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Psychotherapy integration poses a challenge for psychoanalysis. To what extent can a psychoanalytic approach be modified and still be considered psychoanalytic? Can a once a week face to face treatment with a self-disclosing therapist that regularly suspends conversation inspired by the patient's free association in order to engage in structured therapist guided exercises still be considered psychoanalytic. Reading Sensorimotor Psychotherapy requires psychoanalysts to contemplate such questions.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is psychoanalytic in that its theory of pathogenesis should be agreeable to psychoanalysts who view trauma and attachment injury as central to adult psychopathology. Trauma and attachment injury result in states of hyperarousal as well as defensive hypoarousal that are registered in the body as reflected in observable body language as well as interoceptively perceived bodily sensations. Psychoanalysts have always been interested in body language in the service of character analysis, of nonverbal communication as a source of countertransference, of aversive somatic states as reflections of dissociated affects yet to be symbolized, of physiological dysregulation as symptoms of trauma and insecure attachment, and of physical symptoms as concrete symbolizations that implicitly reflect unprocessed memories of traumatic experience. For these reasons the body has a long history as an object of analytic contemplation.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy shares these psychoanalytic insights into the role of the body in psychopathology and references trauma theorists such as van Der Kolk, self psychologists such as Beebe, attachment theorists such as Lyons-Ruth, dissociation theorists such as Bromberg, and affective neuroscientists such as Schore and Panksepp whose work should be familiar to many psychoanalysts. Yet Sensorimotor Psychotherapy recommends a treatment approach that is not primarily having a conversation that follows the flow of a patient's free associatio