Description
This book introduces body psychotherapy as one of the essential approaches in psychotherapy, reflecting the increasing integration of the body into clinical mental health practice.
The book offers an entirely new view on body psychotherapy based upon advanced research on embodiment, memory, emotion regulation, developmental psychology and body communication and an experiential and relational understanding of psychotherapy. Accordingly, the author grounds the theory of body psychotherapy on the theoretical approach of enactivism, which regards experience as arising from meaningful living interaction with others and their environment. The book, fortified with clinical examples, shows the distinctiveness of body psychotherapy as compared with a traditional talking therapy approach. It also convincingly demonstrates that each form of psychotherapy should consider body experiences.
This text will be a comprehensive foundation for psychotherapists of every orientation, scholars of the humanities and students and especially those wishing to integrate embodied experience into their understanding of their patients.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction 2. Towards a definition of body psychotherapy 3. The quest for natural aliveness: On the origins of body psychotherapy 4. The legacy of the schools 5. The living subject 6. Body experience: The basis of self-experience 7. The experienced body and the body of natural science 8. Embodiment research: The sensorimotor basis of thinking and feeling 9. Memory: Embodied remembering 10. Emotions: Models of emotionality and the practice of body psychotherapy 11. Child development: The shaping of experience in early affect motor dialogue 12. Affect motor schemas as body narratives 13. Defence and coping meachnisms: Bodily forms of processing experience 14. Communication with the body: Body behaviour and therapeutic interaction 15. Transference and somatic resonance 16. Moments of understanding 17. Self-regulation and life regulation 18. The contribution of body psychotherapy to integration
