Congress 2013 - Lectures
Theme Healing
Introductory Lectures on theme Healing
Alternative Psychiatry
Speaker: Kasia Weidenbach
Does a vibrant alternative psychiatry exist today?
What has remained of the collectives, communities and alternative clinics? Have they proved to be failures and been abandoned? Or have they failed to withstand societal pressure to conform and become pseudo-alternative assimilated institutions?
What would therefore be a contemporary true alternative to the functionalistic and reductionistic application of modern day psychiatry?
True Psychotherapy
Speaker: Danièle Nicolet Widmer
In contrast to typical conformist psychotherapy with its goal of helping the client conform to societal norms, True Psychotherapy has the goal of freeing the client from human conditioning and thus freeing them for love.
True, profound, truth-finding psychotherapy demands a conscious working with the taboo themes in our society. True Psychotherapy seeks to awaken a truth and reality that is not based upon the historical past. Authentic direct relating and a face-the-reality approach together create a space in which healing, growth and development can take place.
Psycholytic Therapy
Speaker: Jochen Gartz
The psychoactive mushrooms of the genera Psilocybe, Panaeolus und Inocybe are the only ‘classic’ psychedelics that occur naturally in Europe – in localised sites and in sometimes large quantities. Unintended intoxication by these fungi have occurred, as witnessed in Potsdam and Leipzig. In contrast, the well known Czech psychiatrist, Milan Hausner, targeted these mushrooms for use in therapy at a time when under international pressure, Czechoslovakia became the last country to ban psycholytic therapy using LSD.
“Milan Hausner would first search for mushrooms with the patient, and then perform therapy”
Applications of True Psychotherapy – Presentations
Incest Taboo
Speaker: Sebastian Weidenbach
Incest taboo concerns one of the few apparently globally valid taboos.
Even today, a distain of this taboo stretches through different cultures and forms of society with the consequence that those impacted are excluded from society and as result experience a threat to their existence.
True Psychotherapy advocates the working through of fundamentally all taboos, with the goal of developing an individual that is conscious of his own self, who can then contribute as the seed corn for a true human global community.
Community Building
Speaker: Marianne Principi
The realisation that true community means healing and that is necessary for our future survival may not yet be fully within the consciousness of many people.
In her presentation, Marianne Principi will illustrate the value of community building and how it can be integrated into current psychotherapy, what main factors are required and what significance this can have for the therapeutic process. The four stages in the process of community building as described by Scott Peck will serve as foundation for the presentation.
She will examine in detail the main issues that are unavoidably encountered in a true community. The presenter will describe and analyse this organic process of community building, making reference to her own contribution in the book ‘True Psychotherapy’ and to the book ‘Living Together’ by Samuel Widmer.
Tantra
Speaker: Ulrike Füss
What is Tantra?
Tantra is understood in the western world as comprising the many sexual practices and rituals of those who practice tantra in India.
However, tantra in the context of True Psychotherapy has a different meaning: Tantra enables the working through of issues related to sexuality and relationship alongside providing deep insights into the self, and its goals are self knowledge, clarity in relationships, and working through and finding the truth.
Sexuality
Speaker: Kasia Weidenbach
“Hands off” demands the present day creed of psychotherapy and what is intended is a professional conduct that should prevent abuse in therapy through prohibition of any kind of touching or relationship between therapist and client. And within this conduct, the theme of sexuality should never be approached unless at the expressed wish of the client.
Is that still therapy? Does such a regulated therapeutic relationship function in the sense of healing? How does one deal with the theme of sexuality and abuse in true psychotherapy? This presentation deals with these questions through the use of examples from therapy practice and other broader approaches.
