I continue the small series of chronicles on the “body”, always collecting your stories about your addictions, your battles with appearance or the stories your tattoos tell. I add this week a call to your stories on these therapeutic approaches that have included the dimension of the body, in a literal or symbolic way.
I had this great opportunity to do a part of my personal psychoanalysis with an analyst who, in his former life, had also been a dancer and choreographer in contemporary dance. I also lost this analyst when a very special law enshrined the practice of psychotherapy in Quebec. But that’s another story that, maybe one day, I’ll tell you. As you well know, there are losses that bring us into the world, through the primary indignation that they leave within us.
I say that it was a chance since it is unfortunately rare that the body, in the traditional psychotherapeutic clinic, can take all the place which is due to it, and this, as much in the traumatic accounts that it carries as in the impetus vital that it carries within us. Dance having always had, for me, this significance of bringing me back from the world of the dead to keep me in that of the living, I couldn’t have been better off, I told myself at the time.
And I was not mistaken.
I was in my thirties frozen in a life full of representations of myself that did not leave me enough amplitude to dance the life that my body, its past and its future combined, carried as possible. This analysis was a revolution, a real one, the one that throws you into the transformations that you fear, but which, in a way, also bring you back to this integrity that you were looking for. The inner body, the one that expressed itself beyond, upstream or ahead of what I couldn’t always say with words, could be told to someone who wasn’t afraid of it, but who , on the contrary, was willing to decode this language too.
But what is it, then, this language of the body, when it is reflected in the clinic?
Obviously, it differs from one person to another, but it certainly covers an immense spectrum of human states: manifestations of eros, traces of early caring relationships, remains of trauma, reflex arcs of protection. Yes, the body is the place where our feelings are embodied as well as our symptoms.
How many of us become aware of our mental states through first somatic activation? Heart beating faster, breathing cut off, legs giving way like so many physical variations on a theme that we will call “anxiety”, to speak the dominant language. And what about all our stomach aches, headaches and other feelings of being too cold in oneself or too hot everywhere when it comes to designating all these signals from our interiorities? The axes connecting the affects, the sensations to our mental representations being carriers at the same time of our stories and our aspirations, the body occupies a place not only important, but central in the taking into account of the questions of “mental” health.
See how, even in designation, a reduction to a strictly cognitive rationality operates, separating thought from the rest of a more encompassing ontology. Since “I think therefore I am”, this idea of a cognition that overhangs all the other dimensions of life has persisted and it is under this sign that a dominant culture is also housed in my own field of practice.
It is perhaps my childhood clinic that has always kept me closer to this reality of being-in-the-world which is also expressed by a way of occupying space, of moving, to play, to laugh, to dance, to lie on the ground like a dog or to run from one end of the room to the other. The creativity necessary for the care of the other implies a form of presence which, very often, borrows from our personal journeys much more than from any academic teaching.
You may have to have been afraid yourself, to have contained, to have been contained, to have been broken then repaired, then rebroken to know how to tolerate being in the presence and feeling something of another person who carries with them an entire story. going through his body, not just his head. I remember those hours put “in consequence” in one of the wardrobes of my play therapy room, by this child, placed under the protection of youth, who had never had the words to tell me about the neglect and the physical abuse suffered, but who made me feel them, through the body, leaving me in the dark of the room, while he played at throwing the Playmobil men on the walls of the room next door.
With my little patients, I played dead, bad mom, witch or fairy, foam swords, Star Wars and Harry Potter, hockey, soccer, “the one who throws the furthest” or to “the one who makes the most beautiful faces”, to the baby who will not have what he wants or to the other who is thrown at the end of the room when the sister doll is born . Sometimes I was covered in glitter or walked around the room never being able to open my eyes. All these games led me to feel in my inner body something of the experienced experience, repressed or turned inside out of this other little being that I was receiving.
In a world where we would no longer divide people into sectors of practice, where the political stakes of the supervision of professions would interfere less with the care of collective suffering, body care would be an integral part of mental health care, as it is proposed in this magnificent project for traumatized people, including those experiencing homelessness in Quebec, the Bifröst project.
In a world where we would reintegrate knowledge from the humanities, or even that from so-called more “ancestral” cultures, it would be possible to once again access this evidence that “mental” health is also a presence in the world. which includes all the dimensions of being: the body, the head, the emotional, the aesthetic and the spiritual too. One thus often speaks of revolution, when it is simply a question of a return to “obviously obvious evidence”.
In the meantime, may it rain such initiatives, tons of these spaces that would allow body stories to be told in a way that is safe, inclusive and focused on self-elaboration that enlarges us from within.
Clinical psychologist, Nathalie Plaat is an author and teacher at the University of Sherbrooke.