Jeremy Holmes

I'm a retired UK National Health Service Consultant Psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. I now work in private practice seeing patients once a week, and am visiting Professor at the School of Psychology at the University of Exeter, where we set up a psychoanalytic psychotherapy Masters and now Doctoral programme, combining academic with professional training in psychoanalytic work, especially for those working in the public sector. I live on a farm in beautiful North Devon --in the middle of nowhere! In some ways that cuts me off from the mainstream of psychoanalytic and psychiatric life -- but it also enables me to develop my own ideas and to get an overview of the field, which is sometimes harder when is in the thick of things. My main interest has been in Attachment Theory and I continue to follow the Attachment literature and in my writing to bring Attachment ideas to bear on psychoanalytic thinking and practice. Working part-time means that I can go to my desk most mornings for an hour or two where I try to read and write, before attending to the garden, family life with my wife, the garden, music, running, and learning Spanish (our grandson lives in Peru). A recent book, Exploring In Security, is an example of this -- it is also a rather personal book trying to encapsulate some of the things I've learned about the day to day practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. I wrote it by melding together material from a daily diary -- a sort of primitive blog -- with lectures and papers I've delivered over the past ten years or so, since my previous single-author book, The Search for the Secure Base. Recently I've written quite a few papers for academic journals, usually arising out of lectures -- on The Superego, The place of Theory n Psychoanalytic work, Integrative approaches to Psychoanalysis, and Relational Psychoanalysis. I am currently interested in the topic of Intimacy, and I suspect my next book will explore that theme. I've won a couple of awards recently: in 2009 I was awarded the New York Bowlby-Ainsworth award for contributions to Attachment Theory. In 2010 Exploring In Security: Towards an Attachment-informed Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy won the Canadian Psychological Association Psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy Goethe award for the best book of the year. 2012 sees my radical re-write of Anthony Storr's classic The Art of Psychotherapy (Taylor & Francis), a practical guide to the business of trying to help troubled people with psychotherapy. For publication 2013: with my friend and colleague Arietta Slade I am compiling a 6 volume collection of the 120 best Attachment papers since Bowlby began the whole Attachment movement (SAGE); I am updating John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Routledge), which was written 25 years ago; The Therapeutic Imagination: using Literature to deepen Psychotherapeutic Understanding (Routledge) shows how great literature can help us as psychotherapists with its prototypical characters and capacity to capture the essence of what it is to be human. Projects for the future include Selected Papers, and a new book looking at psychic change and how psychotherapy helps to to acheive it.