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Interviewing leaders
in mental health
Interviewing leaders in mental health
Jon Allen Legacy Interview
The Therapist, Not the Therapy: Why Caring Connections Transform Lives
Access the recording + resources + 2 hour CE/CPD certificate for £39
“A beautiful interview honouring Jon Allen. Your style is warm, inviting and grounded in genuine knowledge of your honoree.”
– Cynthia Mulder, Legacy Interview attendee
Special Guests
Anthony Bateman, Arietta Slade & Jeremy Holmes
About this recording
After five decades of practice, clinical psychologist Jon G. Allen has a striking message for the field: the true power of psychotherapy lies not in treatment manuals but in the presence of a trustworthy, caring relationship.
In this Legacy Interview, Jon reflects on the ways personal and professional relationships shaped his thinking, from early family experiences that sensitised him to questions of safety and connection, through decades of clinical work and collaboration, including his role in the early development of Mentalization-Based Therapy.
He is joined by Arietta Slade, Jeremy Holmes and Anthony Bateman. Together, they bring nearly two centuries of combined clinical experience to a reflective conversation about what sustains therapeutic work at a time of social and institutional strain, when questions of trust, care and ethical responsibility feel especially pressing.
Speakers
Join the conversation with four senior colleagues who have reshaped contemporary psychotherapy:
Jon G. Allen, PhD
Clinical Professor, Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Baylor College of Medicine, voluntary faculty. Author of eight influential books on trauma, attachment and mentalizing, including collaborations with Anthony Bateman and Peter Fonagy.
Anthony Bateman, MBBS
Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist and Visiting Professor at University College London, co-developer of Mentalization-Based Treatment, provides a clear-eyed account of mentalizing in clinical practice and the therapist’s stance under pressure.
Arietta Slade, PhD
Professor of Clinical Child Psychology at the Yale Child Study Center, internationally recognised for her work on reflective functioning, attachment and parenting, brings a developmental perspective that links mentalizing to early attachment experiences of fear, safety and trustworthiness.
Jeremy Holmes, MD
Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter and Consultant Psychiatrist and Medical Psychotherapist, offers an attachment-informed psychoanalytic perspective, with particular attention to supervision, process, ethics and the emotional development of therapists.
Together, they explore the foundations of therapeutic connection in a conversation that is reflective and grounded in clinical experience and application. This is not a panel discussion but a collegial exchange in which biography, clinical experience and theory inform one another.
“The joyful connectedness you create models exactly what we hope to foster for our clients.”
– Kiki Taylor, Legacy Interview attendee
Why this conversation matters
Jon Allen has long highlighted that trauma is not only about what happened but about who was absent. When a child faces overwhelming emotion without another mind to help them hold and make sense of it, the result is often a deep disruption in trust. Therapy, he argues, rests on providing a trustworthy relationship in which states that once felt unbearable can be approached with another person present.
Core themes in the conversation:
Trust and care
Jon reflects on trusting and being trustworthy as an ongoing relational task, and why care deserves to be reclaimed as central to our work.
Development and mentalizing
The conversation traces how early relational experience forms the foundations of emotionally meaningful connections long before language, and why this developmental grounding matters so deeply in therapy.
The Third and improvisation
Drawing on Jessica Benjamin, Jon explores how two minds create a shared psychological space, linking this connection to the disciplined improvisation of jazz.
The development of the therapist
All four clinicians consider how life experience, failure, supervision and ordinary relationships shape the therapist over time, often more profoundly than any single model.
Fear and connection
They discuss the challenges therapists face when patients’ terror or dissociation emerges, and how such moments test our capacity to remain present and emotionally available.
Meaning and values
Jon reflects on how the balance of separateness and connection along with care, love, and spirituality entered his thinking later in life, adding an important dimension to his understanding of psychological change.
What you’ll learn
By watching you will gain insight into:
- The role of relational trust in therapeutic change
- How trauma involves feeling alone in pain — and how the experience of connection in therapy mitigates the pain
- How to work with your own emotional responses to deepen clinical effectiveness
- How technical jargon must be translated into ordinary language to foster connection
- Why the field should shift the balance from developing countless models and methods to better understanding the development of therapists
- The clinical implications of mentalizing across modalities
- How attachment patterns and early relationships shape therapeutic process
- Ways to navigate impasses with openness, humility and genuine curiosity
- The Slade Test: does a technical or theoretical concept genuinely help you understand the person in front of you?
- A clear account of core principles of mentalizing in therapy
- How life experience continues to shape therapists’ development across their career
- Insight into shame, fear and the emotional demands placed on both patient and therapist
- The role of spirituality in therapeutic connection
Distinctive to this Legacy Interview
This conversation brings together clinicians who have shaped attachment, mentalizing and psychoanalytic thinking, speaking not as advocates for models but as colleagues reflecting on the work itself. Rather than advancing prepared positions, they stay close to clinical experience, returning repeatedly to questions of trust, care and the therapist’s responsibility within the relationship.
The pace is reflective and unhurried, allowing space for uncertainty and ethical complexity. What emerges is not a set of conclusions, but a shared inquiry into what it means to remain human, trustworthy, caring and emotionally available in the consulting room over a lifetime of practice and especially in our times of political and social turbulence.
Key moments
- Jon traces how early disconnection shaped his interest in trust and attachment
- A discussion of jazz as a model for structure, improvisation and the shared Third
- Humility and moral responsibility in clinical work
- Arietta on fear, rupture and the courage to care
- Jeremy on supportive psychotherapy, moral principles, and relational neuroscience
- Anthony on ordinariness, transparency and mentalizing without becoming model-bound
- Jon on spirituality, values and the experience of connection
- Reflections on how therapists grow through relationships, supervision and failure
Interviewer
Jon is in conversation with Jane O’Rourke.
Jane O'Rourke, founder of MINDinMIND and a former award-winning BBC journalist now practising as a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, draws upon her combined expertise to create rich and thoughtful conversations with leading mental health clinicians. Her interviews weave together the personal and professional threads of her guests' journeys, capturing the experiences that have shaped their clinical work and thinking.
Details correct at time of recording – 11 December 2025
Who this recording is for
- Psychotherapists, psychologists and counsellors
- Clinicians working with trauma, attachment and relational difficulties
- Child and adolescent practitioners
- Supervisors and training organisations
- Anyone interested in what truly enables psychotherapy to help people change
How to watch
- Instant access to the HD recording
- 2-hour CPD/CE certificate included
- Unlimited replays
- Downloadable resources
Further reading
- Allen, J. G. Bringing Psychotherapy to Life Through Caring Connections
- Allen, J. G. Coping with Trauma
- Allen, J. G. Trusting in Psychotherapy
- Slade, A. Enhancing Attachment and Reflective Parenting in Clinical Practice: A Minding the Baby Approach
- Holmes, J. Exploring in Security
- Bateman, A. & Fonagy, P. Mentalization-Based Treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder
