On Moving and Being Moved

Nonverbal Behavior in Clinical Practice

Frances La Barre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138005549
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135829551
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Every sensitive therapist intuits the wealth of meaning that resides in nonverbal behavior. Yet, trained as they are to discern and communicate verbal insights, few therapists have a clear idea of how to tap that stream of meaning. In On Moving and Being Moved, Frances La Barre remedies this situation in an intellectually broadening and clinically exciting manner. Drawing on an extensive research literature on movement and nonverbal behavior, her background as a dancer, and her extensive analytic experience, she seeks to enhance our perception of movement and our understanding of its role in therapeutic communication.

La Barre anchors her contribution in a thorough-going review of both analytic and nonanalytic sources as they bear on clinical issues. Conversant with the language of posture-gesture mergers, of kines and context analysis, and of body attitudes and self-directed touching, she spans the research literatures of all relevant disciplines, from anthropology to developmental psychology to ethology, from studies of temperament to cross-cultural comparisons of interactive rhythms. Turning to the psychoanalytic domain, she begins by considering the traditionally peripheral role of the body that derived from Freud's own belief that action was often an obstacle to verbal understanding. With the advent of the contemporary relational perspective, she holds, the stage is set for a deeper understanding of nonverbal behavior both as a source of meaning and as a ubiquitous shaper of therapeutic communication.

For the clinician, On Moving and Being Moved is a wonderfully informative introduction to the realm of the nonverbal that succeeds both as a reference work and as a pivotal contribution to the theory of therapy. La Barre goes on to illuminate the manner in which analytic and nonanalytic insights can be integrated into a flexible yet disciplined approach that restores nonverbal behavior to its rightful place in the "talking cure."

PART I

The Choreography of Conversation

CHAPTER 1

Language and Nonverbal Behavior

I t was Anna O, the first psychoanalytic patient (Breuer and Freud, 1893–1895), who called her therapy “the talking cure.” In so doing, she framed the overarching conception of psychoanalysis that remains to this day despite the fact that then, as now, psychoanalysts have recognized aspects of nonverbal behavior as essential to their work. In fact, talk was only one thread in the fabric of Anna's work with her therapist among many nonverbal strands, which included symbolic bodily symptoms and emotional expressions, dramatic entanglements and enactments. Consider the following excerpts:

She used to hallucinate in the middle of a conversation, run off, start climbing up a tree, etc. If one caught hold of her she would very quickly take up her interrupted sentence without knowing anything about what happened in the interval [p. 31].

This [deafness] too exhibited a feature that was always observable when a symptom was being ‘talked away’: the particular symptom emerged with greater force while she was discussing it [p. 37].

The patient herself had formed a strong determination that the whole treatment should be finished by the anniversary of the day she was moved to the country…. At the beginning of June, accordingly, she entered into the ‘talking cure’ with the greatest of energy. On the last day, by the help of re-arranging the room so as to resemble her father’s sickroom—she reproduced the terrifying hallucination which I have described above and which constituted the root of her whole illness [p. 40],

Anna O’s nonverbal behaviors were reported with explicit reference to their interactive, symbolic, emotional, and cognitive significance. At the same time, and perhaps in particular because of the nonverbal context described, we can appreciate the yearning for containment believed to be accomplished through verbalization rather than actualization. In these sequences, nonverbal expression is regarded as informative to some extent but also difficult to follow or to stage.

The more contained, though no less difficult, cases of the Rat Man (Freud, 1909) and Dora (Freud, 1905b) each illustrate again the expressive body movement and action dimensions of the psychoanalytic setting. When Rat Man got up from the couch and paced anxiously (p. 166), Freud (1909) noted his facial expressions, which were sometimes a composite of conflicting emotions (p. 166). Dora, of course, “fiddled” with her “reticule” (p. 76), prompting Freud’s (1905b) famous statement: “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. And thus the task of making conscious the most hidden recesses of the mind is one which it is quite possible to accomplish” (pp. 77–78).

