To Be Met as a Person

Una McCluskey graduated from University College Dublin, did her professional social work training at the University of Edinburgh, and got her PhD from the University of York. She has written extensively on individuals, couple, family and group systems, and has developed her own model for exploring attachment dynamics in adult life. Her research on affect attunement in adult psychotherapy led her to develop a theory of interaction for psychotherapy and particularly to identify and rate the concept of goal corrected empathic attunement. Throughout the last ten years she has been providing courses for workers and experienced professionals in the field of psychology, psychotherapy, social work, medicine, organisational management and development, education, nursing, art therapy, legal practice, religious and pastoral carers, to enable them explore their own dynamics of attachment in adult life as outlined by the work of Heard and Lake and to check its application to their personal and work life.

Foreword -- Preface -- The dynamics of careseeking and caregiving -- Research on the process of interaction in adult psychotherapy -- Infant/caregiver interactions: the process of affect identification, communication, and regulation -- Patterns of careseeking/caregiving relationships: research into attachment behaviour in infants and young children -- Presenting the concept of goal-corrected empathic attunement: effective caregiving within psychotherapy -- First experiment: the identification of affect attunement in adult psychotherapy -- Second experiment: is empathic attunement interactive? -- Third experiment: an experiment designed to test whether secure attachment style correlates with empathic attunement and whether empathic attunement can be improved with training -- The process of obtaining a reliable measure for goal-corrected empathic attunement -- Results of the Third Experiment -- Patterns of functional and dysfunctional careseeking-caregiving partnerships -- Interactions between therapists and patients and their roots in infancy -- Role play scenarios for day one -- Measure of student attunement to be completed by the actor after each interview -- Measure of student attunement to be completed by the actor after each interview -- Role play scenarios for day two