Clay Field Therapy® is a powerful haptic medium that can evoke, structure, and transform the inner world and an individual's biography. It is important that every participant aiming to work with this modality experiences its power and impact first. It is a unique approach that is predominantly non-verbal and kinaesthetic.

Workshop:

• Individual art therapy sessions at the Clay Field

Seminar:

• Understanding the structure and dynamics of the field
• Understanding the haptic language of the hands

We will learn to identify the bottom-up Gestalt Formation Process through:

• How fundamental experiencing progresses from diffuse motor impulses to sensory awareness and from there to fulfillment and cognitive integration.
• The structure of the Primary Gestalt and the Optimal Gestalt
• Afference and re-afference
• The Bottom-up Approach

The second module will focus more on the understanding of the psychodynamic processes as they occur in the Clay Field and how these processes can be supported in therapeutic sessions.

• Co-counselling sessions with the Clay Field
• Trauma Healing at the Clay Field
• Pendulation
• Body-focus
• Sensory Interventions
• Motor Interventions
• Haptic perception
• Pathological indicators and their expression in the Clay Field.

To “read” the hands of a client the therapist needs to understand certain movements and how they relate to developmental stages; stages that express a client’s age-specific developmental needs and a process-specific pattern of action. The sensorimotor base is essential for children’s early development and is formative in all adults’ processes.

• The topography of the hands
• Proprioception
• Kinaesthetic messages of the hands
• The Skin Sense
• Sense of Balance
• Depth Sensibility
• Haptic Perception
• Haptic object relations
• The therapeutic dialogue with the hands
• Haptic diagnosis

Prof. Heinz Deuser has mapped out nine stages, “situations” as he has called them, that characterize the Work at the Clay Field. These are partially based on D. W. Winnicot's theories on a child's developmental stages, but also relate to the human need to create mythical correspondences.

A particular focus will be given to these Nine Situations and how these situations are being acquired in Clay Field Therapy®:

1. Reliability, being reliable to me: Perceiving myself in my body.
2. Reliability, relying on something other than me: Shifting focus onto an opposite.
3. Finding orientation: Finding reliability in what is present.
4. Acquisition of Object Constancy: Acquiring emotional constancy through creative destruction
5. Acquisition of Subject Constancy: Establish my own position in a foreign place.
6. Centering, Grounding: Acquisition of one’s own ground.
7.  Shadow integration: Acquisition of one's individuality; self-correspondence, object accordance.
8. Destruction as self-realization: Taking on the consequences of one’s own realization.
9. Accepting one’s humanity: Integration with one's own Other.

• be able to define at least three ways how trauma affects haptic perception
• be able to define at least three ways how trauma affects client’s embodiment
• be able to define Clay Field Therapy® as a haptic, trauma-informed, bottom-up approach
• be able to define the core methodological concepts of haptic perception underpinning Clay Field Therapy®
• be able to identify the developmental stages of Skin Sense, Balance and Depth Sensibility as the universal sensorimotor foundation in all human beings
• be able to link haptic perception to the implicit and explicit memory systems in the brain
• be able to define and apply the core concepts of Polyvagal Theory and Somatic Experiencing to ensure a trauma-informed practice
• be able to identify the Nine Situations at the Clay Field as a structure that informs the cognitive integration of the process
• be able to identify the Haptic Gestalt Formation process as a diagnostic structure to transform traumatic experiences and apply this knowledge to counselling and psychotherapeutic goals.