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Body, Movement and Dance in

Psychotherapy: An International
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In search of a vocabulary of
embodiment
a
Roz Carroll
a
The Minster Centre , London, UK
Published online: 25 Nov 2011.

To cite this article: Roz Carroll (2011) In search of a vocabulary of embodiment, Body,
Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy: An International Journal for Theory, Research
and Practice, 6:3, 245-257, DOI: 10.1080/17432979.2011.617132

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 Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy
Vol. 6, No. 3, December 2011, 245–257

In search of a vocabulary of embodiment

Roz Carroll*

The Minster Centre, London, UK

(Received 23 December 2010; final version received 24 July 2011)
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In this article I discuss my own struggle to find a language to write about

the body in psychotherapy. I consider the merits of scientific and
conceptual terms, particularly as they relate to the concept of embodiment.
I reflect on updating our vocabulary, as well as enhancing our ability to
communicate using metaphor and metonymy. I conclude that the invention
of new metaphors which match our changing understanding of embodi-
ment is a critical task for our time.
Keywords: body; embodiment; systems; metaphor; metonymy; language

Introduction
When we talk of the mind influencing the body or the body influencing the mind
we are merely using convenient shorthand for a more cumbersome phrase.
(Ernest Jones quoted in Winnicott, 1949, p. 243)
I know who the readers are, and I know what language they will accept. (Stern,
cited in Sandler, Sandler, & Davies, 2000, p. 122)1
In this book, then, the term ‘body’ is used as a generic term for the embodied
origins of imaginative structures of understanding, such as image schemata and
their metaphorical elaborations. (Johnson, 1987, p. xv)
We all know what we are referring to when we use the word ‘body’ in a literal
sense; it means ‘the physical biological structure of a person’. But for those of
us working with the body in psychotherapy, this simple definition does not
convey the rich meaning of the body as we understand it. Fortunately, as Nick
Totton suggested in his recent article in this journal, the conceptual meaning of
‘the body’ is increasingly under scrutiny now in the social sciences and
philosophy (Totton, 2009). This is generating a wider exploration of the social,
emotional and psychological functions of the body.
The starting point for this article was my own difficulties in identifying the
language I wanted to use for writing about the body in psychotherapy. I spent a
couple of years working on a book about the body which aimed to incorporate

*Email: thinkbody@lineone.net

ISSN 1743–2979 print/ISSN 1743–2987 online

! 2011 Taylor & Francis
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 246 R. Carroll

my understanding of neuroscience, intersubjectivity and body psychotherapy.

I gave up the project because it was too big, and I could not find a language or
style that was readable and yet faithful to the complexity and density of the
issues. Thus, one of the purposes of this article is to share my own process of
reconsidering my vocabulary of embodiment.
Across the sciences and humanities now there is an emerging meta-theory of
embodiment, to which body, movement and dance psychotherapists can both
contribute and draw on. In fact, the subject of the language of, or for,
embodiment has been touched on in a number of recent articles in this journal
but not addressed in terms of how we communicate with others (Lavender,
2009; Rumble, 2010; Saffra & Cotta, 2009; Sheets-Johnston, 2010; Totton,
2009, 2010; Westland, 2009). Here I explore some of the difficulties,
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conundrums and creative solutions to the problem of conveying our under-

standing of ‘body’ and embodied processes in our writing.

