Response to Shapiro's Discussion

In her discussion, Sue Shapiro (this issue) offers a passionate and challenging rejoinder to my article, “Stranger to Desire.” I wrote this article in such a way as to provoke a visceral response in the reader before engaging the reader's intellect. Shapiro replies by offering us her visceral response first, before undertaking a careful critique challenging some of the positions I argue and the rather radical interventions I describe. These two articles could well stand on their own, without further commentary from me, leaving the readers to wrestle with their own emotional reactions and theoretical points of view. But Shapiro raises important questions that merit further discussion. It is my hope that the interplay of our perspectives will challenge and elucidate the differing frames of reference held by body-centered psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. We have much to offer and much to learn from one another.

I'll begin with perhaps our most significant area of disagreement, her argument that “I don't think the body therapy was essential to these treatments,” as she goes on to describe more analytically based interventions. Had I held this point of view, I'd have had no cause to write this essay, especially to write it in this particular way about this particular case. Central to my argument is that there are enduring, organizing systems of movement, sensation, and sensorimotor processes that are forms of knowing and showing carried in a different realm from that of speech (Bucci, 2007) and as such may need to be met first within that realm of experience. Experience within these nonverbal subsymbolic systems can then usually be brought into a more realistically embodied language. In psychotherapy and psychoanalysis the movement into a languaged narrative is usually sought, though language is not necessary for all learning. In the more classical psychoanalytic literature, when the body is written about at all, it is likely to be presented as a primitive, regressed