This unique reading group is now entering its 15th year and has gone from strength to strength. We are delighted to be able to offer an opportunity to explore, examine and enjoy the books below. Our presenters have been stimulating and challenging, and have introduced us to new delights or opened up fresh vistas onto pre-loved favourites.

Although many participants have been trainees and practising counsellors or psychotherapists, everyone is welcome to attend. If you are thinking of attending for the first time or have enjoyed one of the previous sessions, why not tell a friend and encourage them to come along too. Please read the book before attending.

All are welcome to attend this event. Refreshments provided.

Friday 18th October  2019
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Led by Stephen Crawford

Friday 17th January 2020
Exposure by Helen Dunmore
Led by Pat MacDonald

Friday 28th February 2020
A Good Enough Mother by Bev Thomas
Led by Jan McHugh
We are delighted that Bev Thomas will be joining us for this group. She is looking forward to taking part in the discussion of her book, as well as answering any questions. 

Bev Thomas was a clinical psychologist in the NHS for many years. She currently works as an organisational consultant in mental health and other services. ‘A Good Enough Mother’ is her debut novel.

Friday 3rd April 2020
Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty
Led by Jenny Riddell

Friday 15th May 2020
In the Woods by Tana French 
Led by Rayna Denitsova

The remainder of the programme will be published shortly.

There are still opportunities to facilitate reading groups, so please e-mail events@wpf.org.uk if you are interested.

This study group has been lively and successful in previous years and is generally fully subscribed.

Did you study Kleinian theory on your training? Maybe you would like the opportunity to explore it in more depth now that you have more clinical experience.  Theory only really comes alive when we can connect with it from our clinical practice. Maybe you did not cover Klein during your training and would like to know more about her work and how it might help you in your practice.

This study group sets out to explore 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. The course is designed to work at different levels, offering food for thought to those unfamiliar with Kleinian thinking as well as those who wish to deepen and enrich their understanding and use of psychoanalytic concepts.

Melanie Klein and those influenced by her have formed a central strand in British psychoanalytic and psychodynamic thinking since the Second World War. 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 understanding.

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: participants have found a space to share impressions, responses, puzzlement, connections and insights, including reflections 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; there are suggestions of secondary sources that discuss and summarise the main readings and of further relevant material.

If you attend these study groups, you can expect:

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 session reading will be sent on booking.

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).

These sessions will be of interest to practicing counsellors/psychotherapists and trainees engaged in clinical work. There will be a focus on working with the ideas and issues clinically. Priority will be given to participants who can attend all 10 sessions.

If you experience any problems during the application process then please call or e-mail Training Administration on 020 7378 2050/events@wpf.org.uk in order to be sent an application form.

FULLY BOOKED Illustrated through the lens of Jewish jokes as well as attachment, neurobiology and psychoanalysis, this talk will elucidate some of the ways in which we understand guilt and shame, the differences between them, and how these differences have important clinical implications. The talk will unpack shame and guilt’s confused and overlapping meanings, and how they manifest in cases where there have been forms of trauma, stress and anxiety. A departure in this talk will be the use of humour, and in particular Jewish jokes, to illustrate some of the subtler conceptual nuances, and how the roots of such jokes lies in a history of trauma. The place of humour in helping to understand and manage trauma will be an underlying additional theme, hopefully bringing in a light touch to a serious topic.

Participants should leave with a sense of how guilt and shame chow and why an both have powerfully negative effects but also how some variants of each can be a force for health and growth. Participants should go away with more confidence about how to make sense of these issues clinically, especially with complex patients,  and also be challenged to think of these mechanisms relate to ourselves, and with luck will also go home with a few things to smile about.

Speaker
Graham Music (PHD) is Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist at the Tavistock and Portman Clinics and an adult psychotherapist in private practice. His publications include Nurturing Children: From Trauma to Growth using Attachment Theory, Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology (2019), Nurturing Natures: Attachment and children’s emotional, sociocultural and brain development (2016, 2010), Affect and Emotion (2001), and The Good Life: Wellbeing and the new science of altruism, selfishness and immorality (2014). He has a particular interest in exploring the interface between developmental findings and clinical work. Formerly Associate Clinical Director of the Tavistock’s child and family department, he has managed a range of services working with the aftermath of child maltreatment and neglect, and organised many community based psychotherapy services. He currently works clinically with forensic cases at The Portman Clinic. He teaches, lectures and supervises in Britain and abroad.