Writing contexts
Firstly we have to deal with different publishing contexts and therefore
different genres of writing: theoretical, clinical, evocative, phenomenological,
scientific, popular and specialist. The language used in each type of article will
have particular effect on our way of knowing or understanding.
From the outset, body and movement psychotherapies have struggled to
find terms to reflect the sense of wholeness, of interconnectedness of mind and
body, coining or borrowing such terms as ‘bodymind’, ‘somatics’, ‘self-
regulation’, ‘organismic’ and ‘holistic’. Each word has its own historical
pathway, reflecting an attempt to overcome the dualism inherent in the
language of biology, psychoanalysis, medicine and psychology.
With the expansion of interdisciplinary thinking (Carroll, 2002) comes
a proliferation of new terms, technical language and concepts; ‘affect
regulation’, ‘attunement’, ‘attachment’, ‘alexithymia’, just to start with a few
a’s. These terms reflect on-going attempts to theorise the body’s role in
human communication, thinking and interaction (Carroll, 2003; Schore, 2003).
In an attempt to embrace related fields of knowledge, our writing may stretch
to include, explain and build on understanding and research findings from
cognitive and experimental psychology, anatomy, infant observation, ethology,
ethnography, neurobiology, evolutionary psychology, linguistics, psychoneu-
roimmunology, anthropology, behavioural neuroscience, comparative psy-
chology, systems theory, metapsychology, artificial intelligence and philosophy
of science.
But the proliferation of new concepts and technical terms can create
as well as alleviate problems in discussions about the body. As Harris has
written, ‘the project of designing useful conversations between disci-
plines entails many problems of translation, of language, of values, of
power, of interests’ (2005, p. 2). In the dialogue between psychotherapy and
science there are also issues of specificity, complexity and generalisation to
address.
 Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy 247

In my review of Cozolino (2006) The Neuroscience of Human Relationships,

I commented on how challenging it is:
to integrate new findings from research and specify what are the implications for
the theory and practice of psychotherapy without ‘dumbing down’ either
discipline. (Carroll, 2009, p. 60)
The difficulty is in how to convey complex information from one field
(neuroscience) in terms of a wholly different but equally complex and rich
conceptual language of another field (psychotherapy). The change of ‘level of
description’ from cells and synapses to human relational processes can be
clumsy and unpersuasive. Alfred Korzybski highlighted this problem over
half a century ago in his dictum ‘the map is not the territory’ (Korzybski, 1941,
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p. 58).
Writers addressing psychotherapists are caught between competing
demands for potted versions of brain science which will explain clinical
phenomena and satisfying the exhortations of others who criticise reductive
and simplistic theories of human behaviour. Added to this is how prose style
itself, the rhythm of the language and the length of the sentences, influence our
understanding of the body. Some styles of writing veer more towards the right
brain, inviting felt experience, evoking aesthetic texture, and employing a rich
use of rhythm, sensuousness and metaphor. Academic publications are usually
more oriented towards the left brain in that they are explanatory, inductive,
technically specific and written to be accurate and unambiguous. In scientific
journals, language is required to be impersonal and persuasive only in its
accumulation of established and referenced data.2 This kind of writing does not
offer an experience of the body, and it makes a heavy demand on the
uninitiated-to-the-field reader.
There will be many factors influencing our choice of language and there can
be no prescription for the right terminology.3 Instead, perhaps, we can develop
our awareness of what language we are using and why. We are in an era now
where the concept of psychology as the study of mental life is gradually giving
way to the acceptance of mind as emerging from and encompassing the
emotional, bodily and relational (Carroll, 2005; Damasio, 1994; Schore, 2003).
This is in large part due to developments in systems theory, research methods,
technology and interdisciplinary thinking. It is a step forward. But the question
remains: how do we maintain a wide frame of reference and keep developing an
internally coherent language?

From organism to organisation

We are rarely asked to define what a body is, but this question was posed to me
in an interview with Susie Orbach, who is well-known for her books on women
and their relationship with their bodies, and is interested in the body as
a relational construct.4 When we met again in a public dialogue at a conference
of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy she put it thus: ‘For me, the
body is constructed. What do I mean by this? I don’t assume the body as simply
existing by virtue of its being a physical entity [ ] the body is not so much the
 248 R. Carroll

truth but it’s a relational outcome of the inter-subjective field’ (Orbach &
Carroll, 2006, p. 68).
‘What is a body?’ was the first question Orbach asked me in the interview.
I replied, ‘a complex organism’. At the time I chose the word organism because
it implied a whole brain-body system in an environment. The words organism
and organismic have been widely used in body psychotherapy and Gestalt
psychotherapy for decades. However, I recently decided to rule it out of my
vocabulary (and implicitly move closer to Orbach’s position) because it
underemphasises mind and relationality; it suggests a pre-cultural entity rather
than a person.
On the other hand, ‘organisation’ or ‘self-organisation’ or ‘self-organising’,
which share a common verbal root with organism, have become a staple part
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of my lexicon. I believe we cannot understand the role of the body in

