Wilhelm Reich Center Panel Presentation: Can Body Psychotherapies be Integrated with Psychoanalysis?
September 14, 2024
Caron Harrang, LICSW, FIPA, BCPsa
My background includes training as a bioenergetic therapist with the New York Society for Bionenergetic Analysis in the early 1980s and employing this model in my work with patients during the 80s and 90s. Thereafter I trained as a psychoanalyst with the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute informed by my initial orientation as a bioenergetic psychotherapist. This sequence in my training and professional development has convinced me that somatopsychic experience is a foundational element of psychoanalytic process. How so, you might ask?
One example is illustrated in my analysis with ‘Clara’ described in “River to Rapids: Speaking to the body in terms the body can understand” in Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond (Routledge, 2021) and winner of the 2022 Gradiva® Award for Best Edited Book.
In a vignette titled “leaning in” I describe Clara who comes to one of her four-times-weekly analytic sessions looking fearful. As she enters my consulting room Clara avoids her usual position on the analytic couch, preferring instead to sit facing me. Our verbal exchange is initially superficial conveying an atmosphere of suspicion and guardedness.
Eventually Clara sheds her coat and moves cautiously to the couch which puts her physically closer to me. However, she remains seated rather than lying down which I silently interpret as expressing her desire to reconnect with me as someone trustworthy while still feeling suspicious and needing to keep an eye on me. The conversation then turns to Clara’s upset with me for being “cold” and “unfeeling,” all the while keeping her eyes averted.
I feel increasingly tense in my own body and badly want to rub my eyes that are aching and dry from not blinking. Yet, if I move a muscle, I fear Clara will take it as further proof of my desire to get away from her. Finally, in desperation I say something (I don’t recall exactly what) about Clara trying to get away from her own feelings and therefore assuming I’m doing the same thing—that is, cruelly turning my back on her. With this, for the first time in the hour, she turns to face me directly and shrieks in a voice thick with rage, “You blame me for everything! Nothing is ever your fault. You hate me and I know it. Well, I hate you too. I hate you!”
As Clara begins shouting, without thinking, I lean my head and torso forward in my chair, bringing myself nearer to where she’s perched on the analytic couch a few feet away. Her eyes reflexively dilate as I tilt my body toward her, startled it seems by my unexpectedly moving closer. Then Clara’s eyes soften, and her shoulders slacken as fury gives way to heart-wrenching sobs. I feel my own eyes well up and make a concerted effort to keep breathing as deeply as I can. Clara notices the moistness in my eyes which seems to break the spell of her feeling
Lynne Jacobs, Ph.D.
How might therapies that incorporate bodily awareness, movement, touch, “shake hands” with psychoanalysis? The answer, I believe, lies in appreciating the skill with emotional process that foundational to body-oriented therapies, and is the touch stone for the capacity for the development self-reflection that psychoanalysis values.. Skill with emotional processing requires attention to one’s bodily sensations. Our sensations and bodily felt emotional reactions tell us what matters to us that any particular moment in time. Our feelings tell us what matters to us, and allowing them to develop on their own terms, in the reciprocity of the sensations and feelings that are flowing between therapist and patient, will lead to words that really matter to THIS particular body, at THIS time. From that, the self-reflective capacity we so cherish can develop. The words may well be fresh, new, surprising. Just as with the feelings and sensations, they can emerge, unplanned, possibly quite conflicted, but they will feel true.