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The East Anglian Psychotherapy Network NEWSLETTERJuly 2024.

The East Anglian Psychotherapy Network

NEWSLETTER

July 2024

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Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to our Summer Newsletter.

2024 has proved to be a necessarily quiet year in terms of conferences and CPD events whilst we have been prioritising essential re-organisation of the EAPN Planning group to bring in new members to broaden and  strengthen our team. 

This has been an important development that will hopefully better enable us to focus on and carry through new initiatives and events with greater efficiency and purpose, assured that we have the human resources and collective stamina to fulfil our realistic plans.  

To this end, we are most pleased to welcome several new colleagues to our enlarged planning group : 


from Suffolk - Frances Griffiths (Group Analyst and Educationalist), Josephine Roger (Child & Adolescent psychotherapist and dramatherapist); and Dan Neale (Group Analyst and Child psychodynamic counsellor);


from Cambridge – Fliss Cadbury (Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist) and Sonja Meyer zu Eissen (Psychodynamic psychotherapist working with children, young people and families); 


and from Norfolk: Alistair Cormack (Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist).


They join our existing Planning Group members:

For Essex : Tim Fox (psychoanalytic psychotherapist) ; Anne Jennings (BPAS Psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic psychotherapy) .

For Suffolk : Dr Jenny Potter  (Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist); Aaron Davis (Psychodynamic Psychotherapist; DIT Therapist; and registered speech and language therapist).

For Norfolk : Jane Polden (psychoanalytic psychotherapist); Dr Emma Went (forensic Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist);

For Cambridgeshire : Nicola Parrott (Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist)

The Planning Group is also losing one of its original founder members of the EAPN as Dr Mary Heller is standing down.   Mary – a psychoanalyst , Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a Consultant Clinical Psychologist has been a stalwart of the East Anglian Psychotherapy Network and a pillar of wisdom and experience for us.  Thank you Mary – we will greatly miss you in our meetings but look forward to seeing you in future events.

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The renewal and enlargement of our Planning Group has allowed us to delegate designated projects to smaller subcommittees  to take forward : Events and Conference planning;  Supporting Training and Outreach; and a range of topics around communication with the Membership and promotion of the EAPN.  Despite being in our 6th year as an organisation and now registered with the Charity Commission we don’t yet have a leaflet about the EAPN to promote our activities to the wider professional world. We’ve simply been too thin on the ground and too busy to make the time.  With the new hands and minds available to help us, we hope to  get the job done.


We’d also like to improve the functionality and use of the EAPN website as a fluent channel of communication that members can access more easily to advertise or build peer group activities and special interest groups, or as a forum for discussion and original ideas that can shape the way that the EAPN can serve and support its members and plan events that are relevant to their needs and aspirations.


The current Members’ page of the website has been little used and we hope to be able to make it more user-friendly over the coming months. In the mean time, as a member you can visit and post items  on the Members’ page if you go to the section entitled ‘Becoming a Member’ and scroll down to the box that reads ‘Apply for Access’ and follow the instructions. You’ll need to give yourself a password.


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A key aim in the founding statements of the EAPN was to strengthen the professional identity of the psychotherapeutic community in the East Anglian region – in particular , a psychotherapeutic community that has at its defining principle an interest , albeit not necessarily exclusively, in psychoanalytic and psychodynamic  theory and practice.


Much has been achieved in that regard and it is especially heartening and rewarding to read the appreciation expressed by psychotherapists and counsellors who are new to the region , or newly qualified,  when they discover that there is an existing professional network that they can join and which welcomes them.


However, it must also be said that building a strong regional professional identity requires more than assembling an impressive list of members.  To belong to a large Network dedicated to the practice of psychotherapy is of itself a step that people value.  But within a large network one may still feel at sea in terms of the opportunities for professional development and reciprocity – finding a smaller group that suits and appropriately supports a member’s personal needs and stage of training or postgraduate life.  This is why ‘Supporting Training and Outreach’ is a key position that we want to foster in our ongoing mission for the EAPN. 


Conferences come and go and are often memorable one-day events; well-led peer groups  are what sustains and nurtures learning year in and year out.

Hence, it may be that to develop the EAPN further as a really relevant and enduring organisation  we may need to switch our gaze somewhat from the large conference-style gatherings – excellent as these have been and will continue to be - and to dig deeper into learning needs that might be met by smaller more focussed teaching opportunities.  A good example was the short greatly appreciated series provided a few years ago by Susan Hall on the work of Christopher Bollas, and more recently the mini-series on The Psyche and the Soma.   Other ventures could follow – the choice being led by what members tell us they would find most helpful. So do get in touch.

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Paradise Lost ? The Climate Crisis and the Human Condition.

           -  an audience with Professor Paul Hoggett

It was good to welcome twenty or so EAPN members to this online event where we were privileged to hear Paul Hoggett  talk about his very recently published book on the Climate Crisis and the Human Condition.


