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    Psychotherapy CPDs and Conferences 

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The Generation of Empathy Between Intimate Partners: Gesture and Recognition or Identity Diffusion? – Lectures from the Tavistock Relationships Model

In this online lecture, Susanna Abse will give a psychoanalytic account of intimacy and discuss how intimate couple relationships require both ego fluidity and ego strength.

Key information

Date and time: Friday 28 April 2023, 6pm to 7pm

Speaker: Susanna Abse

Fee: £10

Total number of places available: 500

Venue: Online via Zoom

  • Overview

    The capacity for empathetic feeling is the cornerstone of human intimacy. Without a sense of being understood and responded to, partners often find themselves alienated from each other.

    In this lecture, part of our online series Lectures from the Tavistock Relationships Model, Susanna Abse will give a psychoanalytic account of intimacy and discuss how intimate couple relationships require both ego fluidity and ego strength.

    She will show how intimacy between partners includes the merging of self and other boundaries and how this capacity to enter another’s experience, which is developed in infancy, is vital to satisfying emotional and sexual engagement. However, in therapeutic work with couples we also see how the breaking down of self/other boundaries can lead to destructive cycles of relating via projective identification.

    Susanna will offer clinical insights into identifying and differentiating these two ways of relating and she will discuss how the work of couple psychotherapists can strengthen the individual egos of each partner to bring about greater intimacy.

    She will will talk for around 40 minutes and after this there will be the opportunity for the audience to ask questions.

  • Who is it for?

    Suitable for qualified therapists and counsellors, those in training, and those with an interest in psychoanalytic thinking.

  • About the speaker

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