Join our community
Receive the TR Together newsletters.
CPD Credits
4
Event Type
Recorded Event
Location
Your TR Together account
Standard
£60.00
Trainee/NHS
£48.00
Fathers and Fathering
With Aileen Alleyne, Eugene Ellis, Michael Diamond & Phil & Carolyn Cowan
This event was incredibly moving and powerful as well as offering excellent insights for clinical work. Included below some feedback from participants about the aspects of the event that they found most valuable and engaging.
"The topic itself - fathers and fathering is not discussed often enough All presenters were excellent."
"The importance of focusing on the couple and couple's relationship Eugene and Aileen's presentations were meaningful ... profound"
"Great variety of speaker and approach - from Eugene’s personal presentation to Michael’s more theoretical approach. And the Cowans work is so very interesting and impressive. It made for a really good CPD event"
"Discussions on race within our practice as psychologists - The powerful impact of having someone from the field share their personal story - thank you, Eugene. Was enlightening."
A father’s involvement in a child’s upbringing has a considerable impact on their development. Father absence can hinder development from infancy through to adulthood and its psychological impact can be felt throughout the life course. However, in a world where women continue to be placed at the centre of childcare, understanding the experience of fatherhood is an overlooked area in psychotherapeutic theory, research, and practice.
In this recording, our speakers offer a range of perspectives on fathering and fatherhood. Carolyn and Phil Cowan shared their groundbreaking research into including fathers more actively in family services and conveyed the fundamental importance in the couple relationship to support the individuals. Aileen Alleyne and Eugene Ellis focus on black experiences of fatherhood where intergenerational trauma prevails, drawing on personal, historical and contemporary social insights. Michael Diamond offered a psychoanalytic perspective.
Programme
Carolyn and Phil Cowan
Nurturing Stronger Families: The vital role of fathers and evidence-based interventions
Fathers’ positive involvement in the family contributes substantially to their children’s development. It makes sense, then, to strengthen families by providing interventions to enhance fathers’ positive involvement. Although fathers have pejoratively been described as absent or missing, until recently they have been almost completely ignored by academic researchers and family service providers. The first step in including more fathers in family services involves removing the barriers to participation that fathers face. The second step involves recognizing that fathers’ parenting occurs in a context shaped by the quality of relationship between the parents. Carolyn and Phil will describe an evidence-based couples group intervention for low-income, vulnerable families conducted in the U.S, the U.K., Canada, and Malta. In longitudinal studies with more than 2000 father-mother pairs, we have found that improving the relationship between the co-parents results in less violent problem solving, more effective relationships between each parent and their young children, and fewer behaviour problems, more successful peer relationships, and higher levels of academic achievement in the children. These findings are highly relevant to therapeutic theory, practice, and social policy.
Q&A
Aileen Alleyne
‘Absent black fathers’: Historical and contemporary influences
Aileen will explore how the ’absent black father’ phenomenon pervades as a historical trauma that continues to be passed down through generations of black family life. The newest generation of black fathers from Gen Z are confronting old narratives and stereotypes, for example through social support groups, but intergenerational trauma persists despite such efforts. This highlights how complex and embedded ‘father absence’ is in black family life. What is being re-enacted in the creation and maintenance of families? What do we know about black motherhood and how it interacts with fatherhood? What is it about black masculinity that gets repeated rather than repaired across each generation of new fathers? Aileen will situate these important questions in their historical and contemporary context and offer ideas for working with clients.
Q&A
Eugene Ellis
A personal experience of being fathered and fathering as a black man
In this reflective talk, Eugene will share his personal lived experience of growing up with an ‘absent black father’, as well as his inner work toward healing, the reparation of his relationship with his father, and his experience of becoming a father himself. Eugene’s Jamaican father was present physically but struggled to establish a strong emotional bond with Eugene as he grew up, causing a lasting impact on his sense of self. Eugene will consider the notion of the ‘absent black father’ and the wider cultural impact of intergenerational trauma on his experience. As Eugene became a father himself, he felt determined to break this pattern, which brought its own set of new challenges. Through sharing his experience, Eugene seeks to challenge misperceptions of ‘absent black fatherhood’ and deepen insight into the many components that contribute to black parental challenges and strengths.
