Dear list-members,
my name is Achim Votsmeier. I live in South Germany, nearby the Alps and
work as clinical psychologist in a psychosomatic hospital in Groenenbach
for over 12 years now. After I trained in Gestalt therapy from 1997-1981
with Gerhard Selter (Simkin, Polsters) in Münster, I continued my
training with the Gestalt Institute of Los Angeles (GTILA) since 1986
and certified in 1991. Beside my clinical work I do training workshops
at the Gestalt Institut Saarbrücken.
Special interest in my clinical work is the treatment of
borderline-patients and others having structual deficits based on
traumatic experiences. I co-founded a treatment-program for these
patients in our clinic and published several articles about it and give
supervision. At the moment I especially work with people having
addictions.
I am very interested in and also concerned with the Clinical theory of
Gestalt therapy. In Germany Gestalt therapy missed to be recognized in
the licensing process of a new psychotherapy law. Client-centered
therapy is the only experiential approach that was accepted. Gestalt
therapists have to retrain and re-certify as psychodynamic or behavioral
therapists. This may be the obliteration of our school in Germany. This
is a highly political process basicly.
However there actually is a deficit on our side, too, i.e. of
conceptualization of our theory, publication, research and presence in
academia and communication with other psychotherapeutic schools. We have
to decide either to remain somewhat esoteric and defiantly perish or to
communicate within the scientific community, do empirical research etc..
There is a lot to do in Germany (and support of international research
and activities will certainly help the German situation, too).
So I became very interested in Les Greenberg´s work. I am surprised that
so little of his work is integrated into the theory and literature of
Gestalt therapy (as far as I can see), e.g. the whole area of inner
representations and changing schematic functioning.
In a small scale I work with a study group on themes around the
clinical theory of Gestalt therapy. We developed a unitary, more
dimensional model of personality, integrating various Gestalt
therapy-theoretical concepts. Based on this unitary theory we outlined a
general concept of disorder and now apply this model on specific
disorders such as depression, anxiety disorders, borderline-disorders
and addictions and see how far we can get. We start to communicate this
model by publication and presentation on congresses, maybe also at the
AAGT-conference in 1999. We also create a Web-site that is under
construction. The URL is:
http://home.primus.baynet.de/avotsmei/home2.html
It is in German but we soon will present an English version, too.
Besides the professional stuff I live with my wife Susanne in a small
village near Groenenbach, which is a little less small village. I like
to play tennis in summer, go skiing in winter and recently discovered
the passion of dancing tango argentino. The closest to my heart area of
my life is my spiritual path. For me it is quite seperate from Gestalt
therapy and psychotherapy - I don´t like the mixing of "Gestalt therapy
and ... " and the mostly premature attempts to spiritualize Gestalt
therapy at all.
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