Basics – INTEGRA CPD

Towards embodied-relational therapy by (re-)integrating psychoanalysis & humanistic Body Psychotherapy

Michael - Handouts — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 15:31:42 +0000

By bringing together the bodymind expertise of the body-oriented tradition and the relational expertise of both humanistic and psychoanalytic traditions, we can develop a 21st century embodied-relational way of working that views the whole client-therapist relationship as a complex bodymind intersubjective system. Rather than a meeting of minds, we are involved in an encounter between two bodyminds, both with spontaneous/involuntary and reflective/voluntary impulses and faculties, creating a dance and dialogue across the physical, emotional, imaginal and mental dimensions of experience.
The following graphic attempts to summarise the re-integration of these traditions, towards a paradoxical position which remains relationally fluid, flexible and aware of transference-countertransference entanglements.
In simple practical terms that means: I want to be aware that any body-oriented intervention can be made or received through:
1. an objectifying one-person psychology stance,
2. an attuned and regulating one-and-a-half-person psychology stance, or …
3. as a two-person psychology intersubjective response.
In my view of relationality, all three stances each have their partial and limited validity – it is the therapist’s capacity to be aware of the enactments which occur via these stances and fluidly move between this diversity of relational spaces which is conducive to providing a relational container.

This re-integration lends the powerful techniques of the body-oriented approaches the relational depth and containment which makes them interpersonally and intra-psychically transformative rather than merely utilising the body as an objectifying therapeutic tool in an effortful, goal-oriented top-down strategic fashion.

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The Client’s Conflict across the Window of Tolerance (2015)

Michael - Handouts — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 23:00:00 +0000

This handout is a more comprehensive and complicated version of the client's internal conflict, relating this conflict to the window of tolerance. There is a simpler version which only describes the client's internal conflict as occurring between their 'habitual mode' and their 'emergency'.

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The Client’s Conflict between ‘Habitual Mode’ and ‘Emergency’ (2015)

Michael - Handouts — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 23:00:00 +0000

The notion of the client's conflict is foundational in all depth psychotherapy. This hand-out here is a more evolved and updated version of the 1998 hand-out on the client's internal conflict. There is also a slightly more comprehensive and complicated version which relates this conflict to the 'window of tolerance'.

There are many ways to language and conceptualise the client’s internal conflict (Freud’s Id-Ego-Superego, TA’s Child-Adult-Parent, object relations theory, sub-personalities etc.), and over the years I have tried to find a formulation which speaks to therapists from across the traditions, helping us towards an integrative appreciation of the vicissitudes inherent in the therapeutic position vis-a-vis not a monolithic individual [remembering that the word 'individual’ literally means undivided], but systematically opposed and conflicting parts or polarities. Developmental depth psychology assumes that these conflicts are chronic and largely unconscious, habitually frozen and structured into a person's personality and identity. Because the client cannot help but approach therapy - the way they approach much of life - through their wounding, through the lens of the pain and their defences against it (see: The wounding enters) - the client's conflict implies two opposing constructions of therapy (i.e. two mutually exclusive versions of therapy - which then immediately becomes a dilemma for the therapist, too - see: The client's conflict becomes the therapist's conflict).

The best and most generic formulation I have been able to find is to conceptualise the client’s internal conflict as occurring between their 'habitual mode' and their 'emergency' [rooted in the early Gestalt formulation of the conflict between 'acute high-level emergency' and 'chronic low-level emergency']. I have been using this formulation in my teaching since the mid-1990s, but this version of the hand-out makes the therapist's dilemma more obvious.

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