Using psychoanalysis to improve performance

MC International will be the first and only accredited International Institute for Complementary Therapists (IICT) in the UK, providing the teaching of biocentric psychoanalysis together on the very important mission of promoting a new integrative medicine and a shared freedom of knowledge. Its founder, Professor Melania Anna Duca-Canavan, explains more about how biocentric psychoanalysis can be applied to sports performance.

What is biocentric psychoanalysis (biopsysis)?

Biopsysis is a new theory inspired by biocentrism, which is the idea that there’s no reality outside of our perception. According to biopsysis, your mind generates reality through various cognitive processes. Your mind is blind and learns via specific unique codes, which are different for each individual. What we call personality, even our own behaviour, results from a complex cognitive code that’s as long and indecipherable as the many traumatic episodes we collect during our life-experience. Its functioning is organic and at the same time logical, instinctual through learned adaptation.

Any code can be analysed, broken down into smaller logical sentences, modified, recomposed, activated, tested for a trial period and finally stabilized. It’s exactly as you would do with a new biological implant, such as a new kidney from a donor, including the possibility of a rejection, discomfort or collateral effect. Medicine has finally started to accept that mind and body are curable, in a different, multi-disciplinary and complementary way.

How can all this be applied to sport performance improvement?

I’ve been working with athletes competing at different levels in various sport disciplines, including volleyball, swimming, kickboxing and tennis, but without doubt the most fascinating sport from a psychoanalytic point of view is horse riding. As well as being very therapeutic, it reveals the rider’s internal conflicts as an individual. This includes conflict between different sides of personality, wishes and beliefs, including the space-time location of their own body and the body of their horse, plus false perceptions of rhythm, distances, speed and even colours at times. Riding a horse is a dialogue, a marriage of two souls of different species. It’s also a mirror that we constantly put in front of ourselves. In the arena we’re all equal, with no difference of age, ethnicity, or social or cultural background. It’s a challenge to our self-control and willpower, something immeasurable in other terms.

I’ve developed a new approach to therapy in this field called Psychoanalysis for Athletic Performance (PAP), which has been registered in UK as Applied Psychoanalysis. Applying psychoanalysis to improve sport results means, in simple words…

• testing an athlete’s learning system
• introducing small useful changes in the training and competition routine
• altering perceptions through specific exercises
• applying conversational and traditional hypnosis, art and music therapy.
• intensive biopsysis treatment

At this stage of my career as a therapist, I can say that with a few rare exceptions due to sudden therapy interruptions, all of my patients have achieved a concrete improvement of their sport results. That’s why I have decided to start the first International Biocentric Psychoanalysis Institute, based in Northern Ireland, to teach other therapists to apply the new biopsysis modality.

Melania Anna Duca-Canavan, PhD is a Complementary Medical Association Fellow working in Lisburn (NI), United Kingdom. She’s also an Italian University Professor of Logics and Philosophy of Mind. In 2015, Prof. Duca-Canavan was awarded an important Italian acknowledgement, Excellence in Medical History Research, for having discovered the first theorisation of a moral therapy, applied in the early 19th century to treat mental illness.

Website: biocentricpsychoanalysis.uk

Email: [email protected]