www.mlpc-uk.org - MLPC - The Multi-Lingual Psychotherapy Centre

Welcome to MLPC

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How do you experience your second language?

Is it your mother tongue you rarely speak?

What is it like to live in a second learnt language?

Do you feel exiled or do you feel it gives you a fresh perspective?

What is it like to speak many languages?

How does this affect how you relate to your surroundings, friends, family and above all yourself?

The Multi-Lingual Psychotherapy Centre was founded with Imago East-West in December of 1997 by a group of psychotherapists and analysts, writers and academics from various fields. Our first public event was a lecture on the multi-lingual experience held at Burgh House in Hampstead. Since then we have hosted three MLPC Lectures each year, exploring diverse experiences of multilingualism and how it affects our experience of ourselves, our work and our daily lives. We believe in the importance of creating a thinking space for our various languages and how they live inside us.

The aim of our clinical network is to provide a psychotherapy service in a number of languages including English. Since our inception we have built up a growing clinical network in which a diverse range of European and non-European languages is represented.

We have started a series of successful workshops exploring Personal Narratives, Social Dreaming and the Refugee Experience. We have been involved in a series of International Conferences in London, Paris and Budapest on 'Lost Childhood and the Language of Exile'. Future conferences are planned.

In our bi-annual Newsletter which is sent to all our members we write about our activities and clinical work. We also offer members of our clinical network, and other clinicians on our membership list, a multi-lingual supervision space for further exploration of clinical issues.

We live in an increasingly multi-lingual society and world, a world of exiles with cultural differences living in the spoken and written word. To open this up and explore is to open ourselves up to the other. It has so far been a fascinating journey but we have only just begun and we welcome your participation, experience and thinking to develop this important area of modern life.

You don't have to speak a second language to be member of MLPC. Membership is open to all those who are interested in language, culture and identity.

Dr Esti Rimmer - "Language of the Mountains Language of the Sea" Living with Trauma and Exile as a Journey between Languages

THE MULTI-LINGUAL PSYCHOTHERAPY CENTRE

MLPC LECTURE

"Language of the Mountains
Language of the Sea"

Living with Trauma and Exile as a Journey between Languages

By Dr Esti Rimmer

** Please note: date changed to Saturday 3rd of March 2012 **

In our forthcoming MLPC Lecture Dr Esti Rimmer will explore trauma with its legacy of migration and exile. Whether forced by external events or undertaken voluntarily, such exile is compelled by internal forces. In both cases a loss of home, culture, language and identity may be involved. The enforced expulsion or the voluntary escape from the mother tongue to the “safe haven” of a newly acquired language is a needed reprieve from the impact of traumatic experiences. Yet, the ongoing search to rediscover and reconnect with the mother tongue is a necessary rapprochement on the road to recovery and integration.

The talk will illustrate how the playful interplay between languages may provide a transitional space in the therapy, in which horrors and losses as well as creativity and hope can be contemplated. The talk will refer to an Israeli novel as well as clinical material.

Dr Esti Rimmer is a consultant Clinical Psychologist and a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist. After studying Psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalam, she received her Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the University of Denver, Colorado. She completed her psychoanalytic training at the Scottish Institute of Human relations in Edinburgh and currently works for the NHS in Northumberland and in Private Practice.

Venue: The Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX

9.30am - 11.45am

28 Nov 2011 by admin