Paul Renn

Paul Renn is a UKCP-accredited psychoanalytic psychotherapist, supervisor, and couples therapist in private practice in West London. His clinical work is grounded in attachment-informed and relational psychoanalysis, with particular expertise in cumulative trauma, violence, sexuality, dissociation, and the intergenerational transmission of affective and relational patterns. Before entering full-time clinical practice, he spent 15 years in the National Probation Service working with high-risk violent offenders, an experience that deeply informs his understanding of trauma, relational breakdown, and the developmental roots of violence.

Paul is the author of The Silent Past and the Invisible Present (Routledge, 2012), a widely cited monograph that helped establish cumulative relational trauma as a distinct clinical and developmental construct. His peer-reviewed publications have appeared in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Attachment & Human Development, and the British Journal of Psychotherapy, and he has contributed chapters to numerous books on psychoanalysis. He serves on the international editorial board of Psychoanalytic Inquiry and edited a special issue on the creative use of attachment theory in clinical practice.

Trained at the Centre for Attachment-based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (now The Bowlby Centre), Paul taught, supervised, and provided training therapy within the attachment community. He has devised and delivered workshops and webinars internationally on trauma, attachment, violence, memory, and therapeutic change.

His new book, Relational Foundations: A Relational Neuro-Developmental Approach to Cumulative Trauma in Clinical Practice (Routledge, 2026), brings together three decades of clinical work to offer a comprehensive account of how trauma is encoded, enacted, and transformed within relational contexts. It extends the analytic project beyond the consulting room into the fabric of the patient's everyday relational world.