Every psychotherapist will be familiar with what it means to
experience the hatred and despair of their most vulnerable patients in
the
midst of a psychotherapy session. Most often these patients will manage
to
express their feelings verbally, but what about those who never
developed the
capacity to speak? Or those who are capable of talking, but carry a
complex
range of unprocessed embodied feelings that cannot be verbally
expressed? Some
patients must rely on another type of language in order to communicate
their
dissociative states of mind.
Primitive Bodily Communications explores how the
'talking cure' can still work when words fail and the body 'talks.'
Non-verbal
communication can be thought of as a form of body language and, even
though
this is a topic not frequently discussed, many practitioners have
experienced
working with people who communicate through the use of their bodies. The
book
does not refer to bodily communications as primitive because we see them
as
inferior to verbal language, but simply because they point to the
beginnings of
psychological development, to primary ways of being and relating, as
well as to
enduring aspects of ourselves.
The contributors explore the topic of primitive bodily
communications in the context of intellectual disability, eating
disorders and
bodily neglect, focusing on the communicative aspect of bodily
expressions
within the therapeutic relationship. A wide spectrum of clinical cases
illustrates how these patients can reach a state of better physical
and
emotional containment and, when possible, of verbal communication.
