Ageing and the Couple: Life and Death - Our Relationship with Ageing, Dementia, and Other Fates of Time

This session’s focus is on exploring the challenges of late life and what might help us to continue to live our lives and inhabit our relationships as creatively as possible. This discussion is grounded in a psychoanalytic approach to understanding later life as a key point of developmental challenge for us all and explores the experience of ageing. looking at internal and external realities, in considering some of the most difficult things we can face, such as age-related illnesses and losses.

Andrew Balfour, PhD, is Chief Executive of Tavistock Relationships, widely recognised for its groundbreaking work in relationship and couple therapy, professional training, and research. The organisation provides specialist psychotherapeutic support to individuals and couples, helping them understand and improve their emotional and relational lives. Alongside its clinical services, it offers professional training for therapists and undertakes research that continues to shape best practice in the field. With its deep roots in psychoanalytic and psychodynamic thinking, Tavistock Relationships has built an international reputation for combining clinical expertise with academic insight to enhance emotional well-being and strengthen relationships in families and communities.

Andrew originally trained as a clinical psychologist at University College London and then as an adult psychoanalytic psychotherapist at Tavistock Relationships; Portman NHS Trust, whilst in a staff post there. He subsequently trained as a couple psychotherapist at Tavistock Relationships, where for more than 10 years he was Clinical Director before becoming Chief Executive in 2016. He has many years of experience working psychotherapeutically with couples and conducting research, publishing numerous papers in the field and teaching widely both in Britain and abroad. He has co-edited two books How Couple Relationships Shape our World (edited by Andrew Balfour, Mary Morgan; Christopher Vincent, Routledge, 2012); Engaging Couples - New Directions in Therapeutic Work with Families (edited by Andrew Balfour, Christopher Clulow; Kate Thompson, Routledge, 2019) and his latest book is Life and Death: Our Relationship with Ageing, Dementia and Other Fates of Time (Routledge, 2025)

CPD Points have been applied for, & Recording will be available