THE BODY IN PSYCHOTHERAPY:
INQUIRIES IN SOMATIC PSYCHOLOGY

EDITED WITH IAN J. GRAND

From my Introduction:

"A commonplace confusion of medicine, psychotherapy, and bodywork reflects deeply entrenched intellectual divisions. Professionals in each of these fields receive virtually no education in the vast knowledge possessed by the other fields. Like physicians and physical scientists, Somatics pioneers rarely enjoyed a broad knowledge of history, philosophy, literature, and the social sciences. They were and are more typically brilliant technicians, having devoted their lives to exploring a particular region of embodiment, often with little attention even to words. That ignorance is reflected in a dismissive attitude towards other related fields of knowledge. Some leading teachers of bodywork, like many biomedical experts, are often severely critical of clinical psychology, even dismissive of it. Ida Rolf was typical, expressing her disdain for psychology in her well-known refrain to our classes of practitioners: "There ain't no psychology, just biology!" As one would predict in the face of ignorance, there is a tendency within each community to disparage the unique knowledge possessed by the other. Those bearing the brunt of the rift are clients and patients who require help from therapists with a feel for the overwhelming complexities of a developing life in the body, and the many kinds of expertise that might help."

CONTENTS

1. Who Walks?, Don Hanlon Johnson
2. A Case Study of a Survivor of Political Torture, Maryanna Eckberg
3. Psychotherapy as Grief Work, Robert D. Romanyshyn
4. Against the Wall/Her Beating Heart: Working with the Somatic Aspects of Transference, Countertransference, and Dissociation, Barbara Holifield
5. Why Somatic Therapies Deserve As Much Attention As Psychoanalysis in The New York Review of Books, and Why Bodyworkers Treating Neuroses Should Study Psychoanalysis, Richard Grossinger
6. Living Inquiry: Jungian Analysis, Continuum, and Body-Mind Centering, by Carol Burstein
7. The Experience of Safety in Somatic Psychotherapy, Doug Moorhead
8. The Dance and the Body In Psychotherapy: Reflections and Clinical Examples, Tina Stromsted
9. Psyche's Body: Towards a Somatic Psychodynamics, Ian J. Grand

This volume also includes an extensive bibliography on these subjects.