Three-Month Certification Course in the Philosophy and Psychology of Trauma

Trauma is ordinarily treated as a medical problem requiring expert diagnosis and professional treatment. Yet the greater part of human suffering does not originate in the individual mind. It originates in the social conditions which produce that suffering in the first place, and which then proceed to declare it an illness.

This course proceeds from a different premise. It takes psychological distress to be, before anything else, a response to pathogenic communities: to institutions which generate trauma rather than relieving it, and which then present themselves as the only available remedy. Understood in this way, trauma ceases to be a purely psychological question and becomes a philosophical and a political one as well.

The programme brings contemporary continental philosophy, and in particular the work of Schopenhauer, Heidegger and Agamben, into sustained contact with twenty years of clinical experience in philosophical counselling. Participants will examine:

• how fear, the imposition of values and the demand for collective sacrifice grind down the integrity of the person
• why the professionalisation of the helping professions frequently inflicts more damage than it repairs
• how empathy, when it is grounded in an ontological insight into suffering that is held in common, makes genuine healing possible
• what organic communities are, and why they represent the only substantial alternative to institutional violence

The course offers no ready-made prescriptions. What it provides instead are the means to recognise the mechanisms of institutional trauma where they operate, and to build relations of mutual care outside professional frameworks.

It is intended for psychotherapists, philosophical counsellors, social workers, teachers and activists, and more broadly for anyone whose work brings them into contact with human suffering and who wishes to meet that suffering without bureaucratic coldness and without diagnostic labels.

Duration: three months, comprising sixty contact hours, with practical exercises and case analysis throughout.

Fee: 950 EUR.

Certification: participants who complete the course receive a certificate of the Institute for Practical Humanities.

Convenor: Prof. Aleksandar Fatić, Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade and Founder-Director of the Institute for Practical Humanities. aleksandarfatic.net

Delivery: online and in person in Belgrade.

Language of instruction: English.

Applications and enquiries: office@iph.edu.rs