CPD Events coming up in 2025

13th June 2025

An event to celebrate the life of Russell Meares

Speakers :

Else Guthrie and Tony Korner

NOTE Time for this event is 9am to midday to allow the contributions from Australia

For the last year we have been focusing on the huge contribution of Russell Meares to the development of the Conversational Model and this event celebrates Russell from two people who knew him well.

Details to follow

12th September 2025

Music and Conversation:
Music as a form of feeling in the Conversational Model
Presenter: Frank Margison

Hobson and Meares’s work on the Conversational model was a major advance in our understanding of psychotherapy- synthesising a conversational approach to depth psychology whilst also offering a model that was richly embedded in theory and open to empirical testing>

In Forms of Feeling (1985) the emphasis was on the written word as a way in to understanding the conversation- through Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Donne, Shakespeare. That was not to play down the importance of gesture, movement, visual representation, prosody, all of which are described in depth.

But, Hobson wrote relatively little that was specific about music and the conversation

This paper develops the brief sketch that Hobson provides.

The presentation explores forms of feeling in a musical context and draws on the emergence of form through the structure of music, affective attunement and vitality affects, mirror neurons and music, and transformation of affect through music

8th November 2025

Annual conference (all day at St Thomas Centre Manchester)

Change in Psychotherapy

Speakers Gillian Hardy and Michael Barkham

Gillian and Michael were co-authors of the standard manual on PIT

They are giving the keynote speeches on what we can learn about change in psychotherapy from studies of PIT

There will be the usual learning events using role play and open discussion

PAST PROGRAMMES

2023 CPD Events

20^th  January  

Simon  Heyland –

The  use  and  meaning  of  gesture

10^th  March  

Rebecca  Hughes –

Love and loneliness

12^th   May  

Frank  Margison –

The  Self and Marilyn  Monroe

7^th  July  

Tony  Korner –  

Long  term  therapy

8^th   September  

Anna Phillips –

A  PIT  perspective on psychedelics

24^th   November (Annual conference)

Dan  Beales & Simon Heyland  

Introductory  resources – a  transtheoretical  approach

2024 CPD Events

13 February 2024

Special Event: Discussion of PIT, Ethics and Professional Practice

Led by Frank Margison

12 April 2024

 “Psychological Biography: contrasting examples of Lincoln and Oppenheimer”

Else Guthrie.

This talk will focus on the different styles of psychological biography using biographies of Oppenheimer and Lincoln as examples. One style seeks to understand and construct a psychological narrative of the person under study whilst the other presents facts with little attempt to think about them in a psychological way. 

Both Oppenheimer and Lincoln were extraordinary people with contrasting upbringings and psychological profiles.

17th June 2024

Using the Conversational model to work with the darkly disrupted

Mary Lewis

Join us for a presentation and discussion of working with narcissistic and borderline difficulties in a training therapy, based on a published account by Carol Marando. In the paper Marando details her client’s powerful sense of persecution and rage, and how she used the conversational model to shape her responses to him. Mary Lewis will introduce this very detailed and explanatory account and lead our discussion of it.

Marando C (2021) Manifestations of the Malevolent Transformation – Using the Conversational Model to Work with the Darkly Disrupted. The Therapeutic Conversation 1 (2) 48-56

The paper is in Issue 2 of The Therapeutic Conversation, attached for ease of reference. Attendees are advised to read the paper before the event.

13 September 2024

Robert Hobson 25 year Memorial Day

Robert Hobson Day: A Joint ANZAP/PIT-UK Seminar

Friday 13^th September 2024 9.30-12.30 (UK time)

This webinar brings together speakers and audiences from the UK and Australia to describe and discuss Hobson’s psychotherapeutic legacy. With talks on diverse topics including the origins and underpinning influences of the conversational model, its poetic and scientific elements, and personal accounts of how Hobson’s work has shaped psychotherapy and psychotherapists in the last fifty years

We look forward – as ever – to linking up with our ANZAP colleagues in Australia and New Zealand as well as PIT practitioners around the world, for what will be a fascinating and enlivening seminar. I hope to see you there.

Annual Conference

8th November 2024

November 2024

This year’s conference offers answers to fundamental questions every PIT therapist might ask themself: Where does this contemporary form of psychotherapy come from? What are its underlying principles? Why does it place so much emphasis on the shape of therapist interventions? How does it differ from other comparable models?

Talks from leading PIT practitioners will describe the origins of the model, explain its specific use for those suffering from borderline conditions, and offer a compare-and-contrast perspective on PIT in relation to other leading models of therapy in the UK today. Beginning with a therapeutic community in London, we will take a journey to psychotherapy clinics in Sydney Australia and back again. The conference programme will explicitly reference the work of both Bob Hobson and Russell Meares, whose legacy we celebrate this year.

The conference flyer is attached, please circulate it to interested colleagues and display it on the CPD events noticeboard where you work.

2025 Past CPD Events

7th February 2025

Sequencing interventions

Karin Bacha, Ben Hague and Laurence Regan

Three PIT therapists will hold a round table discussion of the PIT technique of ‘sequencing interventions’, followed by a plenary discussion with us in the audience. This session is an opportunity to hear how PIT therapists try to layer and link together feelings, ideas, images, relationships and problems in the cyclical and evolving process of psychotherapy.

A discussion about how the advanced skill of sequencing interventions can be understood and used in practise.

Friday 4^th April 2025

Title: ‘Therapeutic focus in PIT: Trauma, Being and Relatedness’

The theme for the event is therapeutic focus. Drawing on the work of Russell Meares and colleagues, we will examine how the Conversational Model works with trauma in the life histories of people with borderline conditions. We will then explore what might be the essence of the model in its aims, with reference to other contemporary approaches to psychotherapy. And as ever there will be ample time for a conversation in the room to share our responses and reflections.

The conference sessions will offer:

• An overview of how the sense of self is disrupted by trauma in borderline conditions
• An explanation of how the Conversational Model aims to integrate trauma into ordinary consciousness
• A consideration of PIT in relation to emerging transtheoretical evidence for the core actions across all psychotherapies
• Opportunity to discuss these concepts and how to use them to inform our clinical work