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
From Loneliness to Solitude
Perspectives for clinical work
With Michael Buchholz, Lesley Caldwell, Aleksandar Dimitrijević, Gamze Özçürümez Bilgili & Zack Eleftheriadou (Chair)
In this four-speaker webinar, participants can gain valuable insights on how to guide clients from the depths of loneliness towards the bliss of solitude. Lesley Caldwell presents the theoretical discourse emerging from the silent dialogue between Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott. Our other distinguished speakers present compelling case material, encompassing family dynamics, extreme trauma survivors, and the psychotherapists’ experience of loneliness.
Loneliness has become a pervasive and pressing concern in contemporary society, akin to a pandemic that no vaccine can readily cure. The poignant experience of loneliness is something many of us can relate to, and clinical observations underscore the profound struggles patients often face with loneliness. One might argue that loneliness constitutes a fundamental element at the core of many mental health problems, thus making it an essential aspect of our training and practice within the field.
Lesley Caldwell, a distinguished psychoanalyst, offers a theoretical foundation from which we can consider the following case material. Psychoanalyst and family therapist Michael Buchholz shares a compelling case study of a family seemingly bound together by strong connections, which, upon closer examination, revealed a complex enmeshment. Through his work in enhancing the capacity for meaningful relationality and psychic seperation, he successfully helped a troubled child recover from drug addiction and to feel less alone within his family. Psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist Gamze Özçürümez Bilgili, specializing in working with extreme trauma survivors, sheds light on the challenges faced by clients who often lose hope of being truly understood and grapple with profound feelings of isolation. Clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Aleksandar Dimitrijević explores the topic of loneliness within therapists. He discusses how those of us who tend to prioritize the well-being of others over their own may find themselves experiencing a sense of isolation and may therefore be more susceptible to countertransference reactions in work with patients who experience loneliness.
We aim to bring theory and clinical experience together for a lively engagement on the ubiquitous experience of loneliness and for participants and speakers to come together in dialogue to develop ideas for clinical work with clients who experience loneliness.
Programme
Introductions
Aleksandar Dimitrijević
Introduction to the topic of loneliness and its clinical relevance
In this introduction to the event Aleksandar Dimitrijević will define the basic concepts of aloneness, loneliness, and solitude and their general clinical relevance to set the scene.
Lesley Caldwell
Psychoanalytic Accounts of Loneliness and Solitude
This paper discusses the contributions to the area of loneliness and solitude of two significant thinkers of postwar psychoanalysis, Donald Winnicott and Melanie Klein. Their accounts of the neonate and of human nature represent divergent assessments of human subjectivity and its origins, deriving from very different suppositions about early life and the weight to be assigned to innate and environmental factors. The infants they discuss are very different beings with lives shaped by very different ways of sustaining internal conflicts and the importance of the external world in that negotiation. This paper discusses their different theoretical and clinical assumptions and emphasises their relevance beyond the analytic session for more general ideas of life and living.
Q&A
Michael Buchholz
The Loneliness of Enmeshed Families
In many families, a hidden dimension of loneliness is experienced by its members due to a sense of being "enmeshed" rather than "related" to each other. The key distinction lies in the experience of relational dynamics. When you are "related to" someone, you can choose when to engage in and disengage from your relationships, giving you a sense of "relational time" and the ability to enjoy moments of solitude rather than loneliness. However, in cases of being "enmeshed," there is often little time for personal space, and you may feel trapped in a state of constant togetherness. Members of enmeshed families tend to experience high levels of loneliness with limited opportunities for solitude. The objective is to illustrate this phenomenon by presenting transcripts from the initial 20 minutes of a family session involving a 17-year-old drug addict.
Q &A
Break
Gamze Özçürümez Bilgili
Loneliness of the Traumatised
We, as human beings, are born prematurely. Before completing our development, we are 'thrown into the world', making us dependent on the help and care of our environment for an extended period. Consequently, the significance of having others to protect us from various dangers, and an environment to provide support is extraordinary. Due to this inherent helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) at the core of our existence, it becomes imperative to establish lifelong bonds with others. Conversely, each time a major catastrophe occurs, the fundamental helplessness and the tremendous anxiety it generates resurface. The loss of loved ones, as well as the loss of familiar places and the home to which we are deeply attached, lead to real and psychical homelessness. The objective of this presentation is to contemplate the loneliness experienced by those who have been traumatized, viewed through the perspective of an earthquake survivor.
Q&A
Aleksandar Dimitrijević
The Psychotherapist’s Loneliness
Focused on helping others more than on helping themselves, psychotherapists often neglect their own well-being. Several empirical studies confirm that psychotherapists are often prone to self-harming behaviour, addictions, and suicide attempts. In this presentation, I will explore the possible role of loneliness in the lives and psycho(patho)logy of therapists. Beginning with the personality type/s that often stand behind the professional choice, we will discuss the role of countertransference reactions to patients’ chronic loneliness and the passion for psychotherapeutic work at the expense of “true” social life. In conclusion, some ideas about how psychotherapists could prevent and or overcome their loneliness will be shared, which will also serve as an invitation to the audience members to share their strategies and experiences.
