Systemic Therapy, Strategic Therapy: Where do we stand today?
4-5 September 2017, Brussels, Belgium
The International Congress Systemic Therapy, Strategic Therapy: Where do we stand today? is organised by the Institute for the Study of Family and Human Systems of Brussels, sponsored by the University of Louisiana at Monroe, with the support of Elkaim Formations.
The congress will offer enlightenment to the current prosperity of strategic therapies as well as to their potential related to the evolution of the systemic approach. It will also offer delegates a number of theoretical concepts and new tools for their day-to-day practice.
Among the invited speakers is Kyriaki Polychroni, Psychologist, Systemic Family and Group Psychotherapist, and Trainer, a senior member of the Scientific Council of the Athenian Institute of Anthropos in Greece. Kyriaki Polychroni will focus on emotions in couple and family therapy. Her talk “Emotions as the ‘Heart of the Matter’ in couple and family therapy: focusing on the ‘Within’ and the ‘Between’” will take place on the second day of the Conference, September the 5th.
According to the abstract of her talk, the more traditional systemic perspective generally viewed emotion as an individual phenomenon that does not need to be primed in order to modify interactions – a view that led our field to an artificial dichotomy of the “within” emotional experience and the “between” processes of relating. “It is now evident that the power of rigid negative interaction patterns, with which we systemic therapists are familiar, does not simply entail interpersonal homeostasis or systemic coherence but, rather, is primed and maintained by powerful, attachment-related affect that reflects our basic sense of security in the world.
In this presentation, Kyriaki Polychroni will bring attention to the importance of integrating these intrapsychic realities in our work as therapists – I.e. the necessity to focus on the emotional experience of attachment, on how it is constructed and processed. By utilizing this emotional experience as feedback loops into couples’/families’ patterns of relating, the systemic therapist honors the principles of wholeness and context and is able to more fully comprehend distressed interactions and to more effectively facilitate their restructuring.