100 Years of Psychotherapy – And the world is getting worse
Speaker: Andreas Braun
In order for any form of psychotherapy to become officially recognised, its effectiveness must first be scientifically demonstrated in controlled trials. By focusing on the treatment of clearly defined disorders, mainstream psychotherapy has become superficially more effective but not better. Indeed, completely the opposite has been achieved. Whilst illness and psychological disturbances are being diagnosed and treated, their origins remain untouched and their cultural aspects ignored. Psychotherapy has paid a high price in order to become recognised as a serious form of treatment. It has surrendered its intent to cure the patient.
Psychotherapy must insist upon cure and upon the individual becoming whole. Instead of adhering to the reductionist perspective of ‘treatment of a disorder’, it needs to make the oneness of all living things its central theme. The specific treatment of a ‘disorder’ will be illustrated using a clinical case vignette. How does therapy look when a fully alive relationship with reality becomes the focus of the work from the very outset?
Reports about experiences and transformation due to True Psychotherapy
Psychosis
Speaker: Kremena Dimitrova
After the birth of her severely disabled child, the speaker – mentally and physically overwhelmed – fell into a deep life crisis, which was also triggered by psycholysis.
In the integration work for her psycholytic self-experiment, she realized that the psychosis she experienced was a consequence of her life decisions and that psycholytic substances helped her to uncover these decisions.
Addiction
Speaker: Carla Dörrenhaus
The presentation is a summary of own past experiences and represents an example of how the body, mind and soul of an addict becomes ill and how a patient supported by treatment with True Psychotherapy and Psycholytic Therapy can once again recover their lives and their capacity to take responsibility.
Jealousy
Speaker: Kristina Schoch
Coping with jealousy is a central theme in many relationships.
Is jealousy part of love? What hides behind jealousy? Is jealousy a neurosis? What does jealousy say about us and our capacity for committed relationship?
The presenter will use a questioning stance to examine this complex emotion using her own experience and background and will furthermore explore jealousy for its value in developing self-knowledge.
Birth
Speaker: Jutta Augustin
From the start point of modern day clinical midwifery, Jutta Augustin practices with a vision of promoting and strengthening ‘True Midwifery’. Through exposure to ‘True Psychotherapy’, she has completely changed her longstanding work as a midwife. Through re-living and re-processing the experience of birth during psycholytic sessions, she has developed new awareness and new methods of working with birth anxiety. Amongst a range of other themes, she reports how she has incorporated new content into her work, how she has mastered anxiety during birth through a broader perception, and how death during pregnancy can be worked through.
Death
Speaker: Susanne Trinkler
Dying and death have no place in our worldview and yet they are the most certain events in our lives. How are we conditioned, what sort of images and fears do we have in connection to these themes? Why is death so repressed and what effects does this have on our lives? What roles do separation and community play? And what does death mean in its spiritual dimension?
Susanne Trinkler worked as a nurse in an intensive care unit, where death was a daily occurrence and where working with death completely excluded spirituality. She later worked as an independent midwife outside of the hospital environment and in this role gained a completely new experience regarding the dimension of giving birth.
Theme Inspiration
Artistic Expression
Musical Inspiration
Artists: Master Musicians
The congress will be accompanied and structured through musical inspirations that reference the key points and individual themes of the presentations. These inspirations will culminate in the concert evening ‘Viva la Vida’.
Invitation to the Unknown – Performance
Artist: Ulrich Siedenburg
Invitation to the Unknown – Tonal and Nagual.
One table of dimension 1×2 meters, high enough on which to display . . .
Light Symphony
Light.Circle.Lüsslingen
a Light.Circle.Ritual
Artists: Matthias Diesch, Ulrike Epping, Barbara Fabrowicz, Ulrich Grobusch, Matthias Hofmann, Wolfgang Rang
The congress participants and their friends form a circle and bind themselves through beams of light. Seen from a bird’s-eye perspective, the image of a multi-facetted diamond comes into being.
Materials: Black light, cotton, bamboo, pebble stones, and alpine horns.
Number of participants: unlimited
Conditions for participation: none
The New Economics
The Structural Violence of the Prevailing Monetary System
Speaker: Bernd Senf
The global financial crisis is the expression and consequence of deeper underlying causes that are anchored in the prevailing monetary system: Compound interest, money creation and speculation.