a psychological process without embracing a dynamic systems perspective.
Systems theories include chaos, complexity and field theory which have led to
a revolution in understanding the principles of living systems where a great
many variables are interacting with each other (Capra, 1996; Carroll, 2005).
Systems theories can deal with complexity, helping us grapple with aspects
of human functioning, such as consciousness, shifts in emotional states and the
relationship between the nervous system and its environment. ‘Self-states’,
‘emergence’, ‘state-changes’, ‘co-regulation’, ‘re-organisation’ and ‘disregula-
tion’ are some of the words that may be used to present a systems view.
Yet there is a drawback to these terms. They can sound clumsy and very
impersonal. After all, they are frequently used to describe non-human systems,
such as the weather, economic events or the growth of populations.
Nevertheless, their value lies in indicating a way of thinking that goes
beyond dualism and it is a vocabulary that is shared across most disciplines in
the sciences and humanities now. Systems theories are intrinsic to some
psychotherapies already: family therapy, Gestalt, attachment-based psycho-
therapy and the developing relational systems therapies. Moreover systems
theories can be an antidote to medical model terms. Its language is not
pathologising but rather equalising because it recognises symptoms, events and
people as shaped by multiple factors.

What, no self? No inside?

There are further implications too. With this terminology, the unconscious
disappears, and so does the word ‘self ’ by itself:
Although behavior and development appear structured, there are no structures.
Although behavior and development appear rule-driven, there are no rules. There
is complexity. There is a multiple, parallel, and continuously dynamic interplay of
perception and action, and a system that, by its thermodynamic nature, seeks
certain stable solutions. (Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. xix)
There is something uncompromising in this language that appeals to me.
Rather than focus on a part of the brain, a peptide, a gene, a family
environment or a developmental stage to explain psychological phenomena,
 Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy 249

it is more accurate to note their ‘multiple, parallel, and continuously

dynamic interplay’ (Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. xix). Yet in being rigorously
systemic, the notion of the separate self, or an internal world, is dissolved.
There are no structures.5
This perspective has been developed quite extensively now by psychother-
apists in intersubjectivity theory. This highlights the relational co-construction
of self and other, and the multiplicity of selves. It influences my own
psychotherapeutic work these days more than traditional Reichian thinking.
But much pure intersubjectivity theory does not refer to or include the body.
It focuses on shifting, discontinuous self-states that are responsive to
interaction and context (Bromberg, 2001). In a characteristic formulation,
Mitchell asserts that ‘Mind is generated in interpersonal fields of reciprocal
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influence’ (Mitchell, 1997, p. 194). So I find myself referring to embodied

intersubjectivity to ground the theory and to assert the intrinsic role of bodily
process in human relationships.

Cleaning out our linguistic cupboards

Language itself is a living changing system. Along with the pressure to
expand our terminology, we have the opportunity to spring clean to get rid
of dusty old words that have passed their sell-by date, such as ‘neurosis’ and
‘neurotic’. Or words which imply or define a space which is separate from
bodily process, such as psychic or mental. (By contrast ‘cognitive’ which
describes the act of thinking is not used to specify a separate realm.) In this
regard I also welcome the decline in the use of the term ‘non-verbal’ which
defines implicit and embodied processes in terms of a negative. Instead we see
an increasingly wide spread use of the word ‘procedural’. Originally a legal
term, it has been used by cognitive psychologists for decades to describe
knowledge stored in the body as opposed to explicit declarative memory. Now
the word procedural is entering into mainstream psychotherapies as part of
updated developmental theory and intersubjectivity. The term procedural
brings with it a systems model of human communication as firmly based in
movement, gesture and reciprocal bodily interaction (Beebe, 1998; Lyons-
Ruth, 1998).
Although I have used the term ‘ego’ in earlier writing, I am
particularly keen to sweep this word out. It is a word that stood out in
twentieth century psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, yet it belongs to a
dualistic paradigm. Whether ‘ego’ was defined as a good or a bad thing, or seen
as weak or strong, it belongs to a structural model. During the evolution of a
psychological perspective it was necessary to give labels to parts of mind or
agencies. Now we are becoming anchored both scientifically and philosoph-
ically in a new paradigm. ‘Appraising, selecting and interpreting experience
is not a function of an agency of the mind such as the id or the ego or supergo:
it is what the brain does’ (Cortina, 2003, cited in Knox, 2003, pp. 97–98, original
emphasis).
 250 R. Carroll

