Jeremy Holmes Live Legacy Interview

About Jeremy Holmes

For more than three decades Jeremy Holmes has been a leading figure in psychodynamic psychiatry in the UK and across the world. He is Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter and was a consultant psychiatrist and medical psychotherapist at University College London. As the former Chair of the Psychotherapy Faculty of the Royal College of Psychiatrists he has been instrumental in advocating for the role of psychotherapy alongside psychiatry. Through his academic work, he has played a central role in promoting the ideas of John Bowlby and in developing the clinical applications – psychiatric and psychotherapeutic – of Attachment Theory in working with adults. Drawing on both psychoanalytic and attachment ideas, Jeremy has been able to encompass a truly biopsychosocial perspective.

His integration of clinical practice, research, and theoretical development across different domains of mental health care has been a hallmark of his career. This includes significant research into personality disorders, and pioneering work on improving psychiatric inpatient care.

Perhaps one of Jeremy’s most important contributions has been his ability to bridge multiple perspectives – from neuroscience to literature, from attachment theory to psychoanalysis. He has published an astonishing range of books and papers. His latest work, “The Spirit of Psychotherapy” (2024), explores how psychotherapy represents a form of secular spirituality in our contemporary world, offering ways to navigate uncertainty and find meaning through the therapeutic relationship.

Event Highlights:

This Legacy Interview offers an opportunity to be part of a conversation between some of the field’s most respected voices in Attachment Theory and mentalization-based approaches.

Jeremy’s ability to weave together insights from neuroscience, literature, attachment theory and psychoanalysis makes his perspective valuable for practitioners at all stages of their careers.

Jeremy will share his thinking on how to maintain authentic therapeutic relationships while working within modern healthcare systems, including sharing approaches he has pioneered throughout his NHS career to enable therapeutic depth even in time-limited work.

Participants will gain insights into working with attachment principles across different therapeutic modalities. Jeremy’s exceptional capacity to blend scientific rigour with human warmth will guide the way for all practitioners who seek to develop their own authentic therapeutic style while working effectively within institutional constraints.

Drawing on his recent work ‘The Spirit of Psychotherapy,’ he’ll discuss his neuroscience-based model in which practitioners create transitional spaces helping clients explore and find new and more adaptive ways of navigating uncertainty – a framework particularly relevant in our current challenging times.

Special Guests

Arietta Slade

At the Yale Child Study Center and City University of New York, Arietta’s work and thinking has significantly shaped attachment theory, reflective parenting, and infant mental health. Her intellectual partnership with Jeremy, culminating in their collaboration on ‘Attachment in Therapeutic Practice’ and their co-editing of the six-volume ‘Collected Papers in Attachment,’ represents the meeting of two influential minds in attachment theory.

Like Jeremy, Arietta has devoted herself to making complex attachment concepts accessible and clinically meaningful. While Jeremy focused on adult psychiatric contexts, Arietta’s work has advanced our understanding of parent-child relationships. Her development of the Parent Development Interview, now translated into 18 languages and used in over 50 studies, parallels Jeremy’s efforts to bring attachment principles into everyday clinical practice.

As co-director of Minding the Baby™ at the Yale Child Study Centre and School of Nursing for the past 20 years, she has created innovative approaches to supporting vulnerable first-time young mothers and their babies – work that complements Jeremy’s interest in how attachment patterns influence adult mental health. Both recipients of the prestigious Bowlby-Ainsworth Award, their combined contributions have transformed how clinicians worldwide understand and work with attachment principles across the lifespan. Arietta is a MINDinMIND Legacy Interviewee.

Anthony Bateman

Anthony Bateman is Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist and Mentalisation-Based Treatment co-ordinator at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families, and Visiting Professor at University College London as well as an expert member of the development group for treatment guidelines for Borderline Personality Disorder in the UK and was Chair of the National Guideline Development Group for Eating Disorders in the UK. He has authored 18 books and over 150 peer reviewed research articles on personality disorder and the use of psychotherapy in psychiatric practice making him a leading figure in contemporary medical psychotherapy.

His work with Jeremy Holmes spans decades, during which they have collaborated on several influential publications bridging psychoanalytic thinking with evidence-based practice. Their partnership exemplifies the integration of rigorous clinical research with psychodynamic wisdom.

