Dear Colleague:
The NY Society for Bioenergetic Analysis invites applications from qualified psychotherapists for its training program. The NY Society teaches a practice psychotherapy that synthesizes basic psychodynamic principles with a deep and complex understanding of somatopsychic structure and process. The program curriculum begins with an experiential encounter with the embodied self in which each candidate for certification as a Bioenergetic Therapist contacts their own ‘body story’. This perspective of unified understanding of psychological, emotional, and cognitive elements of personality with the somatic self forms the corediscipline which will develop over the course of development as a bioenergetic therapist.
The aim of the training program is to equip psychotherapists with the tools and experience to practice this modality in a way that enables patients to enter their own embodied experience and deepen that knowledge of themselves as far as they can and want to go with in that endeavor. The use of active techniques—breathing, sound, movement—are taught as primary technical methods along with traditional psychotherapeutic practices to broaden and deepen the available the pathways into self-awareness. The aim, as in all psychodynamic psychotherapy, is to inhabit oneself as fully as one can and wants to, to develop consciousness of oneself as an emotionally expressive person, and to enable autonomous, responsible mature functioning.
To this end the curriculum focuses, in the second half of the four-year formal workshop program, on the process aspects of psychotherapy that includes a somatopsychic focus, the use of abreactive techniques, and the embodiment of transference as a central part of the psychotherapy process. In the last year of the program the emphasis is on the person of the therapist and the challenges of being in so intense, intimate, and affecting contact with another person.
Practicing psychotherapist who are interested in depth psychotherapy and want to add a sophisticated understanding and use of somatopsychic process to their practice will find a welcome home in this program. The teaching is done in an experiential framework enabling candidates to use their own bodies as instructional tools. Combined with personal psychotherapy and clinical supervision the program provides a comprehensive and deep preparation for psychotherapeutic work.
For more information, or to begin an application process please contact Dr. Scott Baum (docsbpsych@aol.com). We look forward to hearing from those of you interested in developing a capability for psychotherapy practice with a complex and multidimensional understanding of somatic, psychic, and emotional functioning.