Q&A
Michael Diamond
‘It is a wise father that knows his own child’ - Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, Act 2 scene 2)
Michael Diamond discusses both the symbolic and the actual, flesh-and-blood father. The so-called “paternal function,” more accurately termed the “symbolic function,” signifies that a triadic matrix always exists psychically yet is not intrinsically gendered. Moreover, an ever present “father in the mother’s unconscious mind,” indicates that triangular relations can operate within the mother/child dyad enabling the ‘third’ to open up symbolic space – across heteronormative, gay or non-binary, and single parenting circumstances. As an embodied other, the actual father or surrogate (regardless of gender), operating as both a protective and attracting object as well as a separating agent as the “second other” to the mother, is called upon to recognize the child’s otherness. Challenges to fathering arise from inescapable dependencies, desires, rivalries, and absences or neglect; consequently, recovering the “missing” paternal function in analytic space is often required as a brief clinical vignette will illustrate.
Q&A
Discussion and Q&A
Aileen Alleyne
Dr Aileen Alleyne is a UKCP registered psychodynamic psychotherapist, clinical supervisor and organisational consultant practising in the UK. She lecturers at several training institutions and consults on issues of race, cultural diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Her clinical research examining black workers’ experiences in three institutional settings, makes a significant contribution to the discourse on race. Highlighting the concept of ‘the internal oppressor’, it offers ways of deepening understanding of black psychological reactions to the negative impact of racism. Aileen is the author of several book chapters and journal papers exploring themes on black/white relational dynamics, shame, intergenerational trauma, and black identity wounding. Her first published book, The Burden of Heritage: Hauntings of Generational Trauma on Black Lives. Pub: Karnac/Confer Books (2022), is an invaluable text to the counselling and psychotherapy community.
Eugene Ellis
Eugene Ellis is a psychotherapist, writer and public speaker. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy. For many years, he has worked with severely traumatised children and their families in the field of adoption and has a particular interest in body-orientated therapies and facilitating the healing of trauma. Eugene is also the Director and founder of the Black, African and Asian Therapy Network, the UK's largest independent organisation to specialise in working therapeutically with Black, African, Caribbean and South Asian people.
His book, 'The Race Conversation: An essential guide to creating life-changing dialogue’ (2021), explores the race construct both through its cognitive and historical development and also, more crucially, on the intergenerational, non-verbal communication of race, both as a means of social control and as an essential part of navigating oppressive patterns.
Eugene is also one of the co-editors of 'Therapy In Colour: Intersectional, Anti-Racist and Intercultural Approaches by Therapists of Colour’ (2003), which seeks to articulate new theoretical perspectives useful for both white practitioners and practitioners of colour to support therapy with black and people of colour clients through an intersectional lens, including the intersection of gender, sexuality and relationship diversity and colourism.
Michael Diamond
Michael Diamond, PhD, FIPA is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies. He is a Fellow of the International Psychoanalytic Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Clinical Psychology. His major publications are on masculinity, femininity, and gender theory; fathering and the paternal function; trauma and dissociation; psychoanalytic technique and analytic mindedness; hypnosis and altered states; and group processes and social action. He has written five books including 2021’s Masculinity and Its Discontents: The Male Psyche and the Inherent Tensions of Maturing Manhood (Routledge) and 2022’s Ruptures in the American Psyche and The Appeal of Trumpism: A Plea For Containment Of A Society In Peril (Phoenix). Of his three additional books, two deal directly with fathering: 2007’s, My Father Before Me: How Fathers and Sons Influence Each Other Throughout Their Lives (Norton), and 1995’s co-edited, Becoming A Father: Contemporary Social, Developmental, and Clinical Perspectives (Springer). In 2011, he co-wrote The Second Century of Psychoanalysis: Evolving Perspectives on Therapeutic Action (Karnac). He is a well-respected international presentator and is the honored recipient of numerous awards for his teaching, writing, and clinical contributions. He has a full-time clinical practice in Los Angeles, California where he also remains active in teaching, supervising, and writing.
