Embodied Approaches to Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy as an Embodied Process

In this presentation, Julianne Appel-Opper describes a theoretical foundation which is a contemporary blend of relational body-oriented psychotherapy, with roots in Dialogical Gestalt and intersubjective psychoanalytical thinking, and she invites you to consider psychotherapy as an embodied process. The talk explores how clients bring their pre-verbal implicit relational knowledge into our consulting rooms and how it is with their bodies that they broadcast their attachment histories. As therapists, we inevitably and physically react to these embodied narratives. They reach us skin-to-skin, heart-to-heart and muscle-to-muscle, stimulating responses and impulses in reply. She proposes that the subtle physical impulses of the therapist as a bodily being – and how we receive and reply to those messages as bodily sensations – is at the core of the work. Illustrated with three illuminating cases.