Karlfried Graf Dürckheim: The Initiatory Therapy from the Experience Lived to Theorisation

The article that is proposed to you retraces some elements of Karlfried Graf Dürckheim's career, from his lived experience to a theorization that he developed as soon as he returned to Europe in 1947. It was on the basis of experience that he built the milestones of the initiatory therapy that he theorized as soon as he returned to Germany at the end of the Second World War. A professor of psychology and philosophy, he knew how to combine his academic knowledge with spirituality oriented by Rhenish mysticism. Similarly, he was inspired by the practice of Zen that he discovered during his years spent in Japan. His attention to sensoriality and his striking memories would guide his therapeutic work, his theorization and the support of the many people who came to work with him and his collaborators throughout his life. It is a journey in the footsteps of the "Sage of the Black Forest" that we are invited here, an initiatory journey as close as possible to what constituted the foundations of his thought and practice. Today, many disciples continue his work of transmission and accompany people on the way, in Rütte in Germany or in other countries in Europe, and especially one of his closest disciples, Jacques Castermane, in France in the Drôme.