Applications must be received by Thursday, 15th January 2020. Booking will be final after receipt of payment.

If you experience any problems during the application process then please call or e-mail Training Administration on 020 7378 2050/events@wpf.org.uk in order to be sent an application form.

Attendees of this lecture may also be interested in attending Beyond Psychoanalysis: The place of religious language with David Black.

This talk will focus on the meaning and purpose of the erotic transference in psychotherapy, the boundary issues raised when working with the terminally ill, and the reason for abstinence when dealing with intense transference – countertransference dynamics.

The first part of the talk will be a case presentation and lecture. This is a story of love and death mediated in psychotherapy.  When a patient in psychotherapy is confronted with a life-threatening illness the therapeutic relationship inevitably intensifies. The work becomes time limited but the end date is uncertain.  Boundaries of the analytic frame may come under extreme pressure especially when an erotic transference –countertransference dynamic emerges. A series of dreams reveals how, as analysis deepens, the pace of individuation quickens.  Theoretical and clinical material will give the background to what is hoped will be a lively discussion.

All counsellors and psychotherapists, both qualified and in training, will find this a valuable day where they will have the space and the expert guidance to:

• think more about working with the dying in psychotherapy
• think about the challenges and implications of working with erotic transference and dreams
• explore the countertransference issues faced in both these situations.

Lecturer
Professor Joy Schaverien PhD is a Training Analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology (London) with a private analytic and supervisory practice in the East Midlands. She is Visiting Professor for the Northern Programme for Art Psychotherapy and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Analytical Psychology.  She has published extensively on topics related to art and analytical psychology and her recent books include: The Dying Patient in Psychotherapy  (which is soon to be republished by Routledge) and Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged” Child, (June 2015) which was a Routledge and Amazon bestseller.

Target Audience
This workshop is open to qualified and training psychotherapists and counsellors. The theoretical orientation of the workshop will be psychodynamic but practitioners of other modalities are welcome to attend.

Applications must be received by Thursday, 5^th March 2020. Booking will be final after receipt of payment.

If you experience any problems during the application process then please call or e-mail Training Administration on 020 7378 2050/events@wpf.org.uk in order to be sent an application form.

The inner world of a human being develops as it comes to be recognised.  The process is necessarily circular.  “We are creatures who, for our very existence, depend on concepts that depend on us,” as Jonathan Lear says in his book Wisdom Won from Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Harvard University Press 2017).  It matters greatly, therefore, what concepts we encounter, and how those concepts are regarded.  And our encounter with them depends in turn on language and how language is used in the cultural world, perhaps even the “silo”, in which we find ourselves.  Using examples from the history of Buddhism and Christianity I shall argue that religions offer linguistic resources that can’t be substituted by a scientific psychology, however careful.

Lecturer
David M. Black is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society who has published widely on psychoanalytic, ethical and religious issues. He edited Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century (Routledge New Library of Psychoanalysis 2006) and is author of Why Things Matter (Routledge 2011). His initial psychotherapy training was at WPF, of which he wrote an early history, A Place for Exploration (WPF, 1991).

Applications must be received by Thursday, 13th March 2020. Booking will be final after receipt of payment.

If you experience any problems during the application process then please call or e-mail Training Administration on 020 7378 2050/events@wpf.org.uk in order to be sent an application form.

In later life – do attachment principles still apply.  Drawing on clinical, observational and personal experience, Jeremy will explore the psychodynamic ’tasks’  of the second half of life.

During this talk, Jeremy will touch on:

1. the ‘reverse Oedipus’ and the challenge of letting go
2. the evolutionary role of grandparents (literal and metaphorical) as culture-bearers
3. what attachment research tells us about old age, adaptive and maladaptive
4. Dante and Jung’s map of pathways to graceful endings.

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, (2^nd 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.

We all need certainty to live our daily lives but anyone who seeks psychotherapy is suffering from  convictions which may be unfounded or untrue.  In her talk, Lesley will consider the role of conviction and being right for both patients and therapists.

