NARRATIVE
This six-hour intensive explores how bodily felt experience serves as a fundamental source of knowledge in depth psychotherapy, shifting meaning-making beyond language and symbolization alone. While somatic approaches are gaining prominence, many depth psychotherapy traditions continue to prioritize verbal and symbolic processes. This course integrates body-centered awareness with classical depth psychological concepts of transference, countertransference, and the analytic third.
From a somatic depth psychological perspective, the body is not separate from, but rather an integral aspect of psyche or mind. We will explore the neuroscientific perspective of the body as foundational to affect. In the wake of developmental trauma the body holds the unformulated affects and their unlived meanings—such as grief, anger, terror, shame, and the vulnerabilities inherent in intimacy and attachment. When brought into sensorial awareness, undifferentiated experience stored in implicit memory begins to clarify into distinct emotions. As sensations and feelings emerge and are tolerated, images and memories often surface, generating meaning that contributes to healing psychological wounds and processing trauma.
Contemporary neuroscience illuminates the relational field through discoveries of mirror neurons, adaptive oscillators, and other neurological functions activated in intimate encounters. These findings provide a biological foundation for understanding how the therapist’s nervous system resonates with and is shaped by the patient’s embodied experience, and vice versa. The transferential-countertransferential field can be understood as a dynamic psycho-neurobiological process in which two living systems engage in reciprocal regulation, implicit communication, and co-created states of consciousness. This neurological perspective deepens our appreciation of Jung’s insight that a “third thing” is created in analysis—a lived, embodied phenomenon arising from the interplay of two psychobiological systems.
This course examines how somatic awareness, and attention to the creative unconscious deepens access to the co-created relational field. We will explore how bodily sensation and a wealth of sensorial perception including kinesthetic, and proprioceptive awareness , contribute to reverie and comprehending somatic countertransference to inform clinical interventions. We will explore how dreams and psyche’s mythopoetic expressions emerge from and illuminate the embodied dimensions of the therapeutic encounter. Recognizing the body as an aspect of psyche fundamentally transforms our understanding of countertransference: what arises in the analyst’s body is not secondary information about the psyche, but direct psychic communication.
Particular attention will be given to enactments as moments when previously unformulated experience presses toward consciousness through the lived relational encounter. A somatically informed and sensitive approach may not only lessen the inevitability of enactments between therapist and patient, but can deepen understanding and healing when somatic inquiry becomes part of processing the lived experience as it unfolds in the therapeutic relationship.
The course will address clinical decision-making regarding when to speak from versus about countertransference experience, how the analyst’s capacity to hold and metabolize patients’ unformulated affective experience relates to somatic presence, and how active imagination serves as a paradigm for engaging both imaginal and embodied contents emerging from the therapeutic field. Through this weaving of somatic, neurobiological, and depth psychological perspectives, participants will gain practical tools for working with trauma, developmental wounds, and the transformation that occurs in the unspoken realm of therapeutic encounter.
