Thank you for visiting the web site for our workshop on
Evolutionary Psychology and Psychotherapy.
You will find detailed information on workshop’s content,
schedule, and fine accommodations below…
Evolutionary
Psychology and the Psychotherapeutic Process
A didactic and experiential workshop for therapists
lead by
Paul J. Watson, Ph.D.
John D. Wymore, LPCC
Friday April 18,
6:30 PM
to
Sunday April 20, Noon
Accommodations and meetings will be at the beautiful
Aliento Conference
Center, Santa Fe
$200.00 per person
this includes accommodations, but not meals…
We can accommodate 14 participants at Aliento. The first 8 to
enroll can have beds. If you register after that, please bring a sleeping bag
and camping-style mattress for indoor floor-sleeping; our six “campers” will
share their own bathroom separate from the bedroom occupants.
We will eat lunch and dinner at nearby restaurants, however you
can bring your own stuff for breakfast, including anything to cook. Everyone
will have access to refrigerators and stoves.
Contact: Paul Watson John
Wymore
867-1370
pwatson@unm.edu wymorejd@zianet.com
Mail fee to:
John D. Wymore
241 Camino de San Francisco
Placitas, NM 87043-9319
Fifteen CEU’s awarded by The Counselor and Therapy Board.
Sponsored by Nature and Behavior, Inc. & The Gestalt Center of
New Mexico
"I think it's time that we formulate a psychotherapy that is
founded on what we know today - not a hundred years ago. The early founders of
the craft expressed their conviction that such an endeavor should be based on
biology. But it was social science, which inauspiciously divorced itself from
the rest of science, that informed psychotherapy through the decades. Social
science brought with it certain social values, such as post modernism, and
philosophies such as existentialism and phenomenology. Meanwhile motivation
studies, brain and behavior science, consciousness studies
and evolutionary psychology were opening doors to fascinating radical
changes in the way human behavior was to be understood, and the way we
practitioners should intervene. It's time to step over the threshold. The
founders would only ask, 'What took you so long?' "
John Wymore, LPCC
Gestalt Journal International
Conference, Montreal, 2000
EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS
Evolutionary Psychology
(EP) is a fast-emerging discipline that applies to human behavior the
modern Darwinian reasoning that has proven so productive in elucidating the
adaptive significance of the morphology, physiology, and behavior of all living
things. It provides important new perspectives on the basic understanding of
human behavior. In this workshop, we shall discuss cogent viewpoints from
modern Darwinism concerning the cognitive and affective organization of the
human mind.
These
EP viewpoints…
• Challenge the
assumption that, at birth, the mind is a blank,
more or less infinitely malleable slate. Instead, EP offers the view that
the mind is made up of collections of structured purpose-designed information
processing organs. The purpose? To solve problems related to survival and
ultimately reproduction. The interactive organs of the brain providing the
individual with a species-typical range of innate, yet environmentally primed
and responsive potentials. One of our early tasks in the workshop will be
to update the so-called nature/nurture controversy (i.e., the debate about
whether human cognitive patterns and behaviors are innate and genetically
determined or learned and culturally determined) and discuss how a proper
understanding of gene - environment interactions impact the therapist's
perspective on the people who enter her office.
• Provide a
framework for profound understanding of family and group social dynamics.
Expose the fact that the complex blend of parent-child cooperation and conflict
starts in utero, and continues ever
after. Provides predictions about social and environmental factors that can
explain the varying intensity of such conflicts.
• Replace
conceptions involving internal conflicts among id-ego-superego with a struggle
for competence as a social partner and the conscious or unconscious
"choosing" of alternative social tactics and strategies. The EP
viewpoint also places the analysis of self-esteem and other self-perception and
empathy issues on firm theoretical ground.
• Provide an understanding
of the problem of inter subjectivity and why objective views of self and other
are so difficult (impossible?). Here, we brush up against profound hurdles that
must be jumped, or transformed, in any serious program of personal or spiritual
growth.
• Elucidate
sexuality and male/female relationships as strategies for reproductive
advantage, again, in which partners are enmeshed in a dynamic web of
corresponding and conflicting interests. EP frames marriage as an
environmentally responsive social and reproductive alliance.
•Replace
notions of denial with an understanding of the adaptive value and environmental
responsiveness of various defense mechanisms and the phenomenon of
self-deception.
• Suggest that
depression and certain other "pathologies" may have been adaptive in
the human evolutionary environment (i.e., the "stone age"), and
elucidate how those adaptive functions may have eroded under modern conditions.
