ABSTRACT
In the past 40 years, as dance movement therapists have received additional training in counselling, social work, psychology and psychoanalysis, many have begun to integrate principles of dance movement therapy (DMT) within these disciplines. Recent advances include the recognition of the kinaesthetic dimension of attunement and empathy in the context of the therapeutic relationship (Pallaro, 1996; Wyman-McGinty, 1998, 2006), the personal and archetypal aspects of the somatic unconscious (Chodorow, 1999), the role of the affects in the development of the imagination (Chodorow, 1991, 2000, in press), and the influence of somatic experience in the development of symbol formation, including the capacity for transforming unmentalised experience into thought (Wyman-McGinty, 1998, 2006). Parallel to this has been a developing interest in the body and bodily based experience within the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis. For example: the role of affect regulation in managing unbearable states of mind (Schore, 1994; Wilkinson, 2006); the concept of psychic skin (Bick, 1968; Feldman, 2004); the importance of somatic attunement in determining attachment styles (Fonagy, 2001; Holmes, 2001); an understanding of somatic countertransference as a means of identifying with and differentiating from a patient’s internal intersubjective state (Samuels, 1985; Bollas, 1987), and the development of symbolic thought as an inherently body-based experience (Winnicott, 1967; McDougall, 1989; Mitrani, 1996; Aron, 1998; Wrye, 1998).
