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INTEGRA CPD – Training with Michael Soth: For CPD courses and events for counsellors and psychotherapists, as well as Michael’s writing, presentations, hand-outs and other resources for practitioners, see: www.integra-cpd.co.uk No 'Relating Cure' without Embodiment by Michael Soth Soth, M. (2007) unpublished manuscript This is some of the content of my presentation at the 2006 BACP conference "It's the relationship that matters" turned into an article, bringing some of the relevant modern neuroscience and bodymind principles to counselling. Having addressed the doctor-patient dualism as one legacy from the 19th century origins of our profession in the paper “How the wound enters the consulting room and the relationship”, here I address the other main dualism: the mind-over-body dualism. Introduction In previous articles I suggested that there are two dualisms which our field has been struggling with (and against) over the last hundred years: the doctor-patient dualism (=‘medical model’) and the body-mind dualism. And I proposed that extricating ourselves from dualism is usually a process of oscillating from one extreme to the other, until we can fully engage the dialogue between the inherent polarities and eventually hold the contradiction between them in a paradoxical embrace. We then recognise that the mutually exclusive opposites are also mutually constitutive: as well as being antagonistic they also co-create and depend on each other. In terms of the doctor-patient dualism, the field has swung from being embedded in Freud’s ‘medical model’ assumptions to the humanistic ‘anti- medical model’, leaving us confused as to what we really mean when we say: “it’s the relationship that matters”. In the last issue I was proposing that we may be able to embrace both therapy as treatment and therapy as relationship as valid and necessary ingredients in therapeutic ‘relating’. In this article I want to focus on the notion of ‘embodiment’, and suggest that a similar paradoxical position is required to transcend and work with body-mind dualism. The body-mind problem and the late 19 th century Now we all know that much wiser heads have been broken on the philosophy of the body-mind conundrum - Schopenhauer has called it the ‘world knot’. Ken Wilber, summarising the research and writing on the subject, says: “the influential philosophers addressing the mind-body problem are more convinced than ever of its unyielding nature. There is simply no agreed-upon solution to this world- knot.” (Wilber 2000, p. 175) The origins of our field are steeped in body-mind dualism, or – as the tradition of Body Psychotherapy is used to calling it: the body-mind split (or what Wilber, more accurately, calls the ‘European Split’ – “which is a peculiar lesion in the modern and post-modern consciousness”). These origins go back to the late 19 th century when the three disciplines of psychoanalysis, neuroscience and genetics were born roughly at the same time. Consequently, all three have inherited and carried the zeitgeist of that time, and to some extent have been defined by it. I have struggled to capture the basic assumptions, the inherent paradigm of that zeitgeist, each time I am asked to explain – ideally “in terms that a five- year old can understand” [in the words of Denzel Washington as the lawyer in the film ‘Philadelphia’] - what counselling can learn from neuroscience. Some socio-historical and philosophical compromises were required, but as a result of my struggles I can herewith present to you my ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’-version of neuroscience: according to this vastly over-simplified version (please, indulge me!), the late 19 th century was in the grip of a dominant fantasy reminiscent of the figure all British parents know as ‘the Fat Controller’. The world was imagined as mechanism directed by the quasi-divine representative of an order which the ‘good’ engines obey, and the ‘bad’ engines disturb. As all well-trained counsellors will recognise, this arrangement translates fairly neatly into Freud’s Super-Ego (=Fat Controller), Ego (the good, dutiful, reality-adjusted, obedient engines), and Id (the selfish, greedy and impulsive engines). In this universe, order is maintained from above, all

No 'Relating Cure' without Embodiment

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INTEGRA CPD – Training with Michael Soth: For CPD courses and events for counsellors and psychotherapists, as well as Michael’s writing, presentations,

