Learning to Love with Alain de Botton
CPD Credits
2
Event Type
Live In-Person Event
Location
Kings House, London, N1 9JY
Time (UK)
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Standard
£45.00
Trainee/NHS
£38.25
Learning to Love with Alain de Botton
Saturday, May 16, 2026

Learning to Love with Alain de Botton

An inspiring evening talk with drinks reception!

With Alain de Botton & Perrine Moran (Chair)

Despite our collective yearning for lasting intimacy, thriving relationships remain elusive for many. This talk explores the psychological foundations that underpin successful romantic bonds, drawing on clinical insight, developmental theory, and emotional realism. At its core is the idea that love is not simply a matter of chance or chemistry, but a learnable skill grounded in a few critical capacities: the ability to tolerate imperfection (in ourselves and others), to be vulnerably known, to extend compassion in moments of conflict, and to understand how childhood experiences shape our relational expectations. 

The talk will examine key patterns that routinely undermine relationships - such as unprocessed shame, defensiveness, projection, and the repetition of early attachment wounds - while offering a therapeutic framework for how couples can grow, rather than crumble, through intimacy.

Drawing on familiar clinical dynamics, the talk offers practical, reparative ways of thinking about need, conflict, desire, and repair in modern love. It is especially aimed at those working in relational contexts -therapists, analysts, counsellors - who seek emotionally attuned language to guide both clients and themselves through the complex terrain of adult intimacy.

There will be time for questions at the end of the talk and we encourage you to join in! The event will be offered both in person and online. For those joining in person there will be a drinks reception and time to meet with colleagues old and new before the talk.

This event is also offered online via Zoom.

Programme

18.00 Arrival and drinks
18:30 Introductions
18.35 Alain de Botton 

Why do so many relationships fail despite sincere intentions? This talk explores the psychological skills that support lasting love—vulnerability, tenderness, self-awareness, and emotional non-defensiveness. With particular attention to early attachment patterns, projection, and repetition compulsion, it reframes relationship breakdown not as failure, but as a lack of emotional education. Combining therapeutic principles with cultural critique, the talk offers a compassionate but unsentimental account of what couples need in order to thrive—and how clinicians can help them get there.

19.30 Perrine Moran will facilitate a discussion with Alain and participants
20.00 End

Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton is a psychotherapist, writer and founder of The School of Life. He has written 15 books under his name, including The Consolations of Philosophy and The Course of Love. He has written thirty more under The School of Life name.

Perrine Moran

Perrine Moran is a psychodynamic psychotherapist and a couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has taught internationally as well as at Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and the British Psychotherapy Foundation, and is a senior visiting lecturer and supervisor at Tavistock Relationships. She is the Arts Editor for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, and a member of the editorial board of the journal of the International Association for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. She is bilingual, works with individuals and couples in English and in French, and has a private practice in London. She has a particular interest in the links between popular culture and psychoanalysis. She co-edited with Martha Doniach a special issue of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis on “Couples and Families in Film” (Spring 2025) and is the author of a book: Love Songs. Listening to Couples (2025), Karnac. Before training as a psychotherapist, Perrine Moran was a lecturer in French Literature, and an actress in Paris, where she ran a fringe theatre in the basement of a Cuban restaurant.