Paper short abstract:

Here I discuss how the biocultural becoming of the person, as a process that exchanges and reinvents multiple elements of its entwined healthy and toxic environments, might be affected through IFS (as EMB). I do this by showing how IFS-practitioners treat autoimmune diseases psychotherapeutically.

Paper long abstract:

In my paper, I report on the use and impact of Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) to treat autoimmunity in the UK as a case study, and as part of my broader anthropological study on the development, circulation and regulation of immunostimulant therapies to treat autoimmunity.

My presentation is based on unstructured interviews conducted between December 2018 and February 2019 with IFS-practitioners who are members of the British IFS-community. Analytically, I discuss my findings in light of studies that, in recent decades, have pointed out causal relations between adverse childhood experiences, psychological wounds and autoimmunity. Inspired by somatic approaches, many health professionals tend to perceive autoimmune responses less as predisposed by genetic dysfunctions than as part of intergenerational stories that unfold cyclically. That points to the biocultural coming into being of the person as a process that embodies and reinvents multiple elements of the entwined healthy and toxic environments through and between which one moves and grows (family, education system, neighborhood etc.). One of the key premises of IFS is that every individual is made up of further sub-personalities. That supports an ongoing reconceptualization of the body-mind dichotomy as multiple selves that compound self-systems.

Apparently, stimulating therapies seem to provide means that enable their users to validate and recommit specific parts that co-constitute themselves, instead of suppressing them as conventional therapies do. Through it, IFS-practitioners seek to re-organize the internal script that ‘rules’ their own lives. Finally, I seek to understand whether and how IFS integrates the so-called ‘regenerative medicine’.