ABSTRACT
Therapists usually enter into the field with a wish to work wholeheartedly with their patients. Similarly, infants come into the world with the desire for social connection and relationship underpinned by neural systems that support the experience of feeling in interaction. Bodily rhythms of vitality, such as found in breathing, are backdrops to the living rhythms of exchange in communication. Language as lived through the utterances of speech, listening to it and even thinking with it has a prosody, beginning with the musicality of the exchanges between infant and carer. A normative model of emotional experience is useful to psychotherapeutic care. It is substantially informed by Porges’ Polyvagal Theory which holds that social engagement of vital functions has had a central role in human evolution and culture. It highlights a principle of whole-body, whole-person engagement in communication of purposes and feelings. This chapter forms a background to an intersubjective approach to research that recognizes both the privacy of self and the centrality of relationship to embodied mental lives, while maintaining awareness of the objective interests that may inform understanding of the living process.
