“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.” Rumi In this session I will invite you to explore the therapeutic space beyond notions of right or wrong, beyond ideas of best theory, correct technique, practice by the book or manual. I will invite you to use all your faculties, all your knowledge, all your woundedness and sensitivity to get a flavour of your own therapeutic style, that is free to draw fluidly and integratively from the wealth of therapeutic knowledge and expertise humans have accumulated. As C.G. Jung said: “There should only be one Jungian therapist – me.” Everybody else - including you and me - we need to find our own style, rooted in our own relational complexity and embodied in our own history, wounds and limitations as well as gifts and potential. As we can only find this in the moment, rather than through thinking or theory only, this session will weave between experience and reflection, between skills practice and discussion, engaging you with your next step at your growing edge. We may draw from the following themes what seems most relevant and urgent. ‘Nothing human is foreign to me.’ What gets in the way of full engagement? What limits the client’s experience of the therapeutic space? Phenomenological enquiry into the therapist’s internal process: how is the therapist behaving habitually in ways that are, for example, fixed, limited, restrained, unresponsive or overly-giving? Focussing on the therapist’s ‘construction’ of the therapeutic space. ‘Allowing the client’s unconscious to construct me as an object.’ What limits a full and deeply transformative process? Phenomenological enquiry into the therapist’s external effects: how are the therapist’s responses/interventions countertherapeutic? therapy as treatment (‘medical model’) versus therapy as collusive friendship objectifying/pathologising versus colluding/avoidant therapy as relationship objectifying – differentiating – identifying – colluding ‘something desperately has to happen’ – ‘nothing has to happen/nothing to be imposed’ the client’s character conflicts / the ego-Self axis The shattered and fragmented postmodern wholeness Drawing on the gifts and wisdom of the whole field (fragmentation of the field reflects the fragmented modern psyche – the integration of the client’s psyche into wholeness requires the integration of the whole field) The history of schisms and conflicts in the psychotherapeutic field and how it affects us now integration and dis-integration cherry-picking approaches versus full-spectrum integration therapeutic approach cannot be grasped by theory and technique – underlying implicit relational stance Moving beyond a one-dimensional therapeutic position The wounded healer position The therapist’s habitual position – inheriting the wounds of our family ancestors, our therapeutic ancestors, or cultural ancestors … The therapist’s shadow The dangers of integration Gomez, Stark, Clarkson, Michael’s Diamond model: what kind of therapeutic relatedness? Gomez: humanistic ‘alongside’ stance versus psychodynamic ‘opposite’ stance Stark: ‘one-person psychology’, ‘one-and-a-half-person psychology’, ‘two-person psychology’ Clarkson: working alliance – authentic – reparative – transference/countertransference - transpersonal Michael’s Diamond model: include ‘medical model’ understanding identifications - projective identification – transference and countertransference as systemic bodymind processes the relational paradox: transcending treatment versus relationship dualism = paradox of enactment I-it and I-I relating the bodymind paradox: transcending mind-over-body versus body-over-mind dualism = embodiment/disembodiment paradox the central paradox of therapy: the healing of the client’s wounding is inseparable from the enactment of wounding in and through therapy. integrative/integral relational embodied systemic paradoxical Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool Bob Dylan: License To Kill Narcissism has a reputation for being notoriously difficult to engage with in therapy, for a variety of good reasons, not least because the very idea of ‘needing’ therapy is a humiliating insult to the grandiose self. As one of the key modern ‘disturbances of the self’, narcissism has replaced Victorian repression as the psychological disease of the age, which means that the original theories of our discipline from 100 years ago no longer quite apply. As a dominant collective issue, as exhibited by the celebrity culture all over the world and all over the media, the term ‘narcissism’ has entered pop psychology and lost all precision and meaning. In order to be clinically useful, we need to have a clear, circumscribed definition of narcissism, and its origins and manifestations. Beyond commonplace over-simplifications, the various therapeutic traditions have widely divergent ideas and theories about narcissism, leading to quite contradictory recommendations for therapists. More than many other issues, therefore, narcissism requires an integrative stance, that can draw insights and understanding from the various approaches and combine them, to provide a comprehensive understanding and therapeutic response. Because the narcissist tries to approximate an image of perfection (attempting to manifest a grandiose self), this leads to a chameleon-like disconnection from the body, and an objectifying, ‘perfecting’ treatment of it. For many celebrities, the body becomes an advertisement of the False Self, treated like one more fashion accessory. More than many other issues, therefore, narcissism calls for an embodied therapy, reconnecting the person to pleasurable, ordinary human reality, rather than pursuing the delusions of a disembodied virtual self. Because the narcissist was emotionally ‘used’ by their parent(s), their individuality was never fully seen and mirrored. Therefore, in the moment where we apply a generic diagnostic label and put the narcissist into the same category with many others, we are re-inflicting a lack of individual mirroring. More than any other issue, narcissism reveals some of the shadow aspects and weaknesses of our discipline. In order to make therapy possible, we cannot afford to rely on a reasonable and supposedly realistic ego-ego alliance: we need a working alliance both with the wounded, insignificant self as well as the inflated grandiose self. This course will provide condensed understanding extracted from the various therapeutic approaches, specifically drawing from and integrating the various psychoanalytic, the humanistic-embodied and the Jungian traditions. We will combine the theoretical input with practical, experiential work, based upon vignettes and case illustrations volunteered by participants, to explore how these ideas may be applied in practice. We will be drawing on the following literature: 
Finding your own style within the spectrum of 21st-century psychotherapy
Creating an open, inviting therapeutic space
Creating an effective transformative therapeutic space
The doctor-friend polarity
The client’s conflict: habitual mode versus emergency
A broad-spectrum integration of approaches
The therapist’s habitual, wounded, fixed position
Shifting from therapeutic approaches to relational modalities
Transcending dualisms and binaries into paradox
The fractal self: a chain of nested matrices of parallel process
And when he sees his reflection, he’s fulfilled
Oh, man is opposed to fair play
He wants it all and he wants it his way.
Calendar – Training CoursesMM2014-09-01T16:07:21+00:00
Jan
17
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2026
May
2
Sat
2026
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