The New England Center for Existential Therapy

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The New England Center for Existential Therapy

is pleased to announce our 2020-2021 series

Embodied Experience: How We Practice Existential Therapy

Out of an abundance of caution, to prevent and contain the spread of COVID-19, our events will move to a virtual platform for our 2020-21 Series. More updates will be posted here and on our mailing list. 


How Our Truths Emerge: An Embodied Dialogue
Ming Chang, LMHC and Wendy Sharak, LMHC, ATR
Respondents: Marcos Rosenbaum, LICSW and Glen Freiband, LMHC
Sunday, September 20, 2020, Noon to 3:30 PM

Gendlin's Ongoing Challenge to Conflict Models: Challenge as a Carrying Forward
Bob Fox, LICSW
Respondents: Richard Freid, LMHC and Emma Worth, LICSW
Sunday, December 6, 2020, Noon to 3:30 PM

Language and Body as Inseparable Power
Robin Chalfin, LICSW
Respondents: Jason Ri, LMHC and Eric Severson, PhD
Sunday, March 7, 2021, Noon to 3:30 PM
(Zoom link will be posted closer to the event date.
To purchase CEUs, you can click HERE.)

Political (Dis)embodiment: The Joining Effects of Technology and Liberalism 
David Goodman, PhD 
Respondents: Heather Macdonald, PsyD and Rhiannon Roberts, LMHC
Sunday, April 25, 2021, Noon to 3:30 PM

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The four-part NECET training series for 2020-21 is entitled Embodied Experience: How we practice existential therapy. Five experienced clinicians will be showing how they think about the practice of existentially informed psychotherapy. While each of these presentations addresses a different dimension of the work and is unique to itself, there are common themes that unite all four talks. One of these themes is emphasizing the unity of body and language. Another is appreciating the existential and the intersubjective points of view. Presenters will often be referring to the ideas of the philosophical psychologist Eugene Gendlin who was pivotal in developing these interrelated positions. 

Attendees are encouraged to obtain and read Casey, Edward and Schoeller, Donata (eds) (2018). Saying What We Mean: Implicit Precision and the Responsive Order:  Selected Works by Eugene T. Gendlin. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois.  

Our first presentation will be entitled How Our Truths Emerge: An Embodied Dialogue. Ming Chang and Wendy Sharak were to have presented this in the Spring of 2020 as the final talk of our series on truth. In the crisis response of the pandemic, their talk was postponed to the Fall and has now been refashioned to be both a talk about truth and a talk about embodied dialogue. This talk will highlight powerful connections between culture, body, art, and language.

In the second presentation, Bob Fox will present Gendlin's Ongoing Challenge to Conflict Models: Challenge as a Carrying-Forward. Gendlin's critique of psychoanalytic dialectics will be explored, and the locus of the creative tension of authentic experience and psychotherapy will be understood through the hermeneutics of his process model. Bob will be referring to, in Saying What We Mean..., sections of Chapter 5 (Words Can Say How They Work), Chapter 11 (Befindlichkeit: Heidegger and the Philosophy of Psychology) and Chapter 14 (The Responsive Order: A New Empiricism). 

For our third event, Robin Chalfin will present Language and Body as Inseparable Power. Gendlin's certainty in the direct "felt sense" of the body will be considered in conjunction with the circumscribing power of cultural norms. In this tension, the possibilities for self-determination will be explored in the psychotherapeutic process.

And for our final talk of the series, we are pleased to have David Goodman present Political (Dis)embodiment: The Joining Effects of Technology and Liberalism. The conjunction of rapid technological dependence and a liberal political state risks configuring a self that rivets back to itself and is attracted to counterfeit versions of connection, both individually and politically. This is, in part, achieved through a type of disembodied subject-- technologically mediated and ideologically abstracted. Drawing from the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Wilfred Bion, Lynne Layton, and Eugene Gendlin, the ethical phenomenological and political concerns for such a subject are explored, with consideration of their manifestation in the clinical context.

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Attendance at NECET meetings is free to all. 
3 CEUs (LMHC/LICSW) available for $20.
Events will be held online on Zoom until further notice.  
   
Please consider becoming a NECET member!  Your membership helps support NECET's ongoing work.  Professionals $30/year; students/retirees $15/year.  For more information on membership, NECET's mission & steering committee, visit www.necet.net.

NECET upholds values of inclusion and diversity; please let us know how to best support accessibility needs you might have. Email Sharon Harrington-Hope prior to a NECET meeting to request specific accommodations. She may be reached at sharrington57@gmail.com