Reflections
An important point—and one that I think often gets overlooked in verbally-oriented psychotherapy—is that there are not only two psyches in the room but two bodies. In working with someone, my intention is to attend to the music of the work as it plays through the bodies and imaginations of both people, deepening my ability to listen for the many voices through which the self seeks expression. How can we, as therapists, increase our awareness and comfort with our own bodies, so that we can model this with our clients and not unconsciously impose limitations on the direction of the work? Becoming aw are of the impact of the work on the therapist's body is an important step in this direction.^^
Other questions for future research include the following considerations: Much has been written about the hero's journey. What is essential for the heroine? Though the percentage of men who engage in Authentic Movement is still relatively small, their numbers are growing. As gender roles continue to shift and transform, I see Authentic Movement as one of the a\'enues through which both men and women may reconnect to a deeper and more genuine sense of themselves, bringing the fruits of their embodied experience into relationship and into the culture.
How^ cross-culturally appropriate and effective is movement psychotherapy? Movement and other art forms can often reach people when words fall short. In the course of doing workshops in different countries,
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I see what seem to be movement correlates of a cultural membership. Though the human body appears universal, the individual's cultural background, as well as his or her family and personal history can have a profound impact, shaping the movement, and affecting the persons access to expressive movement and/or contained feeling. While I know that stereotypes can be limiting, I do find that I'm taken by the light yet powerful footwork that I often see spontaneously emerging in the explorative movements of the Highland Scots, or the shaping, extended arms of the Italians, so reminiscent of the classical sculptures that have peopled their imaginations and public squares for centuries. The use of weight, rhythm, and kinesphere or "personal space" that feels like "home" to members of different cultures can be profound. Examples of this include the physical closeness, richness of gestures, and family emphasis that may be expressed in Latin cultures, the group gatherings and community focus in many Asian cultures, and the need for space and the relative lack of conversational gestures among "individuals" from Northern climates. Here, I have painted with only the broadest of brush strokes. We as therapists have much to learn from these intimate dances and from the stories, m34hs, and spiritual practices that inform each culture's collective body.
My experience with post-mastectomy women has given me great respect for the power of this work to assist women in re-inhabiting the body which they often feel has betrayed them.^^ How might somatics practitioners and medical professionals communicate and work together more effectively?^^
And finally, there's the issue of touch. In this age when healthy boundaries, genuine contact, and a sense of intimacy with oneself and others feels so out of reach to so many, how can the appropriate use of touch be reintegrated into the healing process, where it can sometimes play an important role, as it did with Lydia? Because the use of touch by the therapist may be experienced by the client as invasive, wounding, seductive, or as an abuse of power, it must be employed, if at all, with discernment, training, and with a profound appreciation for the impact it may have. The gender of the client and the therapist must also be taken into account. Given the current climate of abuse, together with the length of time that the body has been relegated to the shadows in Western culture and in much of the work of psychotherapy, the issue of touch has become shrouded in a great deal of confusion and fear We have become inarticulate here, and the work of somatic psychotherapy has much to contribute to the dialogue and to bringing the body back into the light.
At the beginning of the therapy, I tell my clients that the work may involve touch, as its conscious use can sometimes amplify and support
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feeling if done appropriately: with the right sense of timing, skill, involving safe areas of the body, and with the clients permission. To do this, assessing the dynamics that are present in the transference relationship is essential. Who am I to the client at that moment, and how old does he or she appear, emotionally, at that time in the work?
Movement psychotherapy is a process of soul-making and body-making, in which body and psyche, matter and spirit, find union and generate new form. It is a creative process of unfolding, yielding enriched access to the self and to community What moves me most has to do with embodied presence, and how it awakens and grows. I find wonder in the richness of life as we experience it through our senses. And I trust the power of this wisdom to inform our spirited participation with one another in the natural world. Shall we dance?
Notes
^Tina Stromsted, "Re-inhabiting the female body," Somatics, Vol. X. No. 1, Autumn/Winter (1994-1995), pp. 18-27.
^Stanley Keleman, interviewed by Tina Stromsted in Dreamdancing: The Use of Dance/movement Therapy in Drearnwork. Master's Thesis, John F. Kennedy University, 1984, p. 116.
