• ARTICLES, Special Section, XIIIth Biennial Conference of the EPCA - 2016

Equine Assisted Constructivist Psychotherapy: Theory and practice

Del Rizzo, F.

Keywords:
constructivist psychotherapy, equine assisted psychotherapy, equine assisted constructivist psychotherapy

Abstract:
Horses had been a primary resource for men since their domestication: at the beginning they helped in any kind of job and made possible travels and transport. Nowadays they are used in sports, free time activities and therapy and they still prove they can be great companions for human beings' enterprises. In the therapeutic field they are traditionally used in hippotherapy, in therapeutic riding and in riding for the disabled persons. More recently Eagala (Mandrell, 2006) developed a psychotherapeutic practice that uses horses as facilitators. Following a childhood dream I'm now trying to develop my own constructivist psychotherapeutic model involving horses as co-construers of the therapeutic experience. I'm trying to subsume the therapeutic approach developed by Eagala by means of PCT theoretical tools (Kelly, 1955). In this talk I will discuss my efforts in this direction especially through a case report.