Auditorium – Presentation 3 14 October (09:30 – 11:00)

“The Psychopathology of Disembodiment and Reconnection through Enactment”
by Genovino Ferri and Maxine Sheets Johnstone

The Embodied Mind, The Enactive Mind, the Trait Mind…
Psychotherapy Today – the Body, Neuroscience and Psychopathology

Reflections are offered on:

  1. Subjectivity, Intersubjectivity, Intercorporeity, Ontogenesis and Mirror Neurons.
    Intersubjectivity is a relational phenomenon well-known to the psychoanalytical world and to the many practitioners, who adhere to an evolutive perspective of affectivity. What does the introduction of the Body into the setting involve on this theme?
  2. The Embodied Mind, the Enactive Mind, the Trait Mind.
    Gregory Bateson (1972) considered the mind-brain boundaries to be without sense and suggested the concept of Embodied Mind. Cognitive processes cannot be confined to the brain as they are formed in connection with and are influenced by the entire body system.
    Varela Thompson and Rosch (1990) proposed the Embodied, Enactive Mind.
    In contrast with the idea of cognition based on mental representations, the embodied and enactive approaches propose the senso-motory coupling between the organism and the environment as the element sustaining cognition – perceiving reality through our continuous bodily activity. In continuity with this extraordinary line of research, the new concept of Trait Mind is proposed, which re-orders Ontogenesis in terms of Stage – Object Relationship – Bodily Level – Traits, and is a three-dimensional compass to move through Complexity and increase appropriateness in Psychotherapy.
  3. Two Active Ingredients in Psychotherapy and in Psychopathology.
    1. Therapeutic Embodied Simulation, which is fundamental in order to draw near to and modify certain specific patterns of interpersonal relationships today, which are the fruit of the embodied simulation in the life-story of the person yesterday.
    2. Therapeutic Embodied Activation, which is indispensable to modify the life experiences of the person and to incisively mark new experiences which are appropriate for the therapeutic questions which emerged in the setting.
Genovino Ferri

Genovino Ferri is a Psychiatrist and Reichian Analyst, trained in Reichian Analysis by Federico Navarro.
He is the director of the Italian School of Reichian Analysis (S.I.A.R.). Recently he founded the «Studio Analysis», a psychotherapeutic structure of a social character.
He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, as well as of the International Scientific Committee for Body Psycotherapy.
Furthermore he is an International Trainer of Reichian Analysis. He keeps courses of training for supervisors in Europe and South America.
During his professional career he has worked as the Director of the Psychiatric Unit at Atri Hospital in Italy and as the Director of the Asli Departmental Psycotherapy Service, in Teramo (Italy).
He is a Psychiatrist as well as a Psychotherapist in private practice.
He is the President of the Italian Association for Body Psychotherapy and the Editorial Director of the Corporal Mente series published by Alpes Editore.
He is the author of Psicopatologia e Carattere, l’Analisi Reichiana: La psicoanalisi nel corpo ed il corpo in psicoanalisi (Alpes Editore, Roma 2012)
The book has also been translated and published in Portuguese and Greek.
E-mail address: genovino.ferri@gmail.com siar@analisi-reichiana.it

Why Kinesthesia, Tactility, and Affectivity Matter

We are here in the land of Aristotle. When Aristotle wrote De Anima—On the Soul—did he write about an embodied soul? No. He wrote among other things that “without touch an animal cannot be.” When English writer D. H. Lawrence wrote “We ought to dance with rapture that we are alive and in the flesh and part of the living incarnate cosmos, did he write about an embodied self? No, he wrote among other things, “that I am part of the earth, my feet know perfectly.” When Leonardo da Vinci wrote of his experience at the entrance of a great cavern, “I was suddenly struck by two things, fear and longing: fear of the dark, ominous cavern; longing to see if inside there was something wonderful,” was he embedded in the world and was the cavern part of his extended mind? No. He was giving voice to his felt fear and longing. When we come into the world kicking, flailing, crying, or whatever, are we enacting? No. We are moving. We are indeed animate beings who are not just alive but moving, touching, feeling. If society is disembodied, it is surely in part because technologies have overtaken the realities of being a body, in part because a reductionist science reduces experience to brain events and in fact identifies the brain as the source of judgments, insights, and feats of all kinds, and in large part too because in a zest for packaging or putting special labels by way of various “E” words—embodied, enactive, embedded, extended mind – we have overlooked or even forgotten the tactile-kinesthetic/affective body and its qualitative dynamic realities.

frameMaxinne Sheets Johnstone

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone received her B. A. in French with a minor in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, her M.A. in Dance, and her Ph.D. in Dance and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She has an incomplete second Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology from the same university. In her first life, she was a dancer/choreographer, professor of dance/dance scholar. During her years of teaching dance in the studio and lecture classrooms, she choreographed 25 dances, performed in 13 of these, was sole artistic-director of 5 concerts, including two full-length concerts of her own works, and was the organizer-director-narrator of numerous lecture-demonstrations. In her second and ongoing life, she is a philosopher whose research and writing remain grounded in the existential and evolutionary realities of animate life. As an independent, highly interdisciplinary scholar, she is affiliated with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon where she taught periodically in the 1990s and where she now holds an ongoing Courtesy Professor appointment in the Department. She has published near 80 articles in humanities, science, and art journals and edited books.
Her book publications include The Phenomenology of Dance; Illuminating Dance: Philosophical Explorations; the “roots” trilogy: The Roots of Thinking, The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies, and The Roots of Morality; Giving the Body Its Due; The Primacy of Movement; The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader; Putting Movement Into Your Life: A Beyond Fitness Primer; Insides and Outsides: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Animate Nature. Two books were nominated for book awards: The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies was nominated by anthropologist Ashley Montagu for an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; The Roots of Morality was nominated by psychiatrist E. James Lieberman for a Behavioral Sciences book award.
Sheets-Johnstone was awarded a Distinguished Fellowship in 2007 for her research on xenophobia in the inaugural year of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, UK, the theme of which was “The Legacy of Charles Darwin.” She received an Alumni Achievement Award, University of Wisconsin (Madison), School of Education, Department of Dance, April 2011. She was honored with a Scholar’s Session at the 2012 meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.