Meditation and psychotherapy The deepening of consciousness as a healing function

Abstract

The following speech deals with the relation between psychotherapy and meditation regarding psychosomatic medicine.It will be shown, how psychotherapy and meditation complement and fertilize each other without mutual replacement.Interfaces of psychotherapy and meditation will be identified within the learning of disidentification and the development of awareness.In psychotherapy disidentification and awareness are used as a method to free oneself of disorder and suffering. This inevitably leads to the development of consciousness so, that effective therapy creates the structural modification of consciousness as an outcome of effective psychotherapy.Meditation works the other way around. Its purpose is to deepen and modify consciousness.Ideally this leads to the riddance of suffering and disorder, usually to stress relaxation and improved health but also to the identification with deeper and wider spaces of consciousness, that transcend personality.Between meditation and psychotherapy there is the polarity of a disorder-based concept and the concept of salutogenesis. In between, of course, there are a lot of transitions.By now psychotherapy has integrated a lot of resource-based aspects and also salutogenesis in its everyday work, while the emergence of disorders through meditation exercise that require therapeutic intervention are not unusual.