Section I Introducing a New Discipline

Transcription

1 Section I Introducing a New Discipline Our world is changing rapidly, and our understanding of what it means to be human and of the place of humans in the universe is shifting. Ways of thinking that have governed the Western world for the past several hundred years are now being radically subverted, proving themselves to be limiting or inadequate. These changes hint at new ways by which we might understand ourselves and our world. But often we do not yet quite know what the new ways of thinking will be or how they will affect our sense of the human condition and the planet we inhabit. Often, we just know that the thinking that has preceded us is not sufficient. Understanding the human condition some would say understanding the human psyche or soul is the mandate of psychology and perhaps of all the social and biological sciences associated with it. This book is about new ways of thinking in psychology. In this first section, and throughout the book, we will consider the nature of change in the history of ideas that constitute the discipline of psychology. We will also locate this investigation within a more general consideration of the nature of change in our understanding of the processes of knowing and being within the development and the diversity of human cultures. This will include a discussion of changes in what the modern western world considers scientific and what it condemns as unscientific. Here you are invited to assess the significance of a newly forming discipline within the human sciences, and along with it a group of healing practices that are both newly emerging and re-emergent; practices that are derived from this new discipline, yet are also derived from ancient traditions of wisdom that are currently being remembered or rediscovered. The discipline is somatic psychology and we will name these diverse healing practices bodymind therapy (although the 1

2 2 The Emergence of Somatic Psychology and Bodymind Therapy group has often been called body psychotherapy, and sometimes body-mind psychotherapy or body-centered psychotherapy). In this context, bodymind therapy is the applied aspect of somatic psychology. As this book unfolds, I hope that it will prompt you to reopen your vision of the psyche in relation to the human experience of embodiment; that you will realize the significance of the contemporary emergence of somatic psychology and bodymind therapy as an indicator of the profound change that is occurring in our most fundamental understanding of what it means to be human. So as we proceed together, we will initially discuss the nature of change, and then gradually focus on the specific topic of interest to us. This first section of the book, with its five chapters, will set the stage for this assessment of the significance of this disciplinary venture the emergence of somatic psychology and bodymind therapy. The second section will offer you an account of what I consider the seven main sources that contribute to the contemporary budding and blossoming of this discipline, and the final section will present several discussions of current challenges in this field. The impetus of this book is to empower you to consider questions such as the following: Is somatic psychology generating excitement simply because it is a newly formed sub-discipline within the general field of psychology (a field which developed so expansively through the twentieth century)? Do the practices of bodymind therapy merely comprise a powerful new branch or novel application of the familiar field of psychotherapy (and the technology of behavior change ), which unfolded so dramatically through the twentieth century? Alternatively, is it possible that somatic psychology and bodymind therapy are the harbinger of a radically different future? Do they perhaps intimate a profoundly different way of understanding and appreciating the human condition, constituting an emergent and revolutionary break with the psychology and the psychotherapeutic methods that dominated the twentieth century? With any comparatively recent cultural or scientific venture, it is difficult to know what it means to call something new. Predictions of revolutionary significance usually need to be treated with healthy skepticism. After all, contemporary culture, impelled by entrepreneurial capitalism, is extraordinarily faddish and prone to transient fashion. Corporations make spurious claims about how some new product

3 Section I Introducing a New Discipline 3 will change our lives and clearly they promote illusions of novelty merely to stimulate the market demand for whatever they are selling. When a revolution in hair styling is declared, or a new line of dietary aids is depicted as indispensable, or the latest line of resource-consuming gadgetry is declared the solution of the future, here today, there is every reason to cease paying attention. We are advised to ignore such claims because there is every reason to believe that the same old stuff is merely being peddled as if it were genuinely a means by which we might break out of the deleterious repetitiveness of our lives. Yet despite our culture s faddish promotion of the illusions and the fetishes of change, there is a profoundly different sense in which incessant change is a reality. Shifts and changes do occur genuinely in our culture and in our sciences, and it is especially challenging but perhaps not entirely impossible to assess and appreciate the significance of a cultural or scientific transformation as it is in the process of emerging. When rock-and-roll burst upon the scene between the late 1940s and early 1960s, it could justifiably be hailed as a new musical genre and indeed it has come to have a massive and unprecedented social impact on cultures across the globe. This new genre, defined by its use of the electric guitar as well as its particular rhythms and accentuated backbeat, did not emerge de novo. Rather, it had its sources in jazz, blues, gospel and diverse forms of folk and country music, including boogie woogie, jump blues, and western swing. It became its own distinctive genre (and allegedly was given its own name in 1951), and it burgeoned through the now classic period of the 1950s and 1960s. The point here is that, throughout this dramatic period of its emergence, no one could have surely predicted the extent or character of its eventual worldwide impact an impact that has revolutionized not only the realm of music, but that has colorfully influenced almost every aspect of human culture. When something new surfaces in the scientific domain, it is sometimes a new discovery within an established field of investigation, and sometimes it is the opening of an entirely new field. When the procedures to produce synthetic polymers were developed in the late 1930s, the utility of nylon fibers could quickly be predicted (as a substitute for silk and for many other uses). Indeed, the advent of thermoplastics has had an inestimable impact on the functioning of our lives. But such discoveries did not change the principles of chemistry as a science, nor did they redefine the underlying philosophy of the field. A somewhat different sort of novelty would be the emergence of an important and previously unavailable application of familiar scien-

