Since the person is his body, it is possible to read the history of the individual from the pattern of chronic muscular tension in his body. These chronic tensions limit the individual's ability to respond in a healthy way to the stresses of life. Bioenergetics provides a technique for reducing these tensions.
Current research on neurogenesis (growth of new brain cells) indicates that novelty, environmental enrichment and physical exercise can facilitate new growth in the adult human brain. How can we optimize our Ericksonian approaches to support the psychobiological growth process?
Besides the patient's past history and present intrapsychic complaints, besides his/her interpersonal relations, the patient lives in an aesthetic, spiritual, cultural, economic and environmental world of intimate things, physical places and invisible atmospheres. To focus mainly upon personal subjectivity to the neglect of the non-human factors falsifies the patient's daily actuality and endangers therapy with artificiality. Therapy must therefore bridge into the world.
Often meetings on therapy focus on differences among therapists; overlooked is what they have in common. Basic ideas are hidden in social and political actions.
Therapy promotes "movement." To facilitate movement the therapist can assume therapeutic "postures." These postures are a font from which interventions follow.
Dr. Yalom will discuss the definition of existential psychotherapy, its sources, basic tenets and applications in clinical work. Major focus will be on the ultimate concerns of death, meaninglessness, freedom and isolation. Dr. Yalom will discuss his approach to teaching about this field through a literary conveyance.
EP00 Invited Address 11b - Therapy of "As If" - Paul Watzlawick, Ph.D.
Certain aspects of language can be especially useful for the purpose of bringing about behavioral changes. The nature of these changes is best known, but by no means limited to, its hypnotherapeutic application. They are, for instance, "corrective emotional experiences," as defined by Franz Alexander. Long before Alexander, the philosopher Hans Vaihinger, in his famous work, "The Philosophy of As If" (1911 ), had investigated in great detail the fact to behave "as if something were the case, could bring about almost immediate changes in given contexts.
In this paper, Dr. Masterson gives an understanding of the intrapsychic structure of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and how it finds clinical expression through the disorders of the self triad. Clinical cases are presented to illustrate how the therapeutic intervention of mirroring interpretation of narcissistic vulnerability helps the patient to convert transference acting-out to therapeutic alliance and transference, thereby creating the condition for psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
This address is a review of the significant theoretical and practical changes in the practice of psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy in the experience of the author's personal practice over the past 62 years.