ABSTRACT
Wendy Wyman-McGinty (1998), in her reflections on authentic movement, the somatic unconscious and the body in analysis, notes that early in his career Jung ‘observed that he was able to understand and communicate with a schizophrenic woman by imitating and reflecting her gestures’. She also notes, however, that Jung ‘did not develop his ideas on movement as a form of active imagination’ (Wyman-McGinty 1998: 239-40). While Andre Sassenfeld (2008) acknowledges that since the late 1980s a place has been made for the body in psychotherapy, citing, for example, the works of Redfearn, Sidoli, Wiener, Cambray, Samuels, Stone, Chodorow, Greene and Heuer among others, he says, ‘analytical psychology’s historical emphasis on the psychological side of the individual’s psychosomatic totality needs for completeness to be balanced with theoretical and practical knowledge regarding the patient’s bodily side’ (Sassenfeld 2008: 1). Heuer is even more blunt regarding the place of the body in Jungian psychology. He says, ‘Jungian psychology seems marked by a theoretical ambivalence towards the body, whilst mostly ignoring it clinically’ (cited by Sassenfeld 2008: 2).
