The split in the modern personality is between the head and the body, between the rational mind and irrational gut feelings. It reflects the split in this culture between science and the natural forces in life and nature which science attempts to control. The modern individual lives largely in his head and is out of touch with his body because he had deadened it to suppress the fear, the pain and the despair which he experienced in childhood.
In the ancient world, the philosopher was a physician of the soul who, employing the healing word (iatroi /ogoi), offered counsel to persons perplexed by problems in living. After the triumph of Christianity, the priest as confessor-counselor replaced the philosopher as rhetorician of consolation. With the birth of psychiatry, and especially since the Freudian revolution, we call helping persons with words "psychotherapy." I shall try to show that without a decisive separation of rhetorical healing from medical healing, psychotherapy as the secular cure of souls is doomed to extinction.
Madanes will present guidelines for the positive use of shame in couples and families. Stories from therapy will be told to reveal complicated problems in which shame, sex, power and love are interconnected. Looking at extreme cases of violence will throw light on when it is appropriate to experience shame and how to recover from the pain that shame represents.
In the 1990's all factors of therapy are changing. The way of financing therapy is changing, there are new types of clientele, there are striking differences in ideology and the training of therapists is becoming a new kind of enterprise.
This talk proposes to separate psychotherapy approaches into two groups: one called the "psychological therapies," focused on the growth and development of the individual psyche, and the other, the "social therapies," which deal with broader issues of relationship and the social web. My aim is to create a freer field for dialogue between two points of view that are historically independent from each other and that derive from a different conceptual base.
The client's task is to try to be open to his/her inner experiencing, disclosing it to the therapist. A client discovers difficulties in doing so, thus disclosing the resistances which are isomorphic with the client's difficulties in life more generally. The therapist's task is to teach and monitor this process.