British Psychological Society Division of Counselling Psychology Masterclass
27 September 2008

All-day Masterclass on
Personification and the Dialogical Self
Presented by John Rowan

The recent work in Dialogical Self Theory (Hermans, DiMaggio and others), Assimilation Theory (Stiles, Osatuke and others), Schema Therapy (Young, Klosko and Weishaar), Narrative Therapy (White, Epston and others), Person-Centred Therapy (Mearns, Cooper and others) and experiential therapy (Greenberg, Mahrer and others) all adds up to make a completely new approach to the use of personification in therapy. Instead of all the plethora of names and titles for internal processes and states, we now refer simply to I-positions.

This results in a huge simplification and demystifying of the whole area. It is now clear that there are ways of working here which can be adopted without loss by people in psychoanalysis (Bromberg), CBT (Padesky), and many other approaches. This does not challenge any existing way of working, as for example the relational, but simply adds to it by working within it.

Participants will be given opportunities to do actual work using this approach, and to get feedback on what they do. There are great opportunities here to expand our repertoire in creative ways while still being able to stay within the ordinary limitations of short term work.

Biography: John Rowan, PhD, is a Fellow of the BPS (and also of BACP and UKCP) and has been working in the field of therapy since 1978. He is a Chartered Psychologist and a member of the Division of Counselling Psychology. He is also on the Register of Psychologists Practising as Psychotherapists. His book on Subpersonalities is well known, and a new book on Personification and the Dialogical Self will be out next year.

Time: 10 am – 5 pm
Venue: The Society’s London Office, 30 Tabernacle Street, London EC2A 4UE
Cost: £99.00 – places are limited so book early.

If you are interested in John Rowan’s Masterclass, please contact the Society’s Conference Office either by telephone, 0116 252 9555, fax, 0116 255 7123, or e-mail, Conferences@bps.org.uk for a Registration form, or see the website www.bps.org.uk/conferences.


British Psychological Society Division of Counselling Psychology Masterclass
31 May 2008

All day Masterclass on
The Transpersonal – Exploring the Subtle realm
Presented by John Rowan

If we ignore people’s soul and spirit, we are ignoring too much, it seems to me. If the spiritual aspects of the person do feature in their lives, and if we want to deal with and meet the whole person, we cannot ignore them. But there are a great many voices in this area, many of them confusing. We have to understand that the transpersonal is not the paranormal, not the right brain, not the New Age, not religion, not fundamentalism and not magic. It is a scientifically respectable acknowledgement of the deeper parts of every human being, based on the research work now prevalent in the field, and published in academic journals.

In this workshop we shall be even more limited, not dealing with every aspect of the transpersonal, but sticking to what is most useful in psychotherapy. We shall be dealing with transcendental empathy, with subtle energy, with symbols and images, with archetypes and big dreams, with intuition and the work of the heart. This is the area which is ignored in the Buddhist approaches to therapy, even though they have a label (Sambhogakaya) for this whole field of work. We shall be exploring Being, Doing and Thinking in this context, and making sure that each participant really gets the message.

Participants will be given opportunities to do actual work using this approach, and to get feedback on what they do. There are great opportunities here to expand our repertoire in creative ways while still being able to stay within the ordinary limitations of short-term work.

Time: 10am – 5pm
Venue: BPS London Office, 30 Tabernacle Street, London EC2A 4UE
Cost: £99.00 – places are limited so book early.

If you are interested in John Rowan’s Masterclass please contact the Society’s Conference Office either by telephone, 0116 252 9555, fax 0116 255 7123, or email conferences@bps.org.uk for a Registration Form, or see the website www.bps.org.uk/conferences.