This event is presented by Confer in association with The Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists.

The conference will be chaired by Christopher Clulow, Vice Chair of the Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists, and Jane Ryan, Director of Confer.

We live in very fast times, attempting to digest vast quantities of information and to push ourselves ever harder and faster to assuage our anxieties about safety and status. Mostly, we subscribe to a 'time = money' equation that runs through each aspect of our lives; in western society we relate to time as a scarce resource.

Psychoanalytical psychotherapies belong in the tradition of 'taking time', and sit uneasily with today's search for time-limited, affordable brief solutions to problems. But why is time so important here? Is it because the brain works slowly when creating fresh narratives and new patterns of experience (energetic therapies such as EMDR suggest the opposite) or is it because psychotherapy is contingent upon a depth of relationship? Does that depth in itself require countless interactions and repeated, subtle interventions that result in emergence of new psychological structures?

At this conference we shall ask: What happens at a brain/neuronal level that underpins change? Is change an emergent property, or can it be sudden and transformational? What has the most lasting effect? What does the research indicate?

We will also explore how these dilemmas manifest in the psychotherapeutic process and in the timing of interventions, the points of departure and arrival, beginnings and endings that may be part of each relationship, and ask: what is psychotherapeutic time and space in the service of? Answers might include: being, relating, spaciousness, freedom to discover - process.

The Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists exists to promote the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with couples. It provides a professional home for clinical graduates of the UKCP validated training in couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy provided by the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships. The Society provides education about and training for couple psychotherapists, as well as a couple psychotherapy service, and its members are delighted to be working with Confer in co-sponsoring this day conference.