Archive of 2023 Seminar
The 2023 Seminar
The Poetic Movements of the Therapeutic Dance
Re-Imagining a Psychotherapy of Depth
Amelio A. D'Onofrio, PhD
July 24-28, 2023
Gubbio, Italy
The Poetic Movements of the Therapeutic Dance
Re-Imagining a Psychotherapy of Depth
Amelio A. D'Onofrio, PhD
July 24-28, 2023
Gubbio, Italy
Opening Conversation
“...Those who understand us enslave something in us."
~Kahlil Gibran
“Some things can only be approached with great reverence,
for it is only then can they disclose themselves to us as they truly are."
~Dietrich von Hildebrand
“There is a listening that works this way: a listening that is responsible for creating what it hears
--a listening...with the power to cause or alleviate the very suffering it hears."
~David Levin
“Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.”
~Samuel Beckett
“Psychoanalysis would seem to have as its sole goal the calming of guilt."
~Jacques Lacan
“...Those who understand us enslave something in us."
~Kahlil Gibran
“Some things can only be approached with great reverence,
for it is only then can they disclose themselves to us as they truly are."
~Dietrich von Hildebrand
“There is a listening that works this way: a listening that is responsible for creating what it hears
--a listening...with the power to cause or alleviate the very suffering it hears."
~David Levin
“Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.”
~Samuel Beckett
“Psychoanalysis would seem to have as its sole goal the calming of guilt."
~Jacques Lacan
Lost in his great madness, Shakespeare’s King Lear howls at the cosmos: “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” It is this question, perhaps more than any other, that echoes in the human heart as we seek to navigate the chaos and confusion of life. Often uttered faintly and enigmatically through our patients’ symptoms and fragmented stories, this question speaks of lostness—the lostness of a soul wandering in exile, fearing that home may be permanently out of reach.
When we are able to provide a clearing for our patients—perhaps even be the clearing ourselves—we hear the patient’s search for subjectivity: “Who am I?” We hear them ask from their depths, “What does it mean to be human in a world fashioned by surface desire and instrumentality, where I am thrown into a life that’s not my own?” “How do I live out my humanity in a world where meaning seems to veil itself, and where inwardness and depth feel increasingly remote? It is this lostness that shepherds patients to our consulting rooms in the hope of being seen and of having their suffering known. They come to us having forgotten themselves, but bring with them a felt sense and secret hope that, perhaps, we all carry in our hearts: “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free, and my suffering can then be transformed.”
————--
Join us in Gubbio, Italy this July, for a week of conversation and a restorative journey—one that will enkindle, elevate, and perhaps even transform. Informed by psychoanalytic theory and existential insights, we will seek to deepen our experience of ourselves as therapists. We’ll engage with such questions as: What are the clinical metaphors that inhabit us and shape our therapeutic work? Might the reifying gaze of some of those metaphors lead us to locate problems in the wrong places, thereby providing false solutions that fail to hear the claim of our patients? Might there be a different way of listening and experiencing—one grounded in an epistemological humility—that can open new narrative horizons? And, if so, how do we unbind the poetic gestures of psychotherapy from their institutional fossilization and bring new vitality to the therapeutic encounter? We’ll also ask: How do we allow silence to be as a cradle that holds, unburdens, and shelters; that gives consent for freedom to become a possibility? How might our very disposition be that space that welcomes the human being before us to show itself as it really is? And finally, we’ll examine how our own incompleteness as therapists (and as human beings) fuels desire and guilt and constrains our unfolding presence and therapeutic power.
This seminar is intended for clinicians who appreciate that the psychotherapeutic narrative is not one written in prose, but one that unfolds dynamically through the undulating cadences and shifting tonalities of the poetic verse that patient and therapist together, in relationship, compose. Our venue, a magnificently restored seventeenth century Franciscan monastery—now a hotel & spa—nestled in the idyllic Umbrian countryside, will serve as the clearing for our retreat from the busyness of the everyday world. This most hospitable and grace-filled setting will beckon us to deeper interiority that will liberate our collective therapeutic wisdom. Join us in exploring new possibilities for being-in-the-world with our patients in ever more spacious, generous, and life-affirming ways. You'll be challenged and inspired to broaden your understanding of the therapeutic passage and to deepen your participation in the renewal of your patients’ lives.
