Learning How to Ask Taking Meaning Seriously in Systemic Psychotherapy

£85.00

What will we focus on? How will we use the time?

In this one-day workshop, I will debate that, in line with current social and global preoccupations with our identities, culture, race and equity have moved to the centre of contemporary social and political ideologies and theories. This has important implications for systemic psychotherapy.

Dr. Krause will develop a guide for how therapists may be sensitive to agency, psychological and local meaning as well as to socially and culturally constructed notions of interaction and communication. This will be explored in the first part using Bateson’s early thinking and dilemmas in "Naven", a book neglected in systemic psychotherapy.

Participants will learn about an ethnographic approach to inter-cultural systemic psychotherapy as a model for inter- as well as intra-cultural systemic work. The workshop will aim to show that an ethnographic orientation, while akin to contemporary approaches such as CMM, narrative and dialogue in terms of capturing meaning, also encompasses earlier family therapy preoccupations with patterns and systems.

The workshop will start with the beginning of systemic thinking in family therapy. It will trace developments through structural and strategic approaches to narrative and dialogical ones. The second part of the workshop will focus on detailed ethnographic and therapeutic sequences as an aid to exploring what is left in and out of observation, patterns, assumptions and the self of the therapist.

An ethnographic approach may therefore be seen to reconcile the past with the present in systemic psychotherapy. At the same time we will learn to integrate preoccupations with culture, race and ethnicity at the centre of systemic thinking and practice.

The workshop is for those professionals and students wanting to explore and further develop their skills using ethnography and systemic therapy. This is a way of increasing our understanding of culture, to enrich our therapeutic practice with clients and other professionals.

Britt Krause PhD is a social anthropologist and a consultant systemic psychotherapist. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Nepal and with the Sikh community in Britain. She has practiced as a family therapist in the NHS for 18 years and has helped set up specialist services for Asian families. She is currently Training & Development Consultant at the Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust

Publications include Therapy Across Culture, Sage Publications 1998 and Culture & System in Family Therapy, Karnac 2002.

At the KCC Foundation, London

Please note that application forms are available in pdf format. If you are unable to read files, you will need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader.  For further information, please click here

To download