Spring 2017 has been a very busy time for us; here is a summary of our news.
Susie Orbach:
I very much enjoyed talking with the BACP (the largest organisation of therapists in the UK) at the Guildhall recently; 500 people in the room were joined by another 2000 on a closed webcast. After a paper, I was joined by the Chair, Andrew Reeves and the President, David Weaver, for a Q&A which worked very well with questions and comments coming in from the web as well as from the people in the concert hall.
I also participated in the Bowlby Conference, an important annual event at which scholars, researchers and psychotherapists came together to discuss the knotty clinical issue of an individual who is driven to repeat negative and damaging experiences, following severe emotional trauma. The talks were excellent and as usual, at this conference, I learnt a great deal.
I felt my age when I joined the BBC Radio 1 presenter, Gemma Cairney, the YouTube blogger, Estee Lalonde and many, many others when we spoke at Conway Hall in a joint venture with The Pool and 5 x15. Our topic was anxiety because so many young women between 25 and 35 can be plagued by it. It was both a painful, a funny and a frank evening which came the day before International Women’s Day and issues of mental health, pressures on young women and human rights were skilfully linked.
This month I am preparing the British Library Lecture for The Listening Project to celebrate – Radio 4’s treasure of 1000 conversations. It has been a delight to listen to some of them and they are now archived by the British Library and are available from their website while the shorter version is available from the BBC. All very fascinating. Take the plunge and listen to a few. They are so interesting.
Christopher Clulow
Chris Clulow presented to the Alumni members of Tavistock Relationships on ‘Interpreting Attachment’; contributed to a Confer conference on ‘Love Sickness’ with a paper on ‘Love, Narcissism and Sexual Fantasy’.
In Manchester, under the auspices of NScience, ran a day seminar for mental health practitioners on ‘Attachment and Intimacy’.
In Helsinki, ran a two day event for psychotherapists entitled ‘Attachment and Intimacy: Developing Love Relationships’.
Brett Kahr
In March 2017, Brett Kahr was appointed as Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University.
Brett has had the privilege – albeit a deeply sad one – of writing several obituary tributes for Dr. Alan Corbett (1963-2016), a much cherished colleague from the field of disability psychotherapy, which can be found in The Psychotherapist magazine, and, also, on the websites of Confer (www.confer.uk.com/blogs/blog-corbett.html) and Karnac Books (Hall of Fame) (www.karnacbooks.com/blog/post-alan-corbett/202), with a further obituary forthcoming from the British Journal of Psychotherapy. A great admirer of the work of Dr. Michael Balint, Alan Corbett taught Balintian theory to his students at the Guild of Psychotherapists.
Wearing his historian’s hat, Brett has also served as a consultant to the recent exhibition on “Attachment: Our Enduring Need for Others”, organised by Kate White of The Bowlby Centre and by Robert Greenwood of the Royal Society of Medicine (R.S.M.). The exhibition, housed at the R.S.M. headquarters on Wimpole Street in Central London, opened on 6th February,2017, and will run until 29th April, 2017 (https://www.rsm.ac.uk/library/exhibitions.aspx). Admission is free.
Finally, Brett contributed a video-lecture on “What Constitutes the Forensic State of Mind?” to the on-line lecture series “Forensic Psychotherapy: Pathologies and Treatment Strategies for Working with Violence”, organised by the psychotherapy continuing education provider Confer.
Amita Sehgal discussed a paper at the Second International Congress on Couple and Family Psychoanalysis held in Madrid, Spain, in February 2017. The meeting was co-sponsored by the International Psychotherapy Institute, The International Association of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, and the Spanish Federations of Psychotherapy Associations.
The conference drew psychotherapists working with couples and families from around the world, to think together and exchange ideas about the complex and creative field of interpretation in psychoanalysis.