When we are able to provide a clearing for our patients—perhaps even be the clearing ourselves—we hear the patient’s search for subjectivity: “Who am I?” We hear them ask from their depths, “What does it mean to be human in a world fashioned by surface desire and instrumentality, where I am thrown into a life that’s not my own?” “How do I live out my humanity in a world where meaning seems to veil itself, and where inwardness and depth feel increasingly remote? It is this lostness that shepherds patients to our consulting rooms in the hope of being seen and of having their suffering known. They come to us having forgotten themselves, but bring with them a felt sense and secret hope that, perhaps, we all carry in our hearts: “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free, and my suffering can then be transformed.”
————--
Join us in Gubbio, Italy this July, for a week of conversation and a restorative journey—one that will enkindle, elevate, and perhaps even transform. Informed by psychoanalytic theory and existential insights, we will seek to deepen our experience of ourselves as therapists. We’ll engage with such questions as: What are the clinical metaphors that inhabit us and shape our therapeutic work? Might the reifying gaze of some of those metaphors lead us to locate problems in the wrong places, thereby providing false solutions that fail to hear the claim of our patients? Might there be a different way of listening and experiencing—one grounded in an epistemological humility—that can open new narrative horizons? And, if so, how do we unbind the poetic gestures of psychotherapy from their institutional fossilization and bring new vitality to the therapeutic encounter? We’ll also ask: How do we allow silence to be as a cradle that holds, unburdens, and shelters; that gives consent for freedom to become a possibility? How might our very disposition be that space that welcomes the human being before us to show itself as it really is? And finally, we’ll examine how our own incompleteness as therapists (and as human beings) fuels desire and guilt and constrains our unfolding presence and therapeutic power.
This seminar is intended for clinicians who appreciate that the psychotherapeutic narrative is not one written in prose, but one that unfolds dynamically through the undulating cadences and shifting tonalities of the poetic verse that patient and therapist together, in relationship, compose. Our venue, a magnificently restored seventeenth century Franciscan monastery—now a hotel & spa—nestled in the idyllic Umbrian countryside, will serve as the clearing for our retreat from the busyness of the everyday world. This most hospitable and grace-filled setting will beckon us to deeper interiority that will liberate our collective therapeutic wisdom. Join us in exploring new possibilities for being-in-the-world with our patients in ever more spacious, generous, and life-affirming ways. You'll be challenged and inspired to broaden your understanding of the therapeutic passage and to deepen your participation in the renewal of your patients’ lives.
Monday, July 24, 2023 (9:30am - 1:00pm)
Day 1
On Forgetting and Remembering:
The Discourse(s) Inhabiting Our Clinical Practice
“[We] can suffer only a certain amount of culture without injury.”
~Carl Jung
“Before the voice of reason, there is the voice of pathos.”
~David Kleinberg-Levin
“It is preferable to warn people that they aren't to
believe too much of what they understand.”
~Jacques Lacan
“What produces alienation is not depth, but lack of depth."
~Iain McGilchrist
“My symptom is my soul.”
~James Hillman
Day 1
On Forgetting and Remembering:
The Discourse(s) Inhabiting Our Clinical Practice
“[We] can suffer only a certain amount of culture without injury.”
~Carl Jung
“Before the voice of reason, there is the voice of pathos.”
~David Kleinberg-Levin
“It is preferable to warn people that they aren't to
believe too much of what they understand.”
~Jacques Lacan
“What produces alienation is not depth, but lack of depth."
~Iain McGilchrist
“My symptom is my soul.”
~James Hillman
Among his many contributions to the therapeutic project, Freud introduced into our imaginations two foundational ideas: First, that human reality is comprised of that which is seen and that which lies outside of direct observation. There is the visible and the invisible, the material and the symbolic, surface and depth. To focus primarily on the first dimension misses much of important human experience, communication, and even suffering. The second idea he offered—a seemingly simple one—was that if you let people talk and you listen to them tell their story, they get better.
