Attachment and Parent-Infant Psychotherapy

Format: Zoom (via Eventbrite)

Speaker: Dr Amanda Jones

Date: Saturday 16th October 14.00 – 15.30 BST

IAN & AGIP Members fee £35 (enter members discount code at point of purchase) | Non-members fee: £50

Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/attachment-and-parent-infant-psychotherapy-tickets-143762043141

This Seminar is also Week 20 of our PG Certificate in Attachment Theory. Registered PG Cert students will be given a code to access free tickets on the Eventbrite page on the day of the seminar.

In this seminar Dr Amanda Jones will explore the well-known hypothesis of how ghosts from a parent’s past can haunt their relationship with their baby.  When this is identified as a problem, parent-infant psychotherapy can be an important intervention.  Part of the therapeutic work often involves exploring how a parent may be unconsciously attached to using certain defensive processes to protect themselves from the ghosts.  But these defensive processes do not protect their baby and this is the therapeutic challenge.  The lecture will use case examples to show some of the work that can occur in parent-infant psychotherapy.

About the Speaker:

Dr Amanda Jones is a Consultant Perinatal Psychotherapist and Strategic & Clinical Lead of NELFT NHS Foundation Trust’s Perinatal Parent Infant Mental Health Service.  She trained as a systemic therapist and pursued her doctoral research at the Tavistock Centre/UEL.  Her research studied how mothers’ use of maladaptive defensive processes can derail their baby’s development.  In collaboration with the Anna Freud Centre, Amanda was the therapist in the Channel Four documentaries ‘Help me love my baby’.  With the NSPCC and Warwick Medical School she made 5 further documentaries called ‘Breakdown or Breakthrough:  pregnancy, birth and the first 18 months of life’, available for free online, for all practitioners working with parents and babies in distress.  Amanda speaks at national and international conferences on psychodynamic parent-baby treatment.  She contributes in several governmental policy groups to try and enhance understanding about the importance of early intervention and the need to develop equitable integrated psychotherapy and psychiatric NHS community perinatal parent infant mental health services in the UK.