ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores "Physical love", partly as a tease, because touch and sexuality always come up in conversations about body psychotherapy, as though it was the most important, or the only significant, so impoverished is therapist culture's range of bodily experience. Body psychotherapy must always understand love as grounded in physical, embodied process. From the body psychotherapist's viewpoint, the whole battle is taking place on the terrain of a unified bodymind, where imaginary splits and oppositions are set up between "mental" and "physical" aspects of experience. Body psychotherapy treats psyche not over and against soma, but as complementary and even, in some senses, identical to it. A great contribution of body psychotherapy is to realise that dissociating, defence, and repression are initially bodily events—a tensing of the voluntary musculature against the perception and expression of feelings.
