Saturday, 25. April 2020:

Morning (10-14)

• Our personal experience: having a body, being a body, feeling the body. We will explore our own body experience construing differences between different sensations, different body parts, and different situations.

• Professional constructions of personal constructions: Kelly’s point of view. We will look at Kelly’s professional constructions of people’s body experiences. In particular, we will focus on his non-dualistic rigorous approach.

Afternoon (15-18)

• Professional constructions of the so-called psychosomatic disorders and the power of metaphors: personal experiences and clinical cases. Drawing on examples from our personal and professional experience we will try to understand what happens when there’s something wrong in the body, but doctors don’t find any physical cause for it. We will try to deepen our understanding by means of metaphors, linguistic devices that seem able to bridge the gap between verbal and non-verbal constructions.

Sunday, 26. April 2020:

Morning (10-14)

• Personal construction of illness and the need to re-construe oneself when something changes in one’s body: personal experiences and clinical cases. We will focus on the experience of being ill, sometimes seriously ill, on the meanings people give to their illnesses and on the personal and relational processes implied in reconstruing one’s life after or during an illness.

Afternoon (15-18)

• Patient and therapist’s body in the therapy room: transference and countertransference through the lenses of the theory of autopoiesis.
  When a patient and a therapist meet, they meet as whole persons: their bodies speak to each other, and sometimes there’s no awareness of this dialogue. But the importance of non-verbal language cannot be underestimated, and so we will focus on the theoretical tools offered by Kelly’s PCP and Maturana and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis to enlarge our awareness of this relational process. We will work on examples drawn from our professional experience.