REFLECTIONS ON THE MEANING OF THE ENCOUNTER IN HELPING RELATIONSHIPS – 23 September in Bergamo (Italy)

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What happens in the encounter with people who request help or assistance is not always understandable. Perhaps it is only rarely and usually after some time. The encounter, when it occurs, is an experience of disorientation, of the known and of the new at the same time. It’s first of all with ourselves and with the otherness within us that the other is confronted, in a temporality that opens up on internal and contingent experiences that the actors in play reinvent through words, gestures, and their sensoriality. In a space of bodies and affects that attempts to constantly redefine itself.

In this framework, the therapist, the mediator, the counselor work with theory, with the experience of practice, but above all with who they are and who they have been, with their «historicity». The bond that such experiences inaugurate is complex, difficult, but it’s also a very powerful instrument of help, a pathway to work and transformation. The availability to the other passes also through the renunciation to one’s own position of «knowledge», to the power of the professional asymmetry that imposes itself and characterizes the experience of the encounter’s subjects. An encounter that, in the final instance, can only be called such if it leaves us transformed with its passage.

This and more will be discussed during the seminar, also by working on one’s own experiences.

The seminar will be held on Saturday 23 September 2023, at 09:30 – 17:30, in Bergamo (venue to be determined).

The seminar will be conducted in Italian.

Teacher : Emanuele Ferrigno – psychologist, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, lives in Brussels where he works as a clinical psychologist at Imago, a psycho-therapeutic day center for young adults (community psychiatry), and has a private clinical practice. He teaches Clinical Criminology at the University of Saint-Louis, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the Free University of Brussels and Psycho-trauma Clinics at the Catholic University of Louvain.
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