Continuing Professional Development
We provide a variety of professional development opportunities. Some of these are available only to our members whilst others are available to other qualified psychotherapists and counsellors and we are committed to developing training provision aimed at giving an attachment orientation to other professionals.
Open Days
Psychotherapy Training Open Days
The Open Day provides an opportunity to meet staff from the Bowlby Centre to find out more about our approach and the details of our training programme. The event is a facilitated workshop, with an overview of the curriculum, a clinical vignette and a discussion about our approach and the theoretical influences that have informed our work. It is also an opportunity to meet some of those who may be training alongside you, should you decide to join us.
There is a charge of £30 for attendance via Zoom. Please note that Zoom is free to download and the facilitator will send you a link to join the Open Day. All papers will be emailed to you beforehand.
Dates:
TBC
Clinical Forums
How It Feels To Be You? Objects, Play and Child Psychotherap
Saturday, 9th October 2021, 11am to 1pm, Via Video Link
Cost: £30 (Bowlby Centre members and students – free)
Presenter: Tamsin Cottis
Synopsis: In this Clinical Forum Tamsin will open a window into what happens in the therapy room between therapist and child in Integrative Child Psychotherapy. Tamsin will show how the power of a therapeutic relationship founded on empathy, respect, creativity, objects and play –can support children who are facing a range of emotional difficulties to build more positive relationships with themselves and others.
The theoretical underpinnings of Integrative Child Psychotherapy will be outlined. These include Attachment Theory, Developmental Trauma, Object Relations and working in the Transference. Connections between child and adult psychotherapy will be made and issues of Safeguarding, confidentiality and working alongside other key people in the child’s life will be considered.
We will also reflect on how our complex, diverse, unequal and often stressful society can informa child’s developing sense of self, and impact on their capacity to form reciprocal positiverelationships throughout their lives.
There will interactivity and plenty of opportunity for questions and discussion.You can watch a short film introducing Tamsin’s book here
About the speaker: Tamsin Cottisis a UKCP registered Child Psychotherapist. She is a co-founder and former Assistant Director of Respond, the UK’s leading provider of psychotherapy to children and adults with learning disabilities. Formerly a teacher at the Bowlby Centre, she currently works as a Child Psychotherapist and Clinical Supervisor in London primary schools and in private practice. Tamsin is a founder member of the Institute of Psychotherapy and Disability and a member of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy. She has presented her work to a range of national and international audiences and has written widely for books and professional journals. Her most recent publication is ‘How it Feels to be You; Objects, Play and Child Psychotherapy’(Karnac 2021).Tamsin is also a published poet and author of short stories.
Online Talk
“I HOPE YOU DIE …. AND I HOPE IT’S SOON” THE HORRORS OF INFANTICIDAL ATTACHMENT
A Special Talk in Honour of our Founder, John Southgate
This presentation will be chaired by Tori Settle, CEO of the Bowlby Centre
Saturday, 23 October 2021 , 11 am to 1pm
ABOUT THE TALK
Do some parents really hope that their babies will die?
In this chilling, but vital presentation, Professor Brett Kahr, a long-standing Consultant in Psychology to The Bowlby Centre, will explore why certain parents harbour either fleeting or sustained murderous wishes (often of an unconscious nature) towards their daughters and their sons. Kahr has defined these secret death wishes as the building blocks of the “infanticidal attachment”, a type of relationship between parent and child which often results in severe madness or criminality.
Drawing upon many decades of work with psychotic and forensic patients, Professor Kahr will investigate the origins of the infanticidal impulse and how these hateful parental feelings become enacted, creating an extremely pathogenic form of disorganised attachment, which he has come to understand as the “infanticidal attachment”. He will consider the different types of such a disturbance and explore why some victims of early death wishes commit suicide, why others become violent criminals, and why others suffer from extreme breakdowns or from eating problems, life-threatening addictions, and a host of other debilitating psychological states.
Kahr will explain how intensive, long-term, attachment-based psychotherapeutic treatment can contribute to the neutralisation of such toxic death wishes and thus offer patients a sense of hope for the future.
SPEAKER
Professor Brett Kahr
Professor Kahr has worked in the mental health profession for over forty years.
He is Senior Fellow at the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology in London and, also, Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis and Mental Health at Regent’s University London. He is also Honorary Director of Research at the Freud Museum London. Additionally, he serves as Consultant Psychotherapist at The Balint Consultancy and, also, as Chair of the Scholars Committee of the British Psychoanalytic Council.
Professor Kahr has enjoyed a long-standing relationship with The Bowlby Centre, having first taught for the organisation back in 1991 and having become its Consultant in Psychology in 1992, nearly thirty years ago.