^Don Hanlon Johnson, personal communication. "^Stanley Keleman, personal communication.
^Eugene Gendlin, Focusing, (New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1978).
^Mary Whitehouse, "The Tao of the Body," in Don Hanlon Johnson, ed., Bone, Breath, and Gesture: Practices of Embodiment (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books & The California Institute of Integral Studies, 1995), p. 242.
^Carl G. Jung, "The Transcendent Function," Collected Works of C.G. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (New York: Bollingen Foundation, Princeton University Press, Vol. 8, 1975).
^Mary Whitehouse, "The Tao of the Body," op. cit., pp. 239-251; "Physical Movement and Personality" (Lecture presented at the Analytical Psychology Club of Los Angeles, 1963).
^Joan Chodorow (ed.) Encountering Jung: Jung on Active Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); and "Dance therapy and the transcendent function," American Journal of Dance Therapy, Vol.2. No.l (1978), pp. 16-23.
^^Janet Adler, "Who is the witness?" Contact Quarterly (Winter 1987), p. 21.
Penny Lewis Bernstein, "The somatic countertransference: The inner pas de deux," TJieoretical Approaches in Dance-Movement Therapy. (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1984): Vol. 2, pp. 321-42; Patrizia Pallero,
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"Somatic countertransference: The therapist in relationship," paper presented at the Third European Arts Therapies Conference (University of Ferrara, Italy, September 14-17, 1994); George E. Atwood and Robert D. Stolorow, Faces in a Cloud: Intersubjectivity in Personality Theory. (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1993).
'^Participation as a group leader in Sandy Dibbell-Hope's "Moving towards health: A study of the use of dance-movement therapy in the psychological adaptation to breast cancer" Doctoral dissertation. The California School of Professional Psychology, Berke-ley/Alameda, CA., 1989.
'^Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, "Body-mind centering,"in Don Hanlon Johnson, ed., Groundworks: Narratives of Embodiment (B^keley: North Atlantic Books & The California Institute of Integral Studies. 1997), pp. 15-26.
IAN J.GRAND
Psyche s Body
Toward a Somatic Psychodynamics
From the time of our birth, we continually create living values of embodied being. We hold and are held in certain ways. We are danced with and sung to and dance with each other and shout for joy, or are told that solemnity and restraint are to be valued and prized. We learn a variety of possibilities of embodiment in our encounters with the world, and from them we create structured ways of feeling, carrying, and expressing ourselves.
In doing Somatic Psychology we then try to understand, directly, in our flesh, how we make meaning from all this. We dialogue with each other about the meanings of the ways we walk and breathe and interact gesturally and posturally. We look at the excitations we permit or refuse in our tissue, and we learn to experience and enact new possibilities of bodily being.
In doing this work we always have some images about the psyche and its development— what has traditionally been called psychodynamics. Unfortunately, there has been little dialogue, for a num.ber of reasons, between analysts and somatic theorists who are each advancing theories about the psyche and how it is organized.
In this chapter, I will sketch a few possible directions towards a somatic understanding of psychodynamics which will incorporate recent advances in analytic and developmental thought and cultural studies. I will also indicate areas in which somatic practitioners have a great deal to contribute to the psychodynamic dialogue.^
Throughout the chapter, I will circle around two major themes. The
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first is the importance of a somatic perspective that considers that the basis of our psychic Hfe is the construction of bodily states, gestures, and ways of moving which have social and emotional meaning. These bodily states, formed in interaction with significant people around us, are the stuff of our psychic life. They interact with each other to permit, prevent, or enhance our feeling and expression of ourselves. They themselves are representations, and representations in language and image are part of them.2
The second point I will be emphasizing is that somatic psychody-namic organization occurs throughout the life span. I don't think it useful to stop our understanding of the development of the somatic with what has been called the end of the preverbal stage or to simply look at early childhood as determinant of our behavior The shaping of bodily experience and the bodily structuring of emotion, feeling, and efficacy continue throughout the life span, outside the family of origin.
Intrapsychically, we develop complex patterns of somatic meaning in which embodied values from many periods of our lives interact and are given varying emphasis and significance. We form various self-images and images of interaction in our early and later childhood and adolescence in our families. These are both extended and contradicted by roles, images, and structures of identity, feeling, and expression we form when we go to school or work, hang out with our friends, and develop adult relationships. All this is enacted as patterns of gesture, postural holding, breath, and qualities of hormonal functioning that can be felt and worked.
