The Annual Memorial Melissa Harte Lecture was established to honour the work of Dr Melissa Harte and pay tribute to her contribution to the world of Person Centred Experiential and Emotion Focused Therapy.
Carl Jung once observed, “We don’t so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems.”
The world we must function in today is unlike any before it. Shattered sustaining myths, “always-on” hyper-connectivity, artificial intelligence, alienation, injustice, information glut, climate change, natural disasters on unthinkable scales, polarization, political and interpersonal violence, cascading paradigm shifts in many areas of human endeavor including science and education and the breakdown in global accords are pushing planet earth and its human inhabitants inexorably closer to incoherence and chaos. At the same time more of us are living longer, have greater democratic freedoms, and technology, creativity, innovation, grass roots community organization and social entrepreneurship is blossoming around the globe. We are in an interregnum where old orders are dying but the new ones are not yet formed. We are dangerously unprepared. If we are to survive in this emerging culture we will need new capacities or literacies with which to address our collective challenges. Rogers’ radical ideas, influenced as they were by both Western instrumentalism, a Chinese sense of implicate potential and efficacy and laterly emergent systems science, together with advances stemming from encounters with diverse e1xperiential universes if available at scale might offer basis of a praxis for facilitating the emergence of a new conceptual and action frameworks.
Course Content
Presenter
(1959 – 2021)
Counselling and Clinical Psychologist, trainer, supervisor and therapist, Melissa’s vibrancy and commitment made her a treasured and esteemed member of the Person-Centred Experiential and Emotion Focused Therapeutic international community. Melissa developed the Expanded Focusing model for working with traumatic pain, outlined in her book Processing Emotional Pain Using Emotion Focused Therapy (2019). She founded the Australian Institute of Emotion Focused Therapy in Melbourne where her influence lives on. We honour Melissa as a much loved colleague, mentor and friend.
Dr. Maureen O’Hara is Professor in the Psychology Department at National University, La Jolla, CA and President Emerita of Saybrook Graduate School, San Francisco. Working with American psychologist Dr. Carl R. Rogers, she helped develop the Person-Centered Approach to psychotherapy and large group process. More recently her writings have examined the relationship between the “big picture” changes underway and internal psychological adaptation. Combining her background as psychotherapist, organizational consultant and futurist, she is a frequent keynote speaker nationally and internationally on the evolution of new ways of being in a changing world. As a specialist in higher education assessment and governance she has served on evaluation teams for the accreditation agencies WASC and DETC.
Maureen served as Board Memeber of APA Division 32, the Society for Humanistic Psychology. She is a Distinguished Clinical Member of the California Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, Fellow of the American Psychological Association, President of the Meridian Institute on Governance, Leadership Learning and the Future, member of the International Futures Forum in St. Andrews, Scotland and President of IFF – U.S..
