Barbara Dockar-Drysdale One-Day Conference (Public Registration Page)

 

 

IPCAPA in collaboration with the Squiggle Foundation present:

Barbara Dockar Drysdale – a conference appraising the work of a pioneer in working therapeutically with children and adolescents.

Barbara Dockar-Drysdale was a towering figure in the emerging therapeutic communities movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. She was instrumental in helping to establish two now famous institutions, the Mulberry Bush School and the Cotswold Community, where she was able to develop her thinking and work with severely deprived and often very disturbed children and young people in residential settings.

A close collaborator of D.W. Winnicott’s for many years, Dockar-Drysdale was able to draw on his thinking and adapt and develop his theory. to make it applicable to the settings in which she practiced.

A gifted clinician and creative thinker in her own right, Dockar-Drysdale introduced several concepts, such as “frozen children”, “archipelago children” and “the provision of primary experience”. Whilst her work is not widely taught in the canon of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, her thinking has lived on and continues to be relevant to therapeutic work with children and adolescents with complex presentations.

This one-day conference will bring to life this important work by exploring Barbara Dockar’s approach. It will bring together contributions from her close collaborators and students, as well as consider her concepts, her links with Winnicott and her relevance to contemporary Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy.

10:00- 10:15 Welcome and Introduction

10:15 John Whitwell: BDD, her approach and the experience of working with her – a personal account

11:15 tea break

11:30 Adrian Sutton: BDD’s thinking, her concepts and their relevance to clinicians working in the Independent Tradition

12:30 lunch

13:30 Stuart Hannah: Child Psychotherapy with a grounding in BDD’s work. A contemporary clinical perspective

14:30 tea break

14:45 plenary discussion

About the Speakers

Chair:
Julia Mikardo:
Julia Mikardo is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist (CAPT, ACP) who in 2021, retired from working in CAMHS in London. She now supervises qualified Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists, as well as trainees, and teaches some seminars on their training, as well as consulting to fostering and adoption Social Workers. Her experience of working at the Cotswold Community in the 1980’s led to her training as a CAPT. She retains a particular interest in work with young people who have experienced early trauma and who have grown up in the care system or been adopted.

Speaker biographies:

John Whitwell:
John Whitwell worked in the therapeutic care of children and young people in a variety of institutions, from 1969 until 2014. He had a longstanding association with the Cotswold Community, where he served as principal between 1985 and 1999 and collaborated with esteemed clinical consultants, including Barbara Dockar-Drysdale, Isabel Menzies Lyth, Dr. Eric Miller, and Paul van Heeswyk. From 1999 to 2014 John was the Managing Director of Integrated Services Programme (ISP), a pioneering independent therapeutic fostering organisation where he was able to adapt the principles acquired at the Cotswold Community to therapeutic work in family settings. He has published several papers in various journals and maintains a website which is a valuable resource for publications associated with his work (www.johnwhitwell.co.uk). He has served as a trustee of several charitable organisations, including The Mulberry Bush School and Gloucestershire Counselling Service. He is a qualified Group-Analytic Psychotherapist.

Adrian Sutton:
Adrian Sutton is a Fellow of the Squiggle Foundation having served as its Director from 2014 until this year. He is a Psychodynamic Organisational Therapist and was previously a Consultant in Child & Family Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at Manchester Royal Infirmary & Children’s Hospitals and Honorary Senior Teaching Fellow in Medical Education at Manchester Medical School: his other academic appointments include Visiting Professor of Psychiatry at Gulu University, Uganda. He writes and teaches on Winnicott’s ideas and has a particular interest in play and interplay in psychotherapy, psychosomatics and somatic countertransference: his book Paediatrics, Psychiatry & Psychoanalysis: through countertransference to case management (Routledge, 2013) has been published in Spanish in 2023. His other publications reflect his work in psychoanalytic approaches to clinical practice, medical education and ethics.

Stuart Hannah:
Stuart Hannah is a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist (ACP) currently practising in boarding schools and a community-based clinic in Shrewsbury. His career in therapeutic work with children began when he worked as a volunteer at the Cotswold Community in 1989. It was here he met John Whitwell and Barbara Dockar-Drysdale. He later trained in social work as a precursor to psychoanalytic child psychotherapy, qualifying in 2007. He is currently completing additional training in adult psychotherapy (BTPP). Throughout, he has held onto his therapeutic community roots and clearly remembers working with “Mrs D”. Her core values and ideas continue to influence his thinking and practice, as well as that of his closest colleagues.

 

*If you are a psychotherapist or counsellor residing in an active conflict zone, you are eligible to attend this event free of charge (regardless of whether you are a bpf member or not). Please email events@bpf-psychotherapy to enquire about a ticket.