants’ clinical experiences and dilemmas.

Comments from Previous Participants

• “This once monthly format is really good value, as I have learnt so much more compared to the equivalent amount of hours in an average 2 days CPD course.”
• “I’m finding the papers enriching whilst at the same time challenging as well as questions and views raised by the group.  This is good as its stirring me up out of lazy thinking.  I have found the relevance/benefit of theories has been demonstrated in the group on several occasions and also it’s helping me with often confusing work.”
• “Linking the reading to our clinical work is most valuable.”
• “The things I found most useful and enjoyable were the readings suggested, the session notes sent in advance and the clinical examples in the sessions.”

Course Reading

Detailed reading lists will be sent on booking. WPF gives participants electronic access to texts.

David Smart’s first career was in multi-disciplinary work in mainstream educational and off-site settings with secondary-age pupils experiencing difficulties. He trained with WPF Therapy to practice as a school counsellor and work privately as a psychotherapist with adults. He is committed to collaborative learning and understands development as a life-long, spiral process. Publications include “Play’ in practice in psychotherapy and education’, European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2008, pp. 147 – 158 (with L. Gomez).

This course will be relevant to practising counsellors/psychotherapists and trainees engaged in clinical work and to those engaged in academic study in the field. There will be a focus on working with the ideas and issues clinically. Priority will be given to applicants who can attend the whole course.

If you experience any problems during the application process then please contact events@wpf.org.uk.

This study group will be delivered via Zoom online.

How could Kleinian perspectives help you in your practice? Perhaps you’ve looked at the work of people like Hanna Segal, Wilfred Bion, Betty Joseph, John Steiner and Ron Britton in training. Coming back to these with greater clinical experience allows you to explore what they offer in more depth – to get hold of connections and understand better what goes on in and beyond the consulting room.

This study group is concerned with developments in Kleinian theory and practice over the past seventy years – what has remained central, what has been discarded, what has become better understood and what is contentious today. It is designed to work at different levels, offering food for thought to those unfamiliar with psychoanalytic thinking as well as to those who wish to extend and enrich their understanding and use of Kleinian approaches.

The group has been popular and successful in previous years and is generally fully subscribed. The 2020-2021 course will be entirely online, allowing those who live outside London to take part.

Session 1: The development of the mind and the inner world: primitive mechanisms, 9 October 2020
Session 2: The development of the mind and the inner world: separation and integration, 6 November 2020
Session 3:Pathological organisations of the personality, 11 December 2020
Session 4: The development of the capacity to think, 15 January 2020
Session 5: The facts of life and the Oedipal triangle , 19 February 2021
Session 6:The central importance of transference/countertransference , 19 March 2021
Session 7:Envy and the death instinct, 16 April 2021
Session 8:The blocking of insight, learning and growth, 14 May 2021
Session 9:Sexuality, 11 June 2021
Session 10: Difference, 2 July 2021
Session 11:What is distinctive about Kleinian work?, 30 July 2021

2021 marks the centenary of Melanie Klein’s first psychoanalytic publication, ‘The development of a child’, in which she argued for the liberating effect of responding honestly to children’s questions. Since then, Klein and her associates have played a major role in the development of psychoanalytic thinking and practice. Much that was once considered innovative and controversial in her approach has been taken up by those with reservations about her basic tenets. Lively debate continues among those more sympathetic to Kleinian ways of seeing and working.

It is possible to attend individual sessions, but there is much to be gained by revisiting material that may seem familiar and through involvement in an ongoing process. In previous years there has been a lively dynamism in the group. Members have found a space to share impressions, responses, puzzlement, realisations and insights, with an emphasis on clinical issues.

The readings include earlier and later practitioners, clinical and theoretical considerations. We refer back to Freud and Klein as we consider how thinking and technique have developed, aiming to replicate the analytic cycle of learning and working-through. Detailed notes are provided to help contextualise the readings and support engagement with them.

By participating in this study group, you can expect to gain:

1. A deeper understanding of projective and identificatory processes in work with clients.
2. A broader conception of how internal and external worlds interact and affect each other.
3. Greater clarity about where you stand in relation to key theoretical and ethical issues.
4. An overview of what the Kleinian tradition has contributed to British Object Relations.

There will be a different paper for each session. The programme centres on readings from key figures in the Kleinian tradition – Freud, Segal, Rosenfeld, Bion, Money-Kyrle, Meltzer, Joseph, Steiner, Britton. We will think about the issues raised in the readings in relation to participants’ clinical experiences and dilemmas.

