Advanced Couple Therapy Summer School 2026
Tuesday 21 July – Friday 24 July 2026
With Andrew Balfour, Liz Hamlin, Stanley Ruszczynski , Perrine Moran, Martha Doniach, Susanna Abse, Amita Sehgal & Leezah Hertzmann.
Published in Blog by TR on 27 April 2026
Who the Summer School is for
The theme for year’s Tavistock Relationships Couple Therapy Summer School is Couple Life and Family Transition. This four day, in person event is designed for psychodynamic and psychoanalytic couple-trained therapists already working in the field. Participants will have the unique opportunity to experience cutting-edge thinking within a world-leading couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy institute.
What you will learn: themes and clinical focus
We will explore how Couple and Family life has diversified in ways that increasingly challenge heteronormativity as an unexamined gold standard. Same-sex couples, solo parents, blended and step-parent families, assisted conception, and polyamorous constellations are not peripheral variations but part of the contemporary relational landscape. However, unconscious ideals about exclusivity, complementarity, legitimacy, and generational order often endure within families, institutions, and clinical thinking itself.
Programme highlights and learning format
We will consider how these ideals shape our formulations, our anxieties, and our therapeutic interventions and offer couple therapists a space to reflect on how psychoanalytic practice might engage these evolving forms without reverting to inherited hierarchies of value. This is an opportunity to learn and grow as a couple therapist through theoretical seminars and twice-daily intensive clinical discussion groups, and to study alongside like-minded people from the UK and around the world.
Included in the course fee is a theatre ticket to see the highly acclaimed play Cyrano de Bergerac, which will be attended as a group on the Wednesday evening with a discussion the following day, and depth learning with experts in the field.
Come to one of our online information events
If you'd like to know more about counselling and psychotherapy courses or a career in counselling, come to one of our online information events and learn more.