Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Philosophy and Therapeutic Practice

• Online
• 4th Dec—4th Jul 2026

Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of embodiment challenges the talking-therapy model: we are not minds that happen to have bodies, but bodily beings whose most fundamental engagement with the world is pre-reflective, habitual, and somatic. This workshop explores what this means for therapeutic practice, particularly in work with trauma. We will examine his concept of the body schema — the body's living orientation to the world — and how trauma reorganises this schema in ways that cognitive insight alone cannot reach. We will consider the therapy room as an intercorporeal field, in which the therapist's own embodied presence is not incidental to the work but constitutive of the conditions in which change becomes possible.