Movement as a medium for psychophysical integration

This Paper is a response to ongoing personal research and involvement in two related but distinct approaches to personal development. It is an attempt to address the relationships that exist between my experience of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, as both a patient and a student of psychoanalytic theory, and my long term study and practice of movement as a medium for psychophysical integration.

I am impelled and fascinated to make links between these two disciplines because each so importantly supports and enhances my experience of the other. Although psychoanalysis addresses itself primarily to the experience of the psyche, and movement therapy deals primarily with the experience of the physical body in space, the two have in common their interest in the relationships between the inner and outer worlds, and between self and other. Both address the recognition of one's emotional condition and of the ability to be present with change. Both respect spontaneity and clarity of expression and the unravelling of one's own truth.

And yet the languages used are distinctly different. The vocabulary of psychoanalysis arises from the formulation of thought and the ability to be articulate with words. The vocabulary of movement is created by the physical articulation of the body. This exploration of physical space has sometimes been linked with the preverbal stages of human development, which underlie the mental space of thought processes with which psychoanalysis is mainly concerned.

Since Freud's much quoted and variously interpreted 1923 statement about the ego being “first and foremost a bodily ego”, the study of psycho-physical relatedness seems to have seldom been directly explored in a practical sense. There seems to have been a surprising dearth of literature about psychoanalytic