Join WPF Therapy ‘Meet the Author’ monthly events for a time of reflection and conversation. This programme will be delivered online via Zoom. What’s really special is that the authors will join us live, read from their books and take part in our discussion.

Anyone with a love of reading, an interest in considering psychoanalytic perspectives in books and lively discussion is very welcome to come along. We ask only that you read the book before attending.

All are welcome to attend this event.

Friday 26th November 2021  7-8.30pm A Grief Companion and Languages of Loss by Sasha Bates

Led by Sasha Bates

We are delighted that the author Sasha Bates will host this reading group.

Sasha Bates, MA, MBACP, is an integrative psychotherapist, yoga teacher and author.

Her first book “Languages of Loss: a psychotherapist’s journey through grief” was published in April 2020. In it, she describes her experience of losing her husband from two perspectives – that of a confused, grieving widow, and that of a psychotherapist truly understanding for the first time what psychotherapeutic theory can offer the bereaved. She explores the usefulness, and otherwise, of some of the grief theories, and looks more broadly at different approaches – psychodynamic, body, transpersonal, attachment and more – investigating how each may be useful when working with one’s own and a client’s grief.

Her latest book “A Grief Companion” was published in June 2021 and was, largely, a response to the many requests she received for a more practical ‘guidebook’ or ‘manual’ that could help people through the early months of grieving. With more people than ever before encountering loss due to the Covid pandemic, A Grief Companion offers reflections and suggestions on how mind, body and spirit can affect, and be affected by, loss of all kinds.

Please book your ticket for the October Reading Group via Eventbrite here

Friday 28th January 2022,  7-8.30pm Attachment, Relationships and Food: From Cradle to Kitchen edited by Linda Cundy

Led by Linda Cundy

We are delighted that the editor Linda Cundy will host this reading group.

Book title: Attachment Relationships and Food: From Cradle to Kitchen edited by Linda Cundy

Where there is food, there is attachment. This book explores relationships with other people, with oneself, and between client and therapist through our connection with food. We comfort, nurture, numb, neglect or attack ourselves through what we consume; food metaphors spice up a therapy session or, more concretely, clients may bring breakfast or edible gifts into the consulting room. Preparing meals and sharing them are therapeutic activities in themselves, helping to bring together couples, groups, and communities. The aim of this book is twofold: to examine the nature of attachment through narratives of feeding, and to enrich psychotherapy practice by encouraging exploration of clients’ food-related memories and associations. Like individual courses of a feast, every chapter has its own distinct flavour, but each author addresses the complex connection between what we eat and how we relate from an attachment perspective.

Please book your ticket for the January Reading Group via Eventbrite here.

Friday 25th March 2022,  7-8.30pm ALL THAT WE ARE: Uncovering the hidden truths behind our behaviour at work by Gabriella Braun

Led by Gabriella Braun

We are delighted that the author Gabriella Braun will host this reading group.

Book title: ALL THAT WE ARE: Uncovering the hidden truths behind our behaviour at work by Gabriella Braun

This book will come out from Piatkus, Little Brown, on 3 February 2022. Please note you do not need to read the book before attending this event.

Who do you bring with you to work?

Try as we might, we cannot leave part of ourselves under the pillow with our pyjamas when we go to work. We bring all that we are.

In this collection of stories, Gabriella Braun shares insights from over twenty years of taking psychoanalysis out of the therapy room and into the staff room. She shows us why a board loses the plot, nearly causes their company to collapse, and how they come through. We see the connection between a headteacher’s professional and personal loss. We understand seemingly unfathomable behaviour – why a man lets his organisation push him around, a lawyer becomes paranoid, a team repeatedly creates scapegoats and founders of a literary agency feud.

At a time when we are re-thinking the workplace, All That We Are shows that by taking human nature seriously, we can build more humane organisations where people and their work can thrive.

At this event Gabriella will talk about why she wrote the book and went to a mainstream, rather than academic publisher. She give a reading and there’ll be plenty of time for questions and discussion.

Please book your ticket for the March Reading Group via Eventbrite here.

Before booking please read our Terms and Conditions for CPD events here.

There are opportunities to facilitate reading groups in the 2021/2022 programme, so please e-mail events@wpf.org.uk if you are interested.