Far from being an evening of pessimism and hand-wringing, Paul’s talk touched on many areas of hope and resilience in relation to the challenges that confront us in facing up to climate change.


Whilst the ‘Paradise’ that is being lost  clearly refers to the inexorable exhaustion and terrible destruction of the world’s natural resources and biodiversity, Paul Hoggett argues that there is additionally an illusory ‘paradise’ – an idealisation - that fuels the modern human’s omnipotent sense of entitlement, ‘specialness’ and exceptionalism , above all other living things – forever urged on to bigger, better and faster ‘growth’ by contemporary ideologies. 


As climate change denial and disavowal have become increasingly untenable and all of us have had to face up to difficult truths , the phenomena of ‘eco-anxiety’ and ‘eco-distress’  -  panic, despair, grief and anger , feelings of helplessness and hopelessness -  have become increasingly manifest in public meetings, on social media as well as in psychotherapy consulting rooms.  The Climate Psychology Alliance has found that often there is also an overwhelming sense of imminent catastrophe…of  ‘end of the world feelings’ ..combined with the sense that one is completely and utterly alone..


Our discussions inevitably gravitated to the question of “..what can I/we do ?” – “How can we make any difference ?”   Like everyone else we may feel that the forces resisting change are just too extensive, and our own efforts just too puny..


But we can provide psychotherapy. The containment of anxieties and raw feelings , the knowledge that you are not alone with these troubling experiences, has been shown to  help individuals or groups to stay with the trouble and to reconnect the troubled feelings with thinking , perhaps providing the motivational basis for more active  engagement with the issues. 


We may also come out of our seclusion to meet and share our thoughts with other groups in society and learn from them what we can do and how we may help. And we can keep the climate and ecological crisis  in the foreground  and not a footnote to the other challenges the world faces.


Paul Hoggett’s book highlighted the importance of knowing you are not alone as an important first step and drew attention to how the environmental and climate movement  has pioneered innovative initiatives  like Carbon Conversations and Climate Cafe’s where facilitated groups enable people to express their feelings, secure from intrusion,  about climate change and ecological destruction. Some of these methods are being adapted for organisational environments such as schools and health services.


Paul has drawn attention to a further book by other authors which will  be of particular interest to psychotherapists :

Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown

Anderson J, Staunton T, O’Gorman J and Hickman C (eds).

published by Routledge 2024

 

And he ended our evening with this generous offer to all EAPN Members

 

“I’m pleased to tell you that my new book Paradise Lost? The Climate Crisis and the Human Condition has just been published by the Simplicity Institute.

You can order the ebook (with colour illustrations) direct on a ‘pay what you can‘ basis from the publisher whilst the paperback (with black & white illustrations) is available from online book distributors such as Barnes & Noble or Amazon or through your preferred indie bookstore quoting isbn: 978-0-6488405-9-6.

 

Proceeds from the ebook will be split evenly between the publisher and the Climate Psychology Alliance. 


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● Foundation Course in Group Analysis  2024 – 2025

 

We’re pleased to announce details of the 2024-25 Foundation Course in Group Analysis which begins in October.

 

The aim of the course is to enable students to experience what happens when people meet and work together in a group. You will learn about and experience group process and group dynamics through seminars, work reflection groups, and through being a member of an experiential group for the duration of the course.  The rhythm of the course over 10 monthly Saturdays gives the opportunity to work intensively and brings to the foreground the importance of working with boundaries and separations. The course offers a blended mix of online and in-person group experiences.

 

The completion of the course qualifies you to apply for the IGA Diploma Course in Groupwork Practice and associate membership of the Institute of Group Analysis.

 

 

Full details of the course are included in the attached flyer.

 

 

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 ●   The B.B. Zeitlyn Psychotherapy Training Fund

9TH November 2024

 

Analytical Psychology in Context: The shaping of Jung’s thought and its place within the psychoanalytic field today.

 

Speaker : Katerina Sarafidou 

 

          Online on Zoom: 10.00am - 12.30pm

 

This talk will be looking at the emergence of analytical psychology as a distinct discipline of psychotherapy at the beginning of the 20th century and will attempt to identify its place within the various strands of psychoanalysis that arise around the same time.  We will trace the core assumptions that underpin theories of the nature of the psyche and its development, the understanding of human suffering and the possibility of therapy, across the main schools of analytic thought. Finally, we will consider the relevance of these ideas within contemporary cultural debates that become particularly prominent in the 21st century.

  

Katerina Sarafidou is the Head of Research and former Director of the MSc Psychodynamics of Human Development run by Birkbeck College and the British Psychotherapy Foundation. She is an honorary member of the British Jungian Analytic Association and is carrying out academic research at the Warburg Institute on Jungian theory and German aesthetics. She is one of the three founders of The Circle of Analytical Psychology, which offers a 2-year course of study on Jung’s Liber Novus.


      Booking and Tickets (cost £45) will shortly be available on :

                    www.bbzeitlyntrust.org.uk and click on Calendar

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