Where It Was, Others Shall Be: Desire, Otherness, and the Alien inside.

Freud’s famous motto ‘Where it was, I shall be’ arguably set off the entire therapy enterprise on the wrong foot. It established the primacy of the self over and above the profound influences of concrete others in our life, whether alive or dead. It also led us to believe that the unknown can be known, that the enigma of psychic life can be translated, and that what is other can be reduced to the same.

Despite their protestations, all therapeutic approaches followed suit, via appeals to ‘evidence-based’ claims, the wild-goose chase for ‘authenticity’, or the fashionable delusions of integration and regulation.

We will explore whether a different trajectory is possible, a reorientation from the self to affect and experiencing, a move from self-centering to decentering and from self-boundedness to infinity and otherness.

Drawing from post-structuralism and post-phenomenology, we will use pair/group work, movement, creative writing, dreamwork and meditation.

Manu Bazzano is a psychotherapist, supervisor, visiting lecturer at Roehampton University. He co-facilitates menswork and is an internationally recognized lecturer, author and facilitator.He has a background in philosophy and rock music and is the author and editor of several books, including

• Zen Poems(MQP, 2002);
• Haiku for Lovers(MQP, 2003);
• Buddha is Dead: Nietzsche and the Dawn of European Zen(Sussex, 2006);
• Spectre of the Stranger: towards a Phenomenology of Hospitality (Sussex, 2012);
• The Speed of Angels (John Hunt, 2013);
• After Mindfulness: New Perspectives on Psychology and Meditation (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014);
• Therapy and the Counter-tradition (Routledge, 2016);
• Zen and Therapy: Heretical Perspectives (Routledge, 2017);
• Re-visioning Person-centred Therapy (Routledge, 2018);
• Nietzsche and Psychotherapy(Routledge, 2019),
• and the forthcoming Re-visioning Existential Therapy: Counter-traditional Perspectives

He is former editor of Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies and associate editor for Self & Society: Journal of Humanistic Psychology. He studied Eastern contemplative practices since 1980 and in 2004 was ordained in the Soto and Rinzai traditions of Zen Buddhism.

www.manubazzano.com.