Confer - continuing professional development, seminars and conferences for psychotherapists, counsellors and psychologists
ATTACHMENT THEORY IN PRACTICE
ATTACHMENT THEORY IN PRACTICE
Developing a therapeutic approach that reflects our understanding of attachment needs
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PROGRAMME
MONDAY EVENINGS 28 JAN - 22 APRIL 2013 - LONDON
28 January 2013
Anne Power
Using Attachment theory to Decipher Enactments in Supervision
Using Attachment Theory to explore break-down in the supervisory relationship, this presentation will examine the relevance of the theory to managing anxiety when revealing one's work and self in supervision. The paper will focus on the dismissing style of attachment and the challenge of working with avoidant defences. I will use clinical vignettes showing rupture and (sometimes) repair in the supervisory dyad.
 
11 February 2013
Jenny Riddell
What can attachment theory add to our understanding of the relationships in a clinical supervision of a therapist's case of couple therapy?
This presentation will explore the tensions between dyads and triads in and outside the consulting and therapy rooms within the framework of attachment theory. We will discuss our understanding of the difficulty of creating secure adult relationships on a foundation of insecure attachment experiences, which often includes the expectation of separation and loss, and an unfamiliarity with safety and intimacy. What may be happening in the spaces in between the participants in this clinical drama, and how might the therapist connect those dramas to the couple's attachment history, both theoretically and within the session? How may the internal working models be affecting the work, for all involved?
 
18 February 2013
Graham Music
The Good, the Bad and the Stressed
I look at some new findings which link attachment, clinical work and early developmental processes. We will see how the development of empathic, altruistic and prosocial capacities, and their opposite, anti-social tendencies, link with attachment styles and internal representations of relationships. I look at the kinds of changes often seen in these capacities in children and adults during clinical work. Some video-clips will be used to illustrate ideas, and reference will also be made to brain and evolutionary science.
 
25 February 2013
Dr Christopher Clulow
Attachment informed psychotherapy with couples
What, from an attachment perspective, distinguishes secure from insecure patterns of relating in couples? What might love look like? And where does sex come in? This seminar will revisit key attachment concepts and apply them to understanding adult couple relationships. It will consider therapeutic implications of applying an attachment framework to clinical practice with couples, especially in connection with regulating affect. Adopting a developmental approach, and using examples from film and clinical practice, it will explore the role played by mirroring processes in bringing about therapeutic change.
 
4 March 2013
Paul Renn
Attachment Theory, the Therapeutic Relationship and the Process of Change: An Integrationist Perspective
Research in the fields of developmental psychology, neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience are helping to deepen our understanding of the therapeutic relationship and the process of change. In my paper, I illuminate the way in which attachment theory and research can be integrated with data from related disciplines and applied to our clinical work. I argue that a key aspect of therapeutic action consists in the modification of implicit memories that motivate the procedures underpinning habitual ways of experiencing self with other. I illustrate this therapeutic process with a clinical vignette.
 
11 March 2013
Kate White
Separation, Loss and Reunion: A View from the Supervisory Relationship
How does an understanding of attachment theory illuminate the complex and intense feelings associated with separation and loss within the therapy relationship and how do our responses relate to our individual attachment patterns and states of mind which we inhabit as clinicians?

This presentation will reflect upon the supervisory relationship as an attachment relationship, exploring the dynamics of caregiving and care seeking that are inherent within it. How does a collaborative approach in supervision emerge to support empathic shifts in therapeutic attunement and the necessary challenge in facilitating mourning, recovery of meaning and the liberation of desire?
 
18 March 2013
Dr Anne Alvarez
Can methods in psychotherapy be related to issues of attachment? And is there something more?
I have previously suggested that types of psychotherapeutic intervention should be related to the level of disturbance in the patient. Here I shall speculate whether the type of disturbance in the patient can be related to attachment category. In trying to identify some elements in attachment security, I shall suggest that attempts to facilitate such security need to vary enormously and to depend on the state the patient is in at any given moment. I shall discuss the difference between feeling with and feeling on behalf of someone, and wonder whether there is `something more' beyond security?
 
8 April 2013
Dr Jeremy Holmes
Attachment, Exploration and the Therapeutic Imagination
A fundamental tenet of Attachment Theory is that attachment behaviour and exploration are mutually incompatible. Sensitivity to the client's attachment state of mind guides therapists moment-to-moment in how much to push for exploration, challenge and change, vis-a-vis containment and security. My clinical example is one of a suicidal 'patient' derived from George Eliot's 19th Century novel, Daniel Deronda. I will then widen the discussion to considering the role of the imagination in attachment theory, and its antithesis to current tick-box appraisals so enamoured of health service planners.
 
15 April 2013
Linda Cundy
Attachment and transference in the consulting room
We see traces of clients' attachment histories in the consulting room in their behaviour, defence mechanisms, attitude to boundaries and ways they attempt to make use of the therapist. This seminar will explore ways that the past is recreated in the present through the therapeutic relationship, focusing on concepts of insecure internal working models, transference and defences. I will propose broad 'aims' of psychotherapy informed by attachment theory, which can guide both the moment-by-moment interactions and the overall direction of the therapy.

Linda Cundy is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist whose work is informed by attachment and object relations theories. She has taught psychoanalytic theory and practice for many years and is an independent trainer specialising in aspects of attachment, human development, and the practice of psychotherapy. She has a private practice in north London and the West End, and is chair of a bereavement counselling service.
 
22 April 2013
Dr Amanda Jones
How working therapeutically with babies with emotionally ill parents can help us question and develop our theories
To help us cope with uncertainty it is understandable that we can, at times, hold on tightly to certain cherished theoretical beliefs that link us to colleagues and a perceived sense of safety. Attachment research and theory has an important strength: driven by rigorous observation and research, as a corpus of knowledge it continues to grow. This seminar will explore how working with emotionally ill parent-baby relationships, and participating in the turmoil of infantile trauma occurring in the here and now of treatment, can require us to stretch our minds and theoretical safety nets. One ever-present dilemma is how, when and why the psychotherapist may or may not use their body in intensive psychodynamic parent-baby treatment.
 
SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHIES
 
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