In this seminar we will highlight the life-long impact of early relational trauma on a person’s psychological and emotional development and its role in creating dissociation. We will discuss the differing views in the psychotherapy world over the relative importance of dissociation and repression, and explore the historical roots of these differing views in the fundamentally different models of the mind offered by Freud and Jung.  We will discuss clinical work with traumatized and dissociative patients and discuss the modifications to psychoanalytic technique that are necessary when working with severely dissociative patients.  

This will be very much a discussion rather than a lecture, and if possible, students should bring clinical material and questions they would like to discuss around this topic.  

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Dr Jean Knox is a psychiatrist and a Jungian analyst with a relational and attachment-based approach.  Her PhD on the effect of emotion on memory and perception was at the Psychoanalysis Unit at UCL,supervised by Professor Peter Fonagy.

She is Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Exeter, for the Doctorate in Clinical Practice and the Professional Qualifying Training in Psychodynamic and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and is Chair of the Trustees of the British Psychotherapy Foundation.

She was Editor-in -Chief of the Journal of Analytical Psychology and has written and taught extensively on the relevance of research in attachment theory and developmental neuroscience to psychotherapy theory and practice. Her book Archetype, Attachment, Analysis: Jungian Psychology and the Emergent Mind was published in 2003. Her book ‘Self-Agency in Psychotherapy: Attachment, Autonomy and Intimacy’ was published in December 2011, in the WW Norton Interpersonal Neurobiology series. 

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Knox, J. (2013) ‘The Mind in Fragments: The Neuroscientific, Developmental and Traumatic Roots of Dissociation and Their Implications for Clinical Practice’, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 33:449-466

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