Susan Aposhyan - Body-Mind Psychotherapy: Principles, Techniques, and Practical Applications

Body-Mind

Psychotherapy

Principles, Techniques,
and Practical Applications

Susan Aposhyan

W. W. Norton & Company

New York London

A Norton Professional Book

B ody-mind psychotherapy (BMP) draws its theory and techniques from diverse fields and integrates the body into psychotherapy. The standard practices of psychotherapy form the ground. The body of literature on somatic psychology and current innovations in the field have added basic techniques for working with the body. Many diverse approaches to working with the bodymind have offered particular jewels. Here we will review some of the major influences to the BMP approach.

PSYCHOTHERAPY

Psychotherapy is a broad term, signifying a vast and diverse field that is difficult to pin down. Thumbing through a series of basic primers on psychotherapy, I find that most authors are passionate about their subject, but do not for the most part have a basic definition of the term. Those authors do attempt a definition use broad strokes, referring to such concepts as an exchange of information and the resulting behavioral change. These definitions are so broad that they are practically meaningless. Websters (1983) defines psychotherapy as the application of various forms of mental treatment to nervous and mental disorders. This is an adequate, but somewhat dry and unsatisfying definition with a bias toward pathology. However, by breaking the word psychotherapy down to its constituents, the results are more satisfying. Psyche refers to the Greek nymph who became a goddess, and who was the personification of the human soul. Psyche is defined as the mind... considered as an organic system reaching all parts of the body. Therapy is derived from the Greek verb therapeuein, which means to attend, guide, or serve. Defining psychotherapy as the task of attending, guiding, and serving the psyche suits both aesthetically and spiritually. It encompasses the pursuit of health and spiritual development, as well as the alleviation of pathology. Particularly important in this perspective is the view of psyche as the mind... reaching all parts of the body.

Exploring the history of the field is also illuminating. Though barely a century old, psychotherapeutic theory has developed a fair degree of subtlety. Phillip Cushman (1995) explored the history of psychotherapy from the perspective of social anthropology. Cushman tracked the infiltration of psychological thinking and references to psychotherapy in popular American culture. From the perspective of his analysis, it is clearly a major cultural influence today.

The pursuit of psychotherapy began with the emergence of psychoanalysis at the turn of the 20th century. Prior to that, most psychiatric approaches involved working fairly directly with the body, either through physical interaction or hypnosis. With the advent of psychoanalysis, an understanding of intrapsychic phenomena and the importance of insight regarding ones psychology, emerged. Insight continues to be one of the primary cornerstones of psychotherapy today. The study of psychological insight has developed into a complex theory base. Most psychotherapists today work from a basic psychodynamic model, meaning an understanding of the ways that past experiences and particularly family dynamics actively affect current behavior. Cognitive approaches offer us basic tools for working with mental processes. Both psychodynamic insight and cognitive processing are integral to most psychotherapy today.

Relationship was also a prominent aspect of psychotherapy even in its earliest stages. Psychoanalysis began to look at the importance of the therapeutic relationship through the concepts of transference and countertransference. The development of object relations theory and self psychology furthered our understanding of the therapeutic relationship. Today, establishing rapport and creating a working therapeutic alliance are the fundamentals of even the most basic approaches to counseling and psychotherapy. On a more sophisticated level, many branches of psychology have combined to offer a complex understanding of relationship. The theory and study of attachment has helped us recognize the importance of early bonding (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). While our understanding of attachment theory continues to develop (Cassidy & Shaver, 1999), many theorists, most notably D.N. Stern and his colleagues in the Boston Change Process Study Group (1998) have moved beyond the categorization system that attachment theory espouses. Instead they are looking at such intangibles as dyadic consciousness and cocreativity in relationship. The vast and sophisticated studies of relationship have allowed psychotherapists to move beyond a rigid transferential model of the client-therapist relationship while retaining the important emphasis on the therapeutic relationship in all its subtle possibilities. These understandings have allowed more room for the person of the psychotherapist to interact with the client and not to be overshadowed by therapeutic technique.

With the advent of family therapy and its fruitful interaction with systems theory (Bateson, 1972), psychotherapy opened up to a much wider context. Understanding the role of the individual within the family and within society allowed psychotherapy to move beyond psychopathology and into functional analysis. Multicultural techniques have expanded our awareness of multicultural context. Feminist psychology has brought awareness of gender issues. Ecopsychology placed human psychology in the context of environment. And evolutionary psychology has awakened us to the biological and evolutionary context of human issues. Today, most psychotherapists are more prepared to understand the familial and cultural contexts of an individuals situation. While the study of biopsychology and biological psychology have been active since the 1970s, these fields have traditionally been of somewhat limited influence. We are just beginning to understand the biological and evolutionary contexts of human behavior. BMP attempts to offer a simple and applicable framework for understanding the biology of human nature. An overall awareness of context can move us toward a general sense of the evolution of human experience.

Finally, with the explosion in the 1960s of encounter groups and various experiential approaches to therapy, many psychotherapists have integrated various types of nonverbal experience into the psychotherapy context. Simple tools such as role-playing, emotional expression, breath awareness, drawing, movement, meditation, journaling, stretching, and visualization are being utilized by many psychotherapists in a practical, nontheoretical approach to support awareness, reduce stress, and promote change. It is within this group of experiential therapies that we find many body-mind approaches being utilized. While BMP draws from all of the aspects of psychotherapy described above, it is these body-mind approaches and their integration into psychotherapy that form the unique contribution of BMP. This identity locates BMP within the overall field of somatic psychology.

SOMATIC PSYCHOLOGY

Somatic psychology is a fairly recent term for a branch of psychology that has been present since the inception of psychology. Somatic psychology can be most simply defined as including all psychological approaches that focus significantly on the role of the body. Somatic is a term first utilized in therapeutic context by Thomas Hanna (1988). Drawn from the Greek word