ABSTRACT
Couples engaged in psychotherapy often perceive and describe the issues that come up in their relationship as linked to the diverse “truths” held by the partners and their respective positions with regard to the primary causes of conflict, wherein the claims of the other are sometimes perceived by each partner as “imaginative windmills.” In these situations, dance/movement therapy for couples (DMT-C) serves as a mediator and a bridge to unconscious contents, aiming to bring forth seminal yet unknown truths in the couple relationship through joint dance, to offer a somatic translation of these unknowns in and through movement and to follow these bodily insights by symbolic and verbal processing in the analytic session.
This chapter presents a qualitative study of nine heterosexual couples who took part in twelve sessions of DMT-C, designed to understand the partners’ perceptions of different subjective truths in the relationship. The research findings show that the joint movement experience elicited the articulation of the subjective truth of each partner and also highlighted some significant shared truths, which were all somatically embodied and expressed. Moreover, the “here and now” encounter with emotional contents through the body created a safe space for the acceptance and internalisation of unconscious and previously unrecognised roles and needs, which only came to the fore through the couple's movement. The combination of movement and subsequent verbal processing thus enables the formulation of latent knowledge, which resides in the body and cannot be consciously reached through spoken language alone.
