Working With The Forces of Destiny – Workshop Content

The true self is aliveness itself.

“The spontaneous gesture is evidence of true self.  It is important to stress how this core self is the unique presence of being that each of us is; the idiom of our personality.  We are singular complexities of human being.

The true self exists before object relating.  It is only a potential, however, because it depends upon maternal care and facilitation for its evolution.  No human being is only a true self.  Each inherited disposition meets up with the actual world and one of the outcomes of this exchange between personality idiom and human culture is psychic life.

The psyche is that part of us which represents…the true self’s negotiation with the actual world.  Conflict is essential to the usefulness of the psyche which depends, in part, on the healthy balance of forces between the true self and the actual world.

The idiom of a person is more a set of unique possibilities  specific to this individual and subject in its articulation to the nature of lived experience in the actual world.  

– Christopher Bollas

IN THIS WORKSHOP WE WILL:

Gain an in depth understanding, in PSEN language, of our essential, core self – how it already exists, how it can

only be a potential within us that needs certain encounters and exchanges to bring it forth in us.

Work with the dynamic process of  BECOMING ENLIVENED – from the inside out – and discern this enlivenment 

as a sustaining and nourishing process, which differs from the kinds of emotional stimulation and intensity that 

is short lived and ultimately destabilizing.

Move through various areas of human experience that are fundamental forces and sources of our most

meaningful lived experiences – creative expression, movements of aggression, erotic imagining, mutual delight,

and other forms of exchanges that express a ‘celebration’ of life.

USING OUR PRESENCE IN DEPTH FACILITATION:

We can grow an in-depth understanding that our most embodied sense of being ‘real’ – true to our own core of

being – can only be lived, it can’t really be processed.  We need the ‘people and things of this world’ – objects that

represent and hold meaning for us – to be available for use.  

Being ‘used’ by the client in this way is most essential for their felt sense of aliveness – this is very different from

being objectified or manipulated.  Without an available ‘object’ to use, the true self remains only as a potential

within us; it does not become a life force.  The true self needs certain encounters and exchanges to bring it forth in us.

There is a need for greater recognition and appreciation for being able to help another person gain access to the felt sense of their own deeper being – their aliveness and realness – through that person’s ability to freely make use of our personality, our presence, our imagination, our emotional aliveness and responsiveness – an exchange of life force in motion.

WHAT TO EXPECT AT THIS WORKSHOP

At this particular PSEN workshop, we will cultivate a strong communal, participatory presence.  We will practice embodied meditations together, think about new psychological ideas together, enter into dyadic sessions together, do embodied movements together, and perhaps even sing & dance together – all those things that create opportunities for each person’s ‘idiom’ to be lived, and for our life force to be ‘put into motion’.

We will have ample opportunities to ‘become more capable of who we already are’, by making spaces where we are more able to make use of one another as available, living, responsive human beings.

Of course, there will also be extended break and lunch times, opportunties to you deeper into yourself in word-less and more fundamental ways, with enough integration time for deep experienes to take root in your being.

The material on this page is taken from Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis & The Human Idiom, by Christopher Bollas.