The EFTA/AFT Congress, 4th - 6th October, 2007
:: Plenary Speakers
Boris Cyrulnik
Boris Cyrulnik (Bordeaux, 1937), a survivor from de nazi camps, is a French neurologist and psychiatrist with a deep knowledge of ethology. Since 1996 he is the director of studies at the school of human sciences of the University of Var, and the chair of the research team in clinical ethology at the Toulon hospital. His work and thinking have allowed the development of the concept of resilience in the field of psychology.
Margaret and Michael Rustin
Margaret Rustin, MACP (Brit), is Head of Child Psychotherapy and the Organizing Tutor of Clinical Training and Doctorate Programme in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic, London. Her main interests at present include the challenges and complexities of working with foster and adoptive families; the development of child psychotherapy training in the UK; and in the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis. She is also very active as an international teacher and speaker. Recent speaking engagements have included presenting at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in San Paolo, Brazil; at the conference on "Deprivation" in Lamore Plage, France; and at the Assessment Conference in Milan, Italy. She is co-author of Narratives of Love and Loss and co-editor of both Closely Observed Infants and Psychotic States in Children, and is a founding editor of the International Journal of Infant Observation and Its Applications. She has a forthcoming book on Psychoanalytic and Sociological Approaches to Classic Drama.
Michael Rustin is Professor of Sociology and Dean of Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of East London, and a Visiting Professor at the Tavistock Clinic. He has been writing about psychoanalysis, and especially about its relation to social and cultural questions, for many years, and has taken a significant part in the development of academic studies of psychoanalysis in Britain over the past decade or so. Michael Rustin also currently works in the fields of socio-biographical methods. He was co-director between 1996 and 1999 of a research project on Social Exclusion funded by the European Union, called "Social Strategies in Risk Societies", which made use of these methods to investigate individual experiences of exclusion and risk. There are links between this methodology, and clinical research methodology, which he and colleagues in London are currently seeking to develop. He is author of The Good Society and the Inner World, co-author of Narratives of Love and Loss and Psychoanalytic Sociology. His new book, Psychoanalysis, Science and Politics will be published in the fall.
Hubert J. M. Hermans
Hubert J. M. Hermans is emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Nijmegen, Netherlands. He is interested in idiographic approaches of the self and deviced a self-confrontation method for the assessment of one's personal meaning system. He developed Dialogical Self Theory and is president of the International Society for Dialogical Science (ISDS). www.dialogicalself.info
Harlene Anderson
Harlene Anderson, founding member of the Houston Galveston Institute, Taos Institute, and Access Success International is recognized internationally as being at the leading edge of the development of a postmodern collaborative philosophy and practices as a thinker, consultant, trainer, coach, and educator. Her approach has proven effective with a variety of human systems and their activities: organizations, individuals, families, higher education, and research. She takes her tools - her insights, her keen interest, her engaging conversational style, her clarity, her leadership skills - to help professionals turn her philosophical stance into new and often surprising possibilities for their clients, students, and organizations, and for themselves. She embodies her own belief in learning as a lifelong process - inviting, encouraging, and challenging others to be inquisitive, creative, authentic, and open to the ever-present possibilities for newness in others - and in themselves.
Kenneth J. Gergen
Kenneth J. Gergen is a Senior Research Professor at Swarthmore College, Affiliate Professor at Tilburg University, and President of the Board of the Taos Institute. His pioneering work in the theory of social construction, and its application to therapy, organizations, and education receives international acclaim. His writings on postmodernism, technology, and the self have also been translated into many different languages. Together with Mary Gergen, he has been a major influence in the development of narrative studies, qualitative methodology, and performance. With Mary Gergen, he also edits the Positive Aging Newsletter. His work, The Saturated Self (Basic Books), has been a major catalyst for family therapists; similarly, his seminal books on social construction, Realities and Relationships (Harvard University Press), and An Invitation to Social Construction (Sage, Ltd), are read around the world. His writings on therapy are collected in a recent edition, Therapeutic Realities (Taos Institute Publications), and are also available in French (Construir la Realite and Spanish, Construir la Realidad). Gergen is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, and honorary degrees from Tilburg University, Saybrook Institute, and the University of Athens.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown came to this country in 1972 from Uganda. She completed her M.Phil. in literature at Oxford in 1975. She is a journalist who has written for The Guardian, Observer, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Evening Standard, The Mail and other newspapers and is now a regular columnist on The Independent and London’s Evening Standard. She is also a radio and television broadcaster and author of several books. Her book, No Place Like Home, well received by critics, was an autobiographical account of a twice removed immigrant. From 1996 to 2001 she was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research which published True Colours on the role of government on racial attitudes. Tony Blair launched the book in March 1999. She is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre. In 2000 she published, Who Do We Think We Are? which went on to be published in the US too, an acclaimed book on the state of the nation. Andrew Marr and Sir Bernard Crick among other reviewers found the book exceptionally wise and challenging. "After Multiculturalism", a pamphlet re-assessing the multicultural ideology in Britain was the first critical examination by a social democrat of a settled and now damaging orthodoxy. She is also a regular international public speaker in Britain, other European countries, North America and Asian nations. In 2001 came the publication of Mixed Feelings, a book on mixed race Britons which has been praised by all those who have reviewed it to date. In June 1999, she received an honorary degree from the Open University for her contributions to social justice. She is a Vice President of the United Nations Association, UK and has also agreed to be a special ambassador for the Samaritans. She is the President of the Institute of Family Therapy. She is married with a twenty eight year old son and thirteen year old daughter.