I might find myself anxious about a deadline, for example, accompanied by feelings from when I was a boy and did something wrong. I hold my breath. My heart races. I hold my mouth in imitation of my fathers mouth-held criticism. At work I might enact being small and hiding or being loud and demanding, projecting in each case my internalized critics, and the ways I was taught to do work both at home or in my first jobs. I can act like I did in my early school days or my most recent ones, making my fellow workers into the teachers or students I despised or loved and acting with warmth, touch, or icy distance. Like dreams, our behaviors, feelings and actions are polysemous, composed of meanings drawn from many periods of our lives.
Imitation
One afternoon, a couple of days before she died, my mother and I sat in her apartment together She had pancreatic cancer and we both knew she would die, at best, within a few weeks. She was very weak and eating very little, but she was sitting up. The sun was literally setting out the window behind us. We had talked at great length about many things, and her
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affairs were in order She had slowly looked with us at all the old photographs she had of her family and then the family I grew up in. Finally, we simply sat there, making the facial gestures that we had always made to each other, playing with raised eyebrows and pursed lips and grimaces and smiles, without words. It was our oldest game and our oldest communication. Now, at this time— she was seventy-two and I was forty-six— we played this old tune. Then, two days later, on the summer solstice, she died.
I start here because I think it is the experience and awareness of facial gesture and bodily play that has attracted me to studies in development that emphasize this aspect of learning between infant and mother. My father also loved to play with face, ge^ure, and movement, often imitating popular comedians and singers. I see this aspect of development as undervalued in our psychodynamic understanding.^
From the time we are bom we begin to mimic the surround. Condon for example noted that infants develop patterned movements that are synchronized with the sound of the mothers voice.'* Meltzoff and Moore describe experiments in which neonates, the youngest of whom was forty-two minutes old, were presented with a protruded tongue to see if they would imitate this gesture.^ They did.
In another study by the same researchers, six-week-old infants were shown a protruded tongue that was moved to the comer of the mouth. Infants normally protmde their tongues straightforward on the midline. The infants in this case made mistakes in the imitation, corrected for them, and then were able to do this unusual gesture that was not hardwired. In a surprising variation, some infants "creatively" tumed their heads along with performing the tongue protmsion to the side gesture. They were not only responding to what they saw, they were adding something to the pattern. From other similar experiments Meltzoff and Moore develop a theory of "gestural signatures"J)y which infants distinguish individuals with whom they come into contact.
These early examples of imitation, creativity, and gestural signaling indicate aspects of how we somatically organize our experience of the world. As the child grows, its repertoire of imitation increases, utilizing other aspects of the body. A hesitant walk, a hunching of the shoulders, a holding in the arms, or a fierce expressiveness of feeling might all be imitated and held as part of the self. This kind of somatic imitation and creation continues throughout the life span.
A friend of mine told me a story about her three-year-old daughter who had a doll that she carried with her everywhere and talked to. The mother was horrified one day when she overheard the daughter talking to the doll in the same voice that the mother used, scolding the doll for some
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infraction or another. The rhytlims of the voice, the gesture patterns, and facial expressions were all excellent imitations. From a somatic psychody-namic point of view, the daughter was practicing and incorporating the critical voice of the mother through this play.
We also in play incorporate various figures from the surround into our repertoire. We are not just pirates or nurses or cyborgs or magicians, we are as well specific ones taken from the media or the people around us.
So we might be, as I was. Batman or Paladin in "Have Gun Will Travel" or James Dean or Sherlock Holmes or a spy or a great lover We learn about human possibility in our families but also from families of our friends, street gangs, the TV, movies, and books. We are given models of how to conduct our thinking, how to conduct business, how to conduct relationships. The wisdom of the family is juxtaposed with what we hear from our teachers, friends, other adults, what we read, see on the screen, hear on the radio, or find on the internet.
And then we go about the business of trying on, bodily, all these behaviors. In front of min ors and with friends, we practice looking a particular way, behaving a particular way. As we watch a movie we covertly (on muscle movement levels) adopt the stance and enact the action of the figures in the movie. We do the same when we read. In our play we develop these enactments further, consciously for the moment, and we then adopt the pattern and forget for the most part that we have adopted it.
