Please click on to the speakers names for biography details

16:00-17:30  - Wednesday 23 June Professor Michael Jacobs

The vanity of looking back

While reflecting on the past is a significant feature of more than one approach to therapy, does that mean there is value in looking back on the history of AUCC? Michael was one of the association's early members, in the days when counselling in universities was at its beginning and BAC(P) did not exist. He reflects on how different things were then, but also on whether looking back to a supposed golden age is a narcissistic fantasy, and how far it is of value in understanding where AUCC is now or might be in the future. Nostalgia? Or learning from history?

09:30-10:45 - Thursday 24 June   Elsa Bell

Looking backwards, moving forward

AUCC/ASC's anniversary - a time for remembering, reminiscing and even maybe just a little nostalgia but definitely no wallowing in the past. As counsellors we know that would never do! The aim of this keynote presentation is to remind us where we have come from and to help us to think about where we are going. What should we hang on to and what should we let go? What are the current challenges of which our founding parents could never have dreamed and are we prepared and ready to face them? You are invited to think on these profound matters in advance....The aim is that this session should become a collaborative venture where old and new voices sing in, not perfect, but good-enough harmony.

09:30 - 10:45 - Friday 25 June    Margaret Wilkinson

Changing minds in therapy: the way forward?

We very much need a theory and practice where the best of the old is conserved yet where new insights are integrated and used effectively. I will seek to show how minds may be changed in therapy by blending together the best of affective neuroscience, attachment theory, infant research, evolutionary psychology, and ethology. I will argue that only when the new is blended with the old will we be able to offer a therapy that can effectively meet the needs of our clients.

How links are made between these fields regarding the making of mind, and how insights are used, is an area that careful research, rather than speculation, will reward. I suggest that an interdisciplinary approach that values the insights from the fathers of psychoanalysis, alongside insights from attachment research, parent-infant psychotherapy research, and the neurobiology of emotion should no longer be considered an optional "extra" in the world of psychotherapy for a few to pursue as a special interest, but rather the foundation of our training and practice.

Gambini (2007) says of Jung: "He followed the silk thread that united the physical and the psychic, he fought to envisage the unity that underlies perceptible diversities and dualities" (p. 364). It is that same silk thread that we must follow as we seek to bring the best of 21st-century thinking and research, to bear upon the process of changing minds in therapy.