The Voiceless and Unheard: Understanding Primitive Bodily Communications in Psychotherapy
Saturday 6 July 2019 - London
With speakers Gabrielle Brown, Raffaella Hilty, Professor Brett Kahr, Dr Valerie Sinason and David O'Driscoll
Every psychotherapist practitioner will know only too well what it means to experience the rage and hatred of one’s most vulnerable clients and the challenges that this raises in countertransference work. Most often these clients will express their hateful feelings verbally. But, what about those clients who cannot talk? Or those clients who are capable of talking but carry a complex range of unprocessed embodied feelings that cannot be verbally expressed?
READ MORE...This conference will explore psychotherapy work with severely traumatised and learning disabled patients who must rely on a non-verbal type of language in order to communicate their most dreadful states of mind.
Specifically, it aims to elucidate the little-discussed, yet not infrequent, clinical experience of working with individuals who communicate through the use of their body and bodily fluids, manifesting with this lack of bodily containment and lack of mental containment. The speakers will discuss a number of clinical cases in which they will offer a psychoanalytic approach to describe how these embodied states of mind can be felt, tolerated and, when possible, verbalised, so that eventually these clients can begin to experience greater mental containment as well as bodily containment.