Embodied and embedded

In an interesting twist of events, the study of robotics (amongst other things)
has given new value to the term ‘embodied’. ‘Embodied cognition’ is a theory
which is gaining ground amongst cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists,
researchers in artificial intelligence and philosophers. They argue that all
aspects of cognition, including thoughts, concepts and categories, are shaped
by aspects of the body. These aspects include the perceptual system and the
intuitions that underlie the ability to move and to interact with our
environment. This is hardly surprising to us as body and movement
psychotherapists, but it is a revolution in thinking for cognitive psychology
and it means we have more common ground than before. An adjunct to the
idea of embodied cognition is the term ‘embedded’ or situated cognition.
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I found myself drawn to some of these authors on embodied cognition

by their vivid use of language, rather than the intricacies of their argument.
Clark writes:
certain forms of human cognising include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-
forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the
boundaries of brain, body and world. (Clark, 2008, p. xxviii)
Clark is a philosopher who uses language quite playfully, developing
fresh metaphors which reframe and update old concepts. Mind, he argues, is a
‘grab bag’, a miscellaneous collection of capacities including ‘aspects
of the local environment’ (Clark, 1998, p. 221). The physical and rela-
tional context is part of the leverage for thinking along with ‘real-world
actions’ (i.e. procedural processes). Perhaps being a philosopher allows
him to loosen his linguistic belt a bit, to find simple words for complex and,
in places, cutting edge thinking. His declaration that ‘Brain, world and body
are locked together in the most complex of conspiracies’ (Clark, 1998, p. 33)
teases all who aim to study any element by itself. Brain, world and body
breathe together.
The embodied/embedded theory of thinking balances the fluidity and
subtlety of the intersubjective perspective. We do not have an immutable ‘self ’
but nevertheless the body confers a basic boundary and a ‘ground reference’ as
Damasio claims:
The body, as represented in the brain, may constitute the indispensable frame of
reference for the neural processes we experience as mind [...] our very organism
[the body] is used as the ground reference for the constructions we make of the
world around us and for the construction of the ever present sense of subjectivity.
(Damasio, 1994, p. xviii)
Kinaesthesia enables us to have a sense of self-in-action, a felt sense of
‘what I have just done’ or ‘what I am doing’. Damasio is arguing that human
beings need a body to feel and think with. This has helped me articulate a
paradox I have explored for many years. The body must, on the one hand,
provide enough robustness and stability to act as a foundation for conscious-
ness, and, on the other hand, be so exquisitely sensitive, finely tuned and
complexly self-organising that our state of self can change rapidly in response
to our relational environment.
 Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy 251

Embodiment, animation and dissociation

Body and movement psychotherapists understand embodiment as much more
than just the fact of having or being a body. We know that inhabiting the body,
fully living it, is not straightforward (Soth, 2006). Embodiment may mean what
Winnicott (1966, p. 516) called ‘in-dwelling’; it may require active sensing of
bodily sensation, impulse and affect; it implies a sense of ownership of one’s
body and feelings, and a capacity for intersubjectivity. All these meanings are
gathered in Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) term ‘the lived body’. Merleau-Ponty had a
huge influence on re-conceptualising the body as the locus of experience, and
placing phenomenology at the heart of understanding. He chose his words
carefully:
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Embodiment is a process which fluctuates according to many factors; it is on a