This lecture will be delivered via Zoom and will not be recorded due to the confidential nature of the clinical material.

The Unconscious is the fundamental and foundational concept of psychoanalysis – but how are we to listen out for it today? Does it have meaning or utility for talking therapists beyond the imprecise metaphors often employed to describe it? This talk charts the genesis of the concept of the unconscious from Freud to Lacan – a theoretical leap that illuminates much of 20th century thought. 

How does the therapist/analyst negotiate the difficult melding of theory and practice that is the reality of the clinic? What conceptual tools can help us to listen out for what is singular in a client’s speech while resisting the defensive compulsion to impose our own understanding onto what is said?  

The talk will be an introduction to theory often viewed as ‘notoriously difficult’. No doubt there is some truth in this characterisation – however, it does not have to be like that. Lacanian structural diagnostics and the famous theory of the ‘unconscious structured like a language’ are ideas that can be made clear and accessible, and be of tremendous value to anyone with an interest in talking therapies.   

The talk will make use of examples drawn from the speaker’s clinical practice, showing how classical psychoanalysis plays out in the present day.  

Lecture Aims
What can you expect at the end of the event: 

1. An overview of Freud’s development of the concept of the Unconscious – with useful clinical examples from contemporary clinic.
2. A summary of the ‘linguistic turn’ – a look at how structural linguistics revolutionised continental philosophy and psychoanalytic metapsychology  
3. An introduction to the Lacanian Unconscious – paying attention to the glitches and discontinuities in speech – with contemporary clinical examples. 
4. Neurosis and Psychosis – a useful overview of the differential clinic.

Outline
This will be a talk that charts the development of the unconscious from Freud’s thought at the beginning of the 20th century through to Lacan’s ‘high structuralist’ phase of the 1950s, asking how can we use these startling intellectual innovations today. The speaker will use PowerPoint presentation, examples from clinical practice and create time and space for discussion and comment.

Conor McCormack is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. He works in Bristol in private practice and has extensive experience working as a psychotherapist in the NHS. Conor is also a director and writer known for his powerful, socially engaged filmmaking, including the BIFA nominated documentary Christmas with Dad and the acclaimed voice-hearing documentary In the Real.   https://parkstreetanalysis.co.uk/

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.   

Comments from previous participants:

• “Conor McCormack is one one the best speakers I would love to listen to again. “
• “Conor McCormack offers important insight into the history of Psychotherapy’s understanding of the Unconscious and shines a helpful light on the dynamic movement between theory and practice.”
• “Conor McCormack makes difficult material accessible and able to be related to clinical experience.”

Applications must be received by Thursday, 17th February 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.

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

This event will be delivered via Zoom.

‘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. 

Chair
Judith Chamberlain is a psychodynamic psychotherapist in private practice and clinical supervisor at Centre70 in South London, which is an organisation supporting adults with social, mental, financial and other difficulties. Judith is a seminar leader and Training Development Tutor at WPF Therapy and is a member of BPC, UKCP and FPC.

Within these roles, Judith has particular interests in perinatal psychotherapy, forensic setting psychotherapy and working with people who are neurodiverse (ADD/ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, OCD).

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.

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

This event will be delivered via Zoom.

During this online 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 language and music 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.

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.

Chair
Kate Trench is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and music lover.

Applications must be received by Thursday,31st 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.

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

This event will be delivered via Zoom.

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. 

Chair
Patsy Fauré is a psychodynamic Couples and Relationships Counsellor, Trainer and Clinical Supervisor. 

She teaches and runs workshops from Foundation through to Masters level, at two leading psychotherapeutic training organisations in London, with a focus on family perspectives and couple theory.  She also supervises groups in different clinical settings which include therapists who work with couples, languages, and art therapists.  She believes that training and supervision are important creative spaces for clinicians to hone their skills as well as being challenged and developed professionally. 

She has a thriving private practice where she works with individuals and couples with relationship issues, from diverse backgrounds, economically and culturally. Patsy is a member of the British Association of Psychodynamic Psychoanalytic Supervisors. Patsy previously worked in Human Resources departments within large international organisations. 

Home

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.

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

This event will be delivered via Zoom.

