What is “experience”, and how does it imprint upon me? How do we interpret “bodies” - and what does society story as “healthy”, “safe”, “attractive”, and “right”? How do we bridge the mind/body relationship central to psychotherapeutic praxis? Particularly in our current American context - where patients endure the gaze of the objectifying psychiatrized body - what does it mean to be a subjective living body or “flesh”? How does this inform our approach to healing the wounds of others therein?

This workshop series will explore the embodied subject and re-think our psychological understanding of the “body” and “experience”. We will explore the significant works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961): a French psychologist, philosopher, and public intellectual. Merleau-Ponty expanded phenomenology towards embodiment and incarnation challenging the mind/body dualism of his predecessors. In a society that splits between a person as an “unseen spirit (or mind)” - or a person as only what can be observed and measured - Merleau-Ponty opens up a flesh that is porous, alive, creating, and united. Put quite simply, we exist as an “I can” rather than an “I think”.

This learning group will explore the radical implications of lived embodiment - of personhood as a creating “I can” - especially as we think and practice therapeutically. During our 10-session learning group, we will explore concepts of body, sense experience, spatiality, temporality, and the like. While mainly focusing on Merleau-Ponty's work, we will connect this to other thinkers (i.e., Husserl, Foucault, Bergson, etc.) and other fields (i.e., trauma studies, neuroscience, narrative theory, etc). Participants will be invited to relate the course study directly to their therapeutic practices and lived experiences through synchronous (recorded) discussions and learning. Most importantly, we will grapple with the implications these questions might have for how we might engage with our world, especially the suffering Other.

Eligible for 15 CEUs for Pschologists. CEs for LMHC have been submitted for review to respective credentialing bodies.