The problem in our contemporary world, however, is that the meaningfulness of these basic propositions has been diluted by our modernist methods that seek to instrumentally order, measure, and control the immeasurable and non-material substance of human experience. The dialectical nature of truth recedes, giving way to a reductionistic and efficient dualism that reifies and that, itself, becomes the source of further suffering. When we fail to experience our patients through ontologically appropriate eyes, we necessarily truncate their stories, contribute to their forgetfulness-of-being, and prevent more authentic self-discovery through the dialectic of our listening.
Our point of departure for the Seminar will entail an examination of the prevailing clinical discourse(s) that may orient our work as therapists. We will explore the distinction between scientific knowledge and narrative knowledge, seeking to identify those frameworks of clinical understanding that encase our patients, delimit their freedom, and hinder their poetic movement toward new possibilities for becoming. To this end, we'll consider what the very notion of a psychotherapy of depth might entail in light of the current zeitgeist. We’ll explore such questions as: Given that all experience is essentially relational, how might "the relational" inform and open up a space for depth? How might our very own theoretical orientation be understood as “symptom”— one that may peripheralize the patient? How might the possibility of depth in our work require us to consider the ontological, in addition to the psychological? And as a corollary: What’s the soul got to do with all of this?
Finally, working from the position that a psychotherapy of depth is necessarily subversive to the conventional order, we’ll begin our reflection on the two foundational questions that constitute the deep structure of our project: “What does it mean to be a healer?” and “What is a reasonable ‘final cause’ toward which we can or ought to orient our work?”
The problem in our contemporary world, however, is that the meaningfulness of these basic propositions has been diluted by our modernist methods that seek to instrumentally order, measure, and control the immeasurable and non-material substance of human experience. The dialectical nature of truth recedes, giving way to a reductionistic and efficient dualism that reifies and that, itself, becomes the source of further suffering. When we fail to experience our patients through ontologically appropriate eyes, we necessarily truncate their stories, contribute to their forgetfulness-of-being, and prevent more authentic self-discovery through the dialectic of our listening.
Our point of departure for the Seminar will entail an examination of the prevailing clinical discourse(s) that may orient our work as therapists. We will explore the distinction between scientific knowledge and narrative knowledge, seeking to identify those frameworks of clinical understanding that encase our patients, delimit their freedom, and hinder their poetic movement toward new possibilities for becoming. To this end, we'll consider what the very notion of a psychotherapy of depth might entail in light of the current zeitgeist. We’ll explore such questions as: Given that all experience is essentially relational, how might "the relational" inform and open up a space for depth? How might our very own theoretical orientation be understood as “symptom”— one that may peripheralize the patient? How might the possibility of depth in our work require us to consider the ontological, in addition to the psychological? And as a corollary: What’s the soul got to do with all of this?
Finally, working from the position that a psychotherapy of depth is necessarily subversive to the conventional order, we’ll begin our reflection on the two foundational questions that constitute the deep structure of our project: “What does it mean to be a healer?” and “What is a reasonable ‘final cause’ toward which we can or ought to orient our work?”
Tuesday, July 25, 2023 (9:30am - 1:00pm)
Day 2
The Breakdown, the Symptom, and Death Anxiety:
Toward a Redeemed Subjectivity
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most."
~Fyodor Dostoevsky
“You sought the heaviest burden, and found yourself.”
~Friedrich Nietzsche
“The fear of psychic dissolution is the ground condition of our being subjects.”
~Walter Davis
“Struggle brings beings into Being.”
~Martin Heidegger
“To become human does not come that easily."
~Soren Kierkegaard
Day 2
The Breakdown, the Symptom, and Death Anxiety:
Toward a Redeemed Subjectivity
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most."
~Fyodor Dostoevsky
“You sought the heaviest burden, and found yourself.”
~Friedrich Nietzsche
“The fear of psychic dissolution is the ground condition of our being subjects.”
~Walter Davis
“Struggle brings beings into Being.”
~Martin Heidegger
“To become human does not come that easily."
