Workshops
A collection of pre-recorded video workshops by Allan Frater exploring themes of imagination, story and dream in therapeutic context.
Each 90 mins workshop is a mix of slideshow presentation, discussion and live demonstrations of the theory in practice. The slideshow presentation and a CPD certificate are included.
Click on the links below to either purchase individual recordings for £9.99 or subscribe to the Onlinevents Learning Library to gain unlimited access to all Allan’s recordings – and more besides – for £9.99 per month (cancel anytime with no penalty).
This is a workshop on imagination with a difference. Conventional image-based approaches often focus upon scripted techniques and/or an interpretative emphasis, figuring out what the images found in dreams, memories and fantasies mean. What makes this workshop different is an emphasis upon the rather neglected area of how we imagine. Instead of taking imagination for granted, as a kind of machine to manipulate changes, or translating images into ideas through interpretations, the workshop will emphasise the process of how we imagine and the healing and transformative effects of meaningful imaginative experience itself.
Stories are not just entertainment or make believe but also how we make sense of the world. This workshop considers a client’s entry into therapy as a breakdown of story-making. How, when stories become fixed and repetitive, unable to incorporate unforeseen events, psychological suffering arises. Caught between holding on to out-of-date stories while simultaneously fearful of embracing the new, clients find themselves in a time-between-stories. This workshop will show how to cultivate the imaginative capacity to notice, validate and enhance the story-making processes already happening in the client’s life. To do so will involve suspending the temptations of a rational-interpretative approach and learning instead a practical and experiential skill set for working with stories as living imagery.
The metaphorical father of modern psychotherapy was Sigmund Freud. Influenced by the zeitgeist of his time, Freud drew heavily upon technological metaphors. Hence ‘psychodynamic theory’ as a carry-over from the thermodynamics of steam-engines and a psychological lexicon of ‘resistances’, ‘pressures’, ‘oppositional-forces’, cathartic ‘release’, psychological ‘parts’ and ‘objects’. While this framework has stood the test of time, the metaphorical comparison is only partial. Human beings are not actually machines, and this workshop explores the limitations of technological metaphors alongside the benefits of drawing upon ecological metaphors as a basis for therapeutic practice.
Traditional fiction therapy (or bibliotherapy) favours prescribing texts to match presenting issues and discussing the thinking/feeling after-effects of reading. This workshop introduces a new approach by focussing directly upon the process of reading itself, exploring why life is somehow enhanced when reading fiction, and how to consciously develop this therapeutic crossover into everyday living. The result will be an experiential and theoretical appreciation of reading fiction, not as an isolated fantasy activity but as the cultivation of an imaginal perception that takes us to the heart of human creativity, healing and transformation.
Much of theory and practice with imagination assumes it to be a personal-historical psychological interiority – for example, with ‘inner child’ and subpersonality work. However, this workshop will show how an ‘inner imagination’ understanding, despite popular usage, is poorly aligned to what therapists most value in experiential work with images. An alternative ‘transpersonal imagination’ (‘trans’ meaning most simply ‘beyond’) will be presented, effectively turning the conventional inner-imagination view inside out, where instead of images being inside us, it is we who find ourselves surrounded by images – allowing work with imagination as an in-the-moment experiential process rather than standing outside this process, trying to figure out what the image content means.
This workshop explores how to work with client crises by placing them within a broad collective context. Firstly, by suggesting therapy itself is in a time of crisis, transitioning away from its origins in a personal-historical framework towards a more collective and societal perspective. And secondly, on a practical level, how to better notice and work with world-issues in the consulting room alongside a personal-historical perspective.
Therapy is one of the few places where adults are actively encouraged to engage in imaginal dialogues. In consulting rooms across the land, conversations are going on right now between human persons and the many non-human persons found in photographs, drawings, sculptures, and maybe even the occasional teddy bear and potted plant. This workshop introduces animism (most simply, the attribution of personhood beyond just human persons) as an intellectually rigorous and experientially aligned basis for the enhancement of imaginal communications.