MLE Friends Talk with Dr Enara García

“An Enactive Approach to Psychotherapy: Process, Vulnerability, and Power”

If you would like to attend, please join MLE Friends Here!

On Thursday 11th December, we are grateful to welcome Dr Enara García, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmar, for our next MLE Friends Talk.

This talk advances an enactive approach to psychotherapeutic practice and research. Viewing psychotherapy as a distinctive form of participatory sense-making, it frames the therapeutic encounter as a second-person, dialogical process that invites both personal and social transformation. I develop three central reflections that bring critical social normativity into dialogue with the enactive cognition approach to psychotherapy. First, I challenge the presumed dichotomy between personal and social change, as well as narratives that cast psychotherapy as offering merely individual solutions to structural problems. In its place, I propose a humanistic perspective that foregrounds ongoing human development and inherent vulnerability, rather than pathologization. Second, I address the ambivalent nature of power in therapeutic contexts, recognizing it as both potentially oppressive and inherently generative. Drawing on the enactive concept of participatory sense-making, I advocate adopting a second-person stance as a means of navigating relational asymmetries. Third, inspired by Process Work, I argue for shifting from outcome- or person-centered models to a process-centered approach to facilitation—one that embraces tension, uncertainty, and change as intrinsic to therapeutic engagement. Ultimately, I present a vision of psychotherapy as a relational and transformative practice that fosters both individual growth and collective change. I conclude by discussing the ethical implications for neurodiversity, the shift from a pathology to a vulnerability paradigm, and the need for preventive and salutogenetic approaches to mental health.