hand-outs and other resources for practitioners, see: www.integra-cpd.co.uk

No 'Relating Cure' without Embodiment by Michael Soth

Soth, M. (2007) unpublished manuscript

This is some of the content of my presentation at the 2006 BACP conference "It's the relationship that matters" turned into an article, bringing some of the relevant modern neuroscience and bodymind principles to counselling. Having addressed the doctor-patient dualism as one legacy from the 19th century origins of our profession in the paper “How the wound enters the consulting room and the relationship”, here I address the other main dualism: the mind-over-body dualism. Introduction In previous articles I suggested that there are two dualisms which our field has been struggling with (and against) over the last hundred years: the doctor-patient dualism (=‘medical model’) and the body-mind dualism. And I proposed that extricating ourselves from dualism is usually a process of oscillating from one extreme to the other, until we can fully engage the dialogue between the inherent polarities and eventually hold the contradiction between them in a paradoxical embrace. We then recognise that the mutually exclusive opposites are also mutually constitutive: as well as being antagonistic they also co-create and depend on each other. In terms of the doctor-patient dualism, the field has swung from being embedded in Freud’s ‘medical model’ assumptions to the humanistic ‘anti-medical model’, leaving us confused as to what we really mean when we say: “it’s the relationship that matters”. In the last issue I was proposing that we may be able to embrace both therapy as treatment and therapy as relationship as valid and necessary ingredients in therapeutic ‘relating’. In this article I want to focus on the notion of ‘embodiment’, and suggest that a similar paradoxical position is required to transcend and work with body-mind dualism.

The body-mind problem and the late 19th century Now we all know that much wiser heads have been broken on the philosophy of the body-mind conundrum - Schopenhauer has called it the ‘world knot’. Ken Wilber, summarising the research and writing on the subject, says: “the influential philosophers addressing the mind-body problem are more convinced than ever of its unyielding nature. There

is simply no agreed-upon solution to this world-knot.” (Wilber 2000, p. 175) The origins of our field are steeped in body-mind dualism, or – as the tradition of Body Psychotherapy is used to calling it: the body-mind split (or what Wilber, more accurately, calls the ‘European Split’ – “which is a peculiar lesion in the modern and post-modern consciousness”). These origins go back to the late 19th century when the three disciplines of psychoanalysis, neuroscience and genetics were born roughly at the same time. Consequently, all three have inherited and carried the zeitgeist of that time, and to some extent have been defined by it. I have struggled to capture the basic assumptions, the inherent paradigm of that zeitgeist, each time I am asked to explain – ideally “in terms that a five-year old can understand” [in the words of Denzel Washington as the lawyer in the film ‘Philadelphia’] - what counselling can learn from neuroscience. Some socio-historical and philosophical compromises were required, but as a result of my struggles I can herewith present to you my ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’-version of neuroscience: according to this vastly over-simplified version (please, indulge me!), the late 19th century was in the grip of a dominant fantasy reminiscent of the figure all British parents know as ‘the Fat Controller’. The world was imagined as mechanism directed by the quasi-divine representative of an order which the ‘good’ engines obey, and the ‘bad’ engines disturb. As all well-trained counsellors will recognise, this arrangement translates fairly neatly into Freud’s Super-Ego (=Fat Controller), Ego (the good, dutiful, reality-adjusted, obedient engines), and Id (the selfish, greedy and impulsive engines). In this universe, order is maintained from above, all

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disturbance is a function of wilful irrationality and all change for the better is top-down, goal-directed, linear, rational. I am suggesting that the late 19th century perceived reality through the lenses of this world view and found corroboration of its assumptions everywhere. Initially neuroscience believed that the brain was the seat of the mind, instructing and directing the body in the same way the Fat Controller directed his island of Sodor. The implied Cartesian dualism was based on the equation mind = consciousness = rationality over and against ‘dumb matter’ = body = unconsciousness. Later, throughout the 20th century,through detailed understanding of the electrical conductivity of nerve cells, the Brain as the

command centre of the Fat Controller was to morph into a Computer, but the assumption regarding top-down maintenance of order remained. The Fat Controller kept upgrading his technology, but his central command position remained unquestioned and unassailable until the late 20th century. Until the 1960’s, for instance, it was largely taken for granted – by both psychoanalysis and behaviourism - that any ‘mental’ problems had to be understood and dealt with by strenghtening a variety of external and internal Fat Controllers, i.e. insight, verbalisation, effort, will and discipline along with gratification delay and other gifts of “Civilization and its Discontents” (Freud 1930).

The demise of the Fat Controller The anti-authoritarianism, postmodernism, feminism etc. of the last 40 years, along with chaos, systems and complexity theories in science, however, have succeeded in undermining the Fat Controller’s credibility and top-dog position.

