The corona virus is starting to effect many events around the globe. Unfortunately OPS is not exempt. Most of our planned events are still going ahead but one that we were particularly looking forward to offering will be cancelled.

Jeremy Holmes has let the Committee know that he is cancelling all his speaking events for the foreseeable future. Professor Holmes is in the age group that is considered to be the most at risk for possible serious consequences if exposed to Covid-19 virus.

Therefore the Workshop advertised for 30th of May is not going ahead.

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The brain has a mind of its own: attachment, ambiguity  and the new science of psychotherapy

The past decade has seen the advent of an exciting new metapsychology, based on the Bayesean brain and the Free Energy Principle (FEP) —with links to Freud’s ideas about psychic energy.  I shall outline the FEP, showing how it relates to psychoanalytic psychotherapy, especially free association, dream analysis,  and an analytic stance that both simulates and helps clarify ambiguity.  I shall link these to attachment-informed research on parent-infant biobehavioural synchrony, the ‘borrowed brain’, and their analogues in the therapeutic setting.  I shall suggest that key mutative features of psychotherapy are its capacity to help clients move from passivity to activity,  and to tolerate ’surprise’, which then helps generate novel and more complex generative models of the self and its relationships.  Lecture format will be interspersed with ‘live supervision’ and delegates are encouraged to bring clinical material , especially where their own or their client’s ambiguity is to the fore.

Professor Jeremy Holmes was for 35 years a Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist in the NHS at UCL and then in North Devon. He has written 200+ peer-reviewed papers and chapters in the field of psychoanalysis and attachment theory.  He was Chair of the Psychotherapy Faculty of the Royal College of Psychiatrists 1998-2002. He set up and still teaches on the Masters/Doctoral psychoanalytic psychotherapy training and research programme at Exeter University, where he is a visiting Professor. He also lectures nationally and internationally.His many books, translated into many languages, include The Oxford Textbook of Psychotherapy (2005, co-editors Glen Gabbard and Judy Beck), Exploring In Security: Towards an Attachment-informed Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (Routledge 2010) which won the 2010 Canadian Psychological Association Goethe Award, best seller John Bowlby and Attachment Theory, (2nd edition 2013), The Therapeutic Imagination (2014).  A new edition of Introduction to Psychoanalysis (with Liz Allison and Antony Bateman, Routledge),  and a volume with the same title as this talk (Confer Books) are due 2020.  He was the recipient of the 2009 New York Attachment Consortium Bowlby-Ainsworth Founders Award. Currently, Jeremy enjoys music-making, gardening, Green politics and grand-parenting which are gradually eclipsing his lifetime devotion to psychoanalytic psychotherapy and attachment.

This event will be open to all students and therapists.

Further Information on the workshop will be published in January, 2020  along with a booking reservation form.