Lidy EverstenWELCOME

to the EABP (European Association for Body Psychotherapy) Congress website.

Our 15th European congress, The Embodied Self in a dis-Embodied Society, is being organised in collaboration with PESOPS, the representative of the EABP in Greece.

The EABP organises Body Psychotherapy congresses every other year in different European countries. The aims of these congresses are:

a. To develop our profession

b. To meet with fellow Body Psychotherapists and with colleagues from adjoining fields in order to exchange information and enjoy each other’s company.

How do we recognise ourselves? By having an idea about who we are and also by experiencing who we are. And these two, idea and experience, cannot be separated. As our society is used to seeing the self as a concept, we call this inseparable unity the embodied self.

Since the 16th century the perspective of science and western society has changed from observing phenomena as whole entities to looking at their smallest possible parts, to understanding the world as a machine. More recently we seem to have been evolving a more complex view of networks, an understanding of the world as an intricate web of phenomena influencing each other all the time.

Nevertheless centuries of Cartesian thinking (‘cogito, ergo sum’) have left western society with a legacy of splitting Mind and Body and thus Dis-embodying the Mind. This split is also to be found in the development of medicine and psychotherapy through the times.

Body Psychotherapy is based upon the opposite view, the view of unity of Body and Mind. Over the last seventy years Body Psychotherapists have become the experts in clinical work based upon this unity. Recently this view has also received increasing attention from other psychotherapy modalities. Moreover, researchers from various scientific disciplines now claim that the Body is mindful and the human self is embodied.