Thinking Through the Body: Embodying Psychoanalytic Concepts

Short courses, talks and tailor-made courses

 

Courses and talks

I offer talks, lectures and tailor-made courses for training organisations, professional associations and conferences organizers interested in the body in psychotherapy. For my background, see biography) Some of the recent lectures I have given are transcribed here, including "Mapping a Landscape: Massage and Psychotherapy"; "How Many Senses have we?"; and "Hamlet and the Somatic Metaphor".

 

Body psychotherapy has its roots in psychoanalysis (Freud, Ferenczi, Reich, Winnicott). Via its long association with humanistic practice, it also has a tradition of phenomenological awareness and direct engagement with a process (Gestalt, bodywork).

 

Pioneering theorist of body psychotherapy have had a deep intuition of the immanence of the psychological in the body and have looked to physiology as a basis for understanding the psyche (Boadella, Boyesen, Keleman). More recently, body psychotherapy theorists have reconsidered the relationship with psychoanalysis and formulated new integrative models. (Soth, Totton) For articles by Michael Soth (including 'Relating To and With the Objectified Body')and Bernd Eiden, visit www.chiron.org. Also important articles by Nick Totton at www.erthworks.co.uk

 

Embodying Metapsychology

In connection with my ongoing research project, I am interested in opening out and exploring psychoanaytic models and concepts in somatic/physiological terms. Gerda Boyesen, a physiotherapist and psychologist who developed biodynamic massage, was fascinated by metabolic process. She used a stethoscope to listen directly to peristalsis (stomach rumblings) as she worked with clients. She proposed that there was a direct correlation between the motility of an individual's colon and their capacity to free associate and to self-regulate emotionally. A comparison of Boysen's and Bion's concept of metabolising, is one of the topics I offer for discussion and exploration.

 

Fleshing out concepts

Attention (and the loss of it), holding, containment, transference and countertransference are concepts which have been finely elucidated in psychoanalytic thinking. Relevant to an appreciation of all of these in clinical practice are the qualities of presence, contact, and self and other awareness. These have been a central focus of body psychotherapy as aspects of embodiment. Through its rich phenomenological tradition, body psychotherapy may offer another lens on familiar aspects of clinical practice.

 

Challenging habits of 'mentalisation'

A paradigm shift in the way that the body/mind relationship is conceived is evident in psychoanalytic psychotherapy as elsewhere. Understanding what happens to the body in the mind (particularly in and through fantasy). however, has tended to obscure what happens to the mind in the body. Psychoanalysis appears often to regard bodily communications and phenomena as necessarily 'primitive'. Symbolization (equated often with verbalisation) is regarded as the main basis for improving mental [sic] health. The capacity of the body to organise, process, distill and contain in sophisticated ways has been neglected or seen as an exclusively maternal function.

 

Tailor-made courses and talks can be developed around:

* specific metapsychological concepts

* the body's relevance in clinical phenomena

* critical issues for debate, e.g. "All in the body"? : Body as unconscious, ego and superego

 

 

Short Bibliography

 

Damasio, Antonio Descartes' Error: Reason, Emotion and the Human Brain (Putnam, 1994)

Eiden, Bernd and Michael Soth Recent Articles*, Chiron Centre Publications 1999 (available only through Chiron/on Chiron website . Includes the article 'Relating to and with the Objectified Body' by Michael Soth)

Staunton, Teresa ed.: Advances in Body Psychotherapy (Routledge, 2001)

Totton, Nick The Water in the Glass: Mind and Body in Psychoanalysis (Rebus Press, 1999)

 

Email Roz at thinkbody@lineone.net

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