Comments from Previous Participants

• “This once monthly format is really good value, as I have learnt so much more compared to the equivalent amount of hours in an average 2 days CPD course.”
• “I’m finding the papers enriching whilst at the same time challenging as well as questions and views raised by the group.  This is good as its stirring me up out of lazy thinking.  I have found the relevance/benefit of theories has been demonstrated in the group on several occasions and also it’s helping me with often confusing work.”
• “Linking the reading to our clinical work is most valuable.”
• “The things I found most useful and enjoyable were the readings suggested, the session notes sent in advance and the clinical examples in the sessions.”

Course Reading

Detailed reading lists will be sent on booking. WPF gives participants electronic access to texts.

David Smart’s first career was in multi-disciplinary work in mainstream educational and off-site settings with secondary-age pupils experiencing difficulties. He trained with WPF Therapy to practice as a school counsellor and work privately as a psychotherapist with adults. He is committed to collaborative learning and understands development as a life-long, spiral process. Publications include “Play’ in practice in psychotherapy and education’, European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2008, pp. 147 – 158 (with L. Gomez).

This course will be relevant to practising counsellors/psychotherapists and trainees engaged in clinical work and to those engaged in academic study in the field. There will be a focus on working with the ideas and issues clinically. Priority will be given to applicants who can attend the whole course.

If you experience any problems during the application process then please contactevents@wpf.org.uk.

This workshop will be delivered via Zoom.

If you are interested in WPF Therapy upcoming events, please book your tickets on our Eventbrite page.

This is a lecture on bereavement which will focus on two aspects Juliet has written about, death denial and partner loss.  

Given the consequences of the Pandemic 2020-21 – ongoing at the time of writing  - the experience and effects of bereavement are much more widespread than they have ever been.  

Lecture Aims

In this lecture, Juliet will touch on: 

• Talk about two aspects of bereavement: death denial and partner loss. 
• What happens when a refusal to contemplate impending death is colluded in by the terminally ill and those around them.
• Partner loss/the death of a spouse and/or the specific difficulties this brings to the survivor. 

Brief Outline  

This talk will be a newly written paper which will contain anonymised patient material which will be sent out with the clinical elements redacted after the talk.  

Participants are simply asked to think in the run up to the lecture about what grief means to them, have they experienced it first hand, and how they work with it and I would very much like it if participants want to bring clinical (or other) examples.  

Lecturer

Juliet Rosenfeld is a psychotherapist who works in private practice in London. She has a particular interest in bereavement and couples. Juliet is the author of the acclaimed memoir The State Of Disbelief (2020) which uses Freud’s 1917 paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ as a backdrop for an examination of the experience of terminal illness and partner loss. She has spoken about bereavement at many venues and trainings, is a Board Member of the UKCP and Clinical Trustee at the Freud Museum London, and is currently writing her second book while contributing articles to national publications.  

Chair

Judith Barac has worked in various settings in a number of roles within the NHS as a psychotherapist.

Target Audience:

This lecture is open to qualified and training psychotherapists and counsellors. Please note that by booking on this event you agree to keep all discussion confidential.   

Applications must be received by Thursday, 17th June 2021. 

Please note that by booking a ticket for this event, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions for CPD events, so please read through them carefully before making your purchase.

If you experience any problems please contact events@wpf.org.uk.

This workshop will be delivered via Zoom.

If you are interested in WPF Therapy upcoming events, please book your tickets on our Eventbrite page.

1. What do we mean when we talk about quantum physics? 
2. How does it relate to our work as therapists? 
3. How do we engage with the mysterious world of quantum physics 
4. Can we understand interpretation in the consulting room from the framework of quantum physics? 
5. Would learning about this deepen and enhance my clinical experience? 
6. Science or Art?  What can we learn when we look at the scientific nature of psychotherapy via the prism of quantum physics? 

Workshop Aims

During this lecture you will: 

•  Gain some sense of the nature of quantum physics.
• Be able to think more deeply about the psychotherapeutic dynamic especially the interpretation. 
• Appreciate some surprising parallels between psychotherapy and quantum physics. 
• Consider a major philosophical question that underlies both disciplines. 

Outline 

Stephen will start with a brief introduction to quantum physics followed by a look at Jung’s picture of the psychotherapeutic interaction. 