~Soren Kierkegaard
A transformative psychotherapy begins with death. Not death as the demise of the body, but as the collapse of our imaginal world, the world that offers us our illusory sense of wholeness. This collapse and seeming annihilation is the metaphorical shipwreck that cracks open the ego’s shell and thrusts us into a new psychological space. In moments of psychic catastrophe, we are drawn into an uncanny self-estrangement in which our very being is called into question. The life that was familiar to us now feels unintelligible: The old narratives, perhaps now seen as false, no longer contain us and our very lives feel fraudulent. Yet this shipwreck—with its accompanying anguish—may take us to new shores where possibilities for a ‘second life’ might be found.
We begin day two of the Seminar by considering the movement toward subjectivity. First, we ask: How do we human beings become the symptom that holds us together as a seeming unified whole, yet embodies our fundamental lack-in-being which fuels desire and constrains our freedom? And as a consequence of this dynamic, how do our fumbling attempts at loving—both in one’s life and in the therapeutic encounter—represent our demand to the other to bestow upon us the very being we feel we lack, and thus make us whole?
We’ll trace the patient’s movements, as pilgrim, from catastrophe, to the call that awakens desire, to the tragic that has held us frozen in place. We’ll explore the challenges of this inward passage and the inherent resistances to the examined life.
The second day of the Seminar will conclude with a reflection on what a ‘second life’ might look like, and how that understanding could offer us an end point from which to depart. We’ll consider the limits of a psychotherapy of depth, and how therapists’ own relationship with their finitude can either permit or inhibit the patient’s recovery of lost experience.
We begin day two of the Seminar by considering the movement toward subjectivity. First, we ask: How do we human beings become the symptom that holds us together as a seeming unified whole, yet embodies our fundamental lack-in-being which fuels desire and constrains our freedom? And as a consequence of this dynamic, how do our fumbling attempts at loving—both in one’s life and in the therapeutic encounter—represent our demand to the other to bestow upon us the very being we feel we lack, and thus make us whole?
We’ll trace the patient’s movements, as pilgrim, from catastrophe, to the call that awakens desire, to the tragic that has held us frozen in place. We’ll explore the challenges of this inward passage and the inherent resistances to the examined life.
The second day of the Seminar will conclude with a reflection on what a ‘second life’ might look like, and how that understanding could offer us an end point from which to depart. We’ll consider the limits of a psychotherapy of depth, and how therapists’ own relationship with their finitude can either permit or inhibit the patient’s recovery of lost experience.
Wednesday, July 26, 2023 (9:30am - 1:00pm)
Day 3
Therapeutic Listening as Poetic Space:
The Therapist’s Ontological Disposition
“Life is pregnant with stories. It is a nascent plot in search of a midwife.
For every human being there are lots of little narratives trying to get out."
~Richard Kearney
“To be means to have space…Not to have space is not to be.
Striving for space is an ontological necessity."
~Paul Tillich
“Can I create a space where I can hear music?"
~Robert Wilson
“Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing.
To be able to keep silent, [one] must have something to say.”
~Martin Heidegger
“Our most fundamental disposition is one that dis-positions us…”
~David Kleinberg-Levin
“The first gesture is to say yes.”
~Donald Winnicott
Day 3
Therapeutic Listening as Poetic Space:
The Therapist’s Ontological Disposition
“Life is pregnant with stories. It is a nascent plot in search of a midwife.
For every human being there are lots of little narratives trying to get out."
~Richard Kearney
“To be means to have space…Not to have space is not to be.
Striving for space is an ontological necessity."
~Paul Tillich
“Can I create a space where I can hear music?"
~Robert Wilson
“Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing.
To be able to keep silent, [one] must have something to say.”
~Martin Heidegger
“Our most fundamental disposition is one that dis-positions us…”
~David Kleinberg-Levin
“The first gesture is to say yes.”
~Donald Winnicott
In the course of our daily lives, absorbed in our everyday concerns, we forget to listen to the most fundamental demand of our soul: to be present to ourselves and to be awake. We are distracted from ourselves and thus we forget what it means to be. We also forget what is at stake in living in that forgetfulness. If “to be means to have space,” then therapy is essentially about recovering lost psychic space, thereby allowing for the lost echoes of our voice to be heard and remembered.
