BOLOGNA 2021
As happened to many big events in 2020, we had to move our EABP congress to 2021.
We suddenly have entered a new era that has severed our connections with the past. We are witnessing two temporal “revolutions” that have followed one after the other: a very strong, tremendous acceleration that has exponentially increased the speed of social interactions, and an unpredictable reduction in physical proximity and body contact due to the CoViD-19 pandemic.
Pandemic stress, due to a state of enduring stress and an unconventional mix of stress that not only affects the present but disrupts the future, is an entirely new condition that is becoming known to us in clinical practice.
This social acceleration with the expansion of the digital and virtual dimension, together with the deprivation of the body has uprooted humanity from our old home / world, reversing each person’s relationship with their body and promoting fragmentation of the social fabric: technological predominance and increased virtual reality are producing a progressive eclipse of the body.
Body Psychotherapy seeks to return humans home, by repairing the deep fracture between the living body and its virtual image, consequently reconnecting sense to sensation.
Body Psychotherapy, in this moment, is faced with a great challenge: on the one hand it risks losing one of its healing factors, the therapist’s direct work with the body; and on the other hand it becomes an indispensable therapeutic tool in the face of a situation where there is deep suffering due to bodily deprivation that threatens the deep and global identity of people.
The eclipsing of the body is primarily caused by detachment from our sensations. These sensations are the solid foundation needed in constructing our emotions. Sensations allow the individual to feel alive, to be in the here and now and to feel completely unique: “I sense therefore I am”, a kind of “cartesian” condition of self-evident truth.
It is therefore necessary to rethink BP at the time of this pandemic and to transform and adapt our clinical techniques and methodologies to this new collective trauma.
Trauma research shows just how important it is to work towards recovering sensorial flux, in order to replace and integrate the memories that trauma has excluded from awareness and personal coherence.
This Congress will explore the “eclipsing of the body” from various perspectives: phenomenological, neurophysiological, anthropological and psychodynamic. It will underscore the particular resources of Body Psychotherapy, compared it with other therapeutic approaches.
We need to research new methodologies, approaches and treatments for clinical disturbances and will require new paradigms to be developed in order to understand how psychotherapy can be effective in a world increasingly more virtual and disjointed.
This is even more important when considering prevention and health promotion: many experts will be confronted with these changes. New challenges and emerging themes will be addressed in the various disciplines, from sexuality to politics, from prevention to clinical work, from ethics to economics, from ecology to new Artificial Intelligences… because a future is still possible.