The conversation between Ed and Sylvie will explore ways touch can be an effective and transformative part of the therapeutic encounter with embodied trauma. For traumas such as physical abuse, sexual abuse, and childhood abandonment, direct physical engagement provides opportunities for deeper levels of healing. Sylvie will discuss the author’s model and rationale for the inclusion of clinical touch in conjunction with theories of somatic processes, trauma theory, transactional analysis and psychoanalysis. The conversation will also address the importance of detailed processing of clinical touch with the patient/client, in order to keep the work informed and disciplined.
Given that informed and disciplined touch can move the patient more directly into their embodied experience of trauma memories, Ed and Sylvie will discuss how this can facilitate an integrative function where such experiences can be recognized, processed, and physically felt. In the conversation, they will focus on how the patient/client can discover a return of a capacity of their body to do something(s) in the here and now, with a trusted other and how traumatic embodied experiences from the past can be transformed and integrated. They will discuss case vignettes which are in the book to highlight how a new experiences of touch with a trusted therapist also provides opportunities for the patient to experience and analyze safe touch in fundamentally new ways. Their conversation will also bring together a theoretical understanding of such clinical application.
Learning Objective Participants Can Expect From This Event
- Understand the five category continuum of touch, including benefits and difficulties in working within each category.
- Expand ways of addressing body processes, regardless if touch is every used, that reduce the mind/body split.
- Through case material, see how touch can be added to the work with some individuals, and avoided with others.
Who is This Workshop Appropriate For?
- Psychotherapists, Counsellors, Educators
How May This Workshop Impact Your Practice?
- The workshop will enhance their intuitive capacity to link mind and body when working with trauma patients, even in nontouch treatment.
Course Content
Presenter
Edward T. Novak is a certified psychoanalyst in private practice in the United States, having trained in contemporary relational psychoanalysis at The National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City. He has over 30 years of clinical experience working with groups, couples, and individuals. He has a special interest in working with trauma and his treatment approach integrates attachment research, body psychotherapy, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and transactional analysis.
He has presented at international conferences and published numerous peer reviewed articles on many topics including trauma. Several of these articles have been published in multiple languages. His 2023 book on trauma was published by Routledge and is titled, Physical Touch in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: Transforming Trauma through Embodied Practice. He is the book review editor for the Transactional Analysis Journal and a member of the editorial board.
Sylvie Monin is a Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst in the counseling field and has a Swiss Federal Diploma of Counselor in the psychosocial field. She is based in Geneva, Switzerland, where she runs a private practice working with individuals and groups. Sylvie has authored articles on TA counseling, was the guest editor of the January 2013 Transactional Analysis Journal issue dedicated to counseling, and has been a coeditor of the TAJ for 9 years. Her previous work as an executive assistant led to work in the United States and Switzerland, where she gained extensive experience in the field of business, international organizations, multinationals, and Swiss private firms. She draws from this experience in her work as a counselor and in her involvement in the TA associations, facilitating closer cooperation and building bridges. She has been intent on gaining recognition for counseling as a professional field. Sylvie received the 2019 ITAA Service Award and is passionate about TA and values its internationality.
