Panel 4: The Challenge of Pleasure & Sexuality

📅Saturday, 5 September📍Cork City Hall 🕒11:45 – 13:15

Description:

Pleasure and sexuality bring us to the edge of what it means to be embodied. They touch the places where we long, reach, refuse, hunger, soften, defend, submit, resist, and come alive. They are not separate from the therapeutic field; they move through it, often unspoken, in breath, gaze, gesture, charge, shame, absence, fantasy, fear, and desire.

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Sexuality can carry wounds of violation, silence, repression, dissociation, and power. Pleasure can be feared as much as pain, especially where the body has learned that aliveness is dangerous. Yet these same territories may also hold the possibility of reclamation: the return of sensation, consent, agency, play, erotic intelligence, and a more honest relationship with life itself.

This panel discussion will explore what it means to meet pleasure and sexuality without avoidance, reduction, or sentimentality. How do we work ethically with the forces of desire, shame, inhibition, and vitality as they appear in the body and in the therapeutic relationship?

Together, we will consider pleasure not as a luxury, and sexuality not as a problem to be managed, but as profound dimensions of embodiment, relationship, and human freedom.

Meet The Panel

Christiane Lewin

Since 1981, Christiane has worked as a bodywork therapist, a trainer, supervisor and lecturer. As co-founder & director of the Ecole Biodynamique (Biodynamic School) in Montpellier Christiane is also responsible for the French Biodynamic Psychology Schools’ training program. For the last 40 years, she has continued her own researches around the chanted voice and its clinical use in body work therapy, to go through and dissolve emotional trauma.

Christiane Lewin - round portrait - EABP Congress 2026

Marc Rackelmann

Working with sexual issues and working with men has become an important part of Marc’s therapeutic work. A body-psychotherapist and couples therapist from Berlin., Marc is also a trainer and supervisor for couples therapy and body psychotherapy. Author of ‘Make Love – das Männerbuch’, Marc was also the 2nd chairman of the German Association for Body Psychotherapy (DGK) and a Board member of the EABP.

Carlien van Heel

Trained by Gerda Boyesen – the founder of Biodynamic Psychology and Psychotherapy – and working in the field since 1988, Carlien is still passionate about Biodynamic work. Head of Courses at the London School of Biodynamic Psychotherapy (LSBP), Carlien is a UKCP registered Biodynamic Psychotherapist, Supervisor and Senior Trainer and earned an MA in Body-psychotherapy (Anglia Ruskin University) in 2014.

Panellist #4 (TBC)

Details coming soon.

Pete Thompson (Moderator)

Details coming soon.