On September 18 and 19, The Forum at The Seattle School will partner with the Northwest Alliance for Psychoanalytic Study to host Dr. Steven Knoblauch, a clinician, teacher, and theorist, for a two-day seminar engaging his groundbreaking work at the intersection of psychotherapy and the body.
The events are part of the annual Author’s Series at The Seattle School, an opportunity for students, alumni, and the wider community to be exposed to the thought leaders and practitioners who shape the works studied in class. “It is such a privilege to hear directly from the theorist,” says Dr. Roy Barsness, Professor of Counseling Psychology. “It reminds us that theory is always connected to a person.”
The Seattle School is honored to partner with the Northwest Alliance every year in curating the Author’s Series. The Northwest Alliance is a community of professionals in the mental health, health care, and human services fields, with which our faculty, alumni, and students are actively involved.
The Author’s Series explores the intersections of theory and embodied experience, both of which are essential to effective healing work. Together, informed theory and embodied presence allow therapists to more holistically engage the entirety of another person. Few people represent this intersection more profoundly than Dr. Steven Knoblauch, a groundbreaking thought leader and theorist who calls for emotional attunement to embodied registrations—including facial display, gaze, gesture, rhythm, intensity of gesture and speech, and the meanings of imagination represented through language.
Author of The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue, Dr. Knoblauch is internationally recognized for his research, teaching, and clinical work. His work is known for how he envisions the clinical interplay with metaphors coming from music, particularly the process of jazz improvisation—a field Dr. Knoblauch is familiar with as an accomplished saxophonist and a student of Brazilian percussion traditions.
Dr. Knoblauch has taught and presented at conferences and workshops in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. In addition to maintaining a private practice in New York City, he serves as faculty and clinical consultant at The New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where he is currently a member of the program’s Executive Committee, and on the Board of Directors of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.
On Friday, September 18, Dr. Knoblauch will lead an evening lecture, Body Rhythms and the Unconscious: Toward an Expanding of Clinical Attention. Dr. Knoblauch will present his approach to expanding analytic attention to include embodied as well as imagined experience in the clinical field. This will include illustrations from his recent papers for ways to attend to, improvise with, and narrate a range of embodied registrations for both patient and analyst.
The next day, Saturday, September 19, Dr. Knoblauch will help lead an all-day workshop, Navigating the Emotional Rhythms Embodied in Clinical Treatment, that will continue to outline his theories and explore what those theories look like in practice. The workshop, 9 a.m. – 3 p.m., will include lecture time, individual and group exercises, clinical illustration and consultation, and group discussion.