Dear Reader,
This year’s summer issue presents us with an unintended ‘almost theme’, which appears to interconnect some of our articles. Psychotherapists are good at communicating with their clients and with each other as demonstrated by our rich history of professional publications and events. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about psychotherapists communicating with the public, with other professional fields, or with disseminating psychotherapeutic knowledge bases to society at large. We are therefore delighted to present in this issue some commendable exceptions to this rule with a number of articles which, each in their own way, show how our field may engage outside our proverbial ivory towers.
The first of our articles comes from Argentina with Diana Fischman, who creates direct links between spontaneous choreographies taking place within dance movement therapy sessions and the concept of transcontextual metapatterns, a concept borrowed by cybernetics and systems theory. Diana, who sees movement endowed with symbolic efficiency in itself, argues that by thinking about metapatterns as referring to forms and functions, we are enabled to understand group dynamics within dance movement therapy in ways that transcend the boundaries of the discipline itself.
The transition from talking therapies to body/moving therapy is the topic of our next article by Einat Shuper-Engelhard from Israel. Einat takes us on a psychodynamic ‘journey’ from Sigmund Freud’s couch all the way to contemporary thinking in body and movement psychotherapies and from Freudian views that the patient needs to freeze his senses to views of the patient needing to ‘dance the soul stories’. Winnicott, Balint and Ogden are some of the theoreticians referred to amongst many others and it perhaps not surprising that the author proposes to consider movement as a transitional space.
Given the dearth of publications on chronic fatigue conditions, the article ‘Dance movement psychotherapy for patients with fibromyalgia syndrome’ by Cristina Endrizzi and colleagues Di Pietrantonj, D’Amico, Pasetti, Bartoletti and Boccalon from Italy will be welcomed not just by body and dance movement psychotherapist but also by clinical practitioners across the range of health professions. The article is a descriptive study that evaluates dance movement psychotherapy for fibromyalgia patients as well as considering the effects of this particular intervention on pain, stiffness, fatigue, anxiety, depression and lifestyle changes. As this demographic patient group is often said to be particularly difficult for practitioners to develop good therapeutic alliances with, the insights published here are promising.
Following on, we are pleased to include in this issue from the UK, Jennifer Leigh’s, ‘Experiencing emotion: Children’s perceptions, reflections and self-regulation’, which disseminates a Somatic Movement Education programme attended by twenty-two children aged four to eleven. This phenomenological research article explores how a child cohort consisting of an ordinary mix of individuals may utilise movement to experience, express, recognise and self-regulate their emotions. In this program, dance movement and body psychotherapy methodology is adapted to an educational-social-therapeutic context on the boundaries of all three disciplines.
The final article for this issue comes from Lauren Garrett from Naropa University in the USA. Lauren, in her final year project of training as a somatic counsellor at Naropa University, she attempted to integrate somatics with lucid dream criteria and ultimately connect process work with Laban Movement Analysis. As a new writer, Lauren succeeds in both integrating concepts and ideas across two different disciplines as well as suggesting areas for future research. We will be great to see more such work submitted to the Journal hoping they will encourage more people to engage with researching, writing and sharing publicly in the future.
Returning back to Europe, in this issue we have Theo Raymond reporting on the 15th European Association for Body Psychotherapy (EABP) Congress that took place from 13th to 16th October 2016 in Athens. First of all, it was heartening to see the title ‘The Embodied Self in a dis-Embodied Society’ chosen by our Greek body psychotherapy colleagues as a theme for this congress. One wonders of course, whether the severe Greek economic crisis played a hand in the choice of this congress theme. In addition to connections being made and bridges built between body psychotherapy and societal dynamics, Raymond notes in his report the interdisciplinary characteristics of current thinking presented at this congress, a theme relevant and particularly important in times like this, when societal fragmentation and conflict appears to be on the rise.
And finally, Patrick Nolan offers a review of ‘The embodied analyst: From Freud and Reich to relationality’, a book by Jon Sletvold with a particular focus on the therapist as the title already suggests. Nolan, after tracing the book’s theoretical journey from the dawn of the psychoanalytic movement and Reichian ideas to contemporary paradigms such as embodied intersubjectiviy and embodied reflexivity, recommends Sletvold’s work as considered, thought-provoking and relevant for clinical practice.
We are also pleased to announce a forthcoming Special Issue on ‘Sexuality and Eros in Body and Dance Movement Psychotherapy’ and invite interested authors to submit articles on this subject.
We hope you enjoy this issue,
Re.Vision - Counselling and Psychotherapy with a Soulful Perspective
[email protected] Karkou
Edge Hill University
[email protected]