Embodied Approaches to Psychotherapy

Traditional Body Psychotherapy and the Contemporary Relational Space

This presentation addresses some of the recurring problems that arise when we attempt to re-include the body in the talking therapies. He outlines some of the shadow aspects and limitations of traditional Body Psychotherapy, which need to be processed before therapists from other traditions can usefully absorb body-oriented ways of working. Rather than using the body as a tool or technique to overcome resistance or minimize or circumvent the transference, he suggests we embrace a re-visioning of all therapeutic theories and techniques in the light of a non-dualistic conception of the bodymind, as envisioned by modern neuroscience. In order to fulfill the promise of bodymind integration he proposes that Body Psychotherapists need to re-integrate psychoanalytic understandings of unconscious processes and pay more attention to the relational space they offer. He outlines some ingredients of a holistic phenomenology of the therapeutic relationship, where attention to the client’s and the therapist’s bodymind deepens our engagement with the inevitable and necessary enactments of wounding dynamics which will occur, whatever our therapeutic approach to the challenge of characterological transformation.