We will then consider some of the most significant concepts of quantum physics  such  as “the uncertainty principle” “complementarity” “hidden variables” and “entanglement” in relation to the psychotherapeutic process and then finally to “the collapse of the wave function” in its application to the therapist’s interpretations.  

Finally, we will consider the philosophical issue on the very question of the existence and possible nature of an objective reality which is central to both disciplines. Slides will be used and there will be ample time for questions and discussion. 

Lecturer

Stephen Gross is a psychodynamic psychotherapist in private practice of 34 years standing. He left WPF this autumn after 32 years as supervisor and ontology seminar leader. Having throughout this time felt strongly the need to consider psychotherapy in a wider social, cultural and philosophical context. he has published a number of articles, papers and book chapters on these topics and in 2018 his book “Living in Language” was launched at WPF as well as at the Freud Museum. 

His play “Freud’s Night Visitors” was performed too at both of these venues some years before . His particular interests are literature, classical music, philosophy and more recently quantum physics. 

Chair

Judith Barac has worked in various settings in a number of of roles within the nhs as a psychotherapist.

Target Audience:

To people of all ages (including psychotherapists and quantum physicists) with an open and adventurous mind. Please note that by booking on this event you agree to keep all discussion confidential.   

Applications must be received by Thursday, 1st July 2021. 

Please note that by booking a ticket for this event, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions for CPD events, so please read through them carefully before making your purchase.

If you experience any problems during the application process then please contact events@wpf.org.uk.

This event will be delivered via Zoom online.

If you are interested in WPF Therapy upcoming events, please check our Eventbrite page.

We know that psychotherapy is ‘effective’, but the ‘dodo bird verdict’ also tells us that with a few exceptions,  no one form of therapy is definitely superior to another, nor does it tell us what it is about therapy that helps.   

In this talk, Jeremy will try to move away from a utilitarian outcomes-oriented approach, and, draw partly on the neo-psychoanalytic ideas of Barnaby Barratt, partly on Jeremy’s own development of the Free Energy Principle, suggesting that psychotherapy is an existential praxis, and an onto-ethical project.  

The background to this is a qualitative study in which Jeremy interviewed people from a wide range of spiritual backgrounds, looking for parallels between spiritual religious journey and the trajectories of psychotherapy.   

Jeremy suggests that while religion provides a spiritual framework for a good life, in our 21st Century milieu psychotherapy has vital contribution to make with its emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual and how to develop narratives which encompass and reflect it. 

Comments from previous participants: 

• “A life enhancing 90 minutes that will stay with me.” 
• “Despite the limitations of remote presentation, the lecturer, subject and participants all managed to have a moving emotional connection.” 
• “Jeremy Holmes eloquence and knowledge delivered this complex theory into a valuable resource that I know will be invaluable in my work as a Psychotherapist.  I urge everyone to attend if they can.” 
• “This lecture has opened my mind to a fresh, deeper understanding of clients in their later years and approaches I can use to work well with them. 

Lecturer

Professor Jeremy Holmes MD FRCPsych was for 35 years Consultant Psychiatrist/Medical Psychotherapist at University College London (UCL) and then in North Devon, UK, and Chair of the Psychotherapy Faculty of the Royal College of Psychiatrists 1998-2002.  He is visiting Professor at the University of Exeter, and lectures nationally and internationally. In addition to 200+ peer-reviewed papers and chapters in the field of psychoanalysis and attachment theory, his books include John Bowlby and Attachment Theory, (2nd edition 2013),   The Oxford Textbook of Psychotherapy (2005 co-editors Glen Gabbard and Judy Beck),  Exploring In Security: Towards an Attachment-informed Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (2010, winner of Canadian Goethe Prize) , The Therapeutic Imagination: Using Literature to Deepen Psychodynamic Understanding and Enhance Empathy (2014), Attachment in Therapeutic Practice (2017, with A Slade), and The Brain Has a Mind of its Own: Attachment, Neurobiology and the New Science of Psychotherapy (2020).  He was recipient of the Bowlby-Ainsworth Founders Award 2009.  Gardening, Green politics and grand-parenting are gradually eclipsing his lifetime devotion to psychoanalytic psychotherapy and attachment. 

Chair

Target Audience:

This course should be interesting and accessible for anyone interested in psychoanalysis, including qualified counsellors and psychotherapists as well as those in training.  Please note that by booking on this event you agree to keep all discussion confidential.   

