Bio

© Photo Studio Gudrun de Maddalena, Tübingen GER

How the arts came back to me

My career startet with a one-year preliminary internship in design crafts: Woodwork, screen printing, sign and letter painting and varnishing. The internship made me get enrolled in a pilot program in Design Techniques at the University of Duisburg-Essen

My major coursework and my work as student tutor was with artist and Folkwang teacher Prof. Franz Rudolf Knubel who also was guest professor at the California State University, Long Beach

I finished the three-year undergraduate program in 1983, continued with wood and stone sculpting for a portfolio for sculpture school and volonteered at an International Symposium for Landscape Sculpturing in the Netherlands

I was participating artist at the International Stone Sculptur Symposium Kaiserslautern when my career took a turn

Art brut of art friends had drawn my interest towards art therapy but I had to take studies in Human Sciences first as requirement (psychology, sociology, philosophy, pedagogics)

Creative Compassion - Freda CV

My second career spanned decades of post-graduate trainings in different humanistic approaches. I was learning from 14 German and Swiss practitioners and 5 international pioneers and practitioners: Gerda Boyesen, David Boadella, Eugene Gendlin and later Mia Leijssen and Christiane Geiser (Gestalt, Drama Play, Biodynamic, Biosynthese, Catathymic Imagery, Focusing, Existential Wellbeing, Processing Structure-Boundness)

I passed a seven-year-programm in person-centered training, undergoing two certification procedures at the Person-Centered Institute AGB Berlin (depth-oriented) and the Person-Centered Institute IGB Stuttgart (behavioral-oriented). The program was performed by 18 clinical teachers including Prof. Reinhard Tausch, founder of the German Person-centered Psychotherapy approach. All teachers had different backgrounds and styles of person-centered practice with critical-marxist and existential teachings from teachers of former East Berlin Institute of Person-Centered Psychotherapy

Two University degrees (pre-Bologna equivalents to masters) from the Free University of Berlin and the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen were backing up my professional practice. They were based on two thesis of 410 pages in total (qualitative research and theory)

For thirty years Person-centered Experiential Psychotherapy, Counseling and Adult Education was the focus of my professional life. I had lost track of crafts, arts and art therapy

In the midst of certifying as FWB practitioner (Focusing with the Whole Body, Astrid Schillings) a dream depicted that I took the wrong direction train. Immediate change of direction was the call of hour. I took a Focusing Oriented Expressive Arts FOAT® training with Dr. Laury Rappaport, started painting again and suscribed to online art courses

My undergraduate studies of Design-Techniques were my entry to the Academic Art Therapy Program of the Catholic University of Freiburg. I finished this program with a Diploma of Advanced Studies (DAS) in 2022 and hold a guest lectureship for Focusing and Expressive Arts at the University department of Curative Education since then

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