About a Body: Working with the Embodied Mind in Psychotherapy

How does our body reveal us to ourselves?

The body can inform the work we do in mental health. This unique collection invites the reader to consider the way we think about the embodied mind, and how it can inform both our lives and our work in psychotherapy and counselling.

The body is viewed as integral to the mind in this book, and in the approaches illustrated in it. Instead of splitting off the body and treating the patient as a body with a mind, contributors from a variety of approaches ask the reader to consider how we might be with, and work with, ‘bodymind’ as an interrelated whole. Subjects covered include:

• the application of affective neuroscience understandings to life as well as to clinical issues
• the body in psychotherapy with a person who is facing death
• the history, significance and scope of body psychotherapy today
• psychoanalytic approaches to working with the embodied mind
• authentic movement groups in the development of wellbeing in our bodymindspirit
• the body and spirituality

This book is unique in its pluralism: it includes a wide range of differing views of the importance of the body in psychotherapy, both in theory and in practice, and it relates these to the latest discussions in affective neuroscience. It will be invaluable for those working in, or studying, psychotherapy and counselling, and will also interest those working generally in the mental health field.

Jenny Corrigall is a research psychologist and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, working in Cambridge.

Helen Payne is Reader in Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of Hertfordshire and a Senior Registered Dance Movement Therapist. She is Editor for the International Journal for Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy.

Heward Wilkinson is co-founder of the Scarborough Psychotherapy Training Institute, until recently was Chair of the Humanistic and Integrative Section of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, and was Editor of the International Journal of Psychotherapy 1996-2004.