By Steven Knoblauch (USA) and Alejandro Ávila Espada (Spain), Co-chairs of the IARPP Colloquium Series
This past May, IARPP hosted its 26th online colloquium entitled The Body As Experience, The Body As Experiencer: A Multi-Perspectival Conversation. The colloquium was attended through electronic viewing and/or posting by 1,496 IARPP members. Asaf Rolef Ben-Shahar (Israel), Bill Cornell (USA), Augusto Escribens (Peru), Katie Gentile (USA), Gianni Nebbiosi (Italy), André Sassenfeld (Chile), Sue Shapiro (USA), Jon Sletvold (Norway), and Sally Swartz (South Africa), served as panelists discussing and interacting with the author, Steven Knoblauch (USA), concerning the issues raised by his paper, Contextualizing Attunement Within The Polyrhythmic Weave: The Psychoanalytic Samba. We are grateful to Dan Shaw (USA), a former colloquium moderator who stepped in so skillfully to moderate this colloquium so Knoblauch could serve in the role of paper author. We are also grateful to Elisa Zazzera for her effective behind-the-scenes management of the technical requirements for mounting such a collective experience electronically.
The paper offered a unique perspective for the way cross-modal rhythms in the analytic interaction carry emotional significance for the patient’s—but also the analyst’s—suffering, strain toward growth, and particularly her/his experience of relational patterning in treatment. Discussion of the paper over the two week period of the colloquium generated 322 posts coming from 67 different participants. These posters came from 16 different countries with 32 from the United States; eight from the United Kingdom; six from Israel; four from Australia; two each from Germany, New Zealand, Peru, and South Africa; and one each coming from Canada, Chile, France, Mexico, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey.
All 26 IARPP colloquia that have taken place are archived on the IARPP website. We continue to be pleased with the valuable exchanges that our colloquia generate, contributing to the theoretical and clinical growth of our field. However, we also feel tasked to continue to explore ways to make our colloquia more accessible to members for whom English is not a first language.
Plans are coming together for our 27th colloquium, scheduled for November 2015. Inspired by the many good plenaries and panel sessions at the Toronto conference, we in particular noted the discussions about the place of sexuality in a relational theory without a classical drive model. We also considered that we have not featured a female author in any of our last three colloquia. After deliberations in our committee we have chosen Galit Atlas (USA) as our next author for our 27th colloquium. We will discuss her paper, Touch Me, Know Me, a wonderful paper offering a relational sensibility for sexuality with a very fascinating clinical narrative. Her paper will first be discussed by a panel and then the larger community for our fall colloquium. Look for further information about the fall colloquium in the months ahead.
Steven Knoblauch, PhD
Email Steben Knoblauch
website: http://stevenknoblauchphd.com
Alejandro Ávila Espada, PhD
Email Alejandro Ávila Espada
http://www.psicoterapiarelacional.es