Despite the early recognition that nonverbal behavior was readable, in time it came to be regarded principally in terms of “acting out,” revealing the patient’s unrecognized effort to avoid awareness and to relieve or be rid of unconscious wishes and fantasies (Freud, 1914). This overinclusiveness seems to have resulted from the identification of all action with impulsive, disruptive, or repetitive behavior. The problem of containment of action contributed to the undervaluing of nonverbal behavior. Analysts often struggle with the practical problem of coping with nonverbal behaviors of overt and subtle dimensions that occur despite efforts to confine communication to speech. For example, patients may demand overt demonstrations of affection, threaten violence, bring food to share with the analyst, want to meet for a session in a coffee shop, and the like. Subtler difficulties that shape the interaction patterns of analyst and patient are sometimes impossible to observe. These problems, along with theoretical conceptions of language and action, have made it difficult to see how nonverbal behavior is unavoidably involved in everything we do and say and thus necessary to understand more fully.

It is paradoxical that the theoretical dilemma with respect to nonverbal behavior began at the moment Freud defined mind and thought as derivative of the body and its actions. His conception holds that thought and verbalization are not only shaped by the body’s drives toward action, but also achieved at the expense of drives’ full satisfaction. Thus framed, struggle within the mind for and against the body and its action is inescapable. As theory evolved and later theorists took issue with parts of Freud’s model, theoretical problems with the body and mental life continued in various forms. There were, of course, revisions over time that expressly sought to move away from the body and toward social conceptions as the central factor organizing mental life. Even in these, action remained polarized with language. All this in the face of the fact that “acting out” is inevitable in any treatment. And so the work of treatment in the pursuit of the patient’s revealing thought through speech continued to be ambivalently attentive to action, believed to be the blatant and subtle repetitions that constitute the transference in the interaction between analyst and patient. Since action is inherent in the psychoanalytic situation, dialogue about the place of nonverbal behavior in psychoanalytic theory and technique has been continuous and full of dispute.

In reading the literature of this dialogue, it becomes clear that different layers of nonverbal behavior have been singled out as significant by various schools of thought or by individual psychoanalysts. Hence analysts are familiar with the following kinds of nonverbal expressions: psychosomatic and emotional expression (e.g., Breuer and Freud, 1893-1895; Freud, 1905a; Ferenczi, 1931, 1933; Deutsch, 1933; Alexander, 1950); attitudes or states of body-mind recognized in gestural and postural repertoire or range of muscle tension changes (arrogance, humility, wellness, illness, preoccupation, engagement) (Deutsch, 1947; Reich, 1949; Sullivan, 1954b); such actions as leaving the room, getting up from the chair or couch, taking a tissue, scratching the head, which have been recognized as sometimes aimed at an interactive or symbolic end as well as having a more obvious goal within the sequence (Bion, 1970; Scheflen, 1973); gestural and postural behaviors that are seen as expressions of fantasies (and phantasies), thoughts, or representations of prior interactions (Klein, 1926, 1955; Deutsch, 1947; Bion, 1970).

Furthermore, the conventional distinction between nonverbal behavior and speech is overly simplistic. Clearly, speech content can be constructed as an act as well as a communication about its content. This happens when what is to be expressed is not conveyed through speech content alone. For example, when someone shouts “Fire!” the intent is to cause alarm and flight, not just to explain that there is a fire. The alarm is carried in the way the word is said—through its loudness, intensity, and abruptness. In the clinical setting, when a patient speaks of gory fantasies, it may be not only because they are important to understand in themselves, but also because the patient wants to provoke feelings in the analyst, perhaps by using fluctuating tones of voice to accompany graphic details. And an analyst may convey warmth or arrogance in tone of voice or body position even though aiming only to construct the content of speech as an interpretation. In such vocal and bodily behavior we recognize an enacted countertransferential experience.

Thus the logic of action has been recognized despite the tendency to keep nonverbal behavior in the shadow of language and mind, which are seen as more evolved, more easily contained, and ultimately more valuable than nonverbal factors. This bias, both of theory and of practice, is based on the ongoing but erroneous assumption that language and mind are fundamentally separate from and superior to nonverbal behavior—body movement and body experience, action, enactment. It is particularly opportune now to correct this sometimes overt, sometimes subtle bias since the psychoanalytic community is currently engaged with renewed energy in questions about action, or enactment (Gill, 1983, 1988; Levenson, 1983; Ogden, 1986; Ehrenberg, 1992; McLaughlin, 1992; Gedo, 1994; Lindon, 1994; Busch, 1995; Knoblauch, 1997; Bacal, 1998; Ellman and Moskowitz, 1998).