When I was six I saw the film Sinbad the Sailor starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr I remember leaping from bed to bed in the hotel we were in, brandishing my imaginan- sword, and deciding to be a swashbuckler I practiced being the chaiTning, broad-gestured, story-telling Sinbad. And then, of course, I automated aspects of this performance and forgot about it. In the past year, however, I watched Sinbad on video and was struck by Sinbad s manner of gesturing and story-telling, as well as the film's evocation of romance and adventure, all of which I had internalized. I tell stories like Sinbad, having imitated and practiced Fairbanks' characterization, and I hold inwardly to images of adventure, mystery, and romance. There is part of me that is Sinbad and I enact him in my teaching, my travel, and my daily life. I am also my father, many of my teachers, and various of my friends as well as a host of other film characters, both heroes or shadows. I am startled when I find myself talking and acting like any of them.
We imitate and take on aspects of the people we admire or despise. It seems to be the case, for example, that people who were abused can adopt the behavior patterns of the abuser We somatically enact particular images of power, success, competency, need, or failure we have imitated
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from models around us. All of these imitations become part of our sense of self.
Handling, Feeding, and Familial Injunctions
Recently, in a health food store, I saw a mother dancing with and rocking her infant to the rhythms of the reggae music being played on the store s loudspeakers. The infant was attuned to the people around it and being moved in a pulsing and joy-felt way. The movement was giving the child possibilities for feeling, rhythmicity, movement, and connection. There was an excitatory play that gave the child the experience of a transformation of being, immediately, in her bodilj^ feeling. In this way, as Christopher Bollas has noted, the mother becomes the first "transformative object" for the child.^ The child's relationship to herself, her body, and the world is altered because of the way she is held and moved by the mother. In ongoing encounters with mother, then father, siblings, and the people and artifacts of the culture, the child experiences both pleasures and difficulties, bodily excitations that will alter it along a variety of experienced somatic dimensions.
There are many paths to the forming of structured somatic responses. First, there are immediate responses to early handling, rhythmicity, and disruption, all of which have immediate effects in the child's organization and regulation of feeling and affect. The individual's relation to self, feeling, and being with others is first developed on the basis of the early rhythmic and emotional environment set in the interchanges with significant caretakers which then gets formed as somatic pattern.
In an important study, Allan Schore looks at infant eye aversion modalities as one example of how the interaction between mother and child leads to the neuronal structuring of affect regulation.^ According to Shore there is a mutual, reciprocal stimulation of pleasure that mother and infant develop as they look at and play with each other. This stimulation can reach the place of being overwhelming to the infant, and as it becomes increasingly excited, it averts its gaze. The attuned mother necessarily takes on the task of attuning to and responding to the gaze aversion, allowing the baby to disengage. Of course, not all mothers are attuned and failures to respond to the child's aversion are common. According to Shore, the child builds a repertoire of affective experience based upon interactions like these through a number of interactional events, and internalizes and solidifies neural and neural-hormonal excitations and regulations from these interactions.
Another example of this somatic forming of responses to the care-giving environment is offered by the psychoanalyst Rene Spitz, who is
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known for his work emphasizing the importance of touch, handhng, and soothing upon the newborn. Spitz discovered, for example, that the lack of tactile stimulation could lead to death. He was also interested in the effects of both under-stimulation and the wrong kinds of stimulation on the development of the child. In one story that dramatically illustrates how internalizations occur, Spitz wrote about a nine-month-old named Jerry who was brought to the hospital because of a failure to gain weight.^ The infant and his mother were observed from behind a one-way mirror The baby's eating patterns, it turned out, were continually disrupted by the mother, who was not vers' attuned to the rhythm of the child. When Jerry expressed hunger, the mother \\ ould push a biscuit or a bottle deep into his mouth, causing him to gag and vomit.
While this rude handling was enough to impact the child's sense of feeling and engagement with the world, the next thing observed was more dramatic and more important for our purposes here. When Jerry was alone he would stick his own fingers down his throat and cause the gag reflex. In this act, he was organismically developing a particular relationship to himself, a particular range of self-stimulation, a particular intrapsychic —somatic—dynamic.
