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Cutting Edges: Analytical Psychology
A Series of Talks Initiated by Dr. Gottfried M. Heuer
Tuesday
25th January 2011 – 8.30pm at AJA
Well of Eternal Youth,
Iona, Scotland. – Photograph by Gottfried M. Heuer,
Birgit Heuer
To Be or Not To Be: On Body, Being and
Spirituality in Analysis
My dual training as both a body-psychotherapist and a Jungian
analyst has enabled a specific approach to the body.
In the past thirty years, analysis has engaged with the body
chiefly in two ways: As somatic expression of psychic reality
(symbolic) and as dance/movement (creative/expressive).
In this presentation, I am suggesting a third possibility:
body is about the experience of embodied being. I shall
explore the manifold aspects of being from tracing it via
developmental theory to providing space for being experience.
In addition, the capacity to be links psyche, soma and spirit
and is a vital ingredient in spirituality: Where the numinous
becomes reality it is essentially experienced through being.
To illustrate and deepen this aspect, I shall outline my doctoral
research on the theme of sanatology – a clinical theory of hope –
which aims to provide a paradigmatic home for both being and
spiritual experience.
Brief Biography
Birgit Heuer is a Jungian
Analyst of the BAP. Having previously trained in body-oriented
psychotherapy, she has been in private practice for the past thirty
years. She has served on the BAP training committee and worked
as clinical supervisor at Kingston University. She has lectured and
published on the body and analysis as well as on clinical
paradigm and is currently writing a doctoral thesis on sanatology.