Over the last two decades, both neuroscience and genetics had to purge themselves of certain “central dogmas” (Fox-Keller 2000) which were originally seen as definitional of the discipline itself [To back up these claims at least minimally, I will illustrate the following section with a series of quotes by eminent geneticists themselves, all from

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Fox-Keller, E. 2000 “The Century of the Gene” – an abundance of similar statements could be found for neuroscience]. Diethard Tautz: “Geneticists must maintain that single and direct causal relationships exist. This genetic paradigm is at the basis of all systematic […] experiments.[…But] even the best paradigm eventually meets a crisis. Such a crisis is imminent.” So what paradigm assumptions are endangered by this crisis ? Apparently, genetic replication, for all its true-to-life stability from generation to generation, requires no central overseer or Fat Controller, according to Antonio Garcia-Bellido: “Development results from local effects, and there is no brain or mysterious entity governing the whole.” What is he saying ? This is beginning to sound reminiscent of Nietzsche: the Fat Controller is dead! Or, more precisely, he never existed, at least not in the absolute, exclusive form we were wont to imagine him in. As a fantasy, he is on a par with Santa Claus. Fox-Keller quotes geneticist Robert Haynes: “The stability of genes is now seen to be more a matter of biochemical dynamics than of molecular ‘statics’ of DNA structure. The genetic machinery of the cell provides the most striking example known of a highly reliable, dynamic system built from vulnerable and unreliable parts.” and then comments: “ … the widespread belief (unspoken I suspect, but amounting to worship) amongst geneticists that the genes are so precious that they must (somehow) be protected from biological insult, perhaps by being carefully wrapped. … The possibility that the genes were dynamically stable, subject to the hurly-burly of both insult and clumsy (i.e. enzymatic) efforts to reverse the insults, was unthinkable.” So apparently there never was an exclusive top-down regulation. No polit bureau or other rigid central control mechanism is needed to maintain order over and against an otherwise increasingly disintegrating cosmos, anarchically at the mercy of entropy. Self-regulation and self-organisation in non-linear complex systems incline the universe towards an ever-increasing complex order, without any Fat Controller being required to organise it all. Apparently, order (and the evolution of ever-‘better’ orders) does not have to be given or imposed – it’s built-in to the fabric of the universe and will come about by itself, on its own accord, without any Fat Controller, or anybody’s mind having to envision, pursue or enforce it. As Bateson (“Steps to an Ecology of Mind” 1972) proposed so radically: “Mind is an emergent property of complex systems.” In the 1980’s courageous neuroscientists were beginning to take the rug from under the feet of their own tradition; then in the 1990’s, the decade of the brain, neuroscience rose – phoenix-like –

from the ashes of its shattered assumptions and smouldering dualistic remains, ready to enter the 21st century. And, as illustrated by the quotes above, just as the ‘human genome’ project – initially a god-like Fat Controller fantasy if there ever was one – is coming to completion, modern genetics is apparently going through a similar process. So the big millenium million-dollar question for us is: will counselling and psychotherapy manage to do the same? Geneticist Barbara McClintock gives us a flavour of what that might involve: “We were making assumptions we had no right to make. From the point of view of how the whole thing actually worked, we knew how part of it worked ... We didn’t even inquire, didn’t even see how the rest was going on. All these other things were happening, and we didn’t see it.” A Fat Controller perspective is bound to be systematically oblivious of certain aspects of reality. Of the two dualisms at the heart of the Fat Controller universe, our profession has been preoccupied with deconstructing the ‘relational’ one between doctor and patient (I tried to trace the steps of that deconstruction in my last article). And as the Fat Controller presided as godparent over the birth of our profession as well as neuroscience and genetics, for clues to extricate ourselves from body-mind dualism we can look to these two sibling disciplines as well as the largely marginalised tradition of Body Psychotherapy which has been quietly championing the body for the last eight decades and built up considerable, if partial and biased, expertise.

The new body/mind paradigm As a plethora of publications are now available introducing neuroscience to psychological practitioners (Gerhardt, Corrigall/Wilkinson, Wilkinson), I will just indicate some headlines, and focus on summarising some of the clinically relevant implications regarding the new conception of the relationship between body and mind.