In all these examples, internalizations are occurring not through conscious practice, but from a somatic structuring of social interchange and training. The body unconsciously expresses—is the site of—the reciprocal and mutual stimulations of caregiver and child. Beyond infancy there is an ongoing development of movement and expressive and feeling possibilities that are internalized from interactions in the family.
The young child of friends of mine, for example, burst out of the bathroom where he had successfully peed in the toilet for the first time. He was holding his penis and danced a triumphant dance of stamping his feet and shouting with glee. There was a complex play between the boy's urination, his toilet training, his triumph at having succeeded, and the way all that was held in the family. There could just as easily have been an injunction against this type of expression resulting in the boy's learning to hold back feeling or dissociate from aspects of his bodily experience. As in the case of Jerry, the boy crystallizes a set of somatic self-expressions from the interchange between himself and the surround.
A history of events like this lays down pathways of excitation, feeling, and expression that are part of the child's growing repertoire. In the course of many exchanges with people in the immediate surround, patterns of self-use begin to develop.
The child also comes to enact particular roles and patterns in the family, expressing in actual movements, emotional expressions, and ways of
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thinking the roles assigned to it. The family becomes regulator of feeling and expression, and the child in unconscious negotiation with the milieu makes a series of inner representations that are somatically organized.
In her story "The Water Faucet Vision," Gish Jen gives a good example of how family roles are enacted:
That was the difference between Mona and me: fighting was just fighting to her. If she worried about anything, it was only that she might turn out too short to become a ballerina, in which case she was going to become a piano player
I, on the other hand, was going to be a martyr. I was in the fifth grade then, and the hyperimaginativeitype — the kind of girl who grows morbid in Catholic school, who longs to be chopped or frozen to death but then has nightmares about it from which she wakes up screaming and clutching a stuffed bear.'^
The individual somatically forms roles in the family, but as Zinner and Shapiro note the family itself also unconsciously distributes roles. The individuals take them on and embody them—act them out, as it were—for the sake of the family. So one child becomes the rebel while another becomes the good person embodying the values espoused by the family. A girl becomes the caretaker of the family or a boy the caretaker of his mother While in some cases this is conscious, in others it is wholly not. The roles evolve and we evolve them. They involve particular rhythms, movements, gestures, and somatic responses. As Colman notes, there are not only structured representations of the individual that are formed, but representations of the individual in relationship to various family members both dyadically and in larger groups.^^ All this is enacted somatically.
Tea and Soap
My work with a client I will call Margaret highlights some of these points. I often make tea for my clients, and Margaret has consistently told me how to do it properly. The milk is put in first, then the tea bag. Hot water is added so that there is a foaming of the milk, and a little sugar is added at the end. She watches me closely to see that I make no mistake.
This ritual had gone on for several months when one day she decided to do it herself. I watched her as she made the tea and I was struck by the resemblance in this act to the developmental stage of early childhood when a child wants to take over the feeding function, learning how to control the spoon, throwing food on the floor, etc. I gave Margaret an interpretation noting that there is the place in development where children want to do it for themselves. "Yeah," she said angrily, "and my mother wouldn't let me!"
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She yelled this last part and then grabbed her mouth in surprise. She was startled by the force of her reply and the rage that was right there with it. We began to explore the meaning, expression and denial of the rage.
In exploring the anger she told me that one day when she was a child she was standing in the doorway watching the other children play. She had been told that she couldn't go out and play with them, and was getting increasingly angry and frustrated. "Oh dam," she said, and then was horrified that she had said such a terrible thing. She walked into the bathroom and, without prompting, washed her own mouth out with soap.
Margaret's childhood home was a gothic horror She was surrounded by people who did not take her seriously or empathically. The terror that she was living could not be spoken either within or outside of the family. She had been punched by her brothers, and made the object of their hunting games in which she was the target for their pellet guns. Her mother was paranoid, and intrusive, and at night blockaded the door of the bedroom they shared, allegedly so that the grandfather couldn't come in.
Margaret was punished for her anger and aggression and became afraid of her own assertion. When I asked her to kick some pillows on the couch, she could hardly move her legs which were painful from lack of use and the contraction of keeping herself in place. Interpersonal social assertion, she said, was often filled with panic.
