The keynote address on Thursday at the American Group Psychotherapy Association annual meeting was given by Jeremy Holmes of the University of Exeter, UK. Before he began to speak, there were the standard introductory remarks. Over 900 people are attending the conference, with attendees from many countries. People who helped facilitate the conference were thanked.

Dr. Holmes speech focused on attachment theory, a realm that I don't know a lot about, so it was very informative to me. He spoke about how infants and toddlers seek security, about mentalization as an effort to feel secure in an insecure world, and related it nicely to both experiences of groups, and experiences in the world.

He started off quoting Adrienne Rich's poem, "In Those Years". He provided the context for the poem and read a large section. What particularly jumped out at me was the line, "the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged" which he related to his description of "the self".

The self, he suggested, resides at the intersection of our internal neural networks and our external social networks. I loved this formulation, because I've often thought about our social networks and being metanetworks of all of our neural networks. I've thought that it would be fascinating to explore artificial neural network technology in terms of our social networks. Could I run a back propagation algorithm to refine the rankings of trust on my social networks? It is a tool I've long wanted to explore.

Dr. Holmes presented a lot of material very quickly. It seems as if his talk probably could be expanded into a fascinating semester long course. He spoke about Winnecott and Gergely and the idea of the mother's face as the mirror in which an infant first finds him or herself. He touched on Goal Corrected Empathetic Attunement. It may well be that all of this is old hat for those that are trained in attachment theory. For me, I couldn't keep up with the notes, and simply decided that I should explore this more later.

One phrase that particularly jumped out at me was 'Companionable exploration', and I believe the reference was to Hard and Lake. I have a vague idea about what was being talked about and need to explore this further as well. It caused me to stop and think about the exploration of Second Life that I have done with friends. Is there some way that Second Life can be used in terms of developing or enhancing companionable exploration?

He presented the idea of 'mentalising' as seeing ourselves internally as others see us, and illustrated the point by referring to the great Robert Burns poem about the louse, and what a gift it would be to see ourselves as others see us. I paused to wonder about the relationship between mentalizing and empathy.

In the end, he tied it all back to Rich's dark birds as presenting the traumatic penetration of the self. It provided a great starting point for the panel I attended next.