 Manchester Institute for Psychotherapy seminars. On the first Friday of every month, the Manchester Institute for Psychotherapy runs a seminar for therapists and counsellers. The following presentation is from a seminar entitled The Interface between Neurobiology and Psychotherapy presented by Stephanie Cook. Stephanie Cook and I'm a trainer and a psychotherapist and I work here at the institute. I have been working here since 1996 but my background is in childcare. I was a social worker for many years and then became a social work manager and worked in all areas of childcare, fostering and adoption and young offenders and children with disabilities. But I became interested in transaction analysis when I worked in a CAMHS unit. I was also attached to a CAMHS unit for many years. I met somebody who was TA trained who came and did some workshops and I thought, wow, this is really good. This really works. So I applied it to my work with the families that I worked with and found it really useful and it worked. So I became interested in training as a psychotherapist. So that's how I came into TA and eventually became qualified. I have a practice here and I work with adults and children and adolescents and their families. But I'm also a trainer and I've been training here for some years. One of my interests over the years has been brain development because in working with children in a CAMHS unit, some of them had some brain injuries, some of them had some difficulties in learning. So I've always been interested in that area. I'm more so recently because it's a very current topic as you know. It's become the thing that people are very interested in. I'm interested in it in terms of how much our brains are impacted by the way that we're nurtured and the way that we're cared for. And I think that brain development is hugely impacted by that. Our brains really only develop if we can attach and we can learn from that attachment how we need to be in society, which fires off the neurons in the brain and develops our memories. Our brains are developed, 90% developed by the time we're five. So if you can think about our brains as being like a circuit board and it's a system that's kind of like a wiring system for taking messages into our brain to different parts of our brain that allow us to learn about how to self-regulate, how to be emotional and how to be the people that we are that we grow up to be. So I was more interested in that aspect more than what every single little bit of the brain does. And I'm interested in the things that occur to stop brain development. So first of all I would quite like though to mention a little bit about the historical interest in brains. Because I think we have to give some credit to history, the historical psychologists and psychiatrists. And of course one of the first people to be really interested in the brain is Freud, funnily enough, in the late 1800s. And he started to become curious about the brain at the young age of 29 years, would you believe? He was only 29 when he got interested, isn't that amazing? Because he won a fellowship to study at the Sal Pettier Hospital under the tutorship of Professor Jean Martin Chaco, who at that time was an expert in both the mind and the brain. Then there was great interest in using hypnosis to control the subconscious mind. It was probably the major technique that they used, they used hypnosis. And whilst Freud studied under Chaco, he became to believe that hidden mental processes do indeed exert powerful effects on the consciousness. And that people who are mentally ill were not malingering or faking it. Because that's what people used to think about people with mental health. And I think there's still something of that stigma around today, because it's not something you can see. It's not something that you can obviously visually see about somebody. And what he came to realise was that due to the power of the unconscious mind embedded in the neural structures of the brain, he then went on to expand Chaco's thinking. And he became to believe that the hysterical patient suffered from unconscious emotional after effects of repressed childhood memories. She's interesting, isn't it? So what he was linking into what went on in the mind was to do with what happened historically that impacted the mind. So in 1968 he actually wrote an unpublished article about this. And how what we witness of conscious and unconscious behaviour is organised and stored within the brain's neural architecture. But he didn't get it published. In fact he shied away from that a little bit. And of course later on he became admonished because he started to talk about children having sexual experiences. So he kind of gave himself a bit of a bad name. If you are interested in attending any of these fascinating seminars, please click the link below this video presentation.