This clearing—this poetic space—begins with an encounter; and it is the nature of this encounter that is the focus of day three of the Seminar. We’ll consider such questions as: Since we need a clearing in order to enter narrative, what does that clearing look like, and how do we begin to constitute it? What might constrict this space and limit access to interiority? How might our therapeutic disposition be responsible for misrecognizing suffering or for alleviating it? Is there a way of listening with ontological understanding that both allows for emergence and that shelters? How might we cultivate in our listening a relational practice that, in its very beholding of the other, releases and let’s be? How might we consider silence as an ontological organ—as the primordial space for emergence—rather than simply an absence; and how might we harness its therapeutic power? We’ll consider our cultural myths regarding listening, and we’ll explore what a mature, generative kind of listening might sound like.
This clearing—this poetic space—begins with an encounter; and it is the nature of this encounter that is the focus of day three of the Seminar. We’ll consider such questions as: Since we need a clearing in order to enter narrative, what does that clearing look like, and how do we begin to constitute it? What might constrict this space and limit access to interiority? How might our therapeutic disposition be responsible for misrecognizing suffering or for alleviating it? Is there a way of listening with ontological understanding that both allows for emergence and that shelters? How might we cultivate in our listening a relational practice that, in its very beholding of the other, releases and let’s be? How might we consider silence as an ontological organ—as the primordial space for emergence—rather than simply an absence; and how might we harness its therapeutic power? We’ll consider our cultural myths regarding listening, and we’ll explore what a mature, generative kind of listening might sound like.
Thursday, July 27, 2023 (9:30 - 1:00pm)
Day 4
The Problem of the Therapist’s Desire and Guilt
“Guilt is an ontological fact.”
~Martin Heidegger
“The only thing of which one can be guilty of
is having given ground relative to one’s desire.”
~Jacques Lacan
“The more you develop as a distinctive, free,
and critical human being, the more guilt you have.”
~Ernst Becker
“In our guilt, we become overactive and intrusive,
and interfere with the analytic growth process. Hence our guilt is apt to
cloak our unconscious wish to cling to the patient."
~Harold Searles
Day 4
The Problem of the Therapist’s Desire and Guilt
“Guilt is an ontological fact.”
~Martin Heidegger
“The only thing of which one can be guilty of
is having given ground relative to one’s desire.”
~Jacques Lacan
“The more you develop as a distinctive, free,
and critical human being, the more guilt you have.”
~Ernst Becker
“In our guilt, we become overactive and intrusive,
and interfere with the analytic growth process. Hence our guilt is apt to
cloak our unconscious wish to cling to the patient."
~Harold Searles
The practice of a psychotherapy of depth is exceedingly difficult. It requires therapists to be at home in darkness as we lay ourselves bare to our patients’ real, unmetabolized, and unformulated pain—pain that infects and fragments. Moving into our patients’ pain requires a choice; and as we make that choice, we come face-to-face with our patients’ deepest anguish and dread. We are asked to not only survive the impact, but to help lead our patients back into sunlight.
The burden of this responsibility likewise brings us face-to-face with our own incompleteness—our lack—and with the ways we’ve forgotten and retreated from our own promise. Through this self-forgetting we abdicate our desire, thus giving birth to a nameless guilt that enframes our soul and compels our choices. Just as the Oedipus story speaks to the tragic consequences of unknown guilt, so too can the guilt of our misshapen desire eclipse the person before us in the consulting room.
Day four of the Seminar takes us on an excursion into the nature of desire and guilt, particularly as it manifests itself in the person of the therapist and in clinical practice. We’ll look at the relationship of desire to subjectivity, to the demand our desire places on the other—the patient’s demand of the therapist, and the therapist’s demand of the patient—and how guilt mediates that demand. We’ll examine the tensions between existential and neurotic guilt, separateness and guilt, ambivalence and guilt, and how guilt can substitute for our own aggression in the therapeutic encounter. We’ll conclude with comments on the relationship of guilt to the therapeutic frame and its effects on the therapist’s capacity for containment.
