Is intuition embodied? A phenomenological study of clinical intuition in somatic psychotherapy practice

Abstract

Intuition in psychotherapy practice is often confused with terms such as emotional insight, body language, gut feeling and psychic ability. These terms generalise a common experience, yet do not adequately describe the lived experience of intuitive phenomena. This phenomenological study explored intuition in clinical practice from an embodied perspective based on two questions: (i) How, if at all, is intuition embodied? (ii) What is the role of non-verbal expressions while describing clinical intuitive phenomena? Purposive sampling was used to recruit somatic psychotherapists who claimed to experience intuition during clinical practice. An original methodology was created by synthesising a body-focused interview with descriptive analysis. Findings (i) challenged the current parameters of embodiment by expanding upon the experience of intuition beyond ‘gut feelings’, and (ii) suggested that gestures reveal implicit information regarding the ways in which intuition arrives into consciousness. Further studies are needed to investigate clinical phenomena from an embodied perspective, which could augment the value of somatic psychology practice and clarify the role of embodiment in traditional clinical practice for adjacent fields of psychology.