• What is the connection between childhood play and aspects of creativity in later life, and how does the capacity to play enable a greater sense of feeling creative in the world? 
•  What insights can psychoanalysis bring to understanding play and creativity, and how can these be applied at individual, group and institutional levels of the uses of technology in the digital age? 
•  How can psychoanalytic insights bring greater understanding to people’s ordinary and everyday uses of digital technologies, including social media? How is it possible to think of the uses of such technologies in terms of play? 

By attending this lecture you can gain:

1. An understanding of various approaches to theorising play and creativity within the psychoanalytic field.
2. Further insight into the emergence of child-centred approaches with a special focus on the work of Melanie Klein and Donald Woods Winnicott.
3. An introduction of how play in infancy builds a sense of creativity and ability to live a creative life, as well as the various impacts that this has upon cultural life.
4. An understanding of how insights relating to play can be applied more broadly to the use of media particularly in digital and online contexts, including aspects of visual social media. 

Outline

The session will be delivered as an interactive lecture with plenty of time given for reflection on contemporary culture, personal life and practice.   It will begin with a brief introduction to the various contributions to understanding play and creativity that have been made by key psychoanalytic thinkers.  Lots of contemporary examples of media use, ranging across the more personal to larger institutional cases will be used to generate relatable discussion.  

Finally, the session will provide space for reflection on some of the less formal ways in which encounters with play and its absences present themselves within everyday life, and potentially also come to light in the clinical context.   

Lecturer

Dr Karen Cross is a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton. She researches on topics ranging across digital culture and social media and is author of the book Toy Story and the Inner World of the Child: Animation, play and creative life (forthcoming in the Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture series at Routledge). She is also a founding scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council. 

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, 16th June 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.

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

This workshop will be delivered via Zoom and will not be recorded due to the confidential nature of the clinical material.

• Do you want to learn useful approaches to work with cases of psychosis? 

• In what ways does it benefit us to understand the fundamental concepts of Lacanian theory? 

• What does Lacan have to tell us about the Big Other? And how can this abstraction be of help in clinical work? 

Psychosis – to what use can we put this weighty signifier? Lacanian analysis starts by binning the notion of psychosis as disorder or illness, reframing it as a commonplace subjective position in language. This talk explores how analytic treatment can offer a way beyond the deadlock of medication and risk management that defines current mental health services.  

Rather than working through a checklist of symptoms and behaviours leading to generalised forms of treatment, the Lacanian clinician listens out for an analysand’s singular relation with language, law and lack – thereby discerning what might be helpful and safe in the analytic work.  

Aims
This lecture will give you: 

1. An overview of the Lacanian metapsychology of psychosis. 
2. An understanding of what is a diagnosis and how does a clinician work towards making one?  
3. Development of approaches to working psychoanalytically with psychosis.

Outline
This will be a talk about clinical work with people with psychotic structures. As often as not psychosis is a low-key thing, discerned through attentive listening over time. But what does one listen out for?  And how does an idea of diagnosis determine the direction of the treatment? The speaker will use a visual presentation and clinical examples to elaborate on a Lacanian approach to working with psychosis.

Lecturer
Conor McCormack is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. He works in Bristol in private practice and has extensive experience working as a psychotherapist in the NHS. Conor is also a director and writer known for his powerful, socially engaged filmmaking, including the BIFA nominated documentary Christmas with Dad and the acclaimed voice-hearing documentary In the Real.

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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 this event you agree to keep all discussions confidential.   

Applications must be received by Thursday, 23rd June 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.

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

This event will be delivered via Zoom.

• How can we take the climate crisis seriously without succumbing to depression, anxiety and pre-emptive grief?  
• How can we best respond to our analysands’ climate-related suffering? 

Treatments for ‘eco-anxiety’ tend to follow a loose pattern that goes something like, ‘meditate, talk to your friends and get involved in activism’. While these are all perfectly good ideas they can sometimes seem merely to skim the surface of the psychic pain caused by species loss, global heating, and the threat of societal breakdown — not to mention the idea that our planet is no longer a viable habitat for new life.  

This talk will discuss the ways in which the climate crisis may affect our mental health, as well as offering some alternative thinking around how we might be able work with and respond to ‘eco-anxiety’ in our practice, taking ideas from eco-psychoanalysis in order to propose a kind of ‘psychoactivism’.  

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, 1st September 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.

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

This event will be delivered via Zoom.

• 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, 17th November 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.

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