Applications must be received by Thursday, 2nd September 2021. 

Please note that by booking a ticket for this event, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions for CPD events, so please read through them carefully before making your purchase.

If you experience any problems please contact events@wpf.org.uk.

This event will be delivered via Zoom online.

If you are interested in WPF Therapy upcoming events, please check our Eventbrite page.

This lecture will touch on: 

• Do you want to increase your understanding of the issues facing gender non-conforming & Trans clients?
• How to work therapeutically with a client questioning their gender identity?
• Would you like to learn more about Conversion therapy and why it is harmful and damaging? 

By attending this lecture you can expect: 

1. Have a better understanding of the needs and challenges facing gender non-conforming clients.
2. Have a basic understanding of how to work with gender non-conforming & Trans clients and not assuming gender is the ‘problem’.
3.  Working with young trans clients. 
4. Understanding gender identity and intersectionality. Is gender identity fixed, primal or constructed?

Outline  

The debate on gender identity has become very toxic. The recent High Court ruling on medical treatment, the constant trans-phobic comments in some elements of the media and the debate around conversion therapy have all made working with gender non-conforming and trans clients a minefield for Psychotherapists and Counsellors. This lecture will demystify the issues and provide attendees with some basic tools to work with. 

Lecturer

Michelle Bridgman is an experienced Gestalt Psychotherapist, Hypnotherapist and Keynote Conference Speaker with over twenty-five years of experience in Private Practice and in hospital settings.  

Michelle have been working with adults and young people presenting with Gender Dysphoria for over twenty years and co-authored the ‘Standards of Care’ for professionals working with Gender Dysphoria published in 2007. Recently completed a research project and thesis on “The Role of Psychotherapy in the clinical treatment of Gender Dysphoria”.

Chair

Lynsey Hotchkies, Director of Studies at WPF Therapy.

Target Audience:

This event should be interesting and accessible for anyone interested in psychoanalysis, including qualified counsellors and psychotherapists as well as those in training.  Please note that by booking on this event you agree to keep all discussion confidential.

Applications must be received by Thursday, 23 September 2021.

Please note that by booking a ticket for this event, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions for CPD events, so please read through them carefully before making your purchase.

If you experience any problems please contact events@wpf.org.uk.

This event will be delivered via Zoom online.

If you are interested in WPF Therapy upcoming events, please check our Eventbrite page.

• How can we work with the internalised experience of privilege and otherness and of internalised racism, sexism and homophobia, etc. in the consulting room? 
• Are you interested in working with issues of privilege and otherness? 
• How privilege and otherness factors in the therapy room? 
• How does a therapist’s identity impact upon their own privilege? 

This lecture presents the key ideas from Dr Dwight Turner’s new book and it will provide clinical examples of how power appears in therapy with the other. This workshop also encourages participants to explore their own sense of privilege and otherness. 

By attending this lecture you can expect: 

1. To have a greater intellectual understanding of privilege and otherness.
2. To begin to develop a felt unconscious understanding of this for themselves.
3. To begin to demystify these concepts as they are so common.
4. To start developing the skills to better work with difference in practice. 

Outline  

The presentation will be provided using Powerpoint and discussion.  

In Dr Dwight Turner’s latest book Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy (Routledge, 2021), the aim is to actually explore the internalised experience of privilege and otherness and of internalised racism, sexism and homophobia, etc.  The last chapter though, looks at how we can actually work with these internalised experiences, especially through the language of dreams.  Borrowing from Carl Jung’s ideas around free association and active imagination, the dreams explored in chapter five of the book involve an uncovering of these internalised objects and how they play themselves out in the dreamscape, and also this looks at just how devastating some of these internalised symbols can be for the psychology of those persons of colour who endure racism.  The third part to this exploration is actually how through working this often dark, shadowy and destructive material, those persons of otherness, in this case based around race, can actually find themselves on a route towards individuation towards a separation from the internalised impact of white supremacy, colonialism, etc. 

Lecturer

Dr Dwight Turner is Senior Lecturer within the School of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Brighton, lecturing on their PG Dip and MSc courses in Counselling and Psychotherapy, a PhD Supervisor at their Doctoral College, a psychotherapist and supervisor in private practice.   

