Dancing with the Demons – Making sense of Schizophrenia

This paper explores the empathic nuances of the therapeutic process with a person experiencing ongoing psychosis associated with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and with a history of severe relational trauma. Incorporating the self psychological principles of working with the therapist’s and client’s forward edge, utilizing experience-near empathic attunement, and the somatic psychotherapy essential for kinaesthetic conversation were essential elements for the ongoing integration of the client’s self. This work demonstrates the development of a nuanced understanding of pathological accommodation with its internal self-organizing dynamics as well as offering examples of forward edge movement. Interweaving vignettes from a two-year period with the subjective and intersubjective somatically animated experiencing of the therapist, the puzzle of how to work with all parts of the client unfolds gently and carefully. This paper outlines how connections were made between the two participants, in a clinical sense and within the client, creating a sense-making structure within the nuclear self experience of the client. Real life clinical experiences of what somatic psychotherapy, undertaken within a relational, intersubjective psychodynamic process, looks and feels like are in short supply. The presentation of this case hopes to remedy that by demonstrating the body mind integration required to work this way.