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Whatever thoughts and feelings we as adults now verbalize were first sensed as rhythmical pulses within the body. The preverbal child is a ‘body/self’ that registers the world through sensation and sensory/motor innervation. In Symbols of Transformation, Jung comments on the importance of the element of rhythm that predates sexual libido and accompanies most human activities from birth until death. The ‘rhythmic tendency’, he states, ‘is a peculiarity of emotional processes in general’ ( Coll. Wks, 5, p. 155, Princeton University Press, 1956). The repetitive effects of the intense feeling-toned complex on heart beat, breathing, and pulse rate noted in the Word Association Experiment confirmed Jung's observation of the intimate relationship between affect and rhythmic expression. He commented on how primitive societies depend on rhythm and ritual dance to impress behaviour patterns on the mind and to channel energy into new forms of activity.
Given Jung's understanding of the rhythmic element in both its developmental and cultural context which he related to the perseverating tendency of the feeling-toned complex in the body, it is not surprising that he included dance and expressive body movement as a possible way of doing active imagination and giving form to the unconscious.
Joan Chodorow's innovative book affirms and develops dance/movement as a means of contacting and confronting unconscious material. She makes a substantive contribution to the field of analytical psychology by extending Jung's insights into the nature of psyche and matter as ‘two different aspects of one and the same thing’ ( Coll. Wks, 8, 1947, p. 215). She ponders the profound and complex interaction between body and psyche that occurs at the psychoid level of being. She proposes the primary emotions of joy, interest, grief, fear, anger, contempt, shame, and surprise, in their somatic and psychic aspects, as the ‘stuff’ of that mysterious interface between the two reciprocal realms.
The book is di