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 26th June 2020
In the Woods by Tana French 
Led by Rayna Denitsova

Friday 10th July 2020
Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty
Led by Jenny Riddell

There are opportunities to facilitate reading groups in the 2020/2021 programme, 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.

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.

This event is now fully booked

“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.

Venue:  The Unicorn Theatre

Timetable

The morning will consist of speaker presentations and discussion.  Followed by lunch.  In the afternoon there will be breakout mini workshops, a Zoom presentation by Irvin Yalom, and a plenary discussion of the day.

Speakers 

Juliet Rosenfeld will present a paper called “Death – how the worst of endings may be transformed; a therapeutic understanding of the critical difference between grief and mourning.”  She is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist working in private practice in North London and the author of The State Of Disbelief, (published February 2020). Juliet has a particular interest in how bereavement and terminal illness can be worked with therapeutically. Juliet is a Board Member and Trustee of the UKCP and Patron of Camden Psychotherapy Unit.

Irvin D. Yalom will present via Zoom.  He was born on June 13, 1931, in Washington, DC. He trained as a doctor and served in the army.  In 1962 he began working as an instructor at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, where he eventually advanced to professor of psychiatry in 1973. Yalom achieved professor emeritus status when he retired from Stanford in 1994.

Yalom began his literary career in 1970 with the publication of Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. Since its release, it has been used as a textbook throughout the world. Yalom has published many more books since, including textbooks, nonfiction, and fiction. Yalom’s 1989 bestseller, Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy, provided a less clinical and more human perspective on ten case histories. In 1992, Yalom published his first novel, When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession that won the Commonwealth Gold Medal. Many of Yalom’s fiction books incorporate themes from philosophy and psychotherapy.

As he reflects on the end of his career, in 2017 Yalom published his most recent book, Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir.  Of particular relevance to the WPF Conference is his book Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death published in 2008.

Yalom himself has said that this is likely to be one of his last speaking engagements.  Please do book early.

Workshop Leaders

Sasha Bates  Loss as a crucible for creativity  In the wake of the unexpected death of her husband, psychotherapist and journalist Sasha Bates turned to journaling to help process her devastating loss. This outpouring of unmediated pain eventually morphed into a book – Languages of Loss – and a 2 book publishing deal. Sasha also began teaching workshops helping others find creative outlets for their grief. In this session Sasha will talk about the intersection of loss, endings, creativity and new beginnings.

Sasha Bates is a psychotherapist, journalist and former documentary filmmaker. After eighteen years in the TV industry she left television behind and re-trained as an integrative psychotherapist at The Minster Centre. After stints working in the NHS and in higher education, she started up in private practice where she gained a reputation as an embodied therapist, earlier trainings in yoga teaching and in ‘trauma sensitive yoga’ having given her a good understanding of the mind body connection. She used this knowledge to write and teach CPD various workshops on the subjects of yoga, trauma and self-care.

Annie Power will lead a mini workshop on ‘When The Therapist Calls Time’  In a long career most therapists will need at some point to close down the work and send clients away. This might be for: Retirement, Sabbatical, Maternity break, Moving home, Illness.

An imposed ending is naturally challenging for clients and therapist. In this mini workshop we will reflect on the practical and emotional challenges for the therapist who is ending.

• How far in advance to plan an ending and what to say
• How to listen to our own ambivalence
• How to enable and work with the protest and grief which manifest differently in each client
• How to let go of our identity as a therapist.

The exact focus of our enquiry will depend on which aspects of an imposed ending are most relevant to the participants. There will be some input from Annie who has interviewed and written about therapists who have faced these challenges but the focus will be on reflective exercises and sharing.

Anne Power has qualifications from The Bowlby Centre, WPF Therapy, Tavistock Relationships and Relate. She has taught on supervision and therapy trainings at The Bowlby Centre, WPF and at Regents University London and has a private practice in central London for both couples and individuals.  Her book, Forced Endings in Psychotherapy, explores the process of closing a practice for retirement or other reasons. Her published papers explore attachment meaning in the consulting room and in the supervision relationship. She is currently researching and writing about logic versus magic in partner choice: random romance, arranged marriage, and dating sites – what’s the difference?

Please note that the venue is The Unicorn Theatre.  Lunch and refreshments will be provided.