Antonio Damasio: humans cannot think (or have a sense of self) without a body (body-proper) Damasio has been instrumental in deconstructing the mind-over-body paradigm. Rather than exclusively directing and instructing the body, the brain’s thinking process depends on mapping the body’s moment-to-moment changes in intricate detail: “... mental patterns we call images consists of specific brain regions employing circuits of neurons to construct a continual, dynamic neural pattern corresponding to different activities in the body”. Our sense of self depends on the brain registering, monitoring and representing the myriad messages from the body-proper regarding

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changes to its internal condition, spatial position, orientation and movement as affected in and by the environment. In simple terms, this lends support to the 70’s pop-psychology adage: “Feel first, think later!” or Fritz Perls: “Lose your head and come to your senses!” It makes credible such practices as Gendlin’s Focussing which make the physical ‘felt sense’ central to their work. The idea of autonomous identity resting in some disembodied consciousness (“I think, therefore I am!”), beyond relational, social and physical embeddedness, can be questioned as pathological rather than a cultural ideal to strive for. Reichian Body Psychotherapy has always considered the psychological-mental process as reflecting the physical-emotional and vice versa.

Candace Pert: no emotion without the ‘chemical brain’ which extends throughout the body through ‘information molecules’. Pert, the woman who established the opiate receptors in the brain, goes further than most neuroscientists in deconstructing the equation brain = Fat Controller. Her research into neuropeptides proposes a bodywide network of information as the biochemical basis for emotions, constituting "basic units of a language used by cells throughout the organism to communicate across systems such as the endocrine, neurological, gastrointestinal, and even the immune system."... "For a long time, neuroscientists have agreed that emotions are controlled by certain parts of the brain. This is a big, neuro-centric assumption - and now I think it is a wrong or at least incomplete one!”

Allan Schore: therapeutic relating is largely a right-brain to right-brain interaction Schore is an interdisciplinary giant who has woven together neuroscience, infant development and attachment theory with psychoanalysis. In his own summary: “The maturation of the socioemotional right hemisphere is experience-dependent, and these experiences are provided in the attachment transactions that occur in the first two years of life. … attachment represents synchronized dyadic bioenergetic transmissions (1994), that resonant emotional transactions involve synchronized and ordered directed flows of energy in the infant's and mother's brains (2000b), that the attachment dynamic involves the right brain regulation of biological synchronicity between organisms (2001a), and that the developing self system is located in the early maturing right hemisphere (1994, 2000x).” He provides a bio-neuro-psycho-social model for emotional-cognitive-relational development as well as pathologies and how therapy can work in response. Considering how we have traditionally

organised the counselling training curriculum, his work constitutes a challenge: therapy has little to do with what we think or intend (whatever our theoretical model); the therapeutically active ingredient is largely oblivious of agendas, objectives, treatment plans or deliberate strategies, as it relies on pre-reflective, spontaneous and largely unconscious right-brain attunement.

Vittorio Gallese - mirror neurons: we can have no empathy without a body-proper Mirror neurons provide an elegant explanantion for how one person’s internal state can appear in another’s experience. "Recognizing emotions from visually presented facial expressions requires right somatosensory cortices", and in this manner "we recognize another individual's emotional state by internally generating somatosensory representations that simulate how the individual would feel when displaying a certain facial expression." One of the essentials of our vocation – empathy - relies on mapping the perceived state of the other in our own body by subtly imitating it. As I suggested in my previous article, this can be taken into relational dynamics like projective identification, further questioning any supposed quasi-medical separateness and objectivity on the part of the therapist. It also lends some credibility to the notion that the spectrum of human relating includes an area where we are pre-reflexively ‘one’ (we are mutually embedded in each other’s felt experience, swimming – so to speak - in a soup of Gallese’s “shared intersubjective manifold”).

Wilhelm Reich ‘character analysis’: the life story (including all wounds, defences and protections) is frozen into the bodymind on all levels as ‘character’ Reich provided us with the foundations of a holistic psychotherapy theory that pre-dates neuroscience and does not rely on it, but actually gets confirmed by it. As I will indicate below, Body Psychotherapy’s championing of the body has come at a price, and it required certain one-sided assumptions and polarisations which we are slowly working through (refs). But what it does establish is a non-dualistic framework for depth-psychological relating in which our perceptions of, our engagement with and our responses to the client’s problems, wounds and negative patterns are all understood as bodymind processes and relationships.