His latest book Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy was released in February 2021 and is published by Routledge. An activist, writer, and public speaker on issues of race, difference and intersectionality in counselling and psychotherapy.  

Here is an article about Dr Dwight Turner, check it here. 

Chair

Alexa Walker trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at WPF Therapy.  She has worked in private practice and taught and supervised at WPF Therapy at all levels, including leading seminars on Diversity.  She has a particular interest in promoting diversity, which has been informed by her earlier experiences of management and communication in multi-cultural environments, and in thinking about difference in all its facets.

Target Audience:

This event should be interesting and accessible for anyone interested in the topic, including qualified counsellors and psychotherapists and the general public. This event is open to all.  

Applications must be received by Thursday, 14th October 2021. 

Please note that by booking a ticket for this event, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions for CPD events, so please read through them carefully before making your purchase.

If you experience any problems please contact events@wpf.org.uk.

This event will be delivered via Zoom online.

If you are interested in WPF Therapy upcoming events, please check our Eventbrite page.

• What is the sublime and how do we understand it as immanent in our everyday life, a source of energy and inspiration? 
• How can it be invoked to support our mental health and well-being? 
• Are encounters with the sublime loving and caring?  Or can they also be hateful, traumatic, and destructive? 
• How do these encounters with the sublime overflow and destabilise our psychological and social structures by exposing their fictional and constructed nature? 

Notions of the sublime are most often associated with the extraordinary, and include the intrapsychic, high-cultural, and exceptional occurrences of elation and exaltation as part of its experience.  

In this lecture, Dr Gaitanidis will use ordinary encounters and case presentations in order to make a plea that the existing philosophical and psychoanalytical perspectives on the sublime acknowledge their rootedness in the same world that we all engage in our everyday lives. For all their theoretical and clinical refinements, the various philosophical and psychoanalytic explanations of the sublime remain an expression of, and hence must be guided by, the world of our common human experience. 

He will begin by turning to the emergence and development of the notion of the sublime in philosophy and psychoanalysis in order to show how we can take up this legacy and transform it in a manner that could endow us with a particular power and relevance for the personal, interpersonal, therapeutic, cultural and political questions that confront us in the 21st century. By proposing a more ‘grounding’, ‘ordinary’ way of speaking and thinking about the sublime, we hope that we will be able to reinvigorate the sensuous, mysterious, and ‘sacred’ ways we experience our everyday encounters with the world, therapy, and each other. 

This lecture will be an opportunity to substantiate the existing psychoanalytic and aesthetic, theoretical and clinical knowledge of the sublime by placing it within the context of everyday life using examples of it in art, film, theatre, literature as well as in work, education, relationships, and the clinic.  

By attending this lecture you can expect: 

• To restore and revive the world of our ordinary sensorial, interpersonal, therapeutic experiences by introducing the sublime as part of its mysterious, irreducible, and open-ended texture. 
• To be able to use psychoanalytic and aesthetic theories as well as clinical presentations, to revitalise the sublime by re-evaluating its significance for contemporary life and psychotherapy and, in a unique and fascinating endeavour, open a space that will explore the sublime in the ordinary, everyday, and quotidian. 
• Through the exploration of familiar and unfamiliar threads of the sublime experience, to posit the sublime as invoking an ordinary human response which contains minute, inter-psychic, inclusive cultural and clinical elements, and thus carries within it therapeutic and political potential.

Dr Anastasios Gaitanidis is a Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, Director of Studies, Author, Theory Editor and Supervisor.  In addition to his clinical work as a psychoanalytic therapist, Anastasios held appointments as a Senior Lecturer and provided clinical and research supervision to counselling psychologists and psychotherapists at Regent’s University London and University of Roehampton. He currently holds the position of Director of Studies for the Professional Doctorate in Psychotherapy at Metanoia training Institute.  

Anastasios is the Theory Editor of the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling (EJPC) and an author who published a substantial body of academic work including journal articles and edited books over the years, with a recent book publication entitled The Sublime in Everyday Life: Psychoanalytic and Aesthetic Perspectives. (Routledge: 2020)

Target Audience:

This course should be interesting and accessible for anyone interested in psychoanalysis, including qualified counsellors and psychotherapists as well as those in training.  Please note that by booking on this event you agree to keep all discussion confidential.

This event will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and art and drama therapists, as well as scholars and students of philosophy, literature, art and popular culture.   

Applications must be received by Thursday, 2nd December 2021. 

