A self-enquiry challenge for practitioners who would like to experience the meaning of the three phases of the “Therapy-World” applied to Group Process Work through the reflection on the key topics that emerged in ten Existential Dialogues between Prof Ernesto Spinelli and international guest speakers.
Clock time is a measure of the linear sense of time. Lived time, as phenomenology describes it, is a vertical spiral in which every present moment carries a creative capacity to remember the past in light of imagining a future and vice versa. This capacity is the foundation of human freedom with implications for psychotherapy.
Western assumptions regarding self tend to isolate each self such that it appears to us and can be defined as separate and distinct to other selves. Existential phenomenology proposes a view of self that is always and inevitably in relation. This interplay between “I” and “not-I” provides a very different view and understanding of self.
We do not live in space. On the contrary, the human body is the power to transform spaces into places where we more often than not unconsciously incarnate the characters in stories of which we are a part, an approach with many implications for psychotherapy and dream work.
Experiential Group and Process Work. A playground for therapists to nurture the imagination, release inhibitions and mobilise therapeutic insights
Both therapeutic and psychological literature addresses various instances when we experience self to be ‘split’, divided, multiple in ways that are likely to generate a sense of alienness and unease. But what might these instances reveal about the self?
Embodied-Mind undercuts the dualism of a subjective mind and objective matter/body. We see, as Merleau-Ponty notes, because we are seeable. An aesthetic bond and erotic field of desire exists between the sensual flesh and the sensuous world.
At various points in our lives, often in moments of change or crisis, we are likely to ask: Who am I? Such a question reveals several, deep-seated, and experientially questionable assumptions about self and identity.
We are ‘meaning-making’ beings. All too often, however, we find ourselves limited and constrained by our existing, rigidified meanings. Opening ourselves to the uncertainty of our meanings requires an entry into meaninglessness.
Eros is the bond that ties us to each other and to the natural world. The myth of Eros and Psyche, among other sources, describes the many shadows of love. Love and its complexities have significant implications for psychotherapy
