ISEP launches the new Master’s Degree in Psychomotricity. Educational and Therapeutic Intervention. Dr. Joaquim Serrabona Mas, clinical psychologist, family therapist, and psychomotor therapist at the Luden center, is a lecturer for the master’s program and introduces us to this course, which arose from the growing demand for more comprehensive and trained psychomotricity professionals.
What led to the creation of this new Master’s Degree at ISEP?
Psychomotor intervention is currently experiencing significant development due to an increase in research, publications, and associations related to psychomotricity. This has led to increased interest in this discipline and a demand for solid training.
From a professional perspective, there is an increasing need to know and use diverse forms of intervention that stem from the body, sensations, movements, and games to adequately respond to the attention required by children at a preventive level or with special needs.
This master’s program aims to address this educational need and the training demand to deepen the understanding of the child, of their psychomotor expressiveness, in order to obtain guidelines and intervention strategies in the educational and therapeutic fields.
What are the functions of a psychomotor therapist?
The psychomotor therapist’s action is an educational and/or therapeutic approach with bodily mediation. It considers the body in its multiple dimensions: neurophysiological, as the foundation of personality, as a basis for the individual’s evolution towards symbolic processes of their affective and cognitive development, and as a place of expression and relationship.
Depending on the characteristics of the individuals attended, they use different specific techniques: instrumental and expressive techniques aimed at improving psychomotor functions and stimulating the individual’s global psychomotor development.
But what is psychomotricity?
Psychomotricity is an educational and therapeutic discipline that acts on the person’s totality through sensations, movements, games, and their subsequent representation, with the aim that the child establishes a positive relationship with themselves, with the objects in their environment, with space and time, and with others.
Like any discipline, it consists of different elements that intervene in its practice. One of these is the integrated vision of the child, which refers to the totality of the subject in all its dimensions: motor, cognitive, rational/social, and affective/unconscious.
What are the fundamental objectives of psychomotricity?
We can list them:
- To feel and experience one’s own body to differentiate it from objects and others.
- To be well with oneself and with others as a vehicle of expression and communication.
- To orient the body in space to then be able to relate to objects and others.
- To move from the plane of “doing” to that of representing through words, drawing, constructions, and gestures.
- To discover and experience sensorimotor pleasure through basic stimulations (tactile, proprioceptive, and vestibular).
- To achieve greater control over one’s own body and, therefore, develop greater autonomy.
- To be able to adopt appropriate postural attitudes for the different activities of daily life, exercising progressive control of muscle tone.
- To become aware of the organization and structure of time through sensorimotor synchronization, access to one’s own time, and the ability to perform rhythmic writings.
- To know the possibilities and limitations to progressively control one’s own behavior through the regulation of actions in relation to other objects and others.
What content is covered throughout the master’s program?
Work is done with the body globally, taking into account the following aspects:
- The body moves: spontaneous motor activity, tone, basic postures, general dynamic coordination, motor controls, balance, dominance, breathing, relaxation, rhythm, motor expressiveness, and creativity.
- The body that knows: body knowledge and awareness, sensory perceptions, spatio-temporal-rhythmic notions, cognitive aspects, and symbolization.
- The affective/phantasmatic body: sensorimotor pleasure, affective dimension of basic notions, investment of space-time, expression and socialization of aggression, acceptance of one’s own limits, tolerance to frustration, postponement of desire, expression and elaboration of the magical world, expression and satisfaction of deep needs and fears, and emotional alterations.
- The relational and social body: interpersonal relationships, tonic desire, peer communication, child-therapist communication, transference and countertransference, empathy, attitude towards relationships. Social relationships: solidarity, cooperation, rivalry, competition, ascendancy, submission, agreements, transactions, isolation, rejection, indifference, rule-following, leading the group.
Play is very important in child psychomotricity. What does the child achieve through play?
Many things:
- Experiment with objects
- Store information
- Relate cause-effect
- Have time to resolve a situation
- Build their language, their form of expression
- Be able to control their attitude, reactions
- Incorporate and adopt social and cultural habits
- Be able to control their attitude, reactions
- Incorporate and adopt social and cultural habits
- Be able to interpret new, problematic events
- Know and relate to children and adults
- Boost self-esteem
- Organize their movements in space, in a given time
- Develop gross and fine motor skills
What are psychomotor development disorders?
Psychomotor development disorders always reflect alterations affecting different aspects of the child; hence the importance of early intervention, as the disorder can negatively impact other areas, hindering and compromising their development. They are classified as:
- Motor weakness
- Psychomotor instability
- Psychomotor inhibition
- Delay in psychomotor development maturation
- Hyperactivity
- Attention deficit
- Tics
- Psychomotor and tonic dysharmonies
- Intellectual disability
- Physical and sensory deficiency
- Personality and behavior disorders
- Dyspraxias
- Body schema disorders
- Body awareness
- Laterality
- Space-time adaptation
- Alteration of symbolic integration
Who would you recommend this master’s program to?
The program is designed for qualified professionals and final-year undergraduate students who wish to specialize in the psychomotor approach at both educational and therapeutic levels: psychologists, pedagogues, psychopedagogues, teachers, speech therapists, occupational physiotherapists, and physical education graduates, among others. Psychomotricity is truly a working tool for these types of professionals.