Comparing and contrasting body psychotherapy and dance movement psychotherapy

Dear Readers,

What an endeavour for the 10th anniversary of this journal – united by the task to compare and contrast body psychotherapy (BP) and dance movement psychotherapy (DMP), the authors of this special anniversary issue have produced a gem for their fields. This special issue not only highlights the vast approaches both modalities have, it demonstrates and illustrates their complex theoretical underpinnings and sensitive thinking around the use of ‘body’ in psychotherapy.

The development of BP and DMP are historically quite different, in spite of the many intersections in these body–mind approaches. However, for the last decade or two, similar topics and questions have been addressed.

The articles in this issue illuminate the tentative grappling to define terms that both fields use such as body, soma, movement and gesture and yet still remain fuzzy in the historical light of theoretical and practical gaps between the two fields. It seems this issue has achieved an important developmental step: after the pioneer years of formulating various methodologies and theories to describe how the body is an integral part in psychotherapy, the two fields have advanced beyond schools towards a search for a common umbrella theory that stresses the embodied connections between feelings, movements, posture, breathing patterns and imagination. On every page, we can read the struggle to overcome the presumed differences and can sense an emerging new phase for the two fields that allows for joint research, for example on the concept of embodiment or the meaning of movement and emotions, coordinating our data and methods with sound theory.

It is interesting that the authors unanimously address the exploration of symbols and creativity in the psychotherapeutic and intersubjective process, exposing the therapist and client to the light of the ‘third’. Perhaps this is also a reflection of what is happening in this courageous endeavour: by allowing space to compare and contrast BP and DMP, something new can grow, a ‘third’ that envelops a vision for mutual development.

The synthetic dimension of this birthday issue of BMDP is highlighted by its way of combining authors who are pure practitioners with others that are sometimes a combination between dance and body psychotherapists with a solid academic training (e.g. doctors in psychology and several university professors). In this second group, combining scientific and empirical research with more practical models has manifestly become a habitual mode of thinking.

A personal approach to the questions that this special issue tackles has been chosen by Yeva Feldman, a Gestalt psychotherapist and dance movement psychotherapist, in her article ‘How body psychotherapy influenced me to become a dance movement psychotherapist’. Originally a dancer, she was intrigued by Neo-Reichian body psychotherapy. The embodied experiences helped her realise that there are multiple levels to physical expression and that through dance she was expressing her emotions and her own narrative. Feldman points to the importance of relationships and the central premise that healing or change can only occur in relationship, to the self, the other, and from ‘body-to-body’, regardless of the modality. She sees more similarities between BP and DMP than differences, particularly in their shared holistic perspective that the body holds conscious and unconscious experiences expressed in movement. With her open and non-judgmental stance and her curiosity to understand relationships, Feldman weaves the two modalities into an extensive form of psychotherapy beyond orthodox approaches.

The reciprocal influences of BP and DMP are also at the core of Maria Luise Oberem’s paper, ‘Breathing, sensing and expressing emotions: The influence of Elsa Gindler and Mary Wigman on body psychotherapy and dance/movement therapy'. A German dance/movement therapist trained in America, Oberem pays tribute to the gymnastic movement, in particular Elsa Gindler’s body of work, and the expressive dance movement as developed by Mary Wigman in Germany at the beginning of the last century. Her particular interest raises an awareness of how virulent political and societal factors at the time had depleted seminal theories on BP and dance/movement therapy, and yet were passed on and transformed by those students who had fled to the USA from Nazi Germany with the felt experience of these movements in their bodies. Oberem’s historic overview offers a possible account of why dance movement therapy is still not valued as deeply in Germany as it seems to be in the USA.

