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CPD Credits
3
Event Type
Live Online Event
Location
Zoom & Recording
Time (UK)
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Standard
£80.00
Trainee/NHS
£68.00
Friday, March 6, 2026
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.
Programme
14.00 Introductions & Housekeeping
14.05 Introduction and theoretical overview of the ‘Claustrophobic-Agoraphobic Dilemma’
Kate will offer an overview of the themes for the seminar including using film clips and literature. She will then offer a theoretical overview of the Claustrophobic-Agoraphobic Dilemma with a focus on the work of Henry Rey and Mervyn Glasser.
14.40 Questions and Reflections
14.50 Working with couples and individuals through the Covid Pandemic emphasising the Claustro-Agoraphobic push and pull within intimate relating.
Kate will share three contrasting vignettes of remote couple and individual psychotherapy to illustrate some of ways in which adaptation to compressed living and remote working facilitated change, be it important self-development, reparation or relationship breakdown.
15.25 Questions and Reflections
15.40 Break
16.00 Manic Defence and Psychic Retreat, Impact on the Therapist and moves towards Reparation
With a focus on the work of John Steiner, the unique tenor of the psychic retreat in those caught up in the claustrophobic-agoraphobic dilemma is explored, as is the projective process that contributes to it’s pull. Transference and countertransference within the therapist and the work are thought about, as are blocks to progress and signs of reparation.
16. 40 Questions and Reflections
17.00 End
Kate Thompson
Kate Thompson, MA, Pg Dip, Couple Psych. is a couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist with over 25 years of experience working with couples and individuals. For the last 10 years she headed Tavistock Relationships’ (TR) Couple Therapy for Depression training in the NHS and adapted the model for perinatal services and to use with couples coping with substance misuse. Kate supervised TR’s Parenting Service for 9 years and co-edited/co-authored ‘Couples as Parents’ (Routledge 2024). Kate writes and lectures widely, in the UK and abroad. She co-edited ‘Engaging Couples: New Directions in Therapeutic Work with Families’, (Routledge, 2018), and Couple and Family Psychoanalysis on Divorce and Separation, (Phoenix, 2021). Kate is co-Editor in Chief, Journal of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. Registered with the BPC and BACP, her private practice is in South West London.
- Psychotherapists
- Psychoanalysts
- Psychologists
- Clinical Psychologists
- Counsellors
- Social Workers
- Psychiatrists
- Understand the Claustro–Agoraphobic Dilemma: Explain Henry Rey’s concept of the claustro–agoraphobic dilemma, including the contradictory human longings for closeness (merger) and autonomy (separation), and how these shape relational dynamics.
- Integrate Psychoanalytic Theory: Analyse the contributions of Bion, Winnicott, Britton, Emanuel, and Steiner to understanding how patients navigate uncertainty, disruption, and compressed living, particularly in relation to defensive systems and psychic survival.
- Identify Dynamics in Clinical Practice: Recognise manifestations of the claustro–agoraphobic dilemma in both couple and individual psychotherapy, including oscillations between clinging, withdrawal, and ambivalence in response to internal and external pressures.
- Apply Theory to Clinical Vignettes: Evaluate clinical case material to illustrate how fears of engulfment and abandonment can distort intimacy, block development, and influence the therapeutic relationship.
- Understand the importance of the Analytic Frame: Formulate approaches to working with patients experiencing these dynamics, focusing on maintaining a therapeutic frame, managing countertransference, and supporting patients’ capacity for containing oscillations between intimacy and distance.
- Reflect on Broader Contexts: Examine how external stressors, such as the pandemic and compressed living conditions, may intensify distance-regulation struggles, and consider implications for sustaining a developmental therapeutic setting.
Standard Online Registration: £80
Trainee, NHS staff and Third Sector: £68
Trainee and NHS 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. Please contact [email protected] to recieve the discount code.
Group Rates (for 4 or more): Contact [email protected] for customised pricing.
Alumni: If you are a TR Alumni (TRAPC member) please email [email protected] 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 the event.