continuum with dissociation. The increasing popularity of the term ‘dissociation’
in psychotherapy as part of the developing understanding of trauma provides a
further word in the interdisciplinary vocabulary. Dissociation has widely varying
meanings of course, as does the word embodiment. But it is increasingly used by
therapists from many orientations to refer to overwhelming affect, dysregulation,
disconnection between self-states, or detachment and disengagement from
relationship. It describes a state of relative disembodiment. (Schore, 2003)
The concept of affect regulation, which is related to self-regulation, places
the process of embodying in a relational context. Thus I see ‘dissociation’ as a
foot-in-the-door kind of word, a movement in the direction of a shared holistic
language.
With all conceptual terms we have the problem of different interpretations
and associations. I was interested to read Sheets-Johnston’s statement that
embodiment represents a ‘thoroughly static concept’ (2010, p. 116). Movement
is what characterises aliveness, she argues, and the term ‘animation’ better
conveys ‘the full range of those intricate and varying dynamics that constitute
and span the multiple dimensions of our livingness’ (Sheets-Johnston, 2010,
p. 119). I am definitely persuaded that the term animation has an important
place in our lexicon. Yet still, for me, animation as a term does not quite
capture the subtleties of nuanced exchange, self-awareness and relationality
that I want to attribute to the term embodiment.

Metonymy and the part-whole conundrum

Writers of accessible, evocative, reader-friendly prose know that too dense a
technical description of a process can be deadening and off-putting. One of the
central characteristics of colloquial, fictional and pop psychology writing is a
liberal use of metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor is a figure of speech which
invokes a similarity between two things, e.g. life is a journey. It confers a
symbolic meaning rather than a literal one. Metonymy is a term from literary
analysis which refers to the use of the part to refer to the whole, ‘substituting
the name of an attribute or feature for the name of the thing itself’ (http://
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/metonymy). Examples of this are common
in our language. We say someone ‘likes the bottle’ when we mean they have a
 252 R. Carroll

tendency to drink too much. ‘The bottle’ stands for the act of drinking, or even
alcoholism. Another way of saying this is that the part is used to refer to a
larger whole or process. With the popularisation of science we see this
condensing and simplifying of complex processes entering into normal speech,
‘Adrenalin got him to the top’ or ‘It’s her hormones talking’.
The danger of this kind of fast and loose speech is that it blurs the
boundaries of conceptual thought. Some may hear it as shorthand for a more
elaborate explanation; others may start to take it literally. Technical words are
prevalent and may end up being used in a way that bears little resemblance
to their original function. As the roles and functions of parts or substances
within the brain and the body are clarified, differentiated and increasingly
understood, the information is often presented (by writers trying to make it
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accessible) as if the particular part (the cingulate, serotonin, cortisol) bears

responsibility for a process, such as depression.
In the search for understanding how people work, minds work or bodies
work, the dialectical tension between specific causes and systemic processes is
constantly collapsing. It is easier to think in terms of ‘this equals that’ than to
hold and articulate complexity. I call this ‘the quagmire of equivalence’ and
I see it as the real danger inherent in drawing on neuroscience. Candace Pert
(1997) gives a vivid account of the discovery of peptides and their role in
organising mood, behaviour and affect, but her argument is an example of this
quagmire. She attributes a whole (emotional processes) to a part (chemicals of
various kinds), without the counterbalancing point that feelings are generated
in and through relationships.

But what if we need metonymy?

Metonymy is intrinsic to our language. It is used to facilitate discussion of
concepts and processes which if described accurately in the language of science
would overwhelm readers who are unfamiliar with the field. The use of
metonymy can reduce technically complex explanations into shorthand
practical pegs on which we can hang ideas. For example, once familiar with
the idea of a differentiated right and left cortex, it is handy to refer to the right
brain (as I did a few pages back) as if particular capacities for processing
information belonged to the cortex rather than the system (human being in a
relational and cultural context). This is a pervasive quirk of English and many
other languages. For example, in news reports in the UK the Prime Minister’s
office and his staff are often referred to as ‘Downing Street’; the location of
their offices in London. For example, ‘Downing Street said today they would
be taking the issue of under-age drinking with the utmost seriousness’. Nobody
takes this to mean that the pavements and tarmac of the street have suddenly
become capable of speech.
As I will show later when I reflect on my own use of the word ‘body’ to
stand for a whole network of concepts and experiences, maybe we need
metonymy. In the meantime, let us consider its better-known cousin, metaphor.
 Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy 253