Now, as before, there are two kinds of approaches to the exploration of nonverbal behavior in psychoanalysis. First, many analysts may grasp the significance of a piece of nonverbal behavior but approach it on a case-by-case basis as a “special occasion” within their work. They have a strong intuitive connection to aspects of nonverbal behavior but no theoretical frame in which to see how their observations fit next to others’. Second, some analysts focus explicitly on nonverbal behavior and can clearly identify behavioral referents that they look for generally. But there is a limitation here: they see behavior through the biases of their theoretical framework and so restrict what can be seen of behavior that falls outside it. They have not connected their work with the large body of literature that is expressly about nonverbal behavior and that would expand their perspectives.

What is needed, therefore, is a comprehensive integration of research on nonverbal behavior as an axis for reengaging basic psychoanalytic premises about action. In my view, this research is fundamental because it alerts us to the intricate nonverbal details of every relationship, including that of psychoanalyst and patient and it enriches the analyst’s perception and understanding of the expression of emotion and attitude (see, e.g., Mehrabian, 1969; Mehrabian and Williams, 1969; Ekman, Friesan, and Tomkins, 1971; Mehrabian, 1972; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1974; Ekman and Oster, 1979; Ekman, Friesan, and Ancoli, 1980; Ekman, 1985), of symbolic behavior (Scheflen, 1965; Freedman et al., 1972; Freedman, 1977; Mahl, 1977), of interactive behavior patterns and rhythms (Kestenberg, 1965, 1975b; Scheflen, 1964, 1973; Birdwhistell, 1970; Condon and Ogston, 1971; Stern 1977, 1982b, 1985; Condon, 1982), and of individual differences in behavior (Laban and Lawrence, 1947; Laban, 1950; Lamb, 1965; Kestenberg and Sossin, 1979). But the ramifications go beyond the practical and technical. Familiarity with a wide range of nonverbal dimensions of human behavior and interaction sheds light on such theoretical issues as how transference and countertransference arise, how we come to understand each other, how “self” develops within relatedness to others, and how drive-related conceptions of psychosexual development may be expanded, understood behaviorally, and integrated within an interpersonal frame. A grasp of the full range of nonverbal behavior makes it starkly clear that we are never “just talking,” that we are always influencing each other through subtle and obvious aspects of nonverbal behavior as well as through what we express in words and language.

CHAPTER 2

Talking and Acting

When I talk with friends and colleagues about my interest in nonverbal behavior, many have their own anecdotes to share. One said, “Oh, you mean for instance when someone sits on the floor in the middle of the room? I worked with someone who did that—he said the chair was too far away and the couch was too close.” Another colleague mentioned that a woman he worked with often reversed her position on the couch because she wanted to see her analyst. A friend told me of a patient who used to bring the wastebasket into the middle of the room and at particular moments in the dialogue would “slam dunk” the tissues. Still another spoke of her experience of a male patient who constantly seemed to pressure her for physical contact by leaning very far forward in his seat.

These encounters involved many different aspects of nonverbal interaction. But also, identified as oddly outside normal practice, they point out the difficulty of seeing behavior whole: talking and acting occurring together all the time. Nonverbal behavior is still often defined as quite separate from verbal interaction, in the background, and occurring in unusual outbursts that break away from the flow of conversation. My purpose here is to challenge this convention and to show how these separably identifiable moments are pulled out of what is really an ongoing, uninterrupted stream of nonverbal behavior factors.

Greta, speaking about her personal history, moves frequently side-to-side in her seat, with smooth and evenly flowing glances to the right and then to the left, in rhythmic phrasings well timed with her speech. She is ranging across ideas, exploring the horizon in thought and movement. When she comes to an event that caused her some pain, she holds still, then pulls back in her seat, looks down. She comes forward and upward with her torso and head as she relates how she tried to resolve a problem and sinks back and down as she describes her experience of frustration. She circles her hand as she gropes for a word or makes gestures reminiscent of the objects or dynamics she is describing. At one point, she strokes the pillow next to her lightly and slowly as she speaks about how important her daughter is to her and what a solace after her own childhood with a rageful mother.