4 4 The Emergence of Somatic Psychology and Bodymind Therapy tific principles to an entirely new topic or area of investigation the inauguration of a new discipline or field of inquiry. The case of molecular biology provides an example. Although it had antecedents in eighteenth century microscopy, the discipline was only inaugurated in the 1930s. Its specific mission to study the vital role of nucleic acids and proteins only became possible when X-ray diffraction, electron microscopy, and other technologies became available. With this availability, a new discipline with its own principles and methods was established. Beyond these specific events, the history of science shows us that sometimes the emergence of apparent novelty is not just a particular line of discovery or the opening of a previously unavailable field of investigation. Sometimes, when something new emerges in science, it comprises such a profound shift in our way of appreciating ourselves and the universe that we think of it as a revolutionary change in our way of thinking about what it means to know and what it means to be wise. Such was the case with the Copernican revolution. Although Vedic, Hellenic, and Islamic philosophers had conjectured the possibility of a heliocentric universe, Nicolaus Copernicus demonstration of the movements of celestial objects at the beginning of the sixteenth century, along with Galileo Galilei s support for Copernicanism at the beginning of the seventeenth century, entirely changed not only western perspectives on earth s place in the cosmos, but contributed to a radically revised understanding of the significance of being human. By the time of Isaac Newton s publication of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, the Copernican revolution had also radically altered our understanding of the nature of science itself. In this sense, an entirely new way of comprehending the universe opened up for us. Our ways of knowing and being were revolutionized in that our fundamental assumptions about the nature of humanity and divinity shifted. This was a novelty that took about two hundred years to emerge fully, but it profoundly changed the way we think, and rocked every aspect of the world in which we live. Western culture s relinquishment of the patterns of medieval thinking, and the emergence of the modern era, constituted what Michel Foucault would call an epistemic shift. It is in this context that this book invites you to entertain the question: Just how radical are the implications of the emerging discipline of somatic psychology and the accompanying healing practices of bodymind therapy?

5 Section I Introducing a New Discipline 5 There is a range of possibilities. At one end, somatic psychology might be understood simply as a broadening of the scope of psychological science to include a new topic or area. After all, the science of psychology itself expanded dramatically in the west at the end of the nineteenth century, but it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the principles and research methods of psychology were systematically applied to the behavior of people in athletic activities, and the sub-discipline or specialization of sports psychology was inaugurated (although there had been some earlier work by pioneers such as Norman Triplett, Carl Diem, and Coleman Griffith). If the emergence of somatic psychology is comparable to this inauguration, then perhaps the new discipline is merely an interesting application of familiar principles and research methods to a new topic the new topic being the human experience of embodiment. Similarly, the clinical practices of bodymind therapy or body psychotherapy might be understood simply as the addition of a set of new techniques to the familiar practices and procedures employed by psychotherapists. After all, when family therapy (or family systems therapy ) started to become popular in the mid-twentieth century, it constituted not only an extension of psychotherapeutic practice, it also began to offer a wide variety of new techniques and clinical perspectives by which to address psychological suffering (with pioneers such as Nathan Ackerman, Carl Whitaker, Murray Bowen, Jay Haley, and Salvador Minuchin). If the popularization of bodymind therapy were to be comparable to that of family systems, then perhaps it is to be appreciated merely as an exciting application of new clinical methods that can be appended to the familiar goals and general methods of clinical psychology. At the other end of the range of possibilities, the significance of somatic psychology and bodymind therapy may be far more radical than this. Perhaps the emergence of somatic psychology and bodymind therapy portends a profoundly different and potentially revolutionary way of appreciating the human condition. In this book, you are invited to entertain this possibility. You are invited to consider whether somatic psychology might indeed imply a radical critique of the psychology and psychotherapy that dominated the twentieth century, and whether indeed it might prove to be the wave of the future. In this first section Chapter 1 will define somatic psychology and bodymind therapy in relation to the modes of psychology and psychotherapy that dominated the twentieth century. Chapter 2 will suggest the significance of the emergence of this new discipline within the

6 6 The Emergence of Somatic Psychology and Bodymind Therapy epistemic shifting that seems to be occurring in contemporary science and culture the implosion of the modern era and the intimations of a postmodern world. Chapter 3 will describe just a few of the practices of bodymind therapy in order to give you the flavor of its healing potential. Chapter 4 will amplify these descriptions by discussing some of the principles of healing that underpin bodymind therapies (as well as the ideological controversies that surround the issue of genuine healing versus social adaptation). And Chapter 5 will survey the current disciplinary state of somatic psychology and bodymind therapy as far as they have developed since the closing decades of the twentieth century.