to more gawky but glamorous modern-day icons such as Virginia Roberts and Madonna. This is also very apparent when two cultures clash. When the ‘white men’ (actually disconnected Europeans) met the North American native population: to take on the ‘white man’s ways meant to lose touch with everything that was meaningful (MacLuhan, 1971). We saw similar disasters, betrayals and genocide when ‘disconnected’ British (uprooted convicts) encountered the Australian Aboriginal culture: a continuum that had been largely unchanged for 40,000 years. What are the cultural images have been influential on our clients: what images do they relate to, aspire to, and deny? What impact have these images had on their process of embodiment? I will come back to this point again when I talk about self-esteem. If you are a female psychodynamic psychotherapist, working in Farsi with a male refugee from Iran who has been tortured, work with any suggestion of touch is obviously inappropriate. The immediate work is around acceptance, dealing with grief and loss, reclaiming a sense of self, of safety and of health, transference and the expression of anger. The client reported the pleasure of coming back into his body (Azari, 2006). (Reversed) Transitional Objects: However, when we do lose touch with our bodies, then we can even start to see our body, the body, as a ‘transitional object’ (Winnicott, 1971). Normally this type of transitional object is created to protect oneself against anxiety derived from the loss of the real object, so that a child’s teddy bear or doll represents the (emotionally absent) parental loved-one. Maclachlan (2004) theorises that we ‘sculpt’ our bodies (in adolescence and adulthood) into reverse transitional objects, so that our bodies are shaped to become like a film star’s (i.e. widely admired) or a ‘Goth’, ‘Flapper’ or ‘Punk’ (peergroup accepted) and it is this that comforts us. Our body is also a transitional object: but the real reversal is when we don’t try to change it, when we can accept the body that we have, and then begin to adapt it towards a more comfortable or functional ‘shape’, which is the process of re-embodiment. Narrative Therapy: Coincidently, also in The Flesh of the Soul (Heller, 2001), Maarten Aalberse speaks well about how Narrative Therapy can develop into what he calls Choreographic Therapy “since once again working with felt gestures is added to the verbal work.” (Aalberse, 2001, p. 118) He also combines this with some ‘focusing’ work, or effectively a ‘mindfulness’ practice, that “relies less on linguistic sophistication and invites more of an embodied process.” And, with a client case example: The way (the) intervention is phrased enables the client to disidentify himself from (his) loneliness: there is a “you” that senses and knows there is a lonely place inside the larger whole of you; the problem is seen as “a part of you” that feels unloveable. The problem both becomes grounded in bodily experience and is seen as a facet of a larger self, a self that can sense and contain this loneliness and much more than that. Both the fact that this loneliness is perceived as a part of one’s selfexperience (even though it may feel as a big part, there is still an acknowledgement that “you are more than that”) and the fact that this loneliness is acknowledged as it is, may lead to significant felt shifts, that enable a more trusting and complete exploration of the issue at hand. A deeper and richer meaning can evolve, as more and more facets emerge from this bodily felt experiencing. (p. 121-122) (my emphasis in bold) There is a lot more in this article that shows how different verbal or narrative psychotherapeutic techniques, including Almaas’ work, and what Dilts calls “somatic syntax”, can be applied in a graceful bodily-oriented way that does not really involve touch but assists the client’s re-embodiment. Body Images: I mentioned this as a technique in the first article. But it also affects our process of embodiment. Stanley Keleman uses “Somatoforms” (Keleman, 1987) where the client draws an illustration of the dynamic forces within their own body. This is more an image of their proprioceptive self. It is influenced by many factors, but is the current present-moment emotional experience that the client has of their body. It is a representation of their current state of embodiment and the forces that influence this. This is the place and direction we are moving from. But what are we moving towards? I hope that we shall find out. Health: Health – as a definition – is a current state of the moment, and it is a continual process towards something, and away from illness or ill health: experienced as a 40 Courtenay Young Doing Effective Body Psychotherapy without Touch: Part II: The Process of Re-embodiment
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