About a Body

Working with the Embodied Mind in Psychotherapy

Jenny Corrigall, Helen Payne, Heward Wilkinson, Jenny Corrigall, Helen Payne, Heward Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317834670
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How does our body reveal us to ourselves?

The body can inform the work we do in mental health. This unique collection invites the reader to consider the way we think about the embodied mind, and how it can inform both our lives and our work in psychotherapy and counselling.

The body is viewed as integral to the mind in this book, and in the approaches illustrated in it. Instead of splitting off the body and treating the patient as a body with a mind, contributors from a variety of approaches ask the reader to consider how we might be with, and work with, 'bodymind' as an interrelated whole. Subjects covered include:

• the application of affective neuroscience understandings to life as well as to clinical issues
• the body in psychotherapy with a person who is facing death
• the history, significance and scope of body psychotherapy today
• psychoanalytic approaches to working with the embodied mind
• authentic movement groups in the development of wellbeing in our bodymindspirit
• the body and spirituality

This book is unique in its pluralism: it includes a wide range of differing views of the importance of the body in psychotherapy, both in theory and in practice, and it relates these to the latest discussions in affective neuroscience. It will be invaluable for those working in, or studying, psychotherapy and counselling, and will also interest those working generally in the mental health field.

1

TOUCHING EACH OTHER YET BEING OTHER

Heward Wilkinson

‘In this body, a fathom long …’

There is a famous teaching of the Buddha, quoted in the title of her contribution by Maura Sills (Chapter 13):

In this body, a fathom long, with its thoughts and emotions, I declare are the world, the origins of the world, the cessation of the world and the path leading to the cessation of the world.

(Anguttara Nikaya, IV, 45)

This sentence encapsulates some of both the richness, and the dilemmas, of the issues around the body which we explored in the conference ‘About a Body’ and which are reflected in this book.

This body, of which the Buddha is speaking and which he says encompasses everything pertaining to our life and to our salvation or liberation, is the experienced body, the phenomenal body, the phenomenological body. Some would say there is no other body. They would say that the physical world itself is analysable in terms simply of actual and possible experience (Berkeley 1710; Ayer 1940).

But not the realist materialists (Dennett 1991). For the materialists the experienced body either is identical with, or is causally completely dependent upon, the physical body – that body whose remains poignantly persist after our experiencing self has died.

These initial formulations of mine are oversimplified, but indicate in a preliminary way some of the creative tensions this book carries within it. For instance, some of the contributors at any rate start from a Darwinian materialist position. This is true of Jaak Panksepp in his chapters, even though he subscribes to what he calls ‘double aspect monism’, and is clear that ‘science has no mind-scope’ (which unequivocally implicates the phenomenal aspect). These contributors will differ substantially in their metaphysical emphasis from those who start from a substantially, or primarily, spirit-centred position (such as most of those from humanistic, transpersonal, Jungian, and body psychotherapy based positions). On the face of it, the former would be fairly chary of such claims as Maura Sills makes about Emoto Masaru’s work, that he has demonstrated that ‘water that has been exposed to different kinds of thoughts and emotions will form different types of crystalline structures when it is frozen’ (p. 199).

Most of the contributors from humanistic, transpersonal, Jungian and body psychotherapy based positions would likewise be sympathetic to, or endorse, talk about ‘subtle energy’, and would balance Western with Eastern medicine approaches. They in their turn would be wary of such remarks of Panksepp’s, with its ostensible reductionism, as:

A guiding premise of the affective neuroscience approach is that various emotional feelings and other affective states reflect primitive states of consciousness that emerge substantially from the neurodynamics of brain circuits that control instinctual emotional behaviours in animal brains.

(p. 14)

Some of our contributors actively pursue dialogue over such controversies, in an academic way; others creatively present their positions; the book as a whole, in its overall pluralistic implication, balances these differing viewpoints on theory and practice. This introductory chapter will seek to fluidly reflect the variety within the contributions, evoking the issues which arise without too slavish an attempt merely to summarize, though it is hoped the central ideas will be touched on clearly enough.

