Embodied attentiveness: recognising the language of movement

Abstract

The author draws on her experience as a movement analyst and movement psychotherapist to address the question of whether the discerning and describing of primary, psycho-physical patterns could be augmented for infant observers if they were to pay closer attention to their own bodily experience within the setting, and acquire some basic vocabulary and categories for describing nonverbal behaviour. To this end, she introduces the well-established framework of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), and also describes what she means by ‘embodied attentiveness’. She suggests that these tools are highly congruent with psychoanalytic thinking, and may provide observers with another perspective from which to recognise preverbal patterns and early survival mechanisms.

Keywords:

• movement psychotherapy
• Laban Movement Analysis
• Infant Observation
• nonverbal communication