Events and Seminars

Cost: £140 Organisations £120 Individuals £100 Bowlby Centre members.

Please make cheques payable to The Bowlby Centre and post to Carol Tobin, The Bowlby Centre, 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN.

If you have any questions or queries please contact: carol.tobin@thebowlbycentre.org.uk

This workshop will examine the challenges in working therapeutically with people on the autistic spectrum. From Autism (where there is an intellectual disability) to Asperger’s (where the patient’s intelligence may be extremely high), working with autism involves a central challenge: how to build an attachment in the absence of a relationship. People on the autistic spectrum struggle to make emotional and social connections, and tend to have an impoverished Theory of Mind – the capacity to understand the thoughts and feelings of others. How then can psychotherapists working primarily within the relationship help patients to feel that others can mean something to them? The workshop will examine various potential solutions to the problem of facilitating symbolic thought that may be hidden beneath defences of concrete thinking, and will explore ways of working with autistic styles of attachment that threaten to leave patients in a disconnected and isolated world.

Using clinical case examples and psychoanalytic theories on working relationally within the autistic spectrum, the workshop will seek to equip therapists with the resources necessary to work with a client group whose needs have traditionally been ignored by the therapeutic world. While the workshop will focus on those at various stages of the autistic spectrum, it will also be of use to therapists working with patients who present with “pockets of autism” – encapsulated parts of non-relating that can co-exist with high-functioning, relational parts of the self. Central to the workshop will be an ongoing exploration of the particular transference and counter transference issues inherent in working with autism, and the various ways in which our own pockets of autism draw us to this work.

Dr. Alan Corbett has specialised in working with disabilities for over 20 years. He has been Clinical Director of ICAP, Director of Respond, and National Clinical Director of the CARI Foundation. He is Chair of the Training Committee of the Institute for Psychotherapy and Disability, is a member of the Training Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists and on the advisory board of Confer. He works in private practice, is a psychotherapist with the School of Life, Consultant Psychotherapist with the Clinic for Dissociative Studies and lectures on a number of psychoanalytic training courses in London and Dublin.