ABSTRACT
As a notable absence in my graduate clinical psychology training, I learned very little about how to think about the body in the therapy room, even though the body plays a major role in how therapists and patients interact with each other. For example, what does it mean when patients “read” various identities onto you based on your body? How does it impact the therapy if patients mention their menstrual status, urinary incontinence, chronic pain, or their history of mastectomy? Is the body a nuisance (something to avoid and ignore) or a source of knowledge and meaning-making? In this chapter, I look at the corporeal, material, fleshy body—that is, the body not as an abstraction but as a concrete entity—in the therapy room, particularly how the body figures centrally in many conversations between patients and therapists. I do this in order to examine the materiality of the body and its impact on the therapy relationship for both patients and practitioners. I structure this chapter by looking at three major areas where the corporeal body appears in the therapy room: leaky bodies (e.g., incontinence, menstruation, breastfeeding, runny nose); identity-marked bodies (e.g., marital/child status, gender, race, clothing and class status); and gendered bodies (e.g., fatness, breasts, trans/cis identity, hair, make-up). I conclude by drawing parallels with qualitative research and teaching in order to specifically look at how the body functions differently in the therapy room than in other similar spaces that feminist psychologists might encounter.
