Message from Prof. Jorge Ulnik:
Dear students: there are many reasons why a professional may be interested in psychosomatics.
We would all like to know why we fell ill and how to cure or cure our patients.
It can be that you want to be better prepared to assist, in the future, this kind of patients and think you are poorly-skilled. Training as a professional is a very important goal, especially taking into consideration that the future working field is getting considerably wider. Today all clinics, sanatoriums specialized in any pathology, and hospital services with a various medical specialties, would need to have teams of mental health providers with a psychosomatic conception assisting their patients.
If the professional comes from the side of psychology, he/she may be tired of abstract answers and techniques – philosophical and psychological – and want to approach a more “concrete” and specific knowledge. Otherwise, if the professional comes from the side of medicine, he/she may be interested in the philosophical and psychological aspects of the body-mind relationship, which has always been so enigmatic and ungraspable, and that has motivated to reflection and research over the centuries.
You may have a sick family member and want to better understand what is wrong with him or her. Maybe some students have an illness themselves and think that it has a relationship with something of their personal history.
You may have thought that diseases do not occur just by chance, or by the unfortunate encounter with a bacteria, viruses, or external agents. Who has not ever experienced that his body “betrays” him/her in special moments of life? It is enough to see how the children get sick when a little brother is born or when the parents go on a trip, to have only a small sample of the strength that the emotions have on the somatic functioning. And without reaching a disease, we also know that the heart accelerates – and sometimes the intestines too – in exams, on the eve of travelling, or in moments of anger, love or uncontrollable passion. Many of these things led Freud to assert that “the unconscious act exerts on somatic processes an intense plastic action that the conscious act never reaches.”
Therefore, each one will have his reasons and his particular curiosity, which is one of the engines that, along with the desire, lead the individual to the search of knowledge.
Our intention is our courses to be very clinical. You will have the opportunity to discuss cases, know the characteristics of the psychosomatic approach of patients with diseases that correspond to different medical specialties, and in the case of those who can do their internship in hospitals, they will participate in supervisions with expert professors of different nationalities. In the theoretical classes we will put special emphasis on applying the theory into practice, which means that the concepts learned can be thought applied to situations of daily life or problems facing clinical psychoanalysis, not only in the setting of consulting room and divan, but also in situations of inter-consultation, seriously-ill patients, interventions with the family, etc.
We have selected a bibliography that you have probably not read in your academic education. We hope you find it enjoyable and interesting.
We welcome you and hope that the EULAPS courses will be a significant step in your professional career and encourage you to continue studying and working with enthusiasm.