The Bodily Roots of Experience in Psychotherapy

This book explores the significance of movement processes as they shape one’s experience through life. With an introductory foreword by Michael Vincent Miller, it provides a comprehensive, practical understanding of how we lose the wonder and curiosity we move with as children, and how we can reclaim that.

A new paradigm is presented in the making of experience through a radical and thorough investigation into the basics of animated life. The book utilizes a precise phenomenological language for those subverbal interactions that form the foundation of lived experience. The centrality of those interactions to the therapeutic encounter is set forth through richly detailed therapy vignettes. The building of experience is meticulously explored via the bridging of infant-parent dyads and the functional similarity of those dyads to the unfolding patient-therapist relationship. Readers learn to acknowledge routine inhibitions developed in early life, appreciate their former usefulness, and discover how to restore the lively flow of moving-feeling responses.

This book is essential for all psychotherapists who wish to integrate the dynamics of movement into their work; educators who work with babies and young children; and all those wishing to understand better their psychophysical selves.

Ruella Frank brings many years of experience to her work as a gestalt psychotherapist: professional dancer/choreographer, yoga practitioner, student of various movement theories, and student of Laura Perls, co-founder of gestalt therapy. Founder and director of the Center for Somatic Studies, Dr. Frank is faculty at the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy, asjunct faculty at Gestalt Institute of Toronto. She teaches throughout the United States, Europe, Eurasia, Mexico, South America, and Canada. She has written articles and book chapters, authored Body of Awareness: A Somatic and Developmental Approach to Psychotherapy (2001, GestaltPress, available in four languages), co-authored The First Year and the Rest of Your Life: Movement, Development and Psychotherapeutic Change (2010, Routledge, available in three languages). Her video, Introduction to Developmental Somatic Psychotherapy, is available in three languages.