Carolyn Pape Cowan
Carolyn Pape Cowan, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor of psychology, emerita, at the University of California, Berkeley, where she trained graduate students in clinical psychology to work with troubled couples. She co-directed and trained facilitators in three longitudinal intervention studies of partners who are parents in the U.S., and consulted on similar interventions in the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and Malta. She has published widely in the literatures on supporting father involvement, enhancing couple relationships, and evaluations of interventions to foster the development of parents, couples, children, and their families. Dr. Cowan is a founding member of the Council on Contemporary Families, and a Senior Fellow of Tavistock Relationships. In addition to authoring many book chapters and journal articles, she is a co-editor of Fatherhood Today: Men's Changing Role in the Family (1985) and Strengthening Couple Relationships for Optimal Child Development (2010), and co-author of When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life Change for Couples (2000).
Philip A. Cowan
Philip A. Cowan, with a PhD from the University of Toronto, came to the University of California, Berkeley in 1963, where he is now Professor of Psychology, Emeritus. He was directly involved in the teaching and supervision of Clinical Psychology graduate students interested in families and couple relationships. Since 1979, he and Carolyn Pape Cowan have been co-directors of three longitudinal couples group interventions, led by mental health professionals, which had long-term positive effects on the couples and their children. In collaboration with Marsha Kline Pruett, and Kyle Pruett, they created and evaluated the Supporting Father Involvement project, also known as the Parents as Partners project – a group intervention for low-income couples. Professor Cowan is the author of Piaget with feeling, co-author with Carolyn Pape Cowan of When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life Change for Couples, co-editor of four additional books and monographs, and the author or co-author of numerous research articles in scientific journals.
- Psychotherapists
- Couple and Family Psychotherapists
- Psychoanalysts
- Psychologists
- Clinical Psychologists
- Psychiatrists
- GPs
- Counsellors
- Social workers
- Teachers/Educators
Carolyn and Phil Cowan
- Recognizing the Significance of Father Involvement
- Identifying Barriers and Strategies for Inclusion
- Applying Evidence-Based Couples Group Interventions
Aileen Alleyne
- Have an understanding of how history with its intergenerational trauma transmissions contribute to reenactments of the Absent Father Syndrome in black lives
- Gain awareness of the profound impact on the psychological, emotional and spiritual well-being of black clients, including coping strategies adopted in response to father-parental alienation
- Be equipped with some clinical tools and conceptual handles to work with the above
Eugene Ellis
- Understanding the Complexities of Intergenerational Trauma
- Challenging Stereotypes and Expanding Perceptions
- Fostering Compassion and Empathy for Parental Struggles
Michael Diamond
- Describe and discuss the nature of the “symbolic” or “paternal function” and its relationship to actual, flesh-in-blood fathering
- Identify and contrast the protective, attracting, and separating tasks of fathering as well as their behavioural manifestations
- Question classical psychoanalytic understandings of the role played by male and female genders in providing successful triangular functions and indicate more contemporary analytic contributions to contemporary parenting arrangements
- Demonstrate an understanding of the role of the paternal or symbolic function in clinical treatment and indicate how it applies to specific therapeutic intervention strategies
Standard Price: £60.00
Trainee and NHS staff: £48.00
Group Rates (for 4 or more): Contact lucysam@trtogether.com for customised pricing.
Trainee discount: To qualify for this offer you need to be taking a course which provides core practitioner training in counselling or psychotherapy that is at least 1 year full time or two years part time and recognised by the BACP or UKCP. TR Together reserve the right to ask to see evidence of training being undertaken.
Alumni: If you are a TR Alumni (TRAPC member) please email anitabruz@tavistockrelationships.org for a discount code to add at checkout
Your CPD certificate will be available to download from your TR Together account within 48 hours of purchase.