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Judy Moore
Country: UK Organization: University of East Anglia Short presentation Title: Discovering ‘a new universe’ for ourselves: beyond voices that affirm or deny ‘spirituality’ in the Person-Centred Approach Carl Rogers said towards the end of his life that he had ‘underestimated the importance of [a] mystical, spiritual dimension’ to human existence. Since his death in 1987 an unstated battle has unfolded in the Person-Centred world where some have sought powerfully to affirm and others powerfully to deny the existence and relevance of a dimension that Rogers chose to describe in his later writings as ‘the spiritual’. We may have learnt much from these voices, but what might we also have lost by giving too much attention either to powerful assertions of ‘the spiritual’ or to equally powerful assertions of concepts and theories that promote a more secular understanding? Since Rogers’ death, ‘spirituality’ has been re-interpreted and re-presented in the Person-Centred world by key individuals, but there has also been a re-framing of phenomena (for example, ‘presence’ and ‘relational depth’) originally articulated quite tentatively by Carl Rogers at a time when his own appreciation of an ineffable dimension to human and non-human life was unfolding. Where do we place ourselves within this particular polyphony/cacophony? Is it possible that, since the death of Carl Rogers, we have created false gods whose authoritative voices have diverted us along paths of their interpretation, invention or choosing, hence contracting our own potential for engaging directly with ‘a new universe, where all the familiar concepts have disappeared [and] nothing remains but vibrating energy’ (Rogers, 1980: 347). Short CV Judy Moore was trained in the person-centred approach in the late 1980s before becoming a trainer on the Diploma in person-centred counselling and psychotherapy at the University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich, UK. She later became Director of the UEA Counselling Service and Director of the University’s Centre for Counselling Studies. More recently, she has been engaged in an evolving project to investigate anomalies within the person-centred approach by studying the original client-centred theory, particularly in the light of the work of Eugene Gendlin. She has contributed to and co-edited (with Nikolaos Kypriotakis) two volumes of Senses of Focusing (Eurasia Publications, 2021). Her most recent contribution to the literature is a chapter on ‘Spirituality and Transcendence’ in the 3rd edition of the Handbook of Person-Centred Therapy (ed. Susan Stephen et al., Palgrave Macmillan, in press). She lives and works in private practice in Norwich, UK.
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Nikolaos Kypriotakis Country: Greece Organization: Hellenic Focusing Center Short presentation Title: Beautiful affordances of things around me: polyphony and the bodily subject Is the self mainly articulated by language and social relations, constructed in an externalist discursive way? Or, rather, is subjectivity mainly a natural, bodily one, a kind of continuity of organic life where a person can be a person even if they are stripped of explicit memories and virtual, semantic narrations? IMAGINE US demented, severely impaired, naked, deprived of language, deprived of consciousness or even speech and speech acts, heavily diminished and lost in a world full of identities and verbal interactions, conflicting or mutually-excluding voices and any kind of explicit knowledge—us—incapable of self-distancing, reflection and explicit recollection—us—bodily self-familiar and unreflective—us—habits, inhabitants, habitus and lived bodies—us—almost at the limits of being considered persons. DO WE bring explicit knowledge to its limits, together with verbalities, concepts, voices and polyphonies? US, while being still able to try to articulate in words what is the root, or the tree, where this strange fruit grows (character, personality, autobiography…), COULD WE be the (otherwise explicitly empty—and, thus, spiritual and mystical) centre of the Babylon of the polyphony of present time, but stripped of highly-ordered capabilities, just as embodied persons and selves? Before we sink into oblivion and forget all the incorporated histories, before we sink into this vast endless field of immediate experience and all-encompassing pre-objective feeling, CAN WE give voice to this anti-voice, this meta-voice, this strange, abstract effort of (impossible) meta-language of languages, meanings and events? How can we make it simple, practical or unreflectively popular not only for everyday life but also for psychotherapies and sciences? Or is this effort doomed to fail par excellence? How strange is it that we need explicitly to protect and define the implicit character of a person as a natural and embodied subject? Short CV Nikolaos Kypriotakis has studied Physics (where he reads Physics as a kind of philosophy) and has been trained in Person-Centred & Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy, Person-Centred Supervision and Children Focusing. He works as a Focusing Trainer for the Hellenic Focusing Center (HFC) and he is Coordinator-in-Training for The International Focusing Institute (TIFI), New York. With Judy Moore he edited the collective work Senses of Focusing, Vol. I & II, 2021, Athens, Eurasia Publications. He is the editor-in-chief of the magazine Εποχή-Epoché (Phenomenological Psychotherapies), Athens, Eurasia Publications. For two years he was the General Secretary of the Hellenic Association for the Person-Centered & Experiential Approach (HAPCEA). |