He is the author of sixteen books and series editor of more than seventy additional titles. His solo books include: Sex and the Psyche; Bombs in the Consulting Room: Surviving Psychological Shrapnel; and Dangerous Lunatics: Trauma, Criminality, and Forensic Psychotherapy. His most recent book, Freud’s Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis, will be published by Karnac Books in September, 2021. In 2022, he will publish his book on Eggshells with Razor Blades: Tales of Extreme Psychological Suffering.
Professor Kahr works with individuals and with couples in Central London.
All monies received from tickets to this talk will go towards a bursary.
DETAILS
This talk will be online
Date: Saturday, 23 October 2021
Time: 11 am to 1.00 pm
Cost: £30
(£10 – Bowlby Centre members)
(Bowlby Centre students – free, please contact Carol Tobin carol.tobin@thebowlbycentre.org.uk to book your place)
Courses
Attachment and Complex Trauma – October 2021
Saturday, 23 and Sunday 24 October 2021
and
Saturday, 30 and Sunday 31 October 2021
10.00am – 4.00pm
Cost: £600
The course will be covering key principles of attachment theory as it originated by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth along with its application in clinical practice.
In addition, the course will teach about the Disorganised attachment status and its characteristics as is often shown in clients who suffer complex trauma and the intergenerational transmission of trauma.
The emphasis on teaching disorganised attachment and complex trauma has arisen based on the demand from practitioners who often find themselves grappling with challengingsituations when working with the more traumatised client groups.
The course is aimed at therapists, psychologists, counsellors, social workers, GPs and other practitioners in the caring profession who want to expand their understanding of attachment theory with the emphasises on complex trauma, intergenerational transmission of trauma and adverse childhood experiences.
Participants will be meeting in person and the numbers of places is limited.
Seminar Leader
Orit Badouk Epstein is a UKCP registered Attachment based Psychoanalytic psychotherapist, a trainee supervisor and a trainee therapist. She trained at the Bowlby Centre, London where she is the Editor of the journal “Attachment-New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis”. She specialises in attachment theory and trauma and regularly lectures, teaches, writes and present papers and book chapters on these topics and consults worldwide on attachment theory. She runs a private practice and works relationally with individuals, couples and parents. Orit has a particular interest in working with individuals who have experienced extreme abuse and trauma and have displayed symptoms of dissociation. She is the co-author of the books “Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs” (Badouk Epstein, Wingfield & Schwartz, 2011 Karnac), “Terror within & without” (Yellin, Badouk Epstein, 2013, Karnac), Shame Matters, Routledge (in Press) and was the co-editor of the ESTD (European Society for Trauma and Dissociation) newsletter for 10 years as well as being a regular contributor of articles and film reviews. In her spare time Orit enjoys the cinema, reading philosophy and writing poetry.
Attachment Theory in Clinical Practice March 2022
Saturday, 5th and Sunday, 6th March 2022
Saturday, 19th and Sunday, 20th March 2022
10.00am – 4.00pm
Cost: £600
The Bowlby Centre
1 Highbury Crescent
London, N5 1RN
Seminars will include the following themes
- Introductions –our relationship to attachment theory.
- Attachment theory in context
- Separation, loss and mourning
- Patterns of attachment and their internal representation
- Secure • Dismissing • Preoccupied • Unresolved/disorganised • Not classifiable
- Evaluating adult attachment states of mind
- Internal working models
- Reflective functioning•Intersubjectivity
Clinical work will consider the role of mourning, narrative, mutuality and recognition, affective attunement and cycles of rupture and repair in the therapeutic process.
The objectives of this course are to introduce Attachment theory and deepen your understanding of it.It’s designed to be of practical value with implications for therapy and human relatedness.The course is aimed for Counsellors, Psychotherapists, Psychologists, Psychiatrists and Social Workers.
“I was surprised how this course touched on all areas of my life… for me it has been the missing piece of the jigsawI have been looking for and brings together many things…”
Orit Badouk Epstein is a UKCP registered Attachment based Psychoanalytic psychotherapist, a trainee supervisor and a trainee therapist. She trained at the Bowlby Centre, London where she is the Editor of the journal “Attachment-New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis”. She specialises in attachment theory and trauma and regularly lectures, teaches, writes and present papers and book chapters on these topics and consults worldwide on attachment theory. She runs a private practice and works relationally with individuals, couples and parents. Orit has a particular interest in working with individuals who have experienced extreme abuse and trauma and have displayed symptoms of dissociation. She is the co-author of the books “Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs” (Badouk Epstein, Wingfield & Schwartz, 2011 Karnac), “Terror within & without” (Yellin, Badouk Epstein, 2013, Karnac), Shame Matters, Routledge (in Press) and was the co-editor of the ESTD (European Society for Trauma and Dissociation) newsletter for 10 years as well as being a regular contributor of articles and film reviews. In her spare time Orit enjoys the cinema, reading philosophy and writing poetry.