CHARACTER-ANALYTIC PSYCHOTHERAPY
Know thyself…
Most of the time, the working, social and daily conditions we live in do not promote our personal, couple or family well-being.
Likewise, we might have experienced violence, fear or impotence over the course of our life, which left an imprint on our body and unavoidably continue to shape our present. These experiences might be the cause of our present illnesses and emotional imbalances, especially if we are unaware of the seemingly irrational mechanisms behind them.
Character-Analytic Psychotherapy allows us to recover our personal and couple’s well-being, restores our natural equilibrium, since it helps us to determine the nature of the conflict and its causes, and increases both the awareness of our inner nature and surrounding reality. This way, we improve our ability to manage our capabilities and resources while learning strategies to overcome our personal limits and deal with social requirements.
A current model of psychotherapy…
Our psychotherapy is a current model of clinical intervention that follows the tradition initiated by Sigmund Freud more than a century ago, together with the contributions Wilhelm Reich did some decades later. Our model embraces Reich’s proposal of Character-Analytic Vegetotherapy incorporating the character, neuromuscular and neurovegetative tools he crafted, but where only systematized until the 1970’s by Federico Navarro for a more effective clinical practice.
Recently, our psychotherapy model has been enriched with cutting-edge neuroscience research, other psychotherapy models and our clinical findings giving birth to a proposal I have named "Character-Analytic Psychotherapy".
From my personal experience with psychotherapy…
From the time I met Federico Navarro in 1980 until his death in 2002 I had a very close relationship to him. He was my tutor and teacher in the first place, but he was also my maintenance vegetotherapist, supervisor, colleague and friend.
Born in Naples in 1924, Navarro was a neuro-psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who, in the late 1960’s, studied with Ola Raknes for becoming an orgone therapist. Ola Raknes was a Norwegian psychoanalyst and intimate collaborator of Wilhem Reich. With Raknes supervision, Navarro organized, together with other colleagues, the first training school that taught his clinical model: the Scuola Europea di Orgonoterapia (S.E.O.R), where I would be trained as the first Spanish member.
Following the psychoanalytic tradition, personal analysis (in this case, vegetotherapy) was the most important "subject" to attend and for me it was a life-changing experience. Roberto Sassone and Piero Borrelli, my therapists, accompanied me masterfully throughout my personal process, which I once described during a session as "living my own inferno in the Reichian divan"....
... It was a time of depression, of doubt, strangeness, confusion, anger, sadness... but also of joy and of feeling Life inside and outside of me.
It was only through this inner journey that I understood so many of the writings I had so far read. Moreover, through my own suffering I found a renew empathy for human suffering growing inside me and I was able to discover the living potential we human beings have, but nonetheless bury deep down in our hearts because of our fierce perception.
I realized the importance of becoming aware of the defensive mechanisms that are articulated in our daily behavior and consequently in the psychic and muscular groundings of our character. These all reflect the repressive, lacking and short-sighted mechanisms of our current social system, which is perpetuated through the dynamics that rule our family, school, job or any human interaction.
All these findings confirmed to me the bio-psychosocial understanding that Wilhem Reich’s work so perceptively embodies. Furthermore, I found myself identified with this vision in such a vibrant way, that I made it my profession and way of life. Even today, after decades of hard work, I keep corroborating Reich’s vision in my everyday practice, with my patients and when supervising colleague’s patients, when we face doubts, errors and the unknown, which stimulates us to investigate further and deepen the reach of Character-Analytic Psychotherapy.
Artículo “Psicoterapias que nos aportan libertad y autonomía”
Artículo “La psicoterapia caracteroanalítica”. Del libro Profundizando en el Diván Reichiano.
LA PSICOTERAPIA CARACTEROANALÍTICA
Conferencia de 34 minutos, a cargo de Xavier Serrano y Javier Torro, en el colegio de psicólogos de la comunidad valenciana, dentro de las jornadas sobre “Psicoterapias actuales”. Julio 2015. Presentado por el Decano del colegio oficial de psicólogos Francisco Santolaya.