Professor Todd DuBose
Moving from Body as “Thing” to Bodyhood as “Event”
An international online workshop delivered direct from Chicago over 3 half-days
Thur 3, Fri 4 and Sat 5 DEC 2026
Introduction
We live in a world profoundly invested in the body as thing. Medicine, aesthetics, fitness and other billion-dollar industries measure, diagnose, repair and reshape our bodies. Yet what happens to our understanding of suffering when we remain subjects looking at bodies as objects? What if the body is not a thing at all, but an event? In this workshop, you’ll explore with Todd what happens when we move from seeing the body as an object to encountering bodyhood as lived experience — embodied, relational, affective and continually unfolding in the world.
Workshop Overview
Todd will take you on a journey through phenomenology, drawing on Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Foucault, as well as contemporary thinkers including Karen Barad, the new materialism and Richard Kearney’s carnal hermeneutics. Beginning with Merleau-Ponty’s lived body, and exploring Drew Leder’s ideas of the recessive and ecstatic body, Todd will invite you to consider a radically different way of understanding embodiment.
What You Will Explore
From Body, Mind and Soul Work to Bodyhood
Across three mornings, Todd will invite you to question the familiar separation of body, mind and soul — the idea that thoughts, feelings, values and relationships exist apart from our bodily lives. Drawing on the concept of bodyhood, you’ll explore how embodiment shapes sexuality and gender, sport and performance, and the ways we live out our values in everyday life.
The Lived Experience of Pain, Trauma, Chronic Illness, Disability and Rehabilitation
What is the difference between repairing a broken arm and living through the experience of being broken in one’s reach for the world? What is the difference between tears as a bodily process and tears as an expression of sadness? What changes when pain is understood not simply as sensory information, but as an event that transforms how we live?
Through questions such as these, you’ll explore the lived experience of pain, trauma, chronic illness, disability and rehabilitation — including the profound difference between wheeling through the world and walking through it.
The Mysterious Territory of Touch
Two surfaces of skin can come into contact — but is that all we mean when we speak of the healing power of touch? Together with Todd, you’ll explore the subtle meanings of touch: how it can soothe or wound, heal or re-traumatise, and what becomes possible when we understand the body not simply as something we possess, but as something that is shaped in relationship.
Throughout the three half-days, Todd will return to the paradox of the non-corporeal body — those dimensions of embodied life that can disappear when human beings are understood only through the lens of natural science. The invitation is not to reject science, medicine or our remarkable capacity to repair bodies, but to ask what more is needed if we are to care for the lived body.
And for the Finale
Todd will ask you to buckle up as he takes you away – way out there – where you’ll explore with him bodyhood after death.
Who Should Attend
Psychotherapists and counsellors interested in phenomenological and existential approaches – particularly those working with pain, illness, disability, trauma, sexuality, gender, rehabilitation or embodied experience. And anyone who is curious about what becomes possible when we stop looking at the body.
The Details
Dates: Thur 3 , Fri 4 and Sat 5 DEC 2026
Time: Please join at 8.45am to iron out any technical issues
Workshop: 9am to 12.30pm AEDT ( break times will be accommodated)
Location: online via zoom (registrants will receive an invitation to participate and all the details they require in advance of the date)
Cost: $420 (flat rate in AUD)
CPD Hours: 9
note to registrants:
if you have registered for other CEP international events in 2026, the registration form will show checked boxes for those. Just check the box for this registration – you do not need to uncheck the others.
Todd DuBose, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Full Professor at The Chicago School’s College of Professional Psychology and is the coordinator of the humanistic-existential orientation/specialization at the school. He is also a licensed clinical psychologist in Chicago, has nearly forty years of clinical experience, and twenty-five years of teaching, supervision and consultation. He was also a former chaplain and holds degrees in contemporary continental and comparative philosophy of religion (B.A., Georgia State University; M.Div., Union Theological Seminary, NYC) and in human science clinical psychology (Ph.D., Duquesne University). He integrates these traditions in a clinical specialization of caring for others in existential and spiritual crises during encounters with the impossible, or “no way out” situations, and limit or boundary events (violence, loss, trauma, transitions, psychosis, nihilism). His research and scholarship also takes this integrated approach to critique ideologies of standardized practices of care that intentionally or unwittingly leave out someone and/or their alternative views about such posited categories as science, evidence, method, empiricism, data, outcome, truth, reality, suffering, care, person and “the good life”. He is the winner of numerous awards for his teaching and scholarship and is known globally for his ongoing teaching, supervision, and presentations on existential-hermeneutical-phenomenological approaches to therapeutic care.
Contact: Todd DuBose, The Chicago School’s College of Professional Psychology: tdubose@thechicagoschool.edu