Confer - continuing professional development, seminars and conferences for psychotherapists, counsellors and psychologists
INTIMACY
THE PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC CHALLENGE OF UNDERSTANDING AND WORKING WITH INTIMACY
A multi-disciplinary conference
Conference
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FULL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
FRIDAY 19 JUNE 2009
17.30 Registration, tea & bookstall
18.30 What is Intimacy?
Dr Susie Orbach
With instant intimacy being promulgated through mass media and the internet, how should we conceptualise and sustain intimacy? What are the implications for psychotherapy?

19.30 A Neural Love Code: The body's need to engage and bond
Dr Sue Carter and Dr Stephen Porgess
The Love Code provides a metaphor to explore the neural mechanisms underlying how and why we attach, bond, fall in love and seek out safe and trusted others in an all too often unsafe world. In this presentation Drs Carter and Porges will explore the body's need for intimate engagement and social bonding from an adaptive perspective. They will explain how specific features in our social environment trigger neurophysiological systems that enable us either to be fearful and disengage or to feel safe and enter enduring intimate relations.

21.00 Drinks reception
SATURDAY 20 JUNE 2009
09.00 Registration & coffee
09.30 The foundations of intimacy in infancy
Professor Colwyn Trevarthen
When we study babies and their mothers we observe the communication and subtle movements between them. These, when they are healthy, regulate a unique intersubjectivity which forms the basis of intimacy in adulthood. We will explore how this capacity is learned.

10.30 Coffee
11.00 Feeling Safe: A biobehavioral preamble to intimacy
Dr Stephen Porges
Our nervous system evolved to evaluate risk in the environment and to rapidly detect features in others of safety, danger, and life threat. Intimacy can occur only when defensive systems are dampened and the social engagement system is activated. This talk will discuss features of the social engagement system, how it involves neural pathways regulating the heart, facial expression, vocal intonation, and the extraction of human voice to determine safety in adult connections.

12.00 Oxytocin, Intimacy and Monogamy: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Dr Sue Carter
Oxytocin is an ancient neuropeptide hormone, previously best known for its role in birth and breastfeeding. Recent research reveals that oxytocin and the related molecule vasopressin regulate the novel traits of social monogamy, including pair bonding and parental care. This presentation will define “love and intimacy” from a scientific perspective, and discuss the causes and consequences of social bonds and related social behaviors, using evidence from humans and other monogamous mammals.

13.00 Lunch break - tea and coffee only will be served
14.15 Conference Symposium
How can we connect developmental, psychotherapeutic neuroscientific, social and psychological insights to develop our clinical work with intimacy issues?

15.00 Promiscuity, Aggression, Solitude and Psychosomatic Illness: Back Passages to the Experience of Intimacy
Professor Andrew Samuels
Unrelated sex and sexual experimentation; anger, competition and envy; pathological introversion and loneliness; and psychosomatic illness - these form the apparently unpromising backdrop for our engagement with the experience of intimacy. The point is to avoid a simplistic and moralistic triumph over these obstacles and work through them to see if solutions can found right where the problems are. Andrew will encourage the audience to reflect on their experiences in these areas, hoping, as did the alchemists, to discover 'gold in dark places'.

16.00 Tea
16.30 Intimacy – the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?
Susanna Abse
Both friendships and sexual couplings pose an ongoing problem for the individual - how to manage the ongoing core complex of the dialectic between intimacy and autonomy? The longing to be known and the drive for “complete security” is counterbalanced by the fear of intrusion and claustrophobic anxieties. Is the need for self actualisation the enemy of intimacy or the fertile soil in which true intimacy is generated? Using case material and visual imagery, Susanna Abse will explore what we really mean by intimacy and whether what is considered to be the “gold standard” of love relations is ever truly achievable?

17.30 End of conference
SPEAKERS' BIOGRAPHIES
CONFER'S SPRING/SUMMER 2009 BROCHURE
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