We have had the coldest summer this year, but I don’t care. I’m from the East Coast. It feels like home. Our childhood is like that, resistant to all change, opinionated, set in steel in a configuration that unconsciously dominates us.
Freud brought such news to a reluctant generation in Vienna by declaring that our life was unconsciously determined by sexually repressed wishes and experiences. Reich showed us that our bodies hold a childhood character form as well. And Jung saw that the myths we live by, the unattended inner imagery, block our individuation. So we are trapped, not so much by culture but the early disasters and beliefs that drive our relationships, our health and our careers.
There is something tribal that causes us to huddle together and protect one truth against the others. In the community of ASTTI, we study dreams with Jung as well as Freud, the Body with Reich and Lowen, and the Self with Winnicott and Kohut. We study Bion, Klein and others. Our views of human nature are shifting. We study neuroscience and evolutionary biology. We are interested in energy and spiritual experience. We prefer ambiguity over hasty certainties.
We work in dyads in pragmatic experiential somatic discourse. We believe that there are at least seven languages and the verbal is the last—that for thousands of years we communicated without verbal language. We want to tune into these other languages that pass unnoticed but are determining our lives. And finally, we are after professional competence as clinicians and the confidence that comes from individual attention, colleagues and a comprehensive training. There is still time to join us, a few places left.
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