Introduction to the Special Issue on Embodiment

Can you recall the last time you wiggled your toes in soft grass or on a sandy beach? Or the last time you noticed your heart race at seeing a loved one? Perhaps you can recall a time with a client who shifted uncomfortably in their chair when speaking of something moving or difficult and you reflexively shifted too, having a gut-sense of their situation coming alive in you?

We are concretely bodied beings surely. Yet, as these simple examples might suggest, it is likely that this everydayness inures us to its importance and allows us to overlook the role and significance embodiment plays in our work as psychotherapists, academics and researchers. After all, if “body” is as ubiquitous to being human as some think it is, why call it out for special attention?

The aim of this special issue is to showcase the latest thinking about the role of embodiment in person-centered and experiential psychotherapies. As intricate (perhaps fundamental) aspects of how human beings sense their living, the traces of embodiment can be found everywhere in our work: in the empathic moment, dream work, imaginative or re-enactment therapies, and Focusing in particular. In this issue, we hope you will find articles by Finlay, Ikemi, Nakata, Aoki, and Glanzer to be particularly helpful in bringing embodiment explicitly into conversations about our theoretical, practice-focused, and research efforts.

It is worth acknowledging from the start that we owe a great deal to Rogers and Gendlin, each of whom have contributed significantly to our collective understanding of body and embodiment in the practice of psychotherapy and research. Of particular interest to me are Gendlin’s philosophy and his psychology and approach to psychotherapy. He points to body as a process in which each identified element functions on its own but is also something more than can be shown from just its discrete existence (Gendlin, 1970, 1984). For instance, person-centered and experiential theories emphasize empathy. In Gendlin’s philosophy empathy could be considered an “element” of a larger process called psychotherapy. There is a lot we have and can still learn about empathy by studying it as a discrete part of therapy. For Gendlin, elements are always derived from our wider body process, can stand on their own, and be subjected to forms of critical reflection and even empirical verification.

We know that Gendlin’s and Rogers’s collaborations informed each other’s theories and views of practice. Significantly, for the consideration of embodiment and psychotherapy, Rogers’s (1975) reference to body as a concrete fact of existence is present throughout his works but in mostly implicit ways, with his later writings forming the exception. We see in his early formulations on human psychological development, for instance, references to the human organism responding to its environment, forming positive, damaging or incomplete bonds with self and its encountered world (Rogers, 1951, 1957, 1959). Rogers’s organism was never merely the flesh and bones of the corporeal body; it was always more.

As a master therapist, Rogers clearly directs our attention to the empathic bond between client and therapist as a key element of what makes for successful psychotherapy. Empathy in Rogers’s later formulations is said to involve the therapist’s directly felt bodily responding, a referent or touchstone identifying the therapist’s inward location in relation to the client and their ongoing work together. As Rogers states (1975), the client is “checking them [the therapists responses] against the ongoing psycho-physiological flow within himself to see if they fit. This flow is a very real thing, and people are able to use it as a referent” (p. 4). Nakata explores this theme in detail, offering us a studied look at the character of therapist experiencing and empathic connection.

In some regard, it is unclear in Rogers’s writings whether or not the therapist’s consciously recognizing or utilizing the felt referent is necessary or only of added value. My reading of Rogers suggests the direct referent (and what Gendlin calls a felt sense when speaking to therapists) functions implicitly for most therapists. It can be explicitly tuned-in to if needed or desired. But it is up to the therapist to decide to use the referent or not. As Gendlin will clarify (Gendlin, 1984), the process of referent formation is happening without any needed special attention. Gendlin recognizes the implicit when he writes: One’s own individual bodily process is always “implicit,” at least at first. “Implicit” means that a human being has something like 600,000 words implicit in its bodily capacity to understand and to form sentences to explicate. But there is always much more than what words can mean (Gendlin, 2013).

We can see the implicit use of one’s felt referent as empathic guide in Rogers’s Gloria sessions, for instance, when Rogers demonstrates for us his bodied knowledge, like a resonating tuning fork as he works with Gloria. I always find something new in reviewing these sessions with my students. Many times they have noticed Rogers moving toward and away from Gloria at just the crucial moments and in ways that seem to exquisitely fit the responding Gloria. They comment how in tune with Gloria Rogers appears as he pauses to find just the right words to reflect and apprehend her meaning.

To paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, bodies recognize bodies, not the concepts about them (Merleau-Ponty, Bjelland, & Burke, 2001). Said another way, we relate to persons who are bodied. As philosophical theme, embodiment can be described as a phenomenological project exploring the interplay between mind, body, and world. In person-centered and experiential work, this project enters our work whenever we engage in reflection and exploration. Heidegger (1962/1927) called this state of disciplined, philosophical reflection dwelling. In dwelling, he says, we come to see who we are and by extension the significant matters regarding our life or that of our clients.

In the practice of psychotherapy, embodiment takes on particular relevance when we consider it to be datum. By this I mean embodiment is datum when it is the concrete physically felt presence we experience when we encounter another, or client. As all the authors in this issue suggest in one way or another, our embodiment is constantly available to inform and shape our practices, regardless of its intent and contents.

When we meet a new client for instance, we have a distinct character or feel for the entire situation of our meeting. In the meeting of client and therapist, that concreteness of experience shows up in a variety of ways (e.g. as a bodily resonance to something a client brings into session, a stirring inside as we offer a reflection that “fits” the moment, etc.). This felt referent is then fundamental to our understanding of the everyday character of who we are as human beings and of the nature of our caring practice. It is part and parcel of the basic human sensitivities we draw upon in whatever therapeutic work we are doing.

Likewise from clients’ own standpoints, embodiment may play a part in treatment implicitly and explicitly through how clients process their experience in-session and even how they make decisions affecting their lives outside the therapy session. The reader interested in these aspects of embodiment will find the articles by Glanzer and Ikemi of particular interest as both provide us with new intellectual scaffolding for further explorative thinking about the processes involved in our craft and science.

Research practices developed along the lines of Rogers and Gendlin have, from the beginning, been a source of renovation for the entire psychological community in conceptualizing about therapy and finding meaningful ways to explore, verify, and revise its approaches. Aoki presents for the first time in English an innovative new research program that explores the “manner” in which one accesses embodied experiencing. I think the reader will see this as I do, as an important addition to researching embodiment. My personal hope is that Aoki’s protocol will be used now outside Japan.

Today, because of the works of Rogers, Gendlin, and many others we enjoy the common understanding that body is more than muscle and bone, and that feeling and thinking are inextricably linked such that changes in one affect the other in how each will move forward in the living of life. However embodiment can be conceived and explored, this special issue is an opportunity for our community to explore embodiment for its theoretical, research, and psychotherapeutic promise and usefulness.

The authors in this special issue have done very well in answering these basic questions and taking us further to consider new forms of research and thinking about how we do the work we do.