Tavistock relationships couple therapy summer school 2026
Theme: couple and family life in transition
With Andrew Balfour, Liz Hamlin, Stanley Ruszczynski, Perrine Moran, Martha Doniach, Susanna Abse, Amita Sehgal and Leezah Hertzmann
Join us for our annual summer school, Couple and Family Life in Transition, exploring how intimate relationships and family structures are continually reshaped by social, cultural, and personal change.
Alongside the diversification of family forms that challenge heteronormativity as an unexamined gold standard, we will broaden our focus to include the many transitions that affect relational life across the lifespan. These include living with long-term illness or disability, ageing, shifts in gender and identity, and the impact of care responsibilities within families.
Same-sex couples, solo parents, blended and step-parent families, assisted conception, and polyamorous constellations are not peripheral variations but integral to the contemporary relational landscape. At the same time, enduring unconscious ideals around exclusivity, complementarity, legitimacy, health, autonomy, and generational order continue to shape family life, institutional norms, and clinical thinking.
How do these assumptions influence our formulations, stir our anxieties, and inform our therapeutic interventions, particularly when families are navigating profound change or vulnerability?
This summer school offers couples therapists, from recently qualified to highly experienced, a reflective and challenging space to consider how psychoanalytic practice can engage sensitively and creatively with evolving relational realities without reverting to inherited hierarchies of value.
Designed for psychodynamic and psychoanalytic couple therapists already working in the field, the programme provides a unique opportunity to immerse yourself in contemporary thinking within a world-leading couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy institute. Through theoretical seminars and twice-daily intensive clinical discussion groups, you will deepen your understanding and develop your practice alongside colleagues from the UK and internationally.
The course fee includes a theatre visit to Cyrano de Bergerac, attended as a group, followed by a reflective discussion.
For full details, including CPD credits information and booking, visit TR Together
Find out more about Tavistock Relationships