Applying neuroscience to counselling ? By cherry-picking a few significant examples, I wanted to give a sense of how enriching the radical de-construction of the body-mind dualism has

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been in neuroscience, and that there are ubiquitous and pervasive implications for our own profession. Now I am not at all suggesting that we therefore simply apply neuroscientific ‘conclusions’ and unquestioningly import an objectifying stance and paradigm to our psychological and relational work. Because there are relevant overlaps and implications, does not mean we can simply copy the thinking and paradigm from another discipline – our field works in a different domain and by different principles which I want to cherish and maintain. And I would certainly consider any attempt to feed off the scientific cudos attached to neuroscience a misleading trap. In my opinion we need to formulate a therapeutic position beyond the body-mind dualism, but we need to do so from within our own discipline, within the terms and the parameters of our own work. Whilst neuroscientists may research, observe and describe the subjectivity of our inner world and the intersubjectivity of the social-relational world, they do (as yet) not engage with these through their own subjectivity, from within, experientially. What they study from the outside, through an objectifying third-person perspective, we practice from within, through first-and-second person engagement. One example of an over-simplified application of neuroscientific insights to counselling would be the parallel between infant–mother and client-counsellor relationships. Because there are significant and valid parallels, (in terms of mutual attunement, right-brain to right-brain communication, cycles of rupture and repair, to name a few), we are tempted to make the assumption that good therapy equals good mothering and to equate the therapeutic position with the mothering role. To my mind, this illustrates a common fallacy: therapy is a lot more complex and difficult, not least because (from a psychodynamic perspective) a chronic developmental rupture is already structured into the client’s engagement with the therapeutic relationship from the beginning. The client is already wounded from previous relationships and has ways of guarding against further wounding. The inherent mistrust, defensiveness and suspicion pose additional problems for the counsellor which – it could be argued - cannot simply be dealt with by a ‘good-mothering’ attitude.

The relevance of the new bodymind paradigm for counselling Having emerged under the aegis of the Fat Controller, the various approaches within our field [with some notable exceptions] are each rife with body-mind dualism in terms of theories, practices and assumptions deriving from that inheritance. Some approaches which claim they are holistic, maintain an holistic model for the client, but do not extend this to the therapeutic position itself, let

alone the therapeutic relationship as a system. Whatever core model we follow, its inherent dualism is bound to ensure that aspects of our model will obstruct our work as much as facilitating it. We can ask ourselves: to what extent does my therapeutic work rely on: mental-verbal interaction, on insight, conscious intention, deliberate effort, on co-operation with the rational mind and the capacity to reflect ? To what extent does my theory of change rely on: linear, mono-causal progress from A to B, the client’s adherence to my model, me taking a quasi-doctor expert stance, involving a ‘counter-acting’ approach to the symptom (the presenting problem)? [Although most person-centred practitioners polarise against the ‘medical model’, much person-centred practice still relies on ‘counter-acting’ the client’s deficiencies, as perceived through the lens of its own model, e.g. in terms of the client’s ‘external locus of evaluation’ or ‘lack of feeling connection’, etc. ] The revolution in neuroscience questions our reliance on conscious, articulated thought and understanding: take away language, take away exclusively top-down, centre-periphery lines of command, and we have to think of the therapeutic relationship as an open, dynamic, self-organising body/mind system where neither the therapist nor the client’s mind/brain are ‘outside’ and in control of the process. Indeed, one of the main challenges to the Fat Controller – as his name suggests – is: “Relax – NOTHING is in control!” The patterns we are dealing with every day in our work are embedded in physiology, biochemistry, autonomic nervous system reactions, involuntary as well as voluntary muscles, breathing patterns, habitual postures, gestures and movements. The roots of the client’s ‘psychological’ problem lie in subliminal, pre-verbal and non-verbal processes outside of most people’s conscious awareness. And the same is true for us as counsellors: significant aspects of what we do - how we perceive, understand and respond to the client – occur largely subliminally, pre-verbally and non-verbally. Contrary to our training priorities, most theory, reflection and insight tend to become relevant after the event, just catching up with spontaneous experience. We cannot be surprised if a linear and mentalist approach to change through understanding, insight and deliberate intention has limited effect. Unless we find ways to include in our practice and our training currently neglected and underrepresented realms of experience (e.g. unconscious emergence and spontaneity, the ‘felt sense’ and ‘wisdom of the body’, the right brain and intersubjective co-regulation), the 19th century limitations will continue to restrict and limit our work.