:: Sub Plenary Speakers
Diana Alvis
Diana Alvis is a Consultant Systemic Family Therapist in The Heart of Birmingham CAMHS and a Systemic Teacher, Trainer and Supervisor. She is also a psychiatrist and an international consultant developing psychosocial programs for communities in poverty or affected by violence (political, social, familiar) in South America, Middle East and Africa. She works as a psychosocial expert for the United Nations.
Eia Asen
Dr Eia Asen, M.D., FRCPsych, is both a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist as well as a Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy. He is also a senior systemic therapist. He grew up in Berlin where he also studied medicine. He came to London in the early 1970s and then started his psychiatric training at the Maudsley Hospital in London. He is now the clinical director of the Marlborough Family Service which is a publically funded (NHS) integrated CAMHS and Adult Psychotherapy service in Central London, predominantly with a systemic orientation. Until 2002 he also worked as a consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, as well as being a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry. He is the author and co-author of 7 books, as well as many scientific papers and book chapters. He lectures all over Europe and he is and has been involved in a number of research projects, on depression, eating disorders, family violence and educational failure.
Susan Benbow
Susan M. Benbow is a consultant old age psychiatrist at Wolverhampton City PCT and Professor of Mental Health & Ageing at Staffordshire University where she is currently developing user and carer led teaching. After training in systemic therapy at the Cardiff Family Institute, she has continued to spread the message.
Paolo Bertrando
Paolo Bertrando, psychiatrist and systemic psychotherapist, was trained in Milan by Gianfranco Cecchin and Luigi Boscolo, with whom he collaborated in the 1990s, using initially the Milan Approach for working with schizophrenia. He has travelled in Europe, Asia and Australia, holding workshops and seminars. His present interests concern the dynamics of systemic therapy the broader implications of systemic theory, and the use of systemic therapy with individuals.
John Burnham
John Burnham is a systemic psychotherapist working in the independent and public sectors. His practice includes therapy, supervision, training, consultation and writing.
His main clinical work is with children, young people and families at Parkview Clinic in Birmingham where he is employed as a Consultant Family Therapist and Director of the Systemic Training Programme. John has 30 years of experience working with families, couples and individuals. He is a trainer and formerly Director of Training at Kensington Consultation Centre (KCC) in London.
As well as training in the UK he teaches in a variety of contexts including Scandinavia, Netherlands, USA, and South America.
He has published numerous articles on the systemic approach to therapy, consultation, training and supervision. He is sole author of the classic text ‘Family Therapy: First steps towards a systemic approach’, published by Routledge, and editor of the Special Edition of Human Systems known as ‘Voices from the Training Context’. His model ‘Approach, Method and Technique is widely used in a variety of training contexts. Currently he writing a book on Systemic Supervision.
David Campbell
David Campbell is a consultant clinical psychologist working in the Child and Family Department at the Tavistock Clinic in London. He is a systemic family therapist, and course organiser for the MSc. in Systemic Psychotherapy course. He is also a free-lance consultant to organizations, specializing in team building and organisational development. He is the co-editor of a 42 book series entitled, The Systemic Thinking and Practice Series, and his most recent publication is a book in this series titled: Taking Positions in the Organisation, (Campbell and Groenbaek, 2006, London, Karnac).
Katia Charalabaki
Since 1993, co-founder and co-director of Family Therapy Unit - Psychiatric Hospital of Athens and it’s Training Institute.