Several of the dichotomies explored, explicitly or implicitly, here include: mind/brain; mind/body; brain/body; emotion/cognition; reptilian/mammalian; monist/dualist; materialist/non-materialist; non-verbal/verbal; body contact in the work/non-body contact based work; environment/genetics. And we could – provocatively – add, even: ‘hard science’ versus ‘alternative science’. Again, I have not yet so much as mentioned ‘psychoanalysis/non-psychoanalysis’, which was a major tension – but also, to our delight, point of dialogue – of the conference and this book, especially, but not only, in the dialogue between Roz Carroll and Susie Orbach (Chapter 5). In the light of that tension, we might express the ‘hard science’ versus ‘alternative science’ dilemma as the question put in terms of psychoanalytic assumptions: is countertransference a form of symbolic inference from subtle sensory data present and past, or is it a form of telepathy? Daniel Stern’s recent work (Stern 2004), in my view, shows very significant movement in this respect (Wilkinson 2003).

But it is a much richer, more complex, and paradoxical tapestry than this list of dichotomies suggests. The dichotomies, perhaps, frame the unfolding but it transcends them, not in any neat, but in a subtle way. This will emerge more fully as we consider the various specific contributions.

In my overview of the themes of this book, I see the chapters as falling into three groupings: first, those concentrating on affective neuroscience and psychotherapy (Panksepp, Chapters 2 and 3; Carroll, Chapter 4); second, those primarily concerned with dialogues in relation to psychoanalysis and the body, and the integration of different theories and practice (Orbach and Carroll, Chapter 5; Young, Chapter 6; Mollon, Chapter 7; Soth, Chapter 8; Herbert, Chapter 10); and third, those focusing on the body and spirituality (Boyesen, Chapter 9; Payne, Chapter 11; Schaverien, Chapter 12; Sills, Chapter 13; Zabriskie, Chapter 14). I will follow these groupings in my reflections on the variety and the pluralism of the contributions to this book.

Back to Freudian primary process via affective neuroscience

This heading is a somewhat impish paraphrase of Jaak Panksepp’s ppossibility that two very different processesosition, but it brings out something important about it all the same. He is one of our central contributors, the one who provides the major affective neuroscience underpinning of the book, as already implied, and in his chapters a deeply anti-reductivist trend surprisingly emerges, against the background of his Darwinian starting point.

Panksepp, in line with Damasio (1994), Solms and Turnbull (2002) and others, sets out to offset the undue emphasis on cybernetic models rooted in cognition, linked to behaviour, appealing to feeling instead. Instead, Panksepp appeals to the core early affective neuro-systems which humans share with all mammals:

The possibility that two very different processes, such as emotional actions and emotional feelings, arise from substantially the same brain mechanisms is a critical aspect of the dual-aspect monism strategy that has guided my own strategy for four decades. According to such a view, a close study of the neural substrates of instinctual emotional behaviours of other animals may reveal the neural principles that generate raw emotional feelings in humans.

(pp. 14–15)

On the face of it this expresses the reductive strategy already touched on. But we note that, like Damasio (1994, 1999), Panksepp alludes to Spinoza (1663), and Spinoza is of course the paradigmatic exponent of dual-aspect monism. So, if we turn to the experiential, as opposed to the behavioural, dimension of this monism, or to both together, what do we get? If we turn to both together, we get a conception of emotion as inseparably enmeshed with bodily expression, as articulated for instance by William James (1890), but as also taken as bedrock by body psychotherapy. And if we turn primarily to the experiential dimension of this, we get the anti-Cartesian emphasis, very strong in Panksepp (which leads him to a concerned wrestling with the ethical dilemmas of, and the necessary ethical codes governing, animal research into affective neuroscience), that animals are every bit as profoundly experiencing subjects, sentient centres, as are humans.

This leads Panksepp to a conception of the relation of the animal in us to the cognitively and culturally developed human in us, which is profoundly Freudian, and from which, like Freud, he derives our proneness to psychological disorder – and the means of its resolution. As a result he roots it in a modelling of this primal mammalian emotional dimension for which he actually uses the Freudian language of ‘primary process’. He quotes (p. 15) Robert Burns’ touching poem about his overturning the nest of a field mouse, which includes the words:

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!

The present only toucheth thee.

