Analytic Somatic Therapy Institute's blog

Therapy is two people playing together

Everyone likes Donald Woods Winnicott. He relates easily to all the work of Psychoanalysis as well as Analytic Psychology (Jungian Analysis). By bringing our focus to Winnicott as an historical center point, we may compare his work to Freud, Reich, Klein, Bion, Kohut, Jung, relational psychology, affect theory and attachment theory. Winnicott was a remarkable clinician and a writer whose literary voice often creates an image of a thoughtful, intimate disclosure, such as a conversation over tea in the kitchen. For instance, he begins his third chapter in Playing and Reality with this provocative, intriguing sentence: “In this chapter I am trying to explore an idea that has been forced on me by my work, and also forced on me by my own stage of development at the present time, which gives my work a certain colouring.”

Winnicott translates psychological terminology into unpretentious prose. He solidified key thoughts into single, startling sentences, which he develops into paragraphs, as much a poet as a prose writer. One suspects Winnicott struggled with organization, having more a mosaic, intuitive than linear mind. Casual as his style appears, the craftsmanship of individual sentences and often paragraphs condense his thought into a tight clinical structure with an intense focus on the infant/mother couple and the necessary steps toward a formation of a self.

Winnicott was considered an unlikely candidate for enduring fame. Paul Roazen, the gadfly of Psychoanalysis, having interviewed Winnicott, was later puzzled by his posthumous popularity. Roazen considered the more “academic” practitioners a more worthy choice. There is something about Winnicott’s attitude that pokes fun at pretension and undermines the self important seriousness of the “Analyst”. He proclaims in one of his “startling” sentences, “Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together.”

It makes sense to me that we take time to read Winnicott because of his enduring relevance and his extraordinary, observant care, the result of half a century as a pediatrician and psychoanalyst. Having studied for five years with Melanie Klein (1935-40) and analyzed one of her sons, Winnicott came to differ with Klein and define himself through his agreements and disagreements, a process Klein and her group found unacceptable. The Kleinians, for instance, put a high priority on delivering the exact interpretation. In contrast, Winnicott encouraged the clinician to be patient enough to allow patients to arrive at the interpretation on their own, without stealing away that pleasure. Klein focused on the unconscious phantasy of the infant as the central work, while Winnicott protested that there was no such thing as a child, only a child/mother.

The Poetic Body

Evolutionary biologists tell us that we share the following 8 emotions
with all mammals: seeking, fear, rage, lust, care, disgust, panic and
play. As we developed as a species, we crafted social emotions
universally identified on our human face: fear, anger, contempt,
enjoyment, shame, sadness, surprise. But these lists tell us nothing
about the poetic body.

Some scientists, not all scientists, tell us the soul exists only as a
function of the prefrontal cortex, but that tells us nothing about the poetic body.

Some scientists, not all scientists, speak to us as if science is the only
language and light in a dark, misguided, superstitious world and that
the scientists are the high priests of truth. They tell us that rational
thought is the only mode of thought, but that tells us nothing about
the poetic body or the nature of truth.

Some scientists tell us that brain scans and chemicals are solutions
that will replace all other forms of deep therapeutic intervention–and
that tells us nothing about the poetic body.

It used to be and still is in some places that religion joined forces
with political rulers. Now science is the handmaid of government,
developing weapons and technology to exercise control and
dominance—and all that power and influence tells us nothing about the poetic body.

I am in love with the discoveries of neuroscience and evolutionary
biology and how such knowledge has informed our view of human
nature–but science tells us very little intentionally about the
expressive arts. The way science must order their thought leaves
everything else out. Their focus is their strength–but they have
nothing to tell us about the poetic body.

The poetic body captures the wonder of the moment, of the amazing
experience of being alive and self-aware in a body that becomes like
lead one instance and in another a shooting star. The poetic body
pushes the limit on the edge of something so much bigger than itself,
with yearning for the impossible and yet content with a bowl of hot
soup. The poetic body sinks into our lover’s eyes. The poetic body
trains and trains for a performance before a crowd or the execution
of a dance alone under a tree. The poetic body always breathes and
sometimes sighs and sobs in grief, but alive we are as full of poetry as
Dylan Thomas, drunk stumbling home or an ascetic alone in the chapel
saying prayers. What is most human and divine about us is our playful
and poetic nature, expressed and unexpressed.