Clare Osbond, a dance movement psychotherapist, and Tim Brown, a body psychotherapist, describe an intriguing synthesis of both modalities in ‘Dance of Awareness™ Evolving a “Free-Form” approach to exploring early developmental patterns in a group setting’. Both invite the reader to follow an eight-week group movement practice that aims to increase self-awareness and self-acceptance in six phases. The six phases – Sensing, Grounding, Expressing, Releasing, Connecting & Completing – offer clients opportunities to discover aspects of their past and present selves in embodied relationships. The authors integrate their vast experiences in both modalities with a strong psychodynamic underpinning, oscillating between ‘hands-on’ practice and theoretical reflections. For body psychotherapists and dance movement psychotherapists alike, DoA encourages fruitful co-operations between the two approaches.

Helen Payne, Tom Warnecke, Vicky Karkou and Gill Westland in their article ‘A comparative analysis of body psychotherapy and dance movement psychotherapy from a European perspective’, show how the field of body and DMP since the 1980s, has gradually unified itself around the academic notion of embodiment. These two fields have been able to include a great variety of methods in a set of theoretical frames, which have vastly improved the dialogue between psychotherapeutic schools and modalities on the one hand, between the practitioners and academics on the other.

Laura Hope Steckler is a typical example of how these various approaches could be combined. She centres her article, ‘The holographic body: The use of movement in body psychotherapy’ on different ways of associating movement with a variety of psychological dynamics. She elegantly shows that body psychotherapists classically approach movement from two points of view: spontaneous exploratory expressions, and prescribed movements that address particular psychological issues. As we read her, we spontaneously think of the important issue of differentiating how a non-singer sings from someone who has trained his or her potential to sing and has become a professional singer. In the particular case, a body psychotherapist may have in-depth knowledge of how spontaneous movement and voice interact with affective dynamics, but does not have the education of a dancer who can discern how the articulation of movement is grounded through complex feet movements and quasi-aesthetical visions of impressions and sentiments. For Steckler, some of this finesse can be integrated by body psychotherapists who have trained in body-mind technique, oriental methods and Gestalt therapy.

Jennifer Frank Tantia continues this discussion in her article, ‘The interface between somatic psychotherapy and dance/movement therapy: a critical analysis’, by proposing general systems theory as a common theoretical frame that can integrate practice and research. Her article introduces the semantic fuzziness of a vocabulary that redefines itself from one school to another, sometimes from one country to another, such as the similarities between the field of somatic psychotherapy (SP) and BP. It gives an excellent historical description of BP from the 1930s in Berlin, including Reich and Perls, to today’s US-based methods such as Focusing (Gendlin, 1998) and those of Caldwell (Caldwell, 2012; Caldwell & Victoria, 2011), showing how the field glides from one philosophical frame to another: the psychologies of Piaget and Freud, Reich’s vegetotherapy, and the dancing of Whitehouse and Chace, whose work is discussed by Chaiklin and Schmais (1993) and Pallaro (1999). Tantia also shows that the validation of these methods by empirical studies is a growing field of study. Her articles, like most of the others, demonstrate that although there are clear practical differences between SP and DMT, they remain difficult to specify conceptually.

In his review of Asaf Rolef Ben-Shahar’s most recent book, Touching the Relational Edge, Tom Warnecke stresses a theme that is developed in several articles: a unique feature of some BP approaches is the use of touch, not only as a form of contact, but also using massage techniques that can allow psychotherapists and patients to explore together the dynamic connection between the layers of what constitutes an embodied being.

Raluca Popa reviews the book Anna Halprin: Dance, Process, Form, translated from German and originally written by Gabriele Witmann, Ursula Schorn and Ronit Land. Her recommendation to read the book is based on her fascination of the vast and impressive aspects of Halprin’s life. The book includes a biographical and chronological overview of her life and work, attempts to explain the theoretical and methodological foundations of Halprin’s Life/Art Process® and describes Halprin’s influences on past and present « artistic figures ».

Claire Schaub-Moore
BPS (British Psychological Society), ADMP UK (Association of Dance Movement Psychotherapy UK), BTD (Berufsverband der TanztherapeutInnen Deutschland), EABP (European Association of Body Psychotherapy), DGK (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Körperpsychotherapie), IARPP (International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy)
[email protected]
Michael Heller
Swiss Federation of Psychologists (FSP), European Association of Body-Psychotherapy (EABP)
[email protected]