(To a Mouse, 1785)

And goes on, with Freudian sombreness and gravitas:

Because of our vast ability to look far back in memory and to imagine dreadful future problems, we humans are prone to sustain internally generated emotional arousal and disturbances much more than other animals. Through primary-process, affectively driven intrapsychic processes – the attributions, judgements, beliefs and construals, driven by the primal emotional ‘energies’ of anxiety, desire, and grief – humans commonly sustain affective arousal long after the precipitating circumstances have passed.

(p. 16, my italics)

Susie Orbach later (Chapter 5) expresses reservations about a caricature version of this model, in which the body enacts what is denied or repressed by the mind, a caricature she finds both in much psychoanalysis and in much body psychotherapy, but it is clear that this is a caricature of a complex double relationship which Panksepp, like Freud, is here invoking.

But what we could easily miss is that, suddenly, as in the Freud of Interpretation of Dreams (1900), here we have a profoundly phenomenological conception of human and mammalian primary experiencing, as absolutely non-reducible, and as constituting the field and the background of human existence, which suddenly gives human embodied experience the anti-reductive authority which, for instance, a Martin Buber (1923) – or the Buddha – accord to it. And it is one which leads on to a positively Jungian conception of the archetypal dimension of human experience – one which comes out in Panksepp’s postulate of a primal feeling base which is objectless, or rather only indeterminately object-tending, which leaves room for the Jungian conception (not a million miles away from Freud’s (1905) concept of ‘drive’ of archetypes as potentials for shaping the patterns of experience in interaction with the environment. This subtle conception comes out in such sentences as the following:

The image that may be most correct is that large-scale emotional-affective attractor landscapes, that are intrinsically (non-reflectively) intentional, pull in relevant cognitive relationships the way strong weather systems embrace and change the landscape, often in a lasting way.

(p. 20)

And this is also reminiscent of the ‘It’, as Groddeck (1977) rather than Freud envisaged it, as a global indeterminate totality of tendencies which encompasses the whole of the self.

Here we suddenly see why there has sprung up the profound, if ambiguous, present day alliance that there is, between affective neuroscience research, and the work, informed by a strong sense of spirituality, of the body psychotherapists, as well as those whose bases are in psychoanalysis, or Jungian analytical psychology.

Panksepp proceeds to map these potentials in detail in seven basic systems he has identified so far, those that mediate Seeking, Fear, Rage, Lust, Care, Panic and Playfulness.

In Chapter 3, he brings out some of the subtle implications of his conception, in two instances. On the one hand he indicates the possibility that the social threshold of autistic children may be significantly increased by the use of opioid antagonists, since excessive opioid blocks the social Seeking system in them. And, on the other, he argues strongly against the use of psycho-stimulants, such as Ritalin, with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnosed children, on the grounds that they inhibit the impulse to rough-and-tumble play, which is the profoundest need of many of these children. Here his model strongly supports psychotherapeutic commonsense.

Roz Carroll, in Chapter 4, offers us the more detailed application of that model for psychotherapy. She succinctly puts the complexity of Panksepp’s position – and its implication for p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword by Lisa Wake
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Touching each other yet being other
• 2 the core emotional systems of the mammalian brain: the fundamental substrates of human emotions.
• 3 Examples of application of the affective neuroscience strategy to clinical issues
• 4 A new era for psychotherapy: Panksepp's affect model in the context of neuroscience and its implications for contemporary psychotherapy practice
• 5 Contemporary approaches to the body in psychotherapy: two psychotherapists in dialogue
• 6 One hundred and fifty years on: the history, significance and scope of body psychotherapy today
• 7 Implications of EMDR and energy therapies: the limits of talking therapy
• 8 What therapeutic hope for a subjective mind in an objectified body?
• 9 How I developed biodynamic psychotherapy
• 10 Healing from complex trauma: an integrative 3-systems' approach
• 11 The body as container and expresser: Authentic Movement groups in the development of wellbeing in our bodymindspirit
• 12 Transference and the meaning of touch: the body in psychotherapy with the client who is facing death
• 13 'In this body, a fathom long ...': working with embodied mind and interbeing in psychotherapy
• 14 When psyche meets soma: the question of incarnation
• Index