The birth of a baby is an irreversible event and one which can precipitate an emotional breakdown in parents. A growing body of psychoanalytic literature and developmental psychology research suggests that how a mother or father sees their baby is profoundly influenced by unconscious projective processes. When a parent suffers an emotional breakdown after a baby is born it is often due to their new baby becoming confused with significant figures from the parent's past, or disowned aspects of the parent. Although the parent looks at their baby, they often feel in the presence of someone else. Using clinical examples, this seminar will explore what this can mean for a baby's emerging sense of self and consider a way of intervening early to prevent parental pathology becoming part of a baby's personality structure.

This seminar will discuss the development of the self and the capacity for mentalization, drawing on the latest research in both the conceptual and empirical literature. In particular, we will look at the links between attachment and mentalization and discuss a range of deficits in the capacity to mentalize and their implications for development. The presentation will also touch briefly on the clinical implications of taking a mentalizing perspective in work with both children and adults.

Over the last fifty years, bodily symptoms - eating problems, self harm and bodily transformations of all kinds - have led to a reconsideration of the development of a body self and new theory to understand the body, as a body, not simply as a vehicle or stimulator of affects. The body, I will demonstrate, is made in relationship. The apprehension of a body is no less complex than out notions of how we get a mind. I will draw on body countertransference to theorise a new intersubjective conception of the body.

All human selves are false selves, constructed out of the available cultural and familial roles, words, and images. This being the case, there are varying degrees of health and pathology, freedom and constriction that are possible for the human subject. Narcissistic prisons, often perceived as matters of personal arrogance, are commonly an enslavement by the image (of the child) in the mother's mind. Such pathology and developmental derailment may be exacerbated by a failure of oedipal triangulation and an exclusion of the paternal dimension. A sensitive and empathic unravelling of this situation, in a therapeutic context, can often free the individual to embrace a new authenticity. The work of Kohut is crucial to understanding these problems and their healing.

Roberto Assagioli developed a valuable tool for understanding and working with the multiplicity of the self. The idea of the 'subpersonality', which is an essential building block in psychosynthesis, has often been misunderstood as implying we have fixed and reified parts of ourselves. But this is a simplistic and dated representation of a powerful and subtle dynamic model. In this presentation we will look at subpersonality theory and practice from the multiple perspectives of the postmodern world and the complexity of psychological and social experience. We will also be looking at how the model is likely to be taught as we progress through the 21st century.

Psychoanalytic and Attachment-based theories offer conflicting views on the nature of symbiosis, and whether or not it forms part of healthy development. Regardless of such debates, relational fusion or merger can manifest in various ways such as severe dependency and 'attachment hunger' or withdrawal into the self when relational experiences feel terrifyingly engulfing. Developing healthy experiences of connectedness and separateness, and appropriate boundaries, can be particularly challenging for clients who have experienced severe difficulties with bonding and attachment in early life. By their very nature, symbiotic self states are resistant to change and the client is pulled to re-enact their particular symbiotic patterns. How do we manage the problematic counter- transference responses and avoid the pitfalls of re-enactment, such as becoming 'co - dependent' with the client?

Samuel Myers, writing in 1940, described an acute form of trauma-induced dissociation that he observed in traumatised war veterans. These patients experienced dramatic alterations in the personality, which, when they returned to their apparently normal state of self, were felt to be dream-like intrusions from distressing past experiences. Dissociation like this can be understood as an extreme survival mechanism (generally in childhood) that not only allows life to continue in an apparent normal way but, by storing the emotional experiences in a fragmented form, leaves the potential for the hope of a future more complete sense of self. In this presentation I will be looking at different levels of such separation of identity from PTSD to DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) following a structural model and then examining the stages in therapeutic intervention.

Jung's idea of the Self as both 'centre and circumference' of psyche was also central to and containing of his psychological theory. But how do we understand this? Is the Self pre-existent or emergent? Is it goal or process - or both? Does it exist at all, or is it simply a remnant of the Protestant monotheism in which Jung himself was reared? This talk sets some current debates in the context of individual experience of a psychological energy that comes from beyond ego awareness and transforms its understandings.

In this presentation I will explore the role of mirror neurons and motor intentionality in the development of self-agency. I will suggest that self-agency follows a developmental trajectory, from its foundation in bodily action to its mature expression in mentalization. Some researchers draw on mirror neuron research to suggest that abstract thought and imagination are forms of simulated action, and that the same sensory-motor circuits that control action also control imagination, concept formation and understanding. I will offer some ideas about the implications of these issues of self-agency for our clinical work with patients whose sense of self-agency depends on action rather than reflection.

PDF brochure of full programme.