Michael Soth - Articles & Papers: Extracts

The excluded and objectified body in psychotherapy

I have been to a variety of conferences on the body, on trauma, on somatic countertransference and similar events, inviting participants from across the various sections represented in UKCP. Typically, these events arose from a recognition that - generally speaking - in the theories and practice of psychotherapy (as we know it) the body is not just 'not included', but excluded. And these events were explicitly designed to re-include the excluded body. However, the "return of the repressed" body is inevitably over-shadowed by idealisation on the one hand or by fear, repulsion, mistrust, addiction, etc on the other. This mirrors the way in which our clients bring their bodies to psychotherapy: as an avenue for a simplistic, physical and un-psychological 'cure' or as the most engrained locus of the uncontrollable, unreachable, unchangable symptom.
In a similar fashion, in psychotherapy conferences we then focus on the clinical use or the clinical extremes of the body, i.e. either body techniques (often reduced to: whether to touch or not) or body symptoms (sex, addictions, eating disorders, self-harm, trauma).
However, all of this is pervaded by an underlying stance which treats the body as an object rather than a subject. The objectification of the body is rampant in the culture, in our clients and in the field of counselling and psychotherapy.
We cannot talk about how to 'use' the body in psychotherapy without some recognition of the 'use', mis-use and ab-use of the body under 'normal' circumstances in our culture. We cannot hope to work with the body unless we have an understanding how much we are always already caught in a culturally constructed stance of working against the body. We cannot address the pain and problems manifesting in the body without addressing the problems inherent in our dualistic, hierarchical, objectifying conception of the body/mind relationship.
What do I mean by dualistic conception of the body/mind relationship ?
In simple terms, it's the assumption that change comes about through 'the mind' over and against 'the body'.
According to many therapeutic theories, 'identity' is supposed to inhere in the mind, in mental processes, in cognition, images, thoughts; therefore therapy, change, health, development rely on insight, consciousness, understanding, discipline, motivation, effort. Therapy is based on (and biased towards) reflective capacities (e.g. symbolisation) over and against spontaneous processes.
Neuroscience suggests that these assumptions are partial, one-sided fantasies, no less, no more. In my view this kind of dualistic conception (of the body/mind relationship) is always part of the problem, never the solution; that conception alienates and objectifies the body and drives the body into 'somatisation'.
If neuroscience teaches us anything, it tells us that our traditional conception of the brain-body and mind/body relationship is misleading and insufficient.