Exploratory Encounters: Full Programme

Workshop 1: 10th January 2026
First Encounters

10am to 4pm £90/60students/trainees
What happens when two people meet, and what is special about a first meeting between a therapist and patient ? How can the therapist manage the meeting and their own responses to the patient so that the encounter will support the patient in showing something of the deep hopes and fears that accompany their wish for therapy. How might (and should) the therapist say something to the patient about what s/he understands those hopes and fears to be?
Many therapists are anxious that a first meeting will prove to be a ‘brief encounter’ leaving one or both parties feeling unsatisfied or rejected. We hope this workshop will help.
Workshop leaders: Mark Budden and Julia Warburton

10am to 4pm £90/60 students/trainees
The “ideal” setting for our work is one which contains, supports and facilitates; however, the setting can also impinge on and disrupt therapy. Whatever the context for the work or the role of the practitioner, psychoanalytic thinking, focussing on unconscious processes, can help us pay attention to the detail of the encounter with the patient/client.
For example, what are the arrangements for the meetings? What is the room like? Does it matter? How can the practitioner best situate themselves to take care of the work? What factors (in ourselves, in our patients/clients and in the institutions in which we may work) may make it difficult to maintain a consistent setting that is helpful to the work?

This workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to deepen their understanding of psychoanalytic ideas with reference to the setting, and to apply this understanding to their own work.
Workshop leaders: Clare Harris and Ruth Pooley

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10am to 1pm £60/40 students/trainees
This workshop is for therapists, counsellors and trainees, working in any setting.
Without money there is no therapy. It is how we earn our living and what we live on. It has profound emotional, symbolic and pragmatic power, for us and the people we work with. Yet as a topic it is rarely theorised or discussed, and it can be easier to talk about sex with our patients than money.
In this workshop we will use our own experience, as well as ideas and theories from psychoanalysis, politics, and sociology to explore what money means in our clinical work. We will think about the inhibitions, fears and assumptions that arise around money and their effect on the therapy – for both participants.
The workshop will be participatory, so bring any cases and questions around money that you want to explore.
I hope that after this workshop the subject of money will cease being something avoided and will become a rich topic for exploration in your work.
Workshop leader: Ally Kessler

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10am to 4pm £90/60 students/trainees
Whatever helping role we hold and whatever context we work in, breaks in the contact between us and our clients/patients always have an impact on the relationship between us, and so on the work.
Breaks may be longer-than-usual gaps in contact (caused by holidays, interruptions due to illness or other commitments), or they may be the regular gaps between meetings, or breaks in the emotional contact within a meeting. Psychoanalytic thinking, by focussing on unconscious processes, can help us to understand what any particular break may mean to our patient/client, and how it is being experienced by them. This understanding can then mitigate the otherwise damaging effect of the break on the working alliance.
This workshop will give participants an opportunity to deepen their understanding of psychoanalytic ideas with reference to breaks and to apply this understanding to their own work.
Workshop leader: Clare Harris

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10am to 1pm £60/40students/trainees
Working with neuro-divergent people often raises complex emotional and relational dynamics in the consulting room. This workshop will consider how psychoanalytic thinking can help us understand non-normative forms of communication, attention, and affect, particularly in relation to autism and ADHD. We will reflect on how and when to offer interpretations, and how to create space for meaning to emerge without imposing our own.
The workshop is available to, and will be of interest to, counsellors and psychotherapists working in any modality
Workshop leader: Clive Diaz

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10am to 4pm £90/60students/trainees
Do we do anything differently as therapists when a client or patient tells us a dream? Do we have different expectations of a patient’s account of a dream compared with an account of their journey to the session?

We will consider some of the ways in which Freud’s thinking about his own, his patients’ and other peoples’ dreams led to important insights into how the unconscious operates. And we will consider whether these ideas can help us to explore what the patient may be showing us.

We will also ask if it can be helpful to consider everything a patient says or does as if it were a dream.

Workshop leaders: Mark Budden and Robert Holman

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