Other People's Movements: Ethnologic Perspectives on Motoric Armouring in Body Psychotherapy

Abstract

This paper explores the body as subjectivity, dialectically constructed and influenced by its cultural, ethnological, and political history. It introduces the concept of uber-bodyness, a cultural internalised ideal of a body, with which we are in constant dialogue. The paper examines the body, as well as body-to-body communication as processes that should not be reduced to verbal exchange alone but merit a separate, unmediated, somatic language. When working with clients we therefore seek not only to identify presenting (and absent) self-states, but also to discern which bodies are present in the clinic. The paper offers a third approach to looking at and working with movements in psychotherapy, an approach that derives from relational body psychotherapy. On the one hand, Dance Movement Therapy explores movements as expressive material, which is analysable and interpretable; on the other hand, bodywork disciplines, such as Yoga and Pilates, encourage us to sense our body and find rest within it. This paper examines movements as expressing the body as subjectivity, not necessarily expressing the mind. A case study illustrates the extraction of ethnological, gender, and class aspects as these manifest in the body and its movements. The paper further offers some relational techniques to work with such movements as part of an analytic therapy, whereby the language of the body is welcomed as an irreducible agent.