Katya Bloom’s newly published volume ‘The Embodied Self - Movement & Psychoanalysis’ is most surely the book Dance and Movement Psychotherapists have all been waiting for. So many of us who explore and navigate in that emotional area between words and physical experience are aware of the numerous links between these two traditions of understanding and communicating about feeling. Never before have the strands of free association in movement and the theory of psychoanalysis been brought together in quite this imaginative way or articulated with such clarity.

The book begins by drawing us in to the writer’s own curiosity about movement analysis and psychic processes. She sets out to question what psychoanalytic theory can contribute to the profession of Dance Movement Therapy and whether closer attention to movement can provide an added dimension of understanding to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. She leads us in through numerous and diverse references from Darwin and Freud to attachment theory, recent developments in neuroscience and the many branches of body or movement-based psychotherapy.

There follows a concise introduction to Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), which she relates to the practice of Dance Movement Therapy, to Amerta Movement, an Indonesian movement system introduced to her by Suprapto Suryodarmo, and to her own work in the training of actors.

From this point she weaves together the well-known landmarks of psychoanalytical thinking with movement observations, making links to Bion’s ‘attacks on linking’, Bick’s ‘second skin’, Winnicott’s ‘false self’ and many other concepts. She uses the Laban framework to show how these manifest clearly in patterns of weight, flow, space and time. The issue of counter-transference is addressed within the chapter entitled ‘Embodied attentiveness: a synthesis of frameworks’, in which she once again draws our attention to other theorists; those whose ideas already point towards her own sensitive reception of meaningful messages transmitted via movement.

The second part of the book elaborates on four detailed psychoanalytical observational studies of infants, highlighting and interpreting patterns of movement. The significance of these is then delightfully evident in the third part of the book presenting clinical case studies and surprising us with an unexpected ‘denouement’, in which she draws parallels between the coping strategies of the adults and the infants described earlier.                                                                                   

The brief concluding chapter cautions against too simplistic an interpretation of movement observations and outlines some of the ways in which movement analysis and psychoanalysis may benefit each other. It also describes some of the patients for whom a movement approach could extend the potential of therapy. Finally the author expresses hope for a synthesis of approaches via written and verbal dialogue and even adjustments to training of therapists.

I have no doubt that this book makes a substantial contribution to the field of Dance Movement Therapy and Movement Psychotherapy but I anticipate that it will also offer valuable insights to those psychotherapists and analysts for whom words are more familiar territory.

The mapping out of the overlapping areas of thought is helpful, as is the development of ideas about ‘somatic countertransference’. I particularly liked the discussion relating to reading and receiving bodily experience, in which the author describes the therapist’s anchorage in his/her own body as a means to introjecting, rather than reacting to, patients’ anxiety. Similarly, I was struck by her use of the quote from Quinodoz, reminding us that the confusion of bodily and emotional experience is based in infancy and that …”it may be the analyst who feels in himself the bodily experience that accompanied the patient’s unconscious affect, in which case he will be able to help the patient attend to this sensation, to progress from the sensation to the bodily experience, and thence to its emotional meaning.”

The clinical casework brings a depth to the work, which enables us to leap the gap where infant observation heralds psychoanalytic practice. I think Katya Bloom has provided us with a sophisticated insight into the interpretation of communications via movement, giving us an awareness of the defensive uses of both words and actions and sharing her sensitivity and subtlety of therapeutic intervention in responding to raw, as yet un-verbalised, emotional material.

I think some readers may find it difficult to hold on to the details of Laban Movement Analysis, however it provides a structure from which it is possible to explore more spontaneous reflection on the communications encoded in movement. I liked the inclusion of the section on Amerta, which reminds us that movement has been part of traditional therapeutic understanding in many cultures, and over many thousands of years, sometimes based on principles remarkably similar to those familiar to western society. The reference to the author’s work in the training of actors also brought a three dimensionality to the book, locating the emotionality of body movement within a much broader context.

The book left me wanting to know more about the practicalities of casework; such as the how the author’s patients came to choose the use of movement for therapy in a society that seldom encourages bodily expression beyond childhood – and how ‘not moving’ can be such an important part of the patient/therapist dialogue. Perhaps that is the material of another book?