Joanna Sztulman

I turned to somatic therapy after my own largely unsuccessful experience with traditional talk therapy. Cognitive-behavioral therapy offered me little since my experiences couldn't be neatly encapsulated within the phrase 'irrational thoughts'. The two and a half years of psychoanalysis did provide me with the ability to cognitively analyze my experiences twice a week and gain valuable insights. But I felt  drained after the sessions, which only intensified my negative feelings. I knew that I had to go deeper but I initially sought this depth in a purely intellectual approach. I read Sigmund Freud and was part of a Jacques Lacan reading group for two years but became more and more alienated with Lacan's texts. This sense of alienation inspired me, along with two fellow participants, to create a different collective which we came to name 'FPPF'—'Feminist Psychoanalysis / Psychoanalytic Feminisms'. Over the course of two years, we read and discussed texts weekly. Works by Luce Irigaray, Jessica Benjamin, and ultimately Bracha L. Ettinger profoundly influenced me, pointing toward a conceptual path with a different form of subject theory, interpersonal encounter, and focus on the body. Two questions became exceedingly important to me: How can we encounter each other and our environment without reducing others (or 'the other') to objects of our fantasies and needs? How can we feel, think and act from our inextricable interwovenness? This second question also turned into a research interest which I have since pursued in the context of philosophy of education at the department of Educational Science at Humboldt University in Berlin. It was in a phenomenology colloquium there that I first encountered the term 'Somatic Therapy' which inspired me to find my way to my first somatic therapist.