Aspects of love - attachment-informed psychotherapy with couples

About this study day

The secure attachment of an infant to its mother or other primary carer as the basic building block of strong interpersonal relations in adulthood has held particular sway in the thinking of practitioners ever since Freud described it as 'the first and strongest love object and the prototype of all later love relations'.

Dr Christopher Clulow is a Consultant Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and an expert in the field of attachment, having published extensively on couple psychotherapy from an attachment perspective. As part of this day-long seminar, he will offer participants the opportunity to engage in live supervision with an attachment focus.

The study day will widen our understanding of how our earliest love relationships provide the foundations for - if not necessarily the prototypes of - adult love relationships, especially those we have as partners and parents. We will consider how adult love relationships differ from those of childhood and learn how to recognise secure and insecure partnerships both inside and outside the consulting room.

The seminar will interweave parent-infant, adult-adult and therapist-patient couple domains to explore different aspects of love relationships - attachment, caregiving, sensuality, sexuality, interest-sharing, and intersubjectivity.

Through clinical vignettes and attachment-informed concepts, the seminar will explore the nature of love, and apply this to the process of psychotherapy with couples. Particular attention will be paid to Winnicott’s concept of mirroring in highlighting processes that are central to regulating affect in close relationships and fostering change.

Who is this workshop for?

Individual, group, family and couple psychotherapists and counsellors.

About the trainer

Christopher Clulow is a Consultant Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Senior Fellow of the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology. He has published extensively on marriage, partnerships, parenthood and couple psychotherapy, most recently from an attachment perspective. His edited books in this area include Adult Attachment and Couple Psychotherapy: The Secure Base in Practice and Research (Brunner-Routledge, 2001) and Attachment, Sex and Couple Psychotherapy: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Karnac, 2009), in which year he also wrote the booklet How Attachment Shapes Family Relationships (TCCR, 2009).

He is an editor of the Library of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, a member of the editorial board of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, a member of the Scientific Council and Review Board of the International Association of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, and an editorial advisor to sexual and relationship therapy. He teaches in the UK and overseas, and maintains a private practice in London and his home town of St Albans.

Book here: https://tavistockrelationships.ac.uk/forthcoming-events/1222-love-attachment

Please note that the event will take place on the fourth floor and lift access will not be available until late 2019.