Michael C. Heller - Basic concepts and methods in body psychotherapy: a textbook

Body Psychotherapy

Michael C. Heller

W. W. Norton & Company
New York London

Copyright 2012 by Michael C. Heller

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First Edition

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Heller, Michael, 1949

[Psychotherapies corporelles. English]

Body psychotherapy : history, concepts, and methods / Michael C. Heller.

p. cm.(A Norton professional book)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-393-70669-7 (hardcover)

eISBN 978-0-393-70766-3

1. Mind and body therapies. I. Title.

RC489.M53H4513 2012

615.5dc23 2011042668

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PART I. THE ORGANISM IN THE FAR EAST:
IN SEARCH OF THE UNIVERSE THAT MANIFESTS
IN THE ORGANISM

Philippe Rochat

I t is not unusual to hear that psychology is dead, or dying, gasping for air under the tidal wave in the neurosciences. It reminds us of Hegel and Marx announcing the end of history, with the establishment of the modern democratic state for one, the crowning of socialism for the other. Two hundred years later, look where we stand! History continues with plentiful blood and injustice. The fundamentals remain the same despite the goodwill of all the bloody French and other red revolutions. By analogy, exciting progress in current neurosciences do not eliminate the fundamental questions that drove centuries of psychological inquiries, from Heraclitus in ancient Greece to great Eastern thinkers like Lao Tzu, all trying to capture human experience: what it means to be alive in this world.

I often see my colleagues reassured by their vision of a dying psychology, agonizing under the new lights of the brain sciences. But are we really on the edge of reducing human experience to its brain substance? Are we truly at the threshold of an absolute deterministic understanding of what it means to be alive, in this world, and more important, alive among other embodied and sentient entities? Nothing of the sort since the stuff of basic science is, as always and in an infinite regress, opening doors leading to more, never able to get absolute closure on anything. We are just getting better at approximating psychic phenomena. My neuroscience colleagues tend to get ahead of themselves in their renewed enthusiasm, and psychology resists reductionism in all its classic dimensions, be they clinical, cognitive, social, or developmental. Michael Hellers book is a masterful demonstration of psychology resisting brain reductionism.

It is not a secret that part of the enthusiasm around the neurosciences is dictated by the exponential technological progress in imaging and recording brain activities, notwithstanding the enormous financial investment in brain imaging laboratories that put much pressure on the kind of psychological research questions addressed by neuroscientists: questions and psychological phenomena that have the potential of being reduced and redescribed in neurochemical, biological terms. But the new brain enthusiasm comes at a cost and at a loss. Because of its necessary reductionist and mechanistic undertone, it eludes the meaning of human experience in all its complexity and all its basic nondeter-ministic messiness. It is an experience that in essence cannot be captured by the study of a brain in a vat or a contextual vacuum (see Thompson, 2008). Our brain is just part of a whole that includes the rest of the body, but also other bodies and other interacting brains.

When we think of it, in the end, the fundamental problem of psychology (i.e., the meanings of being alive in this world and what can be deduced from such meanings to capture the human experience) is not reducible to an individual bodily and brain system, a system that would be completely isolatable to be decorticated to its marrow, in the same way that one now decodes and describes the human genome with one long string combining a small ensemble of constitutive DNA elements. No.

The rapid progress in our understanding of brain structure and functioning certainly forces us to reformulate ancient questions about human experience: the mind-body question, the interplay between the physical and the mental, intersubjectivity in general. It does not however resolve questions raised for at least twenty centuries, from the Greeks in the West and the philosophies and meditation practices in the East, particularly those that flourished in India. This textbook is a brilliant demonstration of the importance of anchoring historically the relation of the psyche to the organism, and eventually to the body within traditions and conceptions that have evolved and continue to evolve. Heller reminds us of the importance of positing issues within a diachronic, historical perspective.

In our rich era made of exponential technological inventions and scientific discoveries, we should not get blinded of the fact that the problems of the relation between the body, the organism, and the psyche are eternal problems. They take roots in a long Western and Eastern tradition. If the current neurosciences provide a decisive jolt to reflections about these problems, they are far from offering decisive answers, particularly when limiting its foray to an isolated, individual brain in a vat, be it a bony scull.

In his book, Heller demonstrates painstakingly and cogently that psychological phenomena cannot be captured only inside the individual but rather emerge at the interface of individual bodies, organisms, and brains. The meanings of psychological phenomena can be only captured in the process of an interaction between these systems. Heller makes the demonstration in ways that are reminiscent of the eighteenth-century encyclopedic tradition, not shying away from a large harvest, with broad connections from Western philosophy to Eastern traditions and other Eastern and Western ancestral intuitions and practices.

Heller reminds us that psychic experience is the integration of all these levels with processes that operate within and outside the individual, in interaction with other individuals, like patients interacting with therapists.

Psychotherapy of any kind, whether it focuses primarily on the body or not, does not just pertain to a body, an organism, or a psyche organization that is more or less well functioning. It always pertains to a relation between bodies, organisms, and psychic entities.

There is developmental proof of such general assertion in the fact that from around two years of age, all children (except probably those showing symptoms of autism) start to conceptualize themselves as perceived and judged through the evaluative eyes of others. From this age children start to express unambiguous embarrassment and the first signs of shame and guilt, presumably the trademarks of our species (see Darwin, 1872, on blushing). All these self-conscious emotions are eminently social, determined by the interplay and integration of mutual self and others feelings and mental representations, a major source of typical psychological ills that eventually lead patients to seek therapeutic help.