Early relational trauma has a life-long impact on a person’s psychological and emotional development. Dissociation is both a defensive process against unbearable experience but also the result of the neuro-biological damage that trauma causes. The differing views in the psychotherapy world over the relative importance of dissociation and repression have their historical roots in the fundamentally different models of the mind offered by Freud and Jung. I would look at the history of the concept of dissociation from Janet to Jung and then to psychology research by Van der Kolk and others, showing that Jung's ideas anticipated many modern developments in the concept of dissociation. I shall link these to current neuroscientific models of dissociation and discuss the modifications to psychoanalytic technique that are necessary when working with severely dissociative patients.

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.

She is a Senior Member and Trustee of the British Psychotherapy Foundation and former Editor-in -Chief of the Journal of Analytical Psychology.

She 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.

Online entry opens at 10:15am; the lecture will begin at 10:30am.