Together with Peter Fonagy, Anthony developed Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT), which is now recognised worldwide as an evidence-based approach for treating conditions such as personality disorders.

Anthony’s long-standing collaboration with Jeremy Holmes has produced several seminal works, including their influential ‘Introduction to Psychoanalysis’ which has become a cornerstone text for training clinicians. Their partnership has been particularly effective in making complex psychoanalytic ideas accessible and clinically useful, helping to shape how modern clinicians integrate psychodynamic understanding with contemporary psychiatric practice.

Through their respective leadership roles and collaborative work, they have helped ensure psychotherapy maintains a central position in mainstream psychiatry while remaining grounded in evidence-based practice, influencing a generation of practitioners. Their work together exemplifies the kind of integration between traditional psychotherapeutic wisdom and contemporary mental health care that has characterised both their careers, demonstrating how rigorous clinical thinking can be combined with practical therapeutic effectiveness.

Evrinomy Avdi

Bringing together clinical psychology, research and psychoanalytic thinking, Evrinomy holds complementary roles at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Anna Freud Centre in London. With degrees in both Physics and Psychology, and specialist training in Psychoanalysis and Dramatherapy, she takes a uniquely interdisciplinary approach to studying therapeutic processes. Her research spans multiple areas of psychotherapy – from psychoanalytic to systemic approaches, a focus on verbal and nonverbal levels of interaction with a particular focus on parent-infant work and the role of implicit embodied processes in psychotherapy. She investigates both the experience of serious illness and how social issues can be understood through a psychoanalytic lens. Through detailed analysis of therapy sessions and client stories, she examines how different types of therapy actually work to help people change.

At the Anna Freud Centre, she is currently collaborating with Tessa Baradon on their research project studying moment-by-moment interactions in parent-infant psychotherapy sessions where early relational trauma is being addressed.

As Director of the Laboratory of Applied Psychology at Aristotle, she combines teaching psychopathology, clinical skills and psychoanalytic psychotherapy with active clinical practice and supervision. She coordinates European research projects and serves on the editorial boards of major psychotherapy journals. Her deep engagement with psychoanalytic thinking is also reflected in her role as a member of the Scientific Board of the North-hellenic Psychoanalytic Society.

More about Jeremy Holmes

Jeremy’s work reflects a synthesis of his main influences – R.D. Laing, Michael Balint, Charles Rycroft, John Bowlby and Karl Friston. The thinking of these figures helped spur key developments in psychiatry, psychoanalysis, attachment theory and neuroscience, spanning the latter half of the 20th century through to contemporary neuroscientific approaches.

Jeremy’s books include the widely-read ‘John Bowlby and Attachment Theory’ and ‘The Search for the Secure Base,’ which examine how an attachment approach can enhance and complement traditional psychoanalytic psychotherapy theory and practice. His ability to integrate these different perspectives has contributed significantly to contemporary psychotherapeutic thinking.

About MINDinMIND

What makes MINDinMIND events unique is our distinctive approach to bringing you insightful conversations with renowned clinicians and thought leaders in mental health. As former journalists turned psychotherapists, we draw on our skills in deep listening and storytelling to connect the threads of personal and professional experiences that have shaped our guests’ work and their clinical legacies, preserving their wisdom for current and future generations of mental health professionals.

The interview will be hosted by Jane O’Rourke.

Jane is a Psychodynamic Child, Adolescent and Family Psychotherapist and former award-winning BBC Producer, and founder of MINDinMIND. She creates rich, multi-layered conversations through carefully crafted live interviews with luminaries such as Arietta Slade, Anne Alvarez, Alicia Lieberman, Beatrice Beebe, Patrick Casement, and Miriam Steele. MINDinMIND’s in-depth approach helps to create a special feel to our live events, producing original, thoughtful and at times deeply moving conversations with our visionary legacy interviewees. We deepen these conversations with the inclusion of special guests chosen by our interviewees for the support or inspiration they have offered over their careers, creating a rich, multi-faceted exploration of their work and ideas—bringing to life not just the clinical work but the person behind it as well.

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