Provide an intuitive, cogent understanding of suicidal ideation and behaviors.
•Displace
phenomenology from center stage, replacing it with theoretically grounded
motivational analysis. One compares behavior with reportage and EP provides
explanations for incongruencies that have heuristic value for therapy.
Further
effects of an evolutionary approach to psychotherapy
The Freudian
notion of "unconscious material" is replaced with the hypothesis that
there is a relentlessly present unconscious process that is solely
occupied with Darwinian fitness judgments. Dynamic, real-time choice and
prioritization of behaviors, emotions, and even consciously held material is in
support of this. All such judgments are based on complex unconscious cost /
benefit analyses grounded in solving problems and exploiting opportunities
which are ultimately related to
reproduction. We present an evolutionary view of the functional relationship
between unconscious information processing mechanisms and the contents of
consciousness.
Interpretation
is back in vogue, now informed by EP.
The Gestalt concept
of resistance to contact can be further validated by evolutionary
psychology. This enables more precise understanding of the function and origin
of resistance.
We are
encouraged by the evolutionary view to increase our emphasis on awareness,
curiosity, and self-observation. Theoretical support for the hopeful notion
that humans do indeed possess a mental organization capable of producing more
objective and "holistic" views of self-functioning are given.
Psychotherapy
informed by EP will often aim to increase social and self support
skills with the express intent of achieving improved social alliances
(i.e., reciprocal social-exchange contracts). This may involve guiding,
coaching, nudging clients away from moralistic behaviors that undercut appropriate
and productive behaviors.
It remains
true that a full life is characterized by a certain amount of willingness to
display courage and foolishness on behalf of a certain amount of risk taking -
never forgetting that individuals have to fail, which can mean death and
injury, in order for an endeavor to be seen as risky. Your contribution may be
in that fashion, in which case any recognition or congratulations for it will
not be comforting.
The
existential paradox that humans are both alone and related can be recast with a
scientific EP view of human nature.
Support will
continue for projective techniques in working with dreams, but EP will be
critical of many elaborate interpretational schemes. We can also address why
enterprises such as dream interpretation are so seductive.
The Therapeutic Relationship will continue to be seen as a strong and effective feature of psychotherapy; evolutionary psychology supports mental health professionals playing a deeper and more active role in the lives of their clients and their social groups.
Leader
Biographies
John D. Wymore
•
has a BA in Anthropology from California State University - Northridge and
an MA in Counseling from Webster University;
•
has trained in psychotherapy at Gestalt Institute of New England and
consultation skills at National Training Laboratories (NTL);
•
is an elected member of the American Academy of Psychotherapists;
• has
presented workshops in the application of evolutionary theory to:
Association for Advancement
of Gestalt Therapy
International Gestalt
Conference
National Association of
Sports Counselors
Esalen Institute (w/
Paul Watson).
New Mexico Counselor’s
Association;
•
has published articles and book reviews on the subject of evolutionary theory
and psychotherapy in :
Gestalt Review
The Gestalt Journal
Voices (The Journal of the
American Academy of Psychotherapists);
•
heads the training program of Gestalt Center of New Mexico.
See more at
JDW's web site: http://www.zianet.com/gcnm
Paul J. Watson
• earned
his Ph.D. in Behavioral Biology from Cornell University's Section of
Neurobiology and Behavior;
•
has done NSF-funded postdoctoral work in behavioral ecology and evolutionary
psychology at The University of Oxford and The University of New Mexico;
•
recently published an evolutionary perspective on unipolar depression in The
Journal of Affective Disorders (v72: 1-14), and recently submitted a paper
on the same topic for a special issue on depression under development by JAMA;
•
is a member of the Research Faculty at the University of New Mexico and a
Faculty Adjunct of The University of Montana, performing NSF-funded research in
behavioral ecology;
•
has graduate and undergraduate mentoring duties in evolutionary psychology and
behavioral ecology at the University of New Mexico and the University of
Montana's Flathead Lake Biological Station;
•
has a longstanding background studying human behavior both from a Darwinian
perspective, and from the point of view of esoteric psychologies of several
major religion traditions.
See more at
PJW's web site: http://biology.unm.edu/Biology/pwatson/public_html/pjw_cv.htm
Watson and Wymore will be offering their fourth annual 5-day
residential workshop at
The Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California, in October 2003:
Gestalt
Therapy and Evolutionary Psychology