Deep frames and conceptual metaphor

Metaphorical thought [ ] is simply commonplace and inescapable. Abstractions

and enormously complex situations are routinely understood via metaphor.
Indeed there is an extensive, and mostly unconscious, system of metaphor that we
use automatically and unreflectively to understand complexities and abstractions.
(Lakoff, 1992, p. 463)
Metaphor, like metonymy, is a feature of writing and speech that enables us
to handle abstract thought. Furthermore, many commonly used metaphors are
structured by the features of our bodies and the functioning of our bodies in
everyday life. Basic propositions like up/down as superior/inferior are built on
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our experience of our body in space. (This is another aspect of embodied

cognition theory.) Metaphors transfer meanings between domains. They are
mappings across conceptual domains in which a correspondence is made
between a source domain and what is often a more abstract idea or target
domain (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999).
So, for example, ‘machine’ (source) is used as a metaphor for describing the
‘body’ (target) as a system involving multiple parts that need to be working in
order to function effectively. A deep frame is a core underlying cultural value
or belief embodied in a metaphor. For example, this idea of the body as a
machine goes back to Descartes who argued that bodies follow the laws of
physics. It suggests that bodies have fixed, isolated parts, which can break
down and be mended. A machine is not influenced by feelings, qualities of
relationship or cultural context. The idea of the body as a machine is the
metaphor (the deep frame) that we are still contending with in our work.
Underlying the range of disciplines and historical cultural phases whose
influence have shaped the conceptualisation of the body, there are a growing
number of metaphors for what bodies are or do which reflect widening
perspectives. In looking at both new and old implicit metaphorical structures
for ‘the body’ and ‘body and mind’, I noticed something interesting.
The metaphors for ‘the body’ are quite wide-ranging. A sample of
these drawn from a variety of sources includes: the body is a text, the body
is a machine, the body is an organism, the body is a container, the body is a
perceptual space, the body is self, the body is a dwelling, the body is an
orchestra, the body is an environment, the body is an eco-system, the body is a
landscape, the body is the unconscious, the body is a shape, the body is
a theatre, the body as an assembly of voices, the body is chaos, the body is the
enemy, and the body is a repository of wisdom.
By contrast most formulations regarding mind and body are based on
spatial metaphors: body and mind are separate substances, mind is superior
(literally, ‘higher than’) to body, body is superior to mind, body and mind are
linked, body and mind are one, body is hardware and mind is software, and
mind emerges from the body. A more complex metaphor, still with spatial
implications, is mind as the ghost in the machine (body). I think it is significant
that if we try to understand the concept of the body via its relationship with the
mind, we get something very static. If on the other hand we understand the
 254 R. Carroll

body as an active agent, we get richness and variation. What is most

heartening, however, is the increasing use of musical metaphors, based on
timing rather than space, for describing relations between bodies: attunement,
misattunement, synchrony, communicative musicality, resonance, and rhyth-
micity (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009).

What do I mean by ‘the body’?

