Friday Seminars

24 October 2025 – Billy Smallwood

Title:  Group Analytic Thinking – A Defence against Trauma Organised Systems within Services for Children and Young People.  

Martin is a clinical psychologist, group analyst and writer, working (mostly in the NHS) and living in London.  He has contributed to group analysis in a range of ways, including 3 books- The World Within the Group (Karnac, 2014), Permission to Narrate (Karnac, 2016) and Barwick, N. & Weegmann, M. Group Therapy: A Group-Analytic Approach (Routledge, 2018). 

Martin worked for twenty years in NHS substance misuse services, in a range of settings.   Psychodynamics of Addiction (Wiley, 2002) was his first book.  The illustrated workshop is an introduction to the psychodynamics of addiction- (substances and more) from which we look at how addictive suffering is addressed and recovery from substance misuse is supported.

21 November 2025 – Sheila Melzak

Title: A Holistic Perspective on Working Therapeutically with Refugees Individually and in Groups Finding, Building and Re-Building what has been Lost, Taken Away or With-Held. 

(Working Towards Antidotes and Deep and Fortifying Developmental Underpinnings for Young and Unaccompanied Asylum Seekers after Experiences of Human Rights Abuses, Violence, Separation, Massive Loss, and Numerous Unplanned Life Changes in order to build and sustain resilience, strength, and wisdom and humour)

Sheila has, for as long as she can remember, been fascinated by the power of stories both to heal and sustain and to introduce what we, in our current times, name as fake news.  Her personal experience is rooted in being raised in a refugee family after the second world war in Europe, working in urban children’s homes and in her learning as a child and adolescent psychotherapist and in group therapeutic work, and in particular working with conflict in groups.  She has had opportunities to work in the statutory and voluntary sectors in the UK and internationally, including in areas of conflict.  She worked for nineteen years leader of the Children’s team at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and subsequently with a small group of administrators and clinicians founded the Baobab Centre for Young Survivors in Exile where she was Director for seventeen years, retiring recently.  Sheila has focused in her work with young people who have been separated from their parents after significant experiences of violence, abuse and neglect, and who have made long journeys from one culture, political context and way of life to another.  These young people may have experienced captivity, violence to their own bodies, observations of violation and murder, trafficking, and forced recruitment into government and rebel armies and each find personal and unique ways to cope.  Sheila currently is working with a large number of young adults, who arrived to the UK as unaccompanied minors, as part of a model of non-time limited psychotherapeutic work and is hoping to write and publish about their experiences and needs and about challenging the barriers to this model. 

13 February 2026 – Debra Nash

Title:   The Centering of ‘Whiteness’ and its Impact in Group Analysis and Therapeutic Practice.

This workshop is led by members of the Disrupting Whiteness Group.  This group was set up in 2021, under the auspices of the IGA Power, Position and Privilege Working Group.  It regularly runs series of 6 session Reading and Reflection groups which are open to Group Analysts, Psychotherapists and Counsellors.  The groups are an intentional space where white people meet to grapple with how they came to be ‘white’ and what it means to be white in a racist society and how they can challenge their complicity within the system of racism.  The group also runs a ‘continuing’ group which meets 4 times a year for those who have completed occasional workshops. A question that is reasonably asked is: Why ‘white only spaces’?  These groups are intentionally for those who identify as ‘white’ to foster honest self-reflection, accountability, and learning without placing the burden on people of colour to educate or absorb emotional reactions from white participants.

This seminar invites us to consider how the dynamics of social power are recreated within and between us in our trainings and in clinical applications.

6 March 2026 – Camilla Matthews

Title:  When Art Therapy Meets Group Analysis

Camilla F. Matthews is an art therapist, psychotherapist, group analyst and a group analytic supervisor. She has many years of experience within social services and the NHS working with trauma, personality difficulties and eating disorders. She currently has a private practice providing psychotherapy, supervision and training for individuals and groups.