Events and Seminars
| Event | : | Understanding Fears of Engulfment and Abandonment |
|---|---|---|
| Venue | : | Online and In-Person at the Freud Museum, London, UK |
| Date | : | 06/03/2026 |
| Duration | : | 1:30 - 5:30pm |
| Extra Info | : | Understanding Fears of Engulfment and Abandonment: The Claustro–Agoraphobic Dilemma in Therapy With Kate Thompson This conference explores the psychic dilemma of closeness and distance, the contradictory longing for merger and autonomy that shapes intimate human relationships. The psychoanalyst Henry Rey described this dynamic as the claustro–agoraphobic dilemma: the fear of engulfment by the object when too close, in conflict with the fear of abandonment and being alone when the object is out of reach. Kate Thompson, a psychoanalytic couple psychotherapist and author, will offer a seminar where she describes how these forces may be enacted in the transference, the therapeutic frame, and the client’s wider relational life. The seminar will draw on theoretical perspectives from Bion, Winnicott, Britton, Emanuel, and Steiner to explore how patients manage psychic survival when faced with uncertainty, disruption, and compressed living. These authors help illuminate how defensive systems can crystallise around the need for both safety and freedom, and how development may be stalled when oscillations between intimacy and distance cannot be tolerated or contained. Clinical vignettes from couple and individual psychotherapy will illustrate these complex dynamics, offering vivid accounts of how patients may cling, withdraw, or perpetually oscillate in response to external constraints and internal anxieties. From this base, we will reflect on how similar struggles are encountered in individual work, where therapists may be experienced as either intrusive or abandoning, too present or too absent. By integrating theory with clinical material, the seminar aims to provide practitioners of all modalities with a richer understanding of how to work with patients caught up in these profound and often destabilising dynamics. |
| Organised By | : | Tavistock Relationships |
| Web Link | : | https://trtogether.com/events/understanding-fears-of-engulfment-and-abandonment |