Thinking (And Moving) Outside the Box: Psychoanalytic Treatment and Dance/Movement Therapy

Abstract

For psychoanalysts, an attunement to bodily experience occurs in a setting of relative immobility. Countertransference, reverie, and enactment are essential tools used to access poorly represented and unrepresented states. Psychotic patients pose particular challenges with primitive terrors managed through mind-body dissociation. Words can be rendered meaningless or annihilated, denuded of their symbolic significance. The frame is altered in dance/movement therapy where attunement to bodily experience, including movement, is a catalyst for exploring psychic experience. We present clinical material combining psychoanalytic treatment and dance/movement therapy to illustrate the synergy of these modalities.

Keywords:

• Unrepresented states
• combined treatment
• dance/movement therapy
• enactment
• psychotic states

Notes

1 The medication regimen, which is ongoing, includes olanzapine, lamictal, escitalopram, and moldafinil.

2 Space considerations require the work done in video feedback to be detailed elsewhere (Sandberg and Beebe in press). The multi-modal nature of the treatment complicates parsing out the active ingredients of change. As a real life experiment, we recognize this complexity. As video feedback was largely focused on the face of the therapist and S.’s recognition of facial emotion, process around these aspects is not presented here. The current paper focuses on whole body movement and posture and how DMT influenced the psychoanalytic psychotherapy and vice versa. The process material to follow will illuminate this facet of the treatment—one that took place on a more frequent basis compared to video feedback (weekly versus bimonthly).

3 A distinction is made between the space an individual’s body occupies, known as their personal kinesphere, and the space that surrounds the body within which the person moves, known as the general space (Laban 1976). How an individual moves his or her body through space influences social interactions and can portray the mover’s sense of self in relationship to others.