Vladislav Chvála
Vladislav Chvála, born in 1952, has been working in the field of health care since 1978, first as an obstetrician, later as a sexologist specializing in family therapy. He founded The Center of Complex Therapy of Psychosomatic Disorders in Liberec in 1989, and since then he has been the head of the team of physicians, psychologists, and rehabilitation personnel. He exerts himself to implement family therapy in the health care system especially in the field of psychosomatic medicine.
Together with Ludmila Trapková he co-founded The Institute of Family Therapy and Psychosomatic Medicine in Liberec where they have trained family therapy of psychosomatic disorders for more than 10 years. The training is directed toward narrative therapy modified by their concept of a family as a social uterus. Vladislav Chvála works as a lecturer, supervisor, and organizer of family therapy in the Czech Republic, and he is a co-author of the book Family Therapy of Psychosomatic Disorders.
Luigi Cancrini
Luigi Cancrini, psychiatrist and psychotherapist of a psychoanalitical and systemic formation, founded the Centro Studi di Terapia Familiare e Relazionale during the seventies of which he still is Chairman. He taught Clinical Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at “La Sapienza” University in Rome between 1970 and 1995. His activity had initially developed within cultural battles against the emargination of differences in schools (different or special classes), in psychiatry (psychiatric hospitals) and within the field of dependence and antisocial behaviour (jail). He continued to deal with these conditions connecting the manifestation of differences to the patient's disorder and bringing forward an attempt to enlarge the traditional borders of psychotherapeutical practice with a continuous political and divulgative envolvement directed towards the recognition of its importance. He is the author of many books such as Bambini diversi a scuola (1974), Quei temerari sulle macchine volanti (1982), Date parole al dolore with Stefania Rossini (1996), Lezioni di psicopatologia (1997), La luna nel pozzo (1999), La psicoterapia: grammatica e sintassi (2002), Il vaso di Pandora with C.La Rosa (2002) and Schiavo delle mie brame (2003). He has been the Scientific Director of the Saman Therapeutical Communities for Drug Addicts since 1995 and director of the Centro di Aiuto al Bambino Maltrattato e alla Famiglia attached to the district of Rome since 1998.
Rudi Dallos
Rudi Dallos is Professor of Clinical Psychology and Programme Director on the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology Training Prtogramme at the University of Plymouth. His current clinical work is with children, adolescents and their families and has conducted research and clinical work in a number of areas including work with adult mental health, couples and eating disorders. His recent publications include: Attachment Narrative Therapy, Working Systemically with Families and Researching Psychotherapy and Counselling.
Thierry Darnaud
Doctor in Psychology, Family Therapist ; Laboratoire Santé, Individu, Société (EA 4129), Université Lumière - Lyon 2 ; Centre Hospitalier d’Alès – France, trainer at the Association Réseau et Famille in Montpellier (France). Trained in psychomotricity, he was very quickly interested in the field of the autism and the gerontology. He has become now one of the specialists in the family impacts in ageing.
Bogdan de Barbaro
Clinical psychiatrist, psychotherapist and family therapist, Associated Professor in Collegium Medicum of the Jagiellonian University, Director of Family Therapy Department, Krakow, Poland. President of Family Therapy Section of Polish Psychiatric Association. Author and co-author of 142 publications and lectures on scientific congresses on psychotherapy, family therapy and psychiatry.
Rodolfo de Bernart
• M.D., University Firenze 1972
• Specialized in Psychiatry University Pisa 1993.
• Analitic individual neo-Freudian training 1974-1978 with therapist trained and supervised by E. Fromm
• From 1974 to 1977 Training in Family Therapy and then as a trainer in ITF Roma with Maurizio Andolfi. Carmine Saccu, and supervised by Salvador Minuchin, Carl Whitaker.
• Worked in public Psychiatric Services in Florence from 1975 to 1985, and founded in 1977 the first public Family Therapy Unit in Florence.
• Nel 1981 founded with Cristina Dobrowolski, and from that time is director of Istituto di Terapia Familiare di Firenze.
• Professor of Family Therapy before in Scuola di Specializzazione in Psichiatria dell'Università di Firenze (dir. Prof.Pazzagli), then in Scuola di Psicologia Clinica dell’Università di Siena (Dir. Prof. Reda) Now Professor of Family Therapy in Scuola di Specializzazione in Psichiatria dell’Università di Siena (Prof. Castrogiovanni).