Despite years of teaching and working with my body, with clients and in
groups where the body was a focus, I have had to think quite hard to identify
what ‘the body’ means to me personally, and why ‘the’ body as opposed to
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‘bodies’. The meaning of the word ‘body’ for me has evolved in the constant
and reciprocal shifts between theories and felt experiences. I have noticed
that when I write about ‘the body’ it appears I am ascribing intentionality to
the body when actually the intentionality belongs to the person. I am using the
word ‘body’ not literally but metonymically, to stand for something.
‘The body’, for me, stands for the capacity for, and quality of, living
awareness, responsiveness and creativity. I use the term ‘body’ in a catch-all
sense (to stand for the whole) partly to rebalance the emphasis there has been
on a psychic realm whose relationship with the body was either absent, vague,
pathologised or restricted.
Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings (2005) argue that words, including abstract
concepts, are comprehended by activating images of relevant situations across
multiple contexts. Slingerland (2008) summarises their proposal like this:
On this account, both hammer and truth are comprehended by means of concrete
imagery; our sense that truth is more ‘abstract’ derives from the fact that its
content is distributed across a multitude of situations and involves complex
events, introspective simulation of somato-sensory states, and multiple modalities
of perception. (p. 60, original italics)
If I take on board the full weight of this argument, I understand both how
and why there is such a gap between the meaning of the word ‘body’ for me and
the meaning of that word for someone else. In this context, the word body is as
profound and complex a category as the words ‘woman’, ‘mother’ or ‘Anglo-
Irish’ etc for example. Just as we are gradually deconstructing stereotypes of
what gender, race and sexual orientation mean; that in fact the meanings of
these terms are wide-open, complex, multi-layered, personal, political, and
unique-to-the-user, so too must we realise is the word ‘body’.

Final thoughts
I think of the body as a perceptual space, an organism, a cultural object, as the
site of subjectivity, of transformation and process, and as the vehicle for all
aspects of live communication. In this sense, of course, ‘the body’ always
includes the brain as part of the total system; and indeed ‘the body’ by itself is
meaningless without a social cultural intersubjective field. One of the themes of
this article is that evolving interdisciplinary language means that body,
 Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy 255

movement and dance psychotherapists are less isolated conceptually from

other practices in the field of mental (sic) health. There are more shared terms,
even though we may still understand and use them differently.
In contemporary cognitive linguistics, advances in thinking are recognised
to be the products of blended metaphor. Interdisciplinary thinking is about
adjusting the blend of metaphors for the era in which we live, cooking up
new ideas, echoing the trends perhaps of fusion cooking and world music.
For Lakoff (1992), the development of thought is contingent upon the process
of developing better metaphors. The invention of new metaphors for our time
and which match our changing understanding of embodiment is a critical task.
Recently, embodiment has been referred to as ‘a process, not a state’ with
the ‘witnessing aspect of mind rhythmically leaping like a dolphin above the sea
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of the body’ (Totton, cited in Carroll, 2010). I found this an exhilarating and
inspired metaphor. It captures the complexity of the way a healthy mind moves
between observation and immersion in its experiential field. Further the
dolphin image via its resonant associations conveys the aspects of sensitive
communicativeness and vibrant animated life which are central to my
understanding of embodiment.

Notes on contributors
Roz Carroll is a body psychotherapist with an interest in movement, neuroscience and
relational psychoanalysis. She teaches on the MA in Integrative Psychotherapy at
The Minster Centre. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters, including,
most recently ‘Self-regulation – an evolving theory at the heart of psychotherapy’
in Contemporary Body Psychotherapy (2009) ed. L. Hartley (www.thinkbody.co.uk)

Notes
1. Stern made this comment during a debate with Andre Green about the role of
science in psychoanalysis. He was defending an article he had written for the Infant
Mental Health Journal (cited in Sandler, Sandler, & Davies, 2000, p. 122).
2. On the other hand, increasing efforts are being made to include the body in
qualitative description of human experience ‘the aesthetic dimension’ in social,
health and psychological research (Todres, 1998).
3. The peer reviewer of this article has pointed out the omission of a reference to the
languages of Laban Movement Analysis and the Kestenberg Movement Profile
which are used in DMP. I have not studied these systems although I am aware of
them. It is too late to incorporate a discussion of the language into the whole article
but what strikes me about Laban Movement Analysis is its use of direct, simple,
words such as ‘shape, weight, flow, effort’ to categorise key aspects of embodied
movement (Laban & Lawrence, 1974). It is a language system that gives an
objective technical reference for subtle and complex embodied states.
4. Under the section heading ‘What is a body?’ Totton touches on the very different
assumptions about the body held by social theorists and feminists.
5. Yet actually Gestalt psychotherapy got here some time ago. Fritz Perls declared
more than half a century ago that self is ‘the system of contacts at any moment’
(Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951, p. 235).
 256 R. Carroll

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