Sociocultural Somatics:

Body Practices, Cultural Forces, Social Change

Updated: Jan 27, 2010

Class blog

SOM 6201: Spring 2010. 3 units; Somatics Students only; Grading: O Don Hanlon Johnson,PhD; (CIIS ext 237); e-mail

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
This course is designed to remember and develop the broad vision of human society that motivated the original founders of Somatics. Although the emphasis in our graduate program is on the contributions that Somatics offers to the field of psychology and the practice of psychotherapy, the origins of the field, however, arose from widespread concerns about the commonplace abuses of the body manifested in the proliferation of violence, poverty, and the disruption of diverse populations. Pioneers like Wilhelm Reich and Charlotte Selver, for example, saw their practices of breathing, sensory awareness, touch, and expressive body movement as having implications for the ways we think about the larger world, and about strategies for making that world more humane. They and their contemporaries were part of a great movement of hope that gathered after the first World War had devastated much of the old world and its traditions, followed by the Great Depression and the Second World War. Now we have come full cycle with the collapse of our national ideals and finances. At this fragile moment in our history, we return to the primal questions which gave rise to the origins of our field. What does it mean to be a therapist focusing on the body in a world that is characterized by massive abuse to the body, both political and personal? What are strategies for institutional change coming from the body of knowledge present in the field of Somatics? We will take on these themes with particular attention to the current world situation. In the background of this course are the massive assaults on human bodies by the anti-therapies of war, torture, genocides, displacements, slavery, and the destruction of the very natural environment that is the nurturing matrix for our being. In the foreground, joining the many communities now empowered for change, are the continually innovative body-practices of resistance: dance, song, passionate speaking, the martial arts, the cultivation of courage, imagination, and communities of solidarity.

We will give particular attention to body-shaping practices (both explicit and unreflective) with an eye to whether or not they enhance human life or restrict it in the direction of conformity. We will address complex problems that are rooted in a tension between notions of the body as a source of individuality, and those that put emphasis on the communal body. A major question will concern how this particular kind of study of the body might make it easier to navigate through tensions between the individual and the community; how body practices might make use of sources of wisdom and decision-making within our individual and communal bodies. (The class—its conduct, the relationships promoted among participants, the structure of evaluations and participation, etc.—will be a laboratory for these questions.) In that vein, the course has also evolved as a support for former members who, inspired by these questions, have developed their work in certain directions. Some will be invited to share their achievements with the class.

We will study how those realities shape the bodies of large populations, thereby affecting the practice of somatic psychotherapy. At the same time, we will focus on how somatic practitioners might use their skills to join with other communities of activists, writers, ecologists, etc., who are working towards transforming destructive social attitudes and policies.

TEACHING MODALITIES:
Cognitive, didactic: 20%
Seminar discussion: 60%
Experiential: 20%

EXPECTED OUTCOMES:
1. An understanding of how the larger world and its social institutions shape both one's body (muscle tensions, scars, postural distortions, etc.), and one's perceptions and feelings of his or her body.
3.How the practice of somatic psychotherapy is affected by these larger forces.
4.A more nuanced and strategic grasp of how Somatics can make contributions to social consciousness and activism, by emphasizing those methods which respect the body's inherent capacities for wisdom and its enormous sources of vitality and resistance to oppression .
5. Learning how to design experiential exercises and grounded theoretical discussions to effect social change.
6. How to use narrative writing to articulate the unique knowledge situated in and originating from bodily experience in a way that impacts the thinking and decision-making of one's community, and perhaps even larger communities.

CRITERIA FOR EVALUATION:
1. Prompt attendance at every class . (There are no automatically excused absences): 10%.
2. Essays, 30%.
3. Assigned leading of experiential exercises and group discussions, 20%

4. Thoughtfulness in addressing the readings during discussions, 10%

5. Quality of final presentation, 30%

Alter, Joseph S. Gandhi's Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism. Philadelphia: Penn, 2000.

Benthall, Jonathan, and Polhemus, Ted, editors. The Body as a Medium of Expression. New York: Dutton, l975.

Blacking, John, ed. The Anthropology of the Body. London: The Academic Press, 1977.

Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. New York: Vintage/Random House, l968.
_______. Love's Body. New York: Random House, l966.

Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption. Zone, 1991.

Crary, Jonathan, and Kwinter, Sanford. Incorporations. NY: Zone, 1992.

Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid and the Minotauar: Sexual Arrangements and the Human Malaise. New York: Harper and Row, l977.

Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. London: Barrie and Rockliff, l970.

Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Woman's Body, Woman's World. Princeton, 1991.

Feher, Michel, editor. Fragments for a History of the Human Body. 3 volumes. New York: Zone Press, l989.

Foster, Susan Leigh, ed. Choreographing History. Bloomington: Indiana Univ., 1995.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York:
Vintage/Random House, l978.
_____, Volume II: The Uses of Pleasure.
_____.Volume III: The Care of the Self.

Griffin, Susan. Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature. New York: Harper Colophon, l982.
_______. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. New York: Harper Colophon, l978.

Grossinger, Richard. Planet Medicine. Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1996.

Halberstam, Judith, and Livingston, Ira, editors. Posthuman Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana U, 1995.

Hollander, Anne. Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress. New York: Knopf, 1994.

"The Human Body in Social Theory: Reich, Foucault and the Repressive Hypothesis," by Russell Keat.

Keller, Evelyn Fox. Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven: Yale, l985.

David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision, RKP, 1988.
_______, The Listening Self, Routledge, 1989.

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.

Marx, Karl. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Trans. Martin Milligan. New York: International Publishers, l964.

McNeill, William H. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History.Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1995.

Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan: An Anthropological View. New York: Cambridge, l984.

Otis, Laura. Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Lincoln, Nb: U. of Nebraska Press, 1994.

Polhemus, Ted, ed. The Body Reader: Social Aspects of the Human Body. New York: Pantheon, l978.

Reich, Wilhelm. Character Analysis. Trans. V. Carfagno. New York: Simon and Schuster, l972.
_______. The Function of the Orgasm. Trans. V. Carfagno. New York: Simon and Schuster, l973.
_______. The Mass Psychology Of Fascism. Trans. V. Carfagno. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, l970.

Rosenberg, Çharles, and Golden, Janet, editors. Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1992.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, l985.

Stafford, Barbara Maria. Body Criticism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.