ABSTRACT
It may be helpful at this stage to have a brief summary of the key points of my argument. I will offer a summary every few chapters as we go along.
Embodiment is both a state (corporeality) and a process (becoming aware of and identified with myself as corporeal).
When we speak of “the body”, we usually mean “embodiment without self-awareness”. When we speak of “the self”, we usually mean—though without necessarily realising it—“embodiment with self-awareness”—since embodiment is a necessary though not a sufficient condition for self-awareness.
Mind emerges from continuous, non-linear sensorimotor interactions involving circular causality between brain, body, and environment.
Hence mind is both embodied and extended.
This involves a reciprocal relationship: mind extends into its environment, which means that the environment also extends into mind. Mind is an aspect or expression of its environment, a representative/representation of the systems of which it is part.
58This approach leads to a reconceptualising of vision, which loses its privileged status and its connotations of distance, separation, and objectivity. Correspondingly, there emerges a revaluation of touch and visceral/proprioceptive perception as central forms of knowledge about the world and other people.
Embodiment is fundamental to human relationships, as a conscious or unconscious substrate which shapes, and is shaped by, verbal and mental interactions and responses. The reciprocal impact of one embodiment upon another can be seen as an intaglio-like process, whereby through the pressure of contact an “incised” pattern in one surface creates an “embossed” copy in the other.
The embodied relational substrate generates engrams: complex, stubbornly persistent patterns of activation formed in early life relationships and applied to current ones. Engrams are parsimonious: they would always rather repeat than innovate, although innovation does happen when there is no alternative.
In relationship, engrams operating in each person activate the most relevant—often complementary—engrams in the other, via a process of coupling: an embodied resonance and entrainment in which each becomes an “exogram” for the other—each uses the other as an opportunity to replay powerful life themes.
As with many other involuntary experiences, we are adept at discovering justifications for our engram-defined responses in the perceived behaviour of the other. At the same time, however, our engrams are in fact activated, though not created, by subtle cues in the other’s embodied behaviour.
In psychotherapy just as in life, therapists are drawn through contact with each client into an unconscious reactivation of embodied relational engrams. Their task is not to avoid this inevitable process, but to find ways of bringing it to awareness, both for themselves and for their clients.
