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Franz Ruppert is professor of psychology in Munich. He has developed one of the most innovative therapeutic approaches of the last twenty years: IoPT — Identity-oriented Psychotrauma Therapy.

His starting point is simple — and radical. Most of our suffering does not come from what we think.

Ruppert starts from a clinical observation: when a human being goes through a traumatic event — violence, loss, abandonment, a threat to life — the psyche fragments in order to survive.

He develops what Ruppert calls a survival self — a substitute identity, built to get through the pain. Effective at the time. But which, over time, takes up all the space.

The problem is not that we suffer. It is that we no longer know who suffers — and who, behind, is waiting to truly exist.

The living identity — the one from before the wound, the one that carries our real desires, our vital energy — is there. Buried. But alive.

IoPT uses a simple and powerful technique: the constellation of a sentence of intention. You formulate in a few words what you want to work on.

Each word of that sentence is then explored — through the body, through resonance, through what emerges spontaneously when you truly pause on it.

This is not reasoning. It is resonance. The information rises — often where you least expect it. Buried memories. Repetitive patterns suddenly illuminated. Long-blocked emotions finally finding an outlet.

The analytical brain observes. The body knows. — L.J

The Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst (1875–1961) is the father of "depth psychology". He is probably the most quoted psychologist on social media, in personal-development podcasts and in therapy practices around the world.

He named the mask we all wear. Jung called it persona — from the Latin: the theatre mask — the character we build for the outside world. This mask is useful. It allows us to function in society. But when we confuse it with ourselves — when we forget we are wearing it — we end up living a life that does not truly belong to us.

He took our shadow side seriously. Behind the persona hides what Jung called the shadow — everything we repress, deny, project onto others. For Jung, ignoring one's shadow does not make it disappear. It returns — in the form of repetitions, unexplained conflicts, chronic inner unease.

He highlighted the feminine part of man — and the masculine part of woman. Every man carries an unconscious feminine part — the anima. Every woman, a masculine part — the animus. These inner figures deeply influence our love relationships.

He named what we are all searching for — the Self. At the centre of the whole psyche, Jung places the Self — not to be confused with the everyday ego. The Self manifests where the mind gives way: a dream that leaves a lasting mark, a decision taken without knowing why, an encounter that changes everything.

Jung is the only great psychologist to have recognised that the human psyche has an irreducible spiritual dimension. That the search for meaning, the need for transcendence, the experience of the sacred are not illusions to dissolve — but real psychic forces.

He brought to light a concept that sums up a whole life: individuation — the process by which one gradually becomes who one truly is.

What he leaves us: an invitation. Not to be happy at all costs. But to ask ourselves, honestly: Who am I really — beneath the mask I built to please, to perform, to survive? It is the most courageous question there is. And the most liberating.

Gestalt therapy was born in the 1950s, driven by Fritz Perls, a German psychoanalyst exiled to the United States. It was built in rupture with classical psychoanalysis — not to deny it, but to go further.

Its central idea fits in one sentence: What is happening here, now, in this moment, is richer in information than anything one could analyse from the past.

Where Freud systematically went back to childhood to explain the present, Perls asked a different question: what is happening in you, now, while you speak? Your body tenses. Your voice changes. You avoid my gaze. You smile when you talk about something painful.

These micro-signals do not lie. Gestalt's working hypothesis is that the body, the voice, the gesture, the emotion that arises — all of it carries information that words alone cannot deliver.

The key word in Gestalt is not "healing". It is the art of contact. Contact with oneself — one's real emotions, one's true needs, one's authentic limits. Contact with the other — not facade contact, performative contact, but the real meeting between two people.

Gestalt observes that suffering is almost always born of a rupture of contact — with oneself, with others, with life. We cut ourselves off from something essential in order to survive. To please. Not to be a burden.

Fritz Perls had a formula his students never forgot: "Lose your mind and come to your senses." It is not an invitation to the irrational. It is an invitation to wholeness — to inhabit one's existence with everything one is, not only with what one thinks. — L.J

Let us look around us. Conflicts that never end. Institutions that crush as much as they protect. Relationships that wound — again and again, along the same patterns.

We are our society. Our institutions do not fall from the sky. They are made of people. Of traumatised people. Who reproduce, often without knowing it, what they themselves endured.

Violence calls for violence. Humiliation calls for domination. Abandonment calls for indifference.

What Ruppert names the victim-perpetrator dynamic does not stop at the door of our childhood. It runs through our families, our companies, our governments.

The disturbing question: Are we victims? Yes, often. Are we also perpetrators? Sometimes — without even seeing it.

Ruppert does not seek to blame. He seeks to illuminate. Because what we do not see in ourselves ends up being replayed — in our life, our relationships, society as a whole.

A simple, and radical, conviction: a healthier society begins with individuals who accept to face their own trauma. Not out of guilt — out of lucidity.

"How to live in a traumatising and traumatised society?" Franz Ruppert — Éd. Le Courrier du Livre — €18 — L.J