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A simple reversal of the mind-over-body dualism ? However, in taking the new bodymind paradigm on board and trying to apply it, our profession is likely to encounter a major conundrum. We can have an intuitive sense that something like a body-mind split is structured into our culturally given experience and informs our client’s (and our own) psychological struggles. We may understand mentally-theoretically that we have traditionally approached these struggles through a dualistic stance which is bound to exacerbate and perpetuate these struggles. And we may be able to borrow certain metaphors and recognitions from other, non-dualistic disciplines. But we will not be able to simply switch our therapeutic position and begin to work from a ‘new’ non-dualistic stance just because we ‘believe’ in it. Moreover, as I suggested in my last article, in extricating oneself from being unknowingly embedded in a dualism, more often than not one goes through a process of oscillating between the dualistic extremes. Just such a switch into the opposite extreme can be seen to have occurred in the 80-year old tradition of Body Psychotherapy: in trying to escape Freud’s pessimism, rooted in the irreconcilable opposition between instinct and ego (or later: life and death instinct), Reich formulated a holistic meta-psychology [which he called ‘functionalism’ – in today’s language ‘holism’ by any other name] based on both mind and body arising as complementary and antagonistic opposites from a common energetic unity. We can see this as a precursor for the increasingly fashionable notion of the essential ‘oneness of body and mind’ which – we may agree – has more than just a ring of truth about it. However, when we look at how this ‘truth’ has been used, we are entitled to become suspicious: under the guise of this ‘holistic’ truth, we often find comprehensive denial and non-engagement with the ‘reality’ of the body-mind split. Where Freud may have absolutised his diagnosis of an unbridgable abyss between Id and Ego into a universal human condition (implying the necessity of mind-over-body), Body Psychotherapy tended to reverse this hierarchical duality and idealise bodymind unity. In stating that integration of body and mind was not only a desirable but achievable objective of therapy, Reich initiated a move towards dynamic and cathartic ways of working which dispensed with many psychoanalytic principles and boundaries: this inevitably had shadow aspects and effects [which I have discussed in some detail elsewhere Soth 2006]. Most significantly, it generated the assumption amongst Body Psychotherapists that embodiment could and should be brought about by consequent application of the ‘right’ techniques, that it could be achieved

through expert, quasi-medical intervention. These interventions were aimed at ‘breaking through the client’s armour’ (Bioenergetics) or ‘melting the armour’ (Biodynamic Psychology). We might summarise it as: where mind-over-body was, there body-over-mind shall be. As history teaches us, the error - and the hubris - of too many revolutions is to stop short at such a plain reversal of the power dynamic. From within such a philosophy of reversal, the cure to all neurotic ills appears to be a gratification of the neglected body and the re-establishment of harmonious embodiment. Postmodernists criticise such a holistic perspective of bodymind unity as a retro-romatic fantasy, based on an illusory hope of recapturing the lost Eden of childhood and the idea of the ‘noble savage’. However, whilst the critique of the underlying fantasy may be valid and accurate, this does not invalidate all of Body Psychotherapy’s concepts and techniques. As well as identifying disembodiment as a crucial factor and putting it on the psychotherapeutic map, we can credit Body Psychotherapy with all kinds of useful perceptions, models and ways of working. The rest of the field can derive immense learning from Body Psychotherapy’s tradition, if we can avoid the trap of simply reversing mind-over-body dualism.

The dilemma of defining ‘embodiment’ This has important implications for our definition of the term ‘embodiment’. There are two main problems with how it is commonly used and understood. The first is a confusion between embodiment as a physical reality versus a subjective experience. The second is between (what I would call) an idealised notion of embodiment versus a paradoxical one. Let’s consider them one at a time.

Embodiment as a subjective experience I have seen it argued that Body Psychotherapy is making a big deal out of 'embodiment', that actually we are all 'embodied' because we all have bodies. Therefore – the argument goes - therapists of all schools cannot help but work and have always worked with their bodies. In my view, that is a gross misunderstanding of how the notion of ‘embodiment’ has evolved and has been used: the meaning of the term acquires significance only in the context of an agreed intuitive understanding of the chronic dis-embodiment at the root of our cultural malaise. We cannot talk about how to ‘use’ the body in therapy without some recognition of the ‘use’, mis-use and ab-use of the body under ‘normal’ circumstances. I would suggest that - rather than a simple fact of life – the value and power of the term derives from the idea that ‘embodiment’ is not just a given, but that one’s experience can rest in (or emerge out of)

