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Jessie: Mama … I'm just not having a very good time and I don't have any reason to think it'll get anything but worse. I'm tired. I'm hurt. I'm sad. I feel used.
Mama: Tired of what?
Jessie: It all.
Mama: What does that mean?
Jessie: I can't say it any better.
Mama: Well, you'll have to say it better because I'm not letting you alone 'til you do….
This passage is taken from Marsha Norman's (1983) play, 'Night Mother, a play depicting the interaction between a young epileptic woman and her mother, culminating in the daughter's suicide by shooting. In the play, the daughter has limited means of communicating to others, especially her mother, a woman who has preferred not to hear or know. The daughter chooses to enact her feelings of rage at her mother by choosing suicide, thus negating her mother's eventual pleas for taking a new perspective on their lives. Our story also involves a young epileptic woman's struggle to, in a sense, “say it better.” From a woman unable to imagine that life could “get anything but worse,” she evolved into a woman invested in living. By specifically engaging her tendency to communicate through enactment, we used movement psychotherapy to foster improved verbal and cognitive abilities. By containing and enhancing movement transference relationships, the more traditional work with verbal transferences was facilitated. We hope to demonstrate that, as Mahl (1977) has noted and McLaughlin (1987) has stated recently in the paper, “The Play of Transference,” “the motor act preceding