Auditorium – Presentation 7 15 October (14:30 – 16:00)

Round Table: “The Female Body in Society and Psychotherapy”
by Bettina Schroeter, Christina Angelini, Eirini Avramopoulou, Kathrin Stauffer and Rae Johnson
Moderator: Bettina Schroeter

The female body in society and (body)-psychotherapy

The female body has been a matrix for (male) projections of desires, ideals, fears and horrors for thousands of years. Honored as Goddesses of fertility, burned as witches, adored as symbols of beauty and purity, despised and feared as dirty, demonic and dangerous: these myths have set deep traces into the unconscious of men and women. Even after women’s liberation it is still a challenge for the individual woman to claim her identity and her body. The numerical dominance of women in the field of BPT speaks of that search for self empowerment. BPT has ignored gender issues to an amazing extent. This panel will discuss questions of gender, violence, sexual identity and therapeutic attitudes in BPT.

Bettina Schroeter, Dipl. Päd., HP, ECP, Trainer, Supervisor, Therapist in BPT, Director of the Training Institute for Transformative Body Psychotherapy, Berlin, member of the EABP since its foundation. Initiated panels about gender issues in recent DGK- and EABP Congresses with a group of german colleagues.

Gender Based Violence in the Middle East and traditional societies

Gender Based Violence (GBV) is an umbrella term for any harmful act perpetrated against a person’s will based on socially ascribed differences between males and females (gender). In patriarchal and traditional societies, like in the Middle East now, “gender” (social dimension) and “sex” (biological dimension) are usually overlapped and considered as synonymous. Gender rigidity is strongly associated with GBV.
Body Psychotherapy has a crucial role in the healing process of survivors of Domestic (DV), Sexual (SV) and Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) since it is very effective in the elaboration of traumatic experiences for GBV survivors and in the empowerment process leading to a more active role and deeper awareness about their rights.

Christina Angelini
Certified Psychotherapist since 1995. Private practice in Rome: Analytical-Body Approach (Reichian), EMDR Practitioner, Child Therapist, Trainer from 2002 for: EU, UNICEF, UNFPA, AIDOS on Gender Based Violence, Resilience, PTSD, Psychological First Aid-Counselling, Child Abuse etc. in: Jordan, Syria, Palestine, Irak -Kurdistan, Nepal, Tanzania, Burkina Fasu.
Italian Delegate at Women Deliver, Malesia 2013. Lecturer at UN CSW 2014-2015 New York USA.

The female body as a living archive

If one perceives the female body as a living archive upon which normative, heterosexual and sexist representations of gendered roles have been cast, then one might need to ask: What kinds of processes of disembodiment and dispossession need to occur, personally or in society, in order to claim back this injured body? By critically analyzing psychoanalytic metaphors that still haunt gender roles and sexuality in everyday life, my presentation will offer some meditations on the repetition of norms and stereotypes and on the performative aspects of re-writing differently histories that hurt.

Eirini Avramopoulou, PhD, University of Cambridge, is a social anthropologist whose research interests include anthropology of the body, gender and sexuality; human rights, social movements and activism; feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to subjectivity, biopolitics and affect. She is the co-author of the edited volume: Porno-graphics and Porno-tactics. Desire, Affect and Representation in Pornography (2016, Punctum books) and she is currently completing her first monograph on affect, performativity, and gender-queer activism in Istanbul, Turkey.

Sex, market value and love

Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe, and these young mothers want babies to love them unconditionally. Clearly they feel deeply unloved.
I encounter in young women a belief that they need to make themselves sexually available in order to “snare” a man into a loving relationship. In a tragic perversion of the aims of the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s, sexuality has become all about a person’s “market value”, and the real need for love goes unmet.

Kathrin Stauffer, PhD, UKCP Registered Body Psychotherapist, is the author of Anatomy & Physiology for Psychotherapists: Connecting Body & Soul (W.W. Norton 2010). Originally a research biochemist, she retrained at the Chiron Centre for Body Psychotherapy in London. She works in private practice in Cambridge and London as a body psychotherapist, biodynamic massage therapist, trainer and supervisor.

Contacting Gender in Body Psychotherapy

The social context around gender is changing rapidly, and the emergence of transgender and queer perspectives has shifted the conversation about male-female relationships in important ways. How do we engage these conversations with our clients with sensitivity and skill? And how do we incorporate our understanding of the body into the conversation? This presentation will focus on practical strategies for becoming more resourced and responsive to gender issues in body psychotherapy.

Rae Johnson, PhD, RSMT is a Canadian scholar working at the intersection of somatic studies and social justice. Key themes in her work include the embodied experience of oppression and somatic modes of inquiry. She is the author of Knowing in our Bones, an exploration of the embodied professional knowledge of somatic educators, and the forthcoming Embodied Social Justice, a practical guide for counselors, educators, and activists on the role of the body in learning and unlearning oppression.