You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Bracha Hadar addresses what she calls the professional split in psychotherapy referring to her ‘great loneliness among my verbal colleagues’ leading to her ‘two therapeutic identities’ - ‘verbal and body’. Historically, Hadar suggests, this split has its origins in Freud's reaction to a patient whose symptoms he had cured through hypnosis. This patient threw her arms around his neck to embrace him. Although Freud did not respond physically to her overture, and understood it as a phenomenon of the transference, Hadar believes that he took fright, or was confused, and dealt with his feelings by deciding that the body should be left out of psychotherapy. In Hadar's opinion, this attitude led to two false attitudes in psychoanalytic thought: first, ‘There is a relationship between treating the body and the danger of temptation and eroticism’, and second, ‘Body psychotherapy is a suggestive therapy’. Perhaps it was felt that to include the body as a point of reference could be seen as supporting a regressive tendency in which the physical expression of affect would override verbal communication. Certainly, the decision not to include the body in a more overt way, by focusing on verbal communication and the use of the couch, left out the patient's experience of his own body as a vehicle for unconscious expression.