Richard Erskine’s eight relational needs offer language for some of the things people may seek, and struggle to seek, in close relationships: security, valuing, acceptance, mutuality, self-definition, making an impact, having the other initiate, and being able to...
Psychotherapist Resources
Was Richard Erskine an Octopus?
The Three Pillars of Gestalt: Phenomenology, Field Theory and Dialogue
Gestalt therapy is often introduced through three closely connected foundations: phenomenology, field theory and dialogue. They are sometimes called its three pillars, though they are not three separate techniques to be applied in sequence. Together, they shape how a...
Choosing a Website Developer: A Calm Guide for Psychotherapists
Choosing somebody to build your website can feel oddly exposing. You may be presented with lots of confusing terms before you have had a chance to say what you actually want your practice to feel like. You know those really helpful breathing exercises you know…...
Standing on the Edge of the World: a bold, relational account of trauma
Standing on the Edge of the World: a bold, relational account of trauma John Gillespie’s latest book asks what changes when trauma is understood not as a private defect, but as a breakdown in our shared capacity to make a world together. Editorial scope: This is a...
Open Hearted Parenting: A Group for Parents and Carers of LGBTQ+ Young People
When a young person comes out, begins exploring their gender or sexuality, or asks to be known differently, parents and carers can feel many things at once. There may be love, pride and relief. There may also be worry, protectiveness, uncertainty, grief for an...
Together Through Winter: Deb Coughlin’s Online Psychotherapy Group
I first met Deb Coughlin on my psychotherapy course when I was a stripling first year and Deb was preparing for graduation. This was in the context of a room of forty people. Deb’s gentle presence shone out. Now I know her to be an experienced psychotherapist and when...
Petruska Clarkson was a Mouse!
Petruska Clarkson’s account of the therapeutic relationship is serious, useful and far more nuanced than this poem has any right to be. Her five relationship modalities offer a way of noticing the different kinds of connection that can arise in therapy: the shared...
Kurt Lewin, Group Dynamics and the Inner World of Trauma
Kurt Lewin and Donald Kalsched offer psychotherapists two very different ways of thinking about groups. Lewin helps us see the group as a dynamic field of forces, roles, norms, pressures and possibilities. Kalsched helps us see the inner world of trauma: the...
Kalsched, Trauma and the Inner World of Therapeutic Groups
Donald Kalsched did not write a manual for therapeutic group work. His contribution is more indirect, and perhaps more clinically interesting. His writing gives psychotherapists a way of thinking about trauma, dissociation, archetypal defence and the inner protective...
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