Professor Dave Edwards presented at the conference of the Society for Psychotherapy Research in Brisbane where he convened a panel entitled “Modifying early schemas in schema therapy and emotion-focused therapy. Case-based investigations of change processes. There were four presenters, two Australians, a Canadian and myself. My own contribution was entitled “Building a circle of safety and healing: Imagery rescripting and the transformation process in a case of complex trauma.” At the conference Professor Dave Edwards met up with a Rhodes PhD graduate, Robert Schweitzer who has run a Clinical Psychology training at Queensland University of Technology for several years. He was involved in hosting the SPR conference which was at his University. Robert’s PhD, completed in 1983, was on “A phenomenological explication of dream interpretation among rural and urban Nguni people” and was based on field work in Transkei where he stayed with and observed traditional amagqira at work. His collaborator was Vera Buhrmann, a psychiatrist and Jungian therapist who wrote some interesting articles on the subject. Interestingly he is now doing enterprising work with individuals with psychosis.
In Brisbane after the conference Professor Dave Edwards presented a one day professional training workshop on “Schema therapy: basic concepts and practice” and then moved on to Melbourne where I presented a two day professional training workshop on “Schema therapy, attachment theory and the use of reparenting and imagery to heal the vulnerable child.”