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embodiment or not, and that this can make an enormous difference to the quality of one’s life. The way I understand and define embodiment is as a subjective experience, as a felt sense of being in my body, identifying with my 'lived body' moment-to-moment. There is a lot going on in the body, on all kinds of levels, every second, and it is one of the functions of consciousness to screen out the bulk of it. So ‘embodiment’ cannot mean that I am aware of everything that is going on in my body, that is impossible. However, it does mean that reflective awareness and spontaneous processes come together, pretty much in the sense of Winnicott’s phrase “psyche indwelling in the soma”. In simple terms it means sensing, feeling, imagining and thinking are working together as aspects of an organismic, embodied experience of interdependent self as process. The crucial aspect of embodiment, therefore, is not the body per se, but the mutual, reciprocal, self-regulating and self-organising relationship of body and mind as antagonistic and complementary poles of experience: psyche and soma coming together as differentiated poles, being experienced as intimately related, as the ground of subjectivity. In this definition, then, there is no ‘embodiment’ without subjectivity or intersubjectivity.

Embodiment as a paradoxical notion As I suggested before, the hallmark of a transcended dualism is that one can inhabit the paradox at the heart of it. This requires more than switching from a notion of ‘body-mind split’ into an opposite notion of ‘body-mind unity’. In fact, it is the simultaneous ‘truth’ of both these opposite notions which we are appreciating when we are holding them in a paradoxical embrace. Although as Westerners we may take a more laborious and circuitous route towards it, we can find that recognition of paradox echoed elsewhere, for example Shunryu Suzuki (‘Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind’): “Our body and mind are not two, and not one. If you think that your body and mind are two, that is wrong. If you think that your body and mind are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one.” As long as we construe ‘embodiment’ simply as the ‘healthy’, and therefore in itself therapeutic ‘antidote’ to the client’s pervasive pathological dis-embodiment, we are liable to perpetuate the inherent dualism. One obvious instance where this would be dangerous and counterproductive would be with a traumatised client whose disembodiment is part and parcel of their protection against the trauma and re-traumatisation: a simple embodiment agenda then is tantamount to invasion and abuse. A therapeutic response to the body-mind split requires the counsellor to both ‘enter’ the inherent conflict as well as intimately holding the tension between embodiment and dis-embodiment. In my

experience, a paradoxical embrace of body-mind split versus bodymind unity is most helpful in finding this response. Although the conflict between them continues to arise, we can then attend to that conflict without habitually privileging one or the other. This capacity to enter the conflict without pre-empting it or siding one way or the other is a precondition for allowing spontaneous transformation.

Conclusion: integrating the ‘Relating Cure’ with ‘Embodiment’ The client’s potential for recovery, the wound itself and the defence against the wound are all rooted in the bodymind (across all the levels and systems that constitute its wholeness) - they are bodymind processes. I try to understand all our work, all modern psychology as body/mind process within the context of the European Split. I see no hope in attempts at body-mind integration without first recognising and being able to experience - without flinching – the reality of the split. As I have tried to show, for me working with body-mind dualism is not simply a question of counterbalancing, switching or oscillating, but entering the conflict. This paradoxical embrace of body-mind split versus bodymind unity can be held alongside the equivalent paradox of therapy as treatment versus therapy as relationship. In my view, our capacity to hold both in the midst of the emotional turmoil of the therapeutic relationship, and to re-formulate all our models and techniques from that position, would help take our profession a good step from the 19th into the 21st century.

References Corrigall/Wilkinson (2000) Revolutionary Connections Damasio, A.R. (1994). Descartes' Error. New York:

Grosset/Putnam. Damasio, A.R. The Feeling of What Happens Damasio, A.R. Looking for Spinoza Fox-Keller, E. (2000) The Century of the Gene Freud, S. (1930) Civilization and its Discontents Gallese, V. (2003) www.unipr.it/~gallese/

Gallese%20Psychopathology%202003.pdf Gendlin E. () Focussing Gerhardt, S. (2002) Why Love Matters Pert, C. (1997) Molecules of Emotion. London: Simon &

Schuster Schore, A. (1994). Affect Regulation and the Origin of

the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Schore, A. (2003) Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self. New York: Norton.

Schore, A. (2002a). The right brain as the neurobiological substratum of Freud's dynamic unconscious. In D. Scharff (Ed.), The Psychoanalytic Century: Freud's Legacy for the Future New York: The Other Press, pp. 61-88.

Wilber, K. (2000) Integral Psychology. Boston: Shambala Wilkinson, M. () Coming into Mind