These related problems have been collectively suppressed for too long – even by mainstream economists. To overcome the debt crisis and its catastrophic consequences requires a fundamentally new re-orientation in thinking.
The Path of the Warrior
Speaker: Doris Meier
Most people believe that jealousy, envy and greed are unalterable parts of the human being in the same way as sexuality.
The presenter will discuss how these difficult feelings have a great power over individuals and are understood to be part of human nature. She will oppose this view of mankind with that of the Path of the Warrior, an approach that amongst other things and thanks to psycholytics has taught her to look at and step through her deepest feelings. Thus she gathers energy.
Mindful Process Management
Speaker: R.S.
Ever more people spend the best years of their lives in a job which they do not enjoy in order to buy ever more things, which they do not need, in order to lead a lifestyle, which they do not enjoy.
How are organisational process management, work-life-balance und self-knowledge connected?
The presentation is based on the experience and understanding gained by Dr R.S. over a period of 20 years in consultancy, coaching and training in the area of process management. He will present his vision of what Mindful Process Management means and what it requires.
Common Welfare Economy
Speaker: Ulrike Epping
Building on the vision of Christian Felber, the project “Common Welfare Economy – An Economic Model for the Future” will be presented as an intellectual and practical approach. A participative and developmentally open process in which competition and profit motive are replaced by cooperation and common welfare, in which profit and loss are measured in a Common Welfare Balance Sheet, and financial surpluses are employed for investments with social and ecological added value.
Psycholytic Therapy
Psycholytic Therapy and Meditation
Speaker: Vanja Palmers
Where are they now, the flower children and their ideals of yesterday? In which direction point the signs of the times?
The presenter will elaborate the history of psychedelics with the help of his own life story.
Psycholytic Therapy and Religion
Speaker: Volker Warmbt
The presenter has personally engaged on a path of psycholytics and shortly after commencing was confronted by the spiritual and transpersonal aspects of this work. Psycholytics is indeed a part of transpersonal psychology and psychotherapy. As expressed by the presenter: ‘These transpersonal experiences have brought me a depth and breadth of experience that I never knew beforehand, even though I was already socialised into the Christian tradition and had studied theology.’
In his lecture, the presenter will reflect upon his own transpersonal experiences in psycholytics and attempt a structuring of these experiences within a religious and intellectual context. Religious is not taken to mean belonging to a specific established religion, but simply ‘religious’ in the sense of a connection to the whole. In contradiction to the critique of the representatives of the Evangelical Central Office for Ideological Questions, the presenter sees agreement with the outcomes of scientific research in the areas of natural science and consciousness research and an accordance with the more modern developments in Christian theology and mysticism.
Mystical Experiences in Psychotherapy
Speaker: Matthias Diesch
Psychedelica have the quality under certain conditions to provoke mystical experiences. This characteristic makes them an especially valuable instrument on the individual’s path of healing.
In the presentation, the following questions will be explored:
What does mysticism actually mean and what is a mystical experience?
Are mystical experiences of value in one’s own healing process?
How can healing processes in psychotherapy – with the aid of psycholytic substances – be optimised?
Paths to Authenticity
Speaker: Friederike Meckel Fischer
Friederike Meckel Fischer gives a personal account of her journey, which led her from a life crisis to Christina and Stanislav Grof. There she completed training in “Holotropic Breathwork”. At the same time, she trained in classical psychotherapy. Stanislav Grof showed her how to work with psychedelic substances.
She then trained in psycholytic psychotherapy. From then on, she practiced a balancing act between conventional therapy and the special insights she had learned in psycholysis.
Dr. Meckel was increasingly able to let her patients benefit from her own self-experiences and explorations of her consciousness. She calls for a therapeutic paradigm shift. To find a way to combine the desire for self-exploration, self-knowledge and authentic life planning with true healing.