Project Description
These are a few thoughts, written fairly quickly, on my misgivings with the currently fashionable attempts to (re-)include the body into psychotherapy. These attempts, strongly supported by neuroscience, are welcome and long overdue. However, how can we seriously imagine that bringing the body back after 100 years of disembodied 'talking therapies' is just a question of a few new techniques? After spending 20 years making considerable noise, trying to get the body noticed in psychotherapy, we now have the opposite problem: we have reason to discourage all kinds of well-intentioned strategies of 'using' the body in psychotherapy, as we now need to be precise and principled about how to include it. Are we doing justice to the body (the spontaneous, vibrant, alive body that we had in mind all along, as the embodied ground of a subjective sense of self) when it becomes another therapeutic 'tool' ? Here I formulate some ideas for a 'prologomenon (an initial critical survey of a topic, before making any claims or drawing any conclusions) for including the body in psychotherapy - some basic principles to be taken into account. These are some notes, rather than an elaborated argument, and I hope you find them useful as such, as a starting point for further discussion and exploration.
To gain access to the full resource, please log-in if you are a member already (and then re-fresh this page after log-in), or to become a member of the site register here (it's free).
