The program is intended for licensed therapists holding a master’s degree in a therapeutic discipline, with at least six years of clinical experience, who maintain an ongoing embodied practice (such as meditation, yoga, dance, or another awareness-based movement discipline).

Priority will be given to applicants who have completed a foundational psychotherapy training program.

Throughout the program, the group is accompanied by one or two assistants who participate in all sessions and provide continuity, containment, and additional perspectives within the learning process.

Participants are strongly encouraged to support their studies through ongoing personal therapy, appropriate to their stage of professional development and to the depth of the material studied. In addition, the program includes separate payment for individual and group supervision,selected from a carefully curated list of supervisors who combine deep psychotherapeutic training with substantial somatic and movement-based practice. This structure is intended to ensure that the clinical integration of the work is held with both emotional rigor and embodied sensitivity.

The program spans two academic years. Classes meet bi-weekly in sessions of six and a half academic hours each.

Each year includes 22 meetings, not including performances and artist talks (2–3 per year).

The total scope of study is 150 academic hours per year.

The program takes place at Kelim — Center for Contemporary Choreography, in a spacious and welcoming studio at 2 Nefaha Street, Bat Yam.

The uniqueness of the program is articulated through three central dimensions:

Theoretical–conceptual expansion

Participants are exposed to a broad spectrum of contemporary thinking about the body, including philosophical, choreographic, somatic, and psychoanalytic perspectives. The program encourages dialogue among these approaches and offers an entry point into a rich and evolving field of embodied clinical practice in Israel and internationally.

Somatic work within a psychodynamic framework

The program integrates practices, body-based clinical thinking, and somatically focused interventions within psychodynamic psychotherapy, with the aim of bringing the actual bodies of both therapist and patient into fuller presence in the analytic encounter and the therapeutic relationship.

Artistic collaboration and choreographic inquiry

The program includes artist workshops led by prominent choreographers from Israel and abroad. It is grounded in long-term, sustained research and dialogue between these artists and the program’s founder, with the aim of examining which aspects of choreographic thinking and practice can nourish, enrich, and transform clinical work.

This collaboration includes attendance at dance performances, artist talks, and embodied studio-based inquiry, opening a reflective space that links choreographic experience with clinical thinking.

The program is grounded in eight core anchors:

1.

Phenomenological anchor — with particular emphasis on the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as articulated in his seminal work Phenomenology of Perception.

2.

Clinical anchor — the evolution of the body in psychotherapy, from Freud to contemporary relational psychoanalytic perspectives.

3.

Critical perspectives — body, language, politics, and relations of power, inspired by Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Iris Marion Young, and Jessica Benjamin, and in dialogue with contemporary feminist and critical thinkers of the body, movement, and embodiment, emphasizing the multiplicity of languages and modes of experience.

4.

Body psychotherapy — from the classical traditions of body psychotherapy (Janet and Reich) to the work of Bessel van der Kolk and contemporary neuroscience research.

5.

Physiological–experiential learning — understanding bodily processes through direct, lived experience.

6.

Embodied inquiry — diverse methods of bodily and movement-based investigation.

7.

Choreographic–artistic anchor — an exploration of how creative processes, choreographic thinking, and artistic practices may generate change, transformation, and renewed movement of experience, meaning, and relationship.

8.

Performance in supervisory processes — a bodily–experiential action in which the therapist brings the therapeutic experience into live enactment, as an act of re-created making. This process enables thinking, reflection, and transformation through the body, resonance, and collective presence. Supervision thus becomes a liminal space of living learning, in which clinical knowledge emerges through enactment rather than through verbal representation alone.