Children's Literature: Building Resilience, Saturday 23rd June 2018, Dublin
Sat 23rd June
09:30 – 16:45
National Library of Ireland,
Kildare Street, Dublin 2
Tickets at Eventbrite click here
This ground-breaking and thought provoking conference provides a unique perspective from the worlds of literature, psychotherapy and neuroscience.
The learning objectives of the Conference are to bring together the three worlds of children's literature, the psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious and brain development.
The focus is to demonstrate how metaphor and meaning can effect brain development in early infancy and childhood and can later be instrumental in the treatment of trauma in adulthood and so effect the plasticity and structure of the brain. Research findings reveal that metaphor is more effective in lighting up aspects of the brain previously shut down by trauma, even when clients are in a psychotherapeutic process, also known as the talking cure.
The psychoanalytic content includes the meaning of literature and metaphor and their characters as ciphers who provide the child with an opportunity to enter into another world of play, phantasy and creativity. The Literature and metaphor act as an aperture into the unconscious to build the child's capacity for reflective functioning, critical and ethical thinking, and this can happen in children as young as four to six. It also aids the development of symbol formation and the movement from the paranoid schizoid to the depressive position.
It also provides that same aperture to therapists in the consulting room to access the unconscious functioning of the internal world. This process, which Mary T. Brady refers to as "narrative derivatives", representing the unconscious world of literature, film and metaphor, in children who egos and poor sense of self inhibits any direct contact with the unconscious. These children struggle to have a strong sense of I and can only speak about themselves at a remove, through these mediums.
The seminal work of the Jungian Psychoanalyst Margaret Wilkinson's "Coming into Mind, the mind brain relationship" and "Changing minds in .Therapy: Emotion, Attachment, Trauma & Neurobiology" will be included in the discussion and her research on the use of metaphor in the treatment of trauma on brain development.
A full day (5.45 hours) of varied presentations from a wide variety of speakers, including the hosts who will be threading the psychoanalytic threads of all of the presentations together throughout the day.
Facilitators Training
Maria McGrane M.Sc. Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, Group Analyst, MBT Therapist, Clinical Supervisor, ICP, IIGA, IGAS, BPS.
Linda Hanlon M.A Psychotherapy and Counselling, MBT Therapist, Dip in Counselling and Psychotherapist, Dip in Play therapy, Clinical Supervisor IACP, IAHIP, BACP