Q&A
Panel Discussion with Q&A
End
Zack Eleftheriadou
Dr Zack Eleftheriadou MSc MA, Dip NCFED, Dip Psychopathology, is a Chartered Counselling Psychologist, Chartered Scientist, Supervisor and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (HCPC reg). She has trained as an adult, child and parent-infant psychotherapist (UKCP) and is a member of CPJA/UKCP as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She lectures and has published in the following areas: developmental issues, cross-cultural work; including the text ‘Psychotherapy and Culture’. She has been working as a psychotherapist and an infant observation tutor for 30 years. She is currently supervising infant observation students and infant observation tutors. She is a guest lecturer and a member of The Bowlby Centre and is a visiting external examiner for Doctoral projects across the UK. Zack runs the consultancy service ‘Noema’, providing psychotherapy and supervision. She feels passionate about early intervention and presents on the psychology of the baby for midwives and paediatric nurses.
Michael Buchholz
Michael Buchholz, fully trained psychoanalyst and social scientist, was professor for social psychology at IPU (International Psychoanalytic University, Berlin) and is now senior professor and head of the first institute at IPU, named “JUNKTIM”. His research was oriented to clinical and supervision topics, used the analysis of metaphors developed in the field of cognitive linguistics and, more recently, turned to conversation analysis as a useful tool to describe and understand what’s going on in the treatment room. Recent publications can be taken from the list of references.
Lesley Caldwell
Lesley Caldwell is Visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College, London (UCL). She is a psychoanalyst of the British Psychoanalytic Association (BPA), a Clinical Associate of the British Psychoanalytic Society (BPAS), now retired from private practice in London. She continues to supervise, lecture and consult internationally. She is a European member of the IPA board and Europe’s representative on the IPA’s Executive Committee. She is on the editorial board of COWAP (the IPA group on women and psychoanalysis) book series.
She was an Editor and Trustee for the Winnicott Trust from 2002 to 2016 and its Chair of Trustees from 2008 to 2012. With Helen Taylor Robinson she is Joint General Editor of the Collected Works of Donald Winnicott (OUP, 2016), which won The American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis book prize (History section) in 2017.
Professor Caldwell is also Honorary Senior Research Associate in the Italian department at UCL. She has written extensively on the Italian family, the topic of her book, Italian Family Matters (Macmillan, 1991), on Italian cinema, and on the city of Rome. She contributed to the New Library Collection Reading Italian Psychoanalysis (2017).
She is currently working on a book of her papers on Winnicott, transitionality and illusion, and a book on Rome for Cambridge University press.
Aleksandar Dimitrijević
Aleksandar Dimitrijević, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. He works as a lecturer at the International Psychoanalytic University and in private practice in Berlin. He has given lectures, seminars, university courses, and conference presentations throughout Europe and the US. He is the author of many conceptual and empirical papers about attachment theory and research, psychoanalytic education, psychoanalysis and the arts, some of which were translated into German, Hungarian, Italian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Turkish. He has also edited or co-edited fourteen books or special journal issues. His next project is the multi-volume Hearing Silencing (co-edited with Michael B. Buchholz; Karnac Books).
Gamze Özçürümez Bilgili
Gamze Özçürümez Bilgili, M.D., is a psychiatrist and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She is a full-time professor at Başkent University Faculty of Medicine, head of Department of Psychiatry, and invited lecturer at International Psychoanalytic University-Berlin. She is in training at Istanbul Psychoanalytical Association. She is founding coordinator of Neuropsychoanalysis Working Unit of Psychiatric Association of Turkey, and member of Turkish Neuropsychoanalysis Study Group. Her main fields of research and publication are psychoanalytic psychotherapy, psychoanalytic theory and literature, psychosomatics, trauma, personality disorders, and consultation liaison psychiatry.
- Psychotherapists
- Couple and Family Psychotherapists
- Psychoanalysts
- Psychologists
- Clinical Psychologists
- Psychiatrists
- GPs
- Counsellors
- Social workers
- Teachers/Educators
Michael Buchholz
- Recognise and Differentiate Enmeshment and Relational Dynamics.
- Understand the Impact of Enmeshment on Loneliness.
Gamze Özçürümez Bilgili
- Understand the concept of fundamental helplessness.
- Understand the concept of psychical homelessness.
- Understand the link between trauma and loneliness.
Aleksandar Dimitrijević
- Become aware of the psychological problems psychotherapists suffer from.
- Recognise loneliness in psychotherapists (themselves).
- Understand possible factors that cause loneliness in psychotherapists.
Lesley Caldwell
- To recognise the different general psychoanalytic approaches of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott.
- To describe their accounts of being alone and loneliness and their implications of clinical work.
- To consider their relevance for wider societal conditions.
Standard Registration: £60.00
Trainee, NHS staff and Third Sector: £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.