Prof. Stefano Carta Presents at the First Workshop for the 2020 Kyoto Kokoro Initiative
The first workshop for the 2020 Kyoto Kokoro Initiative was held at the Inamori Center on January 8th, 2020. The theme for this year’s Kyoto Kokoro Initiative, which will take place on October 25th 2020, is “Kokoro in Critical Situations”. Prof. Stefano Carta (Visiting Professor, Kyoto University; Associate Professor, Cagliari University, Italy) presented a paper entitled “Relationship, Consciousness and Individuation: Coming into Existence as a Limit-Experience”.
In the presentation, Prof. Carta surveyed various concepts of “limit” from a wide range of fields in order to illuminate the essential significance of limit, and the experience thereof, for a being to come into existence. He propounded the idea of “transgressive” limit-experience – thereby to propose the interpenetrating and interchangeable relationship between the patient and the analyst in psychotherapy. A case of an adolescent cancer patient was also discussed as an example to demonstrate the positive impact of trauma as an intense experience of limit.
In the discussion that followed, the issues raised included: various cases of traumatized patients and the progress of their psychotherapy; the collectivity of limit experience; the concept of death as the ultimate limit and the related cultural differences in how death is understood; and the terminological distinction between limit and boundary.
(Reported by Mori Nakatani, Program-Specific Research Fellow)
2020/05/27