concerns in the name of economic development and survival, the liquefying of supports and structured frames, and the distortion of bonding within and without the family are manifestations and also secondary causes of this dissociation.
The contemporary current of the theories of embodiment and enactment is “sweeping” the philosophic and interdisciplinary scientific world of our epoch, identifying the importance of the body in every aspect of the human dimension: knowledge, pedagogics, and education, awareness and mindfulness, psychosomatics and psychopathology, arts and sciences.
The simultaneous “explosive research and evolution” in neurosciences which point out and confirm the primacy of the body not only as an object of the mind but as participant to the subject (Damasio), has opened the way for the restoration of scientific truth regarding the original union of the human being with his body, and thus with life and nature.
Body-psychotherapy having since its early beginnings identified the root of the problem has developed theories and methods for the restoration of the dysfunction.
We wish this Congress to be a time and a place of meeting for ourselves as psychotherapists, though originating from different backgrounds and approaches that have the body/soma in the center of therapy, to continue defining what unites us and outlines our common ground, and what differentiates and enriches us.
But we also want to meet as scientists, researchers, philosophers, therapists, and most important as human beings in order to share the knowledge, the experiences and the journeys each of us within her field has been traversing, meeting in the common ground of our body, which is the gateway to our subjectivity, our truth but also our humanity. Interdisciplinary dialogue comes to unite that which the partially necessary specialization has fragmented: the integrity and totality of the human being and the human experience and truth with the higher perspective of the re-embodiment of us and our disembodied society.
Panagiotis Stambolis
President of the Congress Content Scientific Committee