That means we are not assuming – as most body-oriented therapists tend to do, due to the transgenerational lack of integration with the psychoanalytic tradition – that the client realistically perceives the therapist’s benign and helpful intention when making their intervention, but receives that intervention via the transference. In the language of modern relational psychoanalysis: the intervention becomes an enactment; specifically: the intervention can become the repetition and replication of a wounding or traumatic relationship, and therefore exacerbates and reinforces the client’s negative patterns, rather than bringing about therapeutic transformation.

The fundamental application of these recognitions when applied to practice involves a reflective loop in the therapist’s internal process before and when making an intervention, especially when making body-oriented interventions (something which the psychoanalyst Patrick Casement calls ‘trial identification’): how will the client’s unconscious receive the intervention I am about to make? Through the lens of which transferential object are they likely to experience me when I make that intervention?

Our internal reflections on these questions can initially be aided and informed by simply distinguishing the four different basic relational stances mentioned above: what shape would the intervention take from each of these four stances and perspectives. In somewhat oversimplifying terms, how would we make the intervention:

1. from an apparently neutral one-person psychology ‘doctor’ or ‘teacher’ position (treatment and psycho-education)
2. from a benign, reparative ‘positive transference’ position
3. from a ‘negative transference’ position, which recognises the presence of a wounding person, figure or ‘object’
4. from an authentic, dialogical position as a co-explorer

Understanding – as a first approximation – that all of these four positions can be involved, makes a profound difference to our therapeutic presence, to our awareness of unconscious processes and the fluctuations in the working alliance, and ultimately to the transformative depth and impact of the therapeutic space we provide. In each case we implicitly recognise that we are using the therapeutic relationship as a microcosm of the person’s life and way of relating, but we understand that our own focus and our own involvement is not ‘neutral’, but carries unconscious significance through the therapist’s implicit relational stance.

Format, learning environment and scope of the weekend

This will be an online Zoom weekend, organised in Greece for Greek therapists, but taking place in English with simultaneous Greek translation, so all English-speaking therapists from across the planet are invited. Michael’s work and workshops are integrative, therefore suitable and of interest for therapists from across the diverse therapeutic approaches and traditions. It will be most likely that participants will bring very different approaches and levels of experience to this workshop – we will try to do justice to this and attempt to try and turn that problem into a productive feature of our work together.

Although we will be online, communicating via computer screens, Michael’s teaching and workshops aim to be as experiential as possible within these limitations. Over the course of the weekend, Michael will invite participants to volunteer examples from their work for supervision demonstrations in the middle of the group. Some of the work will take place in small groups. Experiential work and theoretical input and discussions as well as group process and skills practice will interweave in response to the emerging needs and priorities of the group and its participants. We want to be mindful of confidentiality, and commit to a shared undertaking that nothing from the workshop will be indiscreetly shared with others, other than your very own personal-professional responses to the workshop. Based on that understanding, we are proposing to record the workshop, so the recording can be shared amongst participants for future reference.

Some of the possible learning objectives:

• recognise the therapist’s implicit relational stance as one of the key factors which shapes a therapist’s approach, alongside theory, technique and meta-psychology
• understand the characteristics and distinctions between the four basic relational orientations (as a further development of Stark’s model)
• recognise and identify your own tendencies, repertoire and habitual inclinations between these four stances
• learn principles and techniques for extending the talking therapies into bodymind awareness
• beginning to recognise your countertransference as bodymind processes
• understand the concept of ‘charge’, and how it relates to the therapist’s engagement across the full spectrum of the bodymind and relational possibilities
• practising the reflective loop of trial identification: who may be speaking to whom?
• notice the client’s avoidance and minimisation of charge, and recognise the same process within the therapist’s internal process
• recognise the fragmentation of the ‘charge’ and the therapist’s process of ‘gathering the fragments’
• reframing the ‘window of tolerance’ as a systemic concept, relating to the whole bodymind system of the therapeutic relationship
• learning to take the ‘charge’ to the edge of the window of tolerance – working at the intimate edge
• begin to understand the paradoxical simultaneous presence of the four basic relational stances
• begin to formulate principles for crafting interventions which bridge the bodymind and relational domains, and link the fragments between them