Embodied Approaches to Psychotherapy

Body-mind at-one-ment in Psychotherapy: Non-Verbal Psychotherapeutic Paradigms

In this interview Yorai Sella focusses on the contribution of an integrated Psychoanalytical-East-West approach to embodied psychotherapeutic work. His claim is that contemporary, psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy implicitly recognizes a unified psyche-soma. It is also beginning to recognize ‘at-one-ment’ – the permeability, merger or interpenetration of the therapist’s and client’s psyche-soma. However, plagued by its Cartesian heritage, it is hard put to formulate, conceptualize and – above all – consistently implement these recognitions.

With Shoshi Asheri as interlocutor-participant, the interview demonstrates how current psychotherapeutic understanding and clinical knowhow may be guided by Zen and Daoist therapeutic paradigms. Innovative categories of potentiality, flux, vitality and disclosing-embodied expression are offered to circumvent the fissure between verbal and pre-verbal, presence and representation. The therapist’s presence is demonstrated to be both a guide to clinical practice and a potential curative agent in and of itself.

The interview ends with some radical implications of this unitary turn in body-mind relations in the field of public psychiatric health programs.