ABSTRACT
When therapists describe bodily phenomena it is often but not exclusively with clients who have made a profound connection with the therapist, and this response may be positive or negative. The therapists’ responses in these instances seem to have a significant bodily element. There is also the sense that the therapist is ‘tuning in’ to their client in some way, and that this is related to the intersubjective experience of being in therapy-hence the notion of ‘body empathy’. The use of the term links to our earlier discussion on how embodied phenomena can be viewed as a significant aspect of the intersubjective nature of the therapeutic relationship. I am hoping to convey here a sense that body empathy is more of an active process compared to my earlier description of ‘the body as receiver’ where there seems little choice and which is a much more passive process. Body empathy has a more active quality about it and there are clear links with the other bodily phenomena presented in this book in Chapters 5, 6 and 7. Another significant aspect of body empathy is that it enables therapists to draw upon their own lived experience and that this starts to build up a body story that is related to the therapists’ experience. This implies that such phenomena could be used as a form of self-disclosure, and I would argue that this is important in allowing the client to also build up their body story of the therapy.
