Training at the Bowlby Centre

Our application deadline has passed but if you are interested in one of our training courses, please get in touch ASAP as we are sometimes able to take late applications if spaces are available.

Welcome to the Bowlby Centre and to this introduction to our psychotherapy training course.

Deciding where to train can feel like a major undertaking: we hope this section of our website helps clarify our approach and values.

The Bowlby Centre emerged out of a radical development in the psychoanalytic tradition: an attachment-based approach, pioneered by John Bowlby, which emphasises our need for others and the impact on us when early relationships are insecure, dangerous or abandoning. As a psychoanalytic school, we also draw on the importance of the unconscious and internal world.

The Bowlby Centre draws students from a wide range of backgrounds and has a passionate commitment to valuing diversity. The training provides trainees with the opportunity to develop their potential in a warm and enabling environment. It can feel intimidating to share of ourselves in a psychotherapy training environment and we strive to create an environment in which this process feels as safe as possible.

If you would like to know more about The Bowlby Centre, you can attend one of our Introductory Days, which gives you the chance to meet staff and students to find out more about what our approach could mean for you.

It gives me great pleasure to invite you to join us at The Bowlby Centre.

We offer:
• A 10 week Certificate in Attachment Theory and Skills.
• A 4 year Attachment Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy course to become a United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) registered attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist (ABPP).
• A 2 year Accredited Prior Learning (APL) course for people to become UKCP registered attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapists.
• Continuing Professional Development clinical forums.
• Short courses.
• An annual conference.
• A professional journal (twice a year).
• The Blues Project, low-cost long-term therapy offered for 18 months aimed at those who would not have the financial resources to access psychotherapy.
• Pep-web – a Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing Web, which gives you free access to current and past psychoanalytic journals and papers.

The Bowlby Centre began almost 50 years ago by an active group of psychoanalytic therapists committed to challenging the prevailing psychoanalytic orthodoxy, by combining psychoanalysis with attachment theory and a relational approach to clinical work.

The United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy
The Bowlby Centre is a member of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) – a nationally recognised regulatory body which sets the standards for education and training as well as publishing a register of accredited psychotherapists.

Within the UKCP we belong to the CPJA – Council for Psychoanalysis and Jungian Analysis we adhere to a code of ethics and practice that establishes standards of professional conduct for our psychotherapists in their work and is there to inform and protect the people who use or seek our services.