MASTERCLASS – An Anthroposophical Perspective on Mental Health Issues
with Dr Martha Koelman
Was conducted online June – 22 to 25, 2023, and recorded.
NOW AVAILABLE AS A COMPREHENSIVE LEARNING PACK from our Web Shop.
This Masterclass deepens the introduction presented by Dr Koelman during the Online Biography Gathering on Sunday 18 June 2023.
The Learning Pack includes these Lectures with Visuals from the Biography Gathering 2023, as well as all the Lectures and Visuals from the Master Class that followed.
This Masterclass is beneficial for practitioners with a special interest in mental health challenges and crises, including: health & allied health practitioners, counsellors, teachers, life coaches, biography consultants.
Introducing Martha Koelman
The human being as a unity of body, soul and spirit is so intuitively perceptible and yet, as I was made to realize during my medical studies, initially at the Charité Berlin, so little has been incorporated into conventional medicine. Although Uexküll paved the way for the joint conception of both psyche and soma with the introduction of psychosomatic medicine, the two still fall completely apart in everyday medical practice. The body-soul “problem” still seems to me to be the central theme of medicine and especially of psychiatry. I found my deep conviction reflected and described in Steiner’s approaches in a way that seems to me unique in its diversity of perspectives and clarity. Anthroposophical medicine understands itself as a complementary medical direction, which on the one side uses the current scientific standard and at the same time draws on deep knowledge of the ancient Vedas, Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Four Elements teachings. The third element, the spirit of the human being, is revealed in their biography! In my work as a psychiatrist, biographical exploration was part of the daily patient intake, which I always felt was a great gift. I soon realised that a person’s biography can be asked merely as a string of dead, past facts, or as a living, unfolding being, which then presents itself in a completely different way in its formation. Learning and deepening this way of asking questions differently, of listening and feeling and looking differently, led me to the decision to train in biography work. I now work as a biography consultant in my own practice at the Therapeutikum Cologne, in addition to teaching at the Alanus University in Alfter and the University of Witten/Herdecke.