All her movements and facial expressions are, up to this point, expectable. They add to my understanding, and they fall well within culturally prescribed, easy-flowing body language. It is easy to imagine the pillow she strokes to be symbolic of her daughter and perhaps of longings toward me. I have followed and synchronized my small shifts of position and attitude with her rhythms, shifting gears smoothly from one phase to the next. For instance, I shift my position as she completes a shift with her body and thought. I am moved to tenderness and longing as I react to seeing her stroking the pillow. Her movements and rhythms are a part of her communication, as they parallel and amplify her speech content and rhythm.

But abruptly this ease of expression and understanding changes. She is now less fluent in her speech—she is halting; she starts and stops. Her speech has faltered, yes, but there is more. I am drawn to look closely at her face. It is now split. One side of it is drooping, its expression shifting between sadness and limp neutrality. The other side looks angry. I remark on her stopping and ask what happened to block her. She does not answer my question but retraces her steps. Moving back in her seat, she resumes her side-to-side glancing, now with more tension in her movements, and goes back to a preceding event in her history. Then she again comes forward with her body and her thoughts but again falters and drops back.

She has gone from speaking and behaving fluently to halting, conveying elements of herself to me that she is not aware of and withholding aspects of her experience from me and from herself. I call attention to her shift and ask again about her experience as she shifted. She notices with me now that she is having some difficulty. Reflecting to myself on her split face, I ask her about her split experience: I wonder aloud if she feels two ways about something at this point; also, I say, she appears to be cutting up her thoughts, along with her feelings. She responds that she understands what I am saying, that it connects with something in her experience and makes sense. She had not realized that she was angry at herself for feeling sad and could not accept it. Her behavior repeats the way her mother always treated her and also shows her own attack on her sad, longing feelings. She sighs and weeps, and a new phase of communication begins.

There is a seamlessness between these verbal and kinesic dimensions of Greta’s and my communication which is as important as anything that she and I say. She shows me as she tells me, and she shows me when and how she cannot tell me. These are not actions that leap out at me, but they are neverthe less informative and interactively influential behaviors. This kind of movement behavior occurs all the time, though we do not generally remark on it.

Other ways of looking at the ongoing actions that occur along with speech make use of a different level and kind of nonverbal influence. In the following example, repeated sequences of behaviors in speech and action have a meaning that, as I discovered, was not as obvious as it first seemed. The meaning of the acted components of the sequence were revealed later to contradict the self-presentation of their initial appearance.

Marilyn, in negotiating for a reduced fee, cites debts that her husband incurred before their marriage broke up. I voice some doubts that, as she has told me before, her financial situation in fact requires the reduction, but I leave it open for exploration. Marilyn has developed the habit of taking several tissues from my tissue box before she leaves each session. It has taken a few sessions for me to notice that this has become a pattern. I now find myself feeling a bit resentful about her taking them (not how I usually feel about tissues) and experience her newly as greedy, perhaps even as performing a minor theft. I inquire about what she makes of her behavior with the tissues. She says, “I don’t know”—she thinks she might need the tissues on the way to work, or perhaps they are a special remembrance of me and the session. I notice to myself that I am not touched, only annoyed.

As I continue to inquire about her behavior, she shows confusion and hesitates in speaking. She runs through a list of feelings that we have met before in other contexts and that for a time seem to fit: she needs some connection to me when she leaves; she feels very needy and the tissues are something to hold on to, she is avoiding the sadness and pain of separation. But those answers are ultimately not convincing to either of us. She realizes reluctantly that she just feels that she needs them, and it seemed to her that I don’t. After all, she thinks, they are just there, being offered, so why not “take advantage” of them? Her feelings actually center on greediness and her habitual confusing of need and desire, which she keeps hi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part I The Choreography of Conversation
• Part II Psychoanalytic Theory The Setting of the Unseen Scene
• Part III The Logic of Action Studies of Nonverbal Behavior
• Part IV The Logic of Action in the Clinical Setting
• Conclusion
• References
• Index