“Love is the willingness to experience, through suffering, what the beloved truly is, and not to use the pain of this experience as an objection against the beloved.” Wolfgang Giegerich
Love is the topic of the Nelles Institutes’ Summer Academy 2027, which I am happy to preview for you because I am one of the teachers. Pencil it in!
Love is a universal force: the force that holds the world together at its innermost core and gives our lives meaning and abundance. Personal love is our way into love. It touches us, guides us, and seduces us. The pain that love can bring is not its enemy but its sibling.
The mythical image of Amor, the god of love, tells us something about love. Amor’s arrow strikes us in the heart, and that means nothing less than death. What has to die? All our childlike notions, all our youthful ideas and dreams of love. And with them, at the same time and above all, our ego, as the sum of our notions, expectations, and concepts. Love is the force to which the ego succumbs.
We can run away from love or fight against it, but we cannot banish it from the world, let alone from our soul. When love happens to us, our will becomes small. Only through love do we find ourselves. Only those who love live.
Psychotherapy, in the ancient sense of service to the soul, can only succeed if we follow the flow of love and respect its inherent power. Like nothing else, love can bring healing, and like nothing else, it can lead us into the deepest distress. Only those who can see both sides of love and give them a place in their own heart can accompany people through the storms that love stirs up in the soul.
In this course, we will present the different stages in which we experience love and make them tangible for the participants:
– The symbiotic unity with the mother, which still echoes in our dreams of oneness with the beloved;
– The child’s attachment love, which shows itself in our needs for safety, security, faithfulness, and eternity;
– Youthful, romantic love, which seeks to combine all of this with the urge for individual self-realization, ecstasy, and autonomy within a couple relationship;
– Adult love, which faces the collapse of these childhood dreams, lets itself be taught by reality, and accepts the beloved, and the relationship itself, as they are;
– Mature love, which is no longer directed toward particular others but finds its home in one’s own heart.
Contents:
-Stages of love
– Men, women, and love
– The loving couple
– Individuation and attachment
– Work and love (Coen Aalders)
– Attachment love, romantic love, love of being
– Love as a phenomenon in psychotherapy
– The model and constellation format of the female archetypes (Petra Pejchalová)
Methods
We work with morning lectures, the Life Integration Process (LIP), the Couple Life Integration Process (CLIP), free constellations and other constellation formats, phenomenological dialogue, exercises and conversations in small groups, and the power of silence.The Evolution of Consciousness and the Life Integration Process