Lesley Murdin practises as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She teaches and supervises in many contexts and has considerable experience in running psychotherapy organisations. She has worked for the registering bodies UKCP and BPC, chairing committees over many years. She was CEO and National Director of WPF Therapy. She has published numerous books and papers including How Much is Enough? Endings in Psychotherapy and Counselling (2000) Setting Out: The Importance of the Beginning in Psychotherapy and Counselling (2005), Understanding Transference: The Power of Patterns in the Therapeutic Relationship (2009) How Money Talks (2012). Lesley’s latest book, Managing Difficult Endings in Psychotherapy It’s Time (2019) is about the difficulty of endings, but it is also about learning from the endings that we know have gone wrong as well as those that have worked well. It sets out how the psychological therapist can help a person to live well while life is available, and to face the endings that confront all of us with  a need for honesty, and the acceptance of our human fragility. Therapists suffer through the fears and failures of the people they see as well as through their own endings. These difficulties can either help each one to be more understanding and helpful, or can lead to disaster. This book is about making sure that we use experience as well as theory constructively.

“If we think about it, and often we don’t, almost everything we take into the consulting room is in the area of preconception. Throughout our training we have been learning to understand the minds of others in terms of what has been understood before. But the more we rely upon the thinking of others the more that may get in the way of our understanding the individual minds of those who come to us for help. I shall therefore focus upon what I regard as the “analytics space”, a space set aside for each patient. And I will focus on those ways in which we can monitor the analytic space, in order to notice how and when we are putting something into this which may not have to do with the patient we are then concerned with.”

Patrick Casement is a retired fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He worked as a psychoanalyst for more than forty years, and has written several books and numerous papers on clinical technique. Most prominent among these is On Learning from the Patient, which, since its publication over thirty years ago, has been translated into many languages and used across the world by professionals, both in psychoanalysis and related fields.

From the beginning of his psychoanalytic training, and throughout his subsequent career, Casement was opposed to relying too heavily on particular theories in the consulting room. Instead, his clinical approach was to use whatever made sense with a particular patient in a particular moment; he was not concerned with where a theoretical or technical tool originated – from which thinker or school it emerged – as long as it was useful and true to the work he was doing with that patient. His experience in social work also instilled in him a certain pragmatism, which he retained throughout his analytic career. With regards to the analyst’s role, he returned often to Winnicott’s metaphor of the spatula, which can be shoved down people’s throats, or used playfully, experimentally and expressively. In the same way, he believes that an analyst should not impose theories on a patient, rather that he or she should allow him- or herself to be psychologically explored and played with by the patient.

During this talk Stephen will use musical illustrations from the 10th to the 20th century, to show how music as well as language is able to express the unconscious mind. With both of language and mind functioning as modes of communication mediating between the material of the unconscious and the listener.

A major focus will be on the fact that Sigmund Freud’s attitude to music tells us as much about the personal psychology of the man, as it does about the character of music itself. We shall see how Freud’s general mistrust and actual hostility to most music, with the exception  of a couple of 19th century operas, was founded on two differing anxieties. The first being its power to penetrate to, and then activate, the  dark forces and phantasies of the personal unconscious against which Freud was personally so resolutely defended. The other being that three of the major thinkers of the 19th century; the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, the former especially, and composer Richard Wagner all wrote significantly about music. In doing so they expressed ideas which could be understood as anticipating Freud’s own ideas about the unconscious and even psychoanalysis itself. Freud’s immense narcissism could not tolerate such possibilities.

With regard to the power of music we shall consider the degree to which the personal psychological life especially that of the unconscious is expressed in the music itself; as well as perhaps a collective unconscious and how that musical communication may be experienced by the listener. The combination of words with music will also be addressed.

Participants will leave this presentation, not only with some new insights into Freud himself as a result of his complex relationship to music, but also able to consider more fully the role that modes of art forms,  particularly music, may have in expressing and communicating unconscious material. In addition, how for the listener, music might be seen as being as much of a mediator between the unconscious and the conscious mind as language itself.

Target Audience
This course is open to qualified and training psychotherapists and counsellors. The theoretical orientation of the workshop will be psychodynamic but practitioners of other modalities are welcome to attend.

All participants completing the workshop will receive a Certificate of Attendance for their Continuing Professional Development portfolio.

Speaker
Stephen Gross is a psychodynamic psychotherapist in private practice who qualified at the BAP in 1986. For over 30 years he has been working at WPF Therapy principally as supervisor and tutor. For the last 15 years has been facilitating the Ontology seminars.  His play Freud’s Night Visitors was performed at The Freud Museum in 2012 and at WPF Therapy. IN 2018 his book Living in Language: Poetry and Prose was launched at WPF Therapy. He is particularly interested in the relationship between language and music.

Applications must be received by Thursday,11th June 2020. Booking will be final after receipt of payment.

If you experience any problems during the application process then please call or e-mail Training Administration on 020 7378 2050/events@wpf.org.uk in order to be sent an application form.