Friday, 10^th of september 2021

09:15-09:30 Body, Soul and Music

SESSION II –Making Sense
Chair – Maurizio Stupiggia

09:30-10:30 The sense of body as power for action
Corrado Sinigaglia
What’s the role of the body in shaping our basic self-awareness? A standard way of answering this question appeals to proprioception. After all, it seems quite obvious that our bodily self-experience has primarily to do with proprioception. Challenging this assumption is the main aim of my talk. I shall argue, and provide evidence for, that our body is primarily given to us as a manifold of action possibilities, which cannot be reduced to proprioceptive awareness. Strikingly, a large amount of studies that the same action possibilities constituting our bodily self also allow us to make sense of other bodily selves inasmuch as their action possibilities can be mapped onto our own ones. This suggests that the sense of body as power for action may provide a building block for better understanding the core of our full-fledged sense of self and others.

10:30-11:00 Coffee break

11:00–12:00 Where do we go from here? A possibledirection for body psychotherapy
George Downing
Major developments have taken place in the body psychotherapy world in recent years.  A number of schools, profiting from relational psychoanalytic concepts, have developed creative ideas about how to work with the therapeutic relationship.  Overviews of body psychotherapy techniques have been put together (e.g., Geuter, Heller). Approaches to trauma which draw on Porges’ Polyvagal Theory have emerged.  Philosophic theories about embodied cognition are being widely recognized. 

So where do we go from here?  In this talk, a series of suggestions will be proposed.

12:00–13:00 Round Table
P. Moselli
B. Schroeter
M. Heller
M. Spagnuolo Lobb
Chair: Maurizio Stupiggia

13:00–14:45 Lunch

14:45–16:45 Workshops session I and Symposium

Symposium 1
“From Neuroception to Body Awareness in Body Psychotherapy”
Chair: Herbert Grassmann
As Body Psychotherapists we have brought essential areas of human existence into consciousness and we have developed powerful methods and techniques to touch these. At the same time there was a lack of well-formulated descriptions and concepts of the phenoma we work with. Research into the efficacy of Body Psychotherapy is essential to the future development of the Body Psychotherapy profession. The EABP Science and Research Committee works hard to promote research in Body Psychotherapy. The topic of this year’s symposium is called “From Neuroception to Body Awareness in Body Psychotherapy”. Body awareness as the ability to contact and feel one’s body from within is considered a key feature in normal functioning and general health. The term “Neuroception” describes how neural circuits distinguish whether situations or people are safe, dangerous, or life threatening. A scientific comparison of both terms could show how important it is to work towards the restoration of the sensory flow. We will explore different approaches and new paradigms to understand how Body Psychotherapy can be effective in a world that is becoming increasingly virtual and disjointed.

PART I:
Herbert Grassmann Touch in Body Psychoterapy – An overview

Aline LaPierre Therapeutic use of touch

Will Davis Connective tissue, interoception and instroke work

Symposium 1
“From Neuroception to Body Awareness in Body Psychotherapy”
Chair Herbert Grassmann

PART II:
Giovanni Ottoboni The impact of Body awareness and Affect on effectiveness of body oriented psychological therapy techniques  

Riccardo Cassiano Ingoni Neurogenic miofascial vibration-induced neuromodulation: an EEG study in Bioenergetic analysis

Steven Porges Body Awareness Scales and utility in Body Psychotherapy

Biljana Jokic Trauma research & Body psychotherapy: Preliminary results

Herbert Grassmann

Symposium 2
“Identity, difference and otherness”
Chair: Rosanna De Sanctis
Discussants: Gabriel Graça de Oliveira, Carlo Lepri, Roberta Rosin
The construction of identity is a path along which there is always a confrontation with otherness, which cannot be separated from recognizing the presence of the other, from taking note of its diversity and listening to it without reducing it to its own parameters. Denying otherness indicates, therefore, the inability to grasp the diversity and complexity that is expressed in individuals.

Knowing something that is other than oneself means understanding that it is possible only by going towards, in the awareness of having to respect to be “other than oneself”.

The analysis of the factors that favour change in psychotherapy, the dialectic between individual identity, new forms of family ties and the complexity of social phenomena, are the starting points for a necessary reflection.

In the vortex of changes, which are affecting the quality of existential and relational styles, we must ask ourselves about the discomfort and the need for stability of contemporary man, increasingly looking for islands of solidity in the “liquid sea” of our time.

16:45–18:15 Workshops session II and Symposium

Symposium 1
“Body psychotherapists in society”
Chair: Ulrich Sollmann

Marianne Williams Bentzen  Body psychotherapists as Elders in our societies
Discussants: Thomas Riepenhausen
How can we as body-psychotherapists use our skills in the so-called ‘real world’, to become elders in the (social inequalities and) conflicts that are increasing in our societies? In this (short) presentation, Marianne will relate modern wisdom research and the developmental model of spiral dynamics. Human beings make social decisions and chose political stances based on what feels right to them, on their psycho-social consciousness. This includes the values they esteem.

• Spiral dynamics describes how perspectives change at different levels of cultural development, and that higher levels of social consciousness must both transcend and include the lower ones, that we all carry as well. 
• Wisdom research offers components of wisdom that are recognized across cultures and throughout history, giving us an inner sense of the forms of mastery we can bring and the kinds of challenge that would be most difficult for us.