Book Announcement by Paul Renn (UK)

Renn, P. (2026). Relational foundations: A relational-neurodevelopmental approach to cumulative trauma in clinical practice. Routledge.

Relational Foundations: A Relational-Neurodevelopmental Approach to Cumulative Trauma in Clinical Practice (Routledge) offers a comprehensive re-examination of cumulative trauma, showing how early relational experience becomes embedded in mind and body and shapes emotional life across the lifespan. Centered on what the book describes as “cumulative relational trauma” – the subtle, ongoing misattunements that accrue over time – it demonstrates how everyday relational patterns leave enduring imprints and how these can be recognised, worked with, and gradually repatterned in therapy. A distinctive contribution is the use of infant observation as a developmental bridge to adult treatment, illuminating the microprocesses of attunement, misattunement, and repair that underlie procedural templates and implicit relational knowing. The book also explores how therapeutic change unfolds in the patient’s everyday relational world, where new possibilities take shape in lived interactions. Attending to cultural and systemic forces such as racism, poverty, migration, and marginalisation, Paul Renn offers an accessible, integrative, and clinically grounded framework for understanding trauma and facilitating transformation.

www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003789727/relational-foundations-paul-renn

Paul Renn is a UKCP-accredited psychoanalytic psychotherapist, training therapist, supervisor and couples therapist in private practice in London. He trained at the Centre for Attachment-Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (now The Bowlby Centre) and has a background in the National Probation Service, where he specialised in work with violent individuals and couples. He is a member of IARPP and the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy, and serves on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. He is the author of The Silent Past and the Invisible Present (Routledge, 2012) and has published widely.

Paul Renn, DipSW
London, UK
Email Paul Renn