CPD
40th Anniversary Celebration
Annual Lecture
Wednesday 21st May 2025
Professor Brett Kahr
Advancing British Psychotherapy:
How to Enrich our Careers and Transform our Profession
As time has progressed, the psychotherapy profession has flourished hugely, and although the field has grown in size, our profession remains splintered, competitive and, at times, anti-collaborative.
The growth of numerous training institutions, professional bodies, membership organisations and multiple approaches to psychotherapy, ranging from intense psychoanalysis to mindfulness-based short-term interventions, indicates that most practitioners of a particular style regard colleagues from other sectors as poorly-trained or as clinically insufficient.
Professor Kahr will share his experience of how we can not only enhance our own personal skills and careers more efficaciously, helping us to flourish more fully as practitioners with more exciting careers but, also, he will consider how by developing our own verbal potency and our own skills as experts, we will have the capacity to collaborate more fully with other institutions and thus work towards developing greater integration within the profession. He will also explore how we can take fuller ownership of our clinical and psychological wisdom and thus help to expand the respectability and the impact of the British psychotherapy field.
Professor Brett Kahr is Senior Fellow at the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology in London and Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis and Mental Health at Regent’s University London. He serves as Honorary Director of Research and as an Honorary Fellow of the Freud Museum London. He is Chair of the Scholars Committee of the British Psychoanalytic Council and Honorary Fellow of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy. He is the author of twenty-two books and series editor of more than eighty-five additional volumes. He works with individuals, couples and families at his consulting room in Central London.
Reception: 7pm
Lecture: 8-10pm
Cost: £50
BOOK
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Working Psychodynamically with the Menstrual Cycle
An online workshop with Letticia Banton
Saturday 10th May 2025
10am-1pm
Each month, for over three decades of life, female hormonal fluctuations result in a range of physiological, physical, and psychological changes that can impact a woman’s intrapsychic and interpersonal worlds in a profound way. Yet, many people don’t openly discuss the menstrual cycle in western mainstream culture, and it is followed by a pervasive shadow of shame, as well as a long history of misogyny. Menstruation has been silenced and this is evident in psychodynamic theory, research and practice, where there is a ‘silent’ gap in knowledge
As psychotherapists, how can we more openly, sensitively, and insightfully think and talk about what menstruation may mean? To explore this question, Letticia will draw on relevant psychodynamic literature and share findings from her doctoral research, which explored how female clients experienced their menstruality during psychotherapy with a male therapist. The training will include interactive exercises to help participants reflect on the ideas being shared.
While the content of the session will primarily be about women’s experience, we recognise not all women have periods and not all people who have periods identify as women. We intend this to be an inclusive event that recognises subjectivity. We welcome women, men, and gender non-conforming therapists to join us to think about how the menstrual cycle may impact clients and therapists of all genders in a variety of ways.
Letticia Banton is a UKCP qualified integrative psychotherapist. Psychodynamic and existential-phenomenological theory and research informs her practice and she holds a doctorate in psychology and psychotherapy from the Metanoia Institute, London. She currently works in private practice and consults for Tavistock Relationships CPD programme.
Workshop: 10am – 1pm
Venue: Online
Cost: £40
BOOK
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Working with Psychosis
An online workshop with Dr Laura Chernaik
Saturday 7th June 2025
10am-1pm
In this talk, Dr Laura Chernaik discusses psychoanalytical work with people living with psychosis. A contemporary psychoanalytical practice tends to include a much wider variety of structures and states of mind than Freud’s clinic.
Some of our patients—whether in charitably-funded clinics or in private practice—might be living with severe and chronic mental health or ‘psychoses’, including the schizophrenias, others might be living with less severe but equally chronic non-neurotic structures or states of mind, including what in psychiatric terms are called ‘personality disorders’, while only a proportion of the people who decide upon a long-term psychoanalysis and find their way to us are the hysterical or obsessional neurotics who made up the majority of Freud’s patients.
Her work is based on listening to the patient, inspired by R.D. Laing’s approach, but theorised in ways influenced by Lacan, Laplanche, Roustang, and the Latin American Field Theorists, Madeleine and Willy Baranger.
As the focus is on clinical work and listening, Laura will include a range of ‘clinical fictions’—vivid, fictional imaginings. Nobody fits the crude overgeneralisations that are ‘diagnoses’; the stories we tell and the representations we construct are always strongly, frighteningly, political.
Laura Chernaik is a member of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Guild of Psychotherapists. She is a psychoanalyst in private practice, working with people with a diversity of ways of being in the world. She supervises in private practice, at the Guild of Psychotherapists’ low fee Clinic, and at AGIP. She teaches and writes on the relation between philosophical change and social and political change, as this is played out in the history of psychoanalytical theory and practice. She has been published in numerous books and journals.
Workshop: 10am – 1pm
Venue: Online
Cost: £40
BOOK
The MHCPC Continuing Professional Development programme (CPD) offers short courses to keep clinicians up to date with current developments in the profession and enables them to explore various subjects in more depth. Visiting lecturers and speakers have included:
Christopher Bollas, Patrick Casement, Lavinia Gomez, Nina Farhi, Adam Phillips, Neville Symington, Margot Waddell, Anne-Marie Sandler, Sue Gerhardt.