There is a language of emotion developed through music, art,
literature, myth and story that expresses the poetic body. Emotions
are not clumps of words like hate and fear. Myth and story, music and
art are the ways emotions think. Dreaming is the way the body thinks.

Long before we developed a verbal language which is quite recent (the
last 100,000 years) we were communicating up a storm. The evidence
of that is seen in sign language today. Oliver Sacks in Seeing Voices
describes how sign language has its own grammar and syntax, it
allows for humor, irony, and playful spontaneity perhaps greater than
the spoken word, a language perfectly expressive of the poetic body.

One has only to watch two people signing to see that signing
has a playful quality, a style, quite different from that of speech.

Signers tend to improvise, to play with signs, to bring all their
humor, their imaginativeness, their personality, into their signing,
so that signing is not just the manipulation of symbols according to
grammatical rules, bur irreducibly, the voice of the signer—a voice
given a special force, because it utters itself, so immediately, with the
And that of course is what our purpose is in Analytic Somatic Therapy,
to help each other find our voice that so immediately utters itself with
the body, our poetic body.

In Analytic Somatic Therapy, we draw the body, we walk and we hold
We move slowly to feel the numb and traumatized parts. We work
on grounding, boundaries, breath, our range of emotion and even our
intention to be here, the Foundations.

We practice how to be present in body and mind before we do
anything. We practice how to be here now.

And that means we must return to the subtlest feelings of the body
itself like a dancer, like an artist, because our bodies enhance or shut down our deepest human experience, as our poetic body.

 

 

The Five Principles of Analytic Somatic Therapy

There are five key elements to my teaching of Analytic Somatic Therapy: A basic vocabulary of techniques, the evolutionary body, character defenses, analysis, and presence.

1. A basic vocabulary of techniques that provides us with a structure of engagement.

2. The Evolutionary body has crept up on us since the publication The Origin of the Species in 1859. Instead of being a little lower than the angels and ruled by spirit, the body more often an afterthought, we are a little further along than the apes now. Now, in certain circles we are only body–the mind and soul being mapped out in our head. What is it like these days to believe in God, in spirit, in a higher power, in reincarnation, in life after death? Without Divinity in ascendance, what constitutes the basis of justice, of freedom from tyranny, and what is the fate of the planet without a God of history? In some form, many of our older clients are dealing with a loss of meaning that places an unfamiliar demand on a somatic psychotherapist.

3. Character defenses describe the correspondence between the psyche and soma's defense structure. Reich’s character defenses were systematically laid out by Alexander Lowen in accordance with Freud’s developmental theory: the schizoid, the oral, the narcissistic, the masochistic, the rigid and the genital character. Reich as a psychoanalyst used Freud’s developmental theory working with clients in the 1920’s. Winnicott explored the concept of a false and a hidden true self. I distinguish between the ego and the self.

4. Analysis, both Freud's Psychoanalysis and Jung's Analytic Psychology create essential techniques and useful maps in our work with our clients, and finally

5. We practice the presence of being in the body, mind and spirit. Too often we are very busy doing. We talk; we work on the body defenses. Doing turns our clients into objects. But the key is simply to be completely present, much harder than it seems. Being gives our clients room to be seen and intuitively met where words and even touch fail. There are clients we can't fix. There is nothing to do. We may have to feel useless by providing an extraordinary space for our clients to have thoughts of their own.

Many people manage to focus their emotional or intellectual attention well enough but their somatic attention puzzles them. That is why I put together what I call the foundations: grounding, boundaries, breath, range of emotions and intention to be here. To Be Here Now, we need to be present in mind, body and spirit to deal effectively with the dark aspects of our life. 

I once ran a halfway house in the 1970's for Schizophrenics who had recently been released from the hospital. In hiring staff, I always wanted to know how they dealt with their depression–perhaps you can imagine why. The problem is no less important working with a wider range of clients. For instance, some 50 year olds are losing the houses they raised their children in. What is there to say really? What is there to do? As you can see, I am training you to encounter your own deep humanity and for the long-term, a training you can grow into in your own time–but issues to think about now.