Carol Swanson, LCSW, ACSW

Friday, April 12 from 1 PM – 230 PM

$10 for Non-Affiliates / $0 for EHNW Affiliates

Registration ends 24 hours prior to the event.

To be alive is to be responsive. To be alive as a human is to be responsive to the human other. You can not speak of an infant without a mothering one, or a mother without a child. The cry of the infant, the response of the mother is the origin of responsive relational aliveness. Bernhard Waldenfels, a contemporary German philosopher, who studied with Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, has further developed the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty in which intentionality, a keynote of phenomenology, is transformed into responsivity-the demand of the other on our human response-ability. This presentation will focus on how Waldenfel’s responsive phenomenology can inform and ground us in our clinical work with the demands and claims on us by our clients.
The presentation will be a combination of didactic and experiential learning. We’ll begin with an experiment focusing on an embodied experience of the workshop title: First-Responders. I’ll give an overview of the central ideas of the philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels and then an experiment to demonstrate the concepts of responsivity.

Bio:

Carol Swanson, LCSW, ACSW has been in private practice in Portland, Oregon for over forty years. She co-founded the Portland Gestalt Therapy Training Institute and has trained therapists in Europe, Australia and the US. Her current interests are studying philosophical resources for humanistic clinicians.