Moving Through and Being Moved By: Embodiment in Development and in the Therapeutic Relationship

Abstract

Biological bodies play a central role in interpersonal communication, going beyond a metaphoric function and encompassing the mutual sensings that constitute neurobiological relatedness. In this account, emotions are not inner states that we experience only individually or that we have to decode in others, but instead are primarily shared states that we experience through interbodily affectivity, often without verbal articulation. We refer to these processes of embodied affectivity as “moving through and being moved by.” Because meaning making comes from moving in the world and being moved by it, when we move each other, we participate in each other's meaning making. Psychoanalytic treatment can be viewed as the catalyzing of new capacities as patient and analyst move through the patient's most troubling vulnerabilities in increasingly fluent and flexible ways, as communicated most immediately through body-based interaffectivity. We further tie these processes of body-based interaffectivity to early developmental trajectories in the increasingly sophisticated understanding of other minds.