Please note that by booking a ticket for this event, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions for CPD events, so please read through them carefully before making your purchase.

If you experience any problems please contact events@wpf.org.uk.

This event will be delivered via Zoom online.

If you are interested in WPF Therapy upcoming events, please check our Eventbrite page.

‘Anna O’, or Bertha Pappenheim, is famously credited with coining the phrase ‘the talking cure’. What gave her the idea that talking helped? And was it the talking or the listening? While her analyst, Josef Breuer’s, naivety about the explosive potential of listening led to an abrupt, catastrophic end to the treatment, together they opened the way to Freudian analysis, the plethora of modern talking cures and, most recently, therapy bots. 

So, what makes a good listener? We will look at some of the most commonsensical ideas — patience, tolerance, availability, responsiveness, lack of moral judgement — and ask whether it’s really so simple. In the early 1960s, Jozeph Weizenbaum developed a robot therapist, christened Eliza after the parroting protagonist of George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’. Eliza was designed to respond like a Rogerian, human-centred therapist, mainly repeating people’s words back to them, slightly differently inflected. Weizenbaum was horrified that his creation was so well-received — people really seemed to like talking to it — and went on to become a forceful critic of A.I. 

If Josef Breuer’s listening was somehow ‘too much’ — his patient fell madly in love with him, causing him to run away in panic — and Eliza’s listening risked being ‘too little’ — the software just offered a vapid semblance of a human response — what would be ‘just right’?  

Lecturer
Anouchka Grose is a psychoanalyst and writer practising in London. She is a member of The Centre for Freudian Research, where she regularly lectures. She has written non-fiction: No More Silly Love Songs: a realist’s guide to romance (Portobello, 2010), Are you Considering Therapy (Karnac, 2011), From Anxiety to Zoolander: notes on psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2018), A Guide to Eco-Anxiety: how to protect the planet and your mental health (Watkins, 2020) as well as writing fiction: Ringing for You (Harper Collins, 1999) and Darling Daisy (Harper Collins, 2000). She also writes about art and fashion, and contributes to The Guardian, Radio 4, and Resonance FM. 

Target Audience:
This event should be interesting and accessible for anyone interested in the topic, including qualified counsellors and psychotherapists and the general public. This event is open to all.  

Applications must be received by Thursday, 10th March 2022. 

Please note that by booking a ticket for this event, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions for CPD events, so please read through them carefully before making your purchase.

If you experience any problems please contact events@wpf.org.uk.

This event will be delivered via Zoom online.

If you are interested in WPF Therapy upcoming events, please check our Eventbrite page.

In psychoanalytic literature fashion appears again and again as something ambiguous, both good and evil; something that shares with the psychological symptom a structure of enjoyment and suffering, pleasure and pain, irritation and relief. On the one hand clothes can supposedly help you out with embodied life, conceal the bits you feel ashamed of and accentuate the bits you’re proud of. But then again, fashion isn’t really about clothes in any practical sense, but about the endless replacement of clothes by other clothes — and especially the vilification of certain styles and the elevation of others. Fashion is therefore a system that’s perfect for producing the kind of anxiety that keeps people captivated — you have to stay constantly attuned or risk committing a shameful faux pas.   

This talk will focus on the phenomenon of fashion, the clothing of psychoanalysts, and the kinds of behaviours around fashion you might come across in the consulting room. 

Lecturer

Anouchka Grose is a psychoanalyst and writer practising in London. She is a member of The Centre for Freudian Research, where she regularly lectures. She has written non-fiction: No More Silly Love Songs: a realist’s guide to romance (Portobello, 2010), Are you Considering Therapy (Karnac, 2011), From Anxiety to Zoolander: notes on psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2018), A Guide to Eco-Anxiety: how to protect the planet and your mental health (Watkins, 2020) as well as writing fiction: Ringing for You (Harper Collins, 1999) and Darling Daisy (Harper Collins, 2000). She also writes about art and fashion, and contributes to The Guardian, Radio 4, and Resonance FM. 

Target Audience:

This event should be interesting and accessible for anyone interested in the topic, including qualified counsellors and psychotherapists and the general public. This event is open to all.  

Applications must be received by Thursday, 12th May 2022. 

Please note that by booking a ticket for this event, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions for CPD events, so please read through them carefully before making your purchase.

If you experience any problems please contact events@wpf.org.uk.