• Teaches in ITFF and other linked institutes (ITFV Treviso , Verona, Vicenza, Venezia-Mestre, CEF Este, Logos Genova, ITFB Bologna, ITFFe Ferrara, ITFS Siena, CoMeTe Empoli, Massa, Pistoia e Grosseto) and in schools of different approaches of Psychoterapy.
Cristina Dobrowolski
Cristina Dobrowolski trained in Family Therapy in Rome with M.Andolfi and C.Saccu.
Supervision with Menghi and Soccorsi in Rome FTI, Training as Trainer with de Bernart and Giacometti in ITFF Florence. Personal Analysis (freudian) with Meneghini in Florence.
In 1981 she founded with R.de Bernart the ITFF (Istituto di Terapia Familiare di Firenze) .
Cristina teaches and supervise in other Italian Institutes and in several Public services all over Italy as well as presenting workshops and papers in Conferences in Italy and abroad.
Editor with Rodolfo de Bernart of the Abstracts Section of Terapia Familiare , Journal founded and edited by Maurizio Andolfi.
She is a member of SITF and SIPPR, Founder of AIMS of EFTA and of EFTA-TIC, external Teacher for A.I.Psi. (Italian Ass. for Psychoanalysis). She is also the author of several papers and charter in books, some translated in French and Spanish.
Anne Douglas
Dr Anne Douglas is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist in Glasgow. She has specialised in the field of trauma for over 20 years. In 2000 she set up the Compass mental health liaison team for asylum seekers and refugees. She received the British Psychological Society Award for Promoting Equality of Opportunity 2006.
Carole Gammer
Ph.D., clinical psychologist, was at the Children’s Hospital of Harvard University Medical School. She is living in Paris since 1980 and training systemic therapists in Germany, Switzerland, France and Spain. She is teaching and supervising in hospitals, institutions…
Publication : The Children’s Voice in Family Therapy.
Erès, Toulouse (2005) – Carl Auer Systeme, Heidelberg (2007) – Norton, New York (2008)
Arlene Healey
Arlene Healey is a social worker and family therapist who has worked in Belfast for more than 26 years with troubled children and young people and their families. In the early 1990s she developed a culturally sensitive systemic approach to the treatment of families affected by trauma emanating from the civil conflict in Northern Ireland. In 1998 she was appointed to the Family Trauma Centre as Centre Manager and Consultant Family Therapist. She has been involved for many years in the development of systemic family therapy in Northern Ireland. Arlene has presented workshops both nationally and internationally and published on the subject of family trauma. She is currently Chair of the Institute for Conflict Research in Belfast and a member of the Board of the Clanwilliam Institute in Dublin. In 2005 she was seconded to the British Red Cross to work with UK survivors of the tsunami in Thailand.
Annette Kreuz-Smolinski
Clinical Psychologist
Director of the Center for Phasic Family Therapy, Fase 2, Valencia, Spain.
Annette Kreuz, born in Germany, lives and works in Valencia (Spain). She is an accredited Psychotherapist and Supervisor in Family Therapy, Director of a training institute, and has been General Secretary of several important Spanish federations in family therapy and psychotherapy. She is the general secretary of the European Family Therapy Association, EFTA.
Michel Maestre
Michel Maestre is psychologists, family therapist since 1982. He has been influenced by the Belgium school (Mony Elkaïm, Edith Goldbeter, Jacques Pluymaker…).
He works first with in social field, than created his consultation in family and couple therapy. Now, he works as trainer and therapist at PSYCOM INSTITUT, Villeneuve d’Ascq, Northern France.
Jacques Miermont
Jacques Miermont was born on the 9th November 1946. Psychiatrist, both in private practice and in hospital and health centre, he was trained in psychanalysis and family therapy for ten years. His main trainer in family therapy was Siegi Hirsch. He created a Federation of Family Therapy connecting serveral psychiatric, social and judicial services in the south suburbs of Paris (Villejuif, France). He founded in 1979 the Centre d’Étude et de Recherche sur la Famille (Training and Research). He is the founder an President of the Société Française de Thérapie Familiale. Following the direction of Jean-Louis Le Moigne, he pursues a clinical research about psychotherapies and an interdisciplinary research about communication and cognition processes allowing complex human systems’ autonomy.
Luigi Onnis
Luuigi Onnis is Professor of Psychiatry Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy at the University “La Sapienza” of Rome. He is Director of Psychotherapy and Family Therapy Service of the Department of Psychiatric Sciences and founder and training Director of IEFCoS in Rome, and President of IEFCoSTRE in Cagliari.