The burden of this responsibility likewise brings us face-to-face with our own incompleteness—our lack—and with the ways we’ve forgotten and retreated from our own promise. Through this self-forgetting we abdicate our desire, thus giving birth to a nameless guilt that enframes our soul and compels our choices. Just as the Oedipus story speaks to the tragic consequences of unknown guilt, so too can the guilt of our misshapen desire eclipse the person before us in the consulting room.
Day four of the Seminar takes us on an excursion into the nature of desire and guilt, particularly as it manifests itself in the person of the therapist and in clinical practice. We’ll look at the relationship of desire to subjectivity, to the demand our desire places on the other—the patient’s demand of the therapist, and the therapist’s demand of the patient—and how guilt mediates that demand. We’ll examine the tensions between existential and neurotic guilt, separateness and guilt, ambivalence and guilt, and how guilt can substitute for our own aggression in the therapeutic encounter. We’ll conclude with comments on the relationship of guilt to the therapeutic frame and its effects on the therapist’s capacity for containment.
Friday, July 28, 2023 (9:30 - 1:00pm)
Day 5
Transforming Exile into Pilgrimage:
W/holeness and the Beauty of Imperfection
“And what we have need of is soul—soul of bulk and substance.”
~Miguel de Unamuno
“Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction
only in another self-consciousness.”
~G. W. F. Hegel
“To love the truth means to endure the void and, as a result,
to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.”
~Simone Weil
“What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent."
~William Shakespeare
“Does this mean now that I am freer than I was?
I do not know. I shall learn."
~Samuel Beckett
Day 5
Transforming Exile into Pilgrimage:
W/holeness and the Beauty of Imperfection
“And what we have need of is soul—soul of bulk and substance.”
~Miguel de Unamuno
“Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction
only in another self-consciousness.”
~G. W. F. Hegel
“To love the truth means to endure the void and, as a result,
to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.”
~Simone Weil
“What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent."
~William Shakespeare
“Does this mean now that I am freer than I was?
I do not know. I shall learn."
~Samuel Beckett
Transformation in psychotherapy requires the re-appropriation of those parts lost to us in our self-estrangement. It requires a coming back to ourselves—recognizing, understanding, and responding to our inner call to responsibility. It is from the appropriation of this responsibility that we become free. We unshackle ourselves from the chains that formerly bound us, so that we can be free for committing to our contingency in a new way. In essence, we become better able to bear the weight of our own mortality. While this newfound freedom can be a balm for the disquieted self and help to create a new sense of wholeness, we also learn that it cannot permanently fill the hole in our hearts that has companioned us in life. Therapy cannot take away our groundlessness and spare us from its accompanying anxiety; for ultimately, therapy cannot change the structure of our finitude.
What therapy can do, however—particularly because, at its best, it is the incarnation of relationship—is help the patient recollect what has been forgotten and what was once hoped for. It can lead to a greater acceptance of our incompleteness, and help cultivate reverence for our newly appropriated ontological dignity. We discover that patients do become poets in their own right—able to speak in new symbolic forms with their own unique voices. And through this poetic movement, fading hope receives new life and beauty is brought back into the world.
We’ll conclude the Seminar with a reflection on the imperfection of ‘wholeness’ and the limitations of freedom. And we’ll look at how the therapist’s courage, humility, forgiveness, gratitude, and lovingness helps give birth in the patient a new soul of greater “bulk and substance.”
What therapy can do, however—particularly because, at its best, it is the incarnation of relationship—is help the patient recollect what has been forgotten and what was once hoped for. It can lead to a greater acceptance of our incompleteness, and help cultivate reverence for our newly appropriated ontological dignity. We discover that patients do become poets in their own right—able to speak in new symbolic forms with their own unique voices. And through this poetic movement, fading hope receives new life and beauty is brought back into the world.
We’ll conclude the Seminar with a reflection on the imperfection of ‘wholeness’ and the limitations of freedom. And we’ll look at how the therapist’s courage, humility, forgiveness, gratitude, and lovingness helps give birth in the patient a new soul of greater “bulk and substance.”
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