Luigi Onnis is also a founder of EFTA and member of the Coordinating Body of the Association, member of the Board of EFTA TIC and member of AFTA (American Family Therapy Academy).
Jacques Pluymaekers
Psychologist and Family Therapist. He was in 1970 on the initiative of a pilot project in one of the most underprivileged districts of Brussels which will develop the systemic approach and the family therapy in the situations of crises. This project will also be the starting point of practices and many researches on the work of inter institutional network.
He has developed, as of the Eighties, cycles of training in systemic approach and family therapy at the Association Réseau Famille in Montpellier (France) and at the Institut Provincial de Formation Sociale in Namur (Belgium).
He was one of the founders of the Network « Alternative to Psychiatry » set up in 1975 in Brussels.
He is now family therapist and trainer at the Institute for Family and Human System Studies in Brussels and at the Association Réseau et Famille in Montpellier (France). He is the Chair of the Chamber of Individual Members of the European Family Therapy Association.
Kyriaki Polychroni
Kyriaki Protopsalti–Polychroni was born in 1952 in Greece, emmigrated to Canada as a child where she went on to her first university studies, returning to reside and work in her native homeland since the late 1970s. She is a psychologist, Group and Family Therapist, Trainer and Supervisor. Ms. Polychroni is a member of the Scientific Team of the Athenian Institute of Anthropos. She is founding Member of EFTA and, currently, Board Secretary of its Training Institutes’ Chamber (EFTA-TIC).
Peter Rober
Peter Rober, Phd is Associate Professor of Marital and Family Therapy and teaches at the KU Leuven, Belgium. He is a family therapist, supervisor and trainer at the training institute Context at the University Hospital in Leuven (Belgium).
He has extensive experience in training, supervision, research, and consultation in academic, clinical, and community settings. Peter’s current interests include working with children in family therapy, dialogical approaches to family therapy and qualitative therapy research.
Jaakko Seikkula
Ph.D., Professor of psychotherapy, University of Jyväskylä
Clinical psychologist, family therapist. Vice chair of the Finnish Family Therapy Association.
He has mainly been involved in developing family and social network based practices in psychiatry with psychosis and other severe crises, after being fa member of the team in Western Lapland in Finland and more recently in many development and research project.
Matteo Selvini
Psychologist and Family Therapist, has studied distortion of reality, family secrets, long term follow-up of anorectic and psychotic patients. Member of Mara Selvini Palazzoli clinical team since 1979, with her, Stefano Cirillo and Anna Maria Sorrentino founded the Family Psychotherapy School of Milan
Ludmila Trapková
Ludmila Trapková, born in 1949, works as a clinical psychologist. She studied mathematics first, and later she focused on clinical psychology. She completed training in individual and group psychotherapy. Since 1985 she has worked in a department of child psychiatry, specializing in family therapy. Since 1992 she has worked as a private psychotherapist in Prague, and at the same time, she has been a member of the team of The Center of Complex Therapy of Psychosomatic Disorders in Liberec, treating psychosomatically ill families in a co-therapist couple with Vladislav Chvála. She co-founded The Institute of Family Therapy and Psychosomatic Medicine in Liberec together with Vladislav Chvála where they have trained family therapy of psychosomatic disorders for more than 10 years. The training has been accredited for public health care system. Within the teamwork with Vladislav Chvála, Ludmila Trapková developed a concept of a family as a social uterus, which has proved to be considerably influential within the family therapist community in the Czech Republic. Ludmila Trapková is an organizer and supervisor of family therapy in the Czech Republic, and a co-author of the book Family Therapy of Psychosomatic Disorders.
Colwyn Trevarthen
Colwyn Trevarthen, PhD (Caltech), FRSE, a New Zealander, has taught at Edinburgh since 1971. He has over 200 publications on brain development, infants' motives for relationships and learning, the effects of autism and depressive illness, help for parents, teachers and clinicians, and rhythms and expressions of 'musicality' in communication.
Arlene Vetere
Arlene Vetere is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Surrey University, Guildford, UK, and is a UKCP registered family therapist. She is current president of the European Family Therapy Association, and chair of the Academic and Research Committee of AFT UK. Her recent books include 'Narrative Therapies with Children and Their Families', co-edited with Emilia Dowling, and 'Researching psychotherapy and Counselling', co-authored with Rudi Dallos.