My work with Margaret for the past three years has been to both allow and permit the terror, but in incremental doses that she can handle. I maintain a good deal of contact and support, including allowing phone calls between sessions. We work on the stories from the past as they come up from the physical work we do, and we do physical work from the stories. Work with breathing, for example, has led to deep mourning tears or feelings of pain, or terror; or in listening to her stories I have seen patterns of holding, of fear or refusal, that we then have explored through movement. We have also, on the other side, worked on her right to feel pleasure, joy, excitement, and the force of her creativity. She is an enormously talented woman in a number of areas, and I have supported and built on this wealth of resource, knowledge and skill. We continually explore the ways her various bodily states interact; how the pattern of pain and self-punishment, for example, interferes with her exuberance and joy.
A recent session occurred just after Margaret had returned from a trip to the Caribbean in which she ha(J had a wonderful and liberating time. We talked about the trip and how freeing it had felt. She told me that every morning she went swimming in the ocean, and that being in the water had been exhilarating and calming. She could move without pain, or at least with lessened pain, and she felt an immediate buoyancy and
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rhythmicity of movement being in the v^^ater and swimming, which, she felt, informed her and nourished her on deep primordial levels.
In our conversation I began to contrast what she was reporting and the familial situation she had grown up in. She began to get agitated. Her foot started wagging—her legs were crossed—and I pointed out the movement. I asked her to see what would happen if she allowed the movement of the foot to develop. The movement of her foot turned into a stamping and she became powerfully angry. Then she became fearful. She began to feel overwhelmingly lost in the somatic self-enactment developed in her family. She huddled and started to shake.
At this point I intervened and asked her to go back and feel the internalized feeling of the ocean that she had Jlescribed and demonstrated earlier There was a choice possible here in which she could identify with either aspect and move with it. For the next three or four sessions she kept working with these embodied alternatives in a number of ways, feeling more clearly the structures from the past and the new set of possible ways of conducting herself. She reported that through all of it she felt more alive and in her body.
The Thing Despised
There is another aspect of psychodynamics that we as somatic therapists hold that can be seen in this last story, namely, the attitude towards the body itself. In the alchemical text Atalanta Fugiens there is an image of a footless man standing in front of the locked Garden of the Philosophers. The epigram that accompanies the picture says: "A thing despicable s the only key...Without which you will stumble, legless, on."^^
It is the body that, for a variety of reasons, often becomes the despicable thing in a persons psyche, despised and avoided, and a good deal of our work deals with the immediacy of this underlying reality. The immediate relationship to the experienced and disowned body is itself a parameter of psychodynamic function to which we continually need to return.
A year ago my father died after a long series of increasingly debilitating difficulties. I have felt recently the growing awareness of the pain my father was actually in, the bodily insults and trauma he suffered that we cheerfully tried to avoid and joke around. On the one hand I am comfortable with the jest, with the banter and play that kept him going. But now, as I write this, I am struck by the immediacy of the suffering.
My father had diabetes and with that came the atherosclerosis and general vascular difficulty that resulted in his having had many operations. He had two quadruple bypasses and a couple of angioplasties. I
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remember one operation in which he was in a hospital in Milwaukee that was famous for its heart operations. There was a huge room of open-heart patients in recover>' from surgerv'. He was King there shaking with the cold with tubes stuck in him everywhere. He was blue and staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. The nurse came up to us and said, "Doesn't he look great?" I didn't think so.
On another occasion he began to develop gangrene in his foot because of the poor circulation, and it became clear that some kind of amputation would be required. It was a horror The doctor, who was his friend, wanted to do a little at a time. The pain was excruciating. He first lost some toes. Then a major part of his foot. He was in constant pain. Finally one surgeon felt it would be best to do an amputation of the whole leg just below the knee. My father decided to go for it and felt, finally, relief from the pain. And then had the problem, and the will, to learn how to walk again.
In remembering all this I become more acutely aware of my own mortality and vulnerability, and I find I can react in a number of ways. I can refuse to feel, pulling away from my bodily sensation. I can get extremely conservative and frozen in my lifestyle and in my sense of possibility. I can refuse to look at the future of this body.
I fall into patterns of holding that I can trace in my work on myself to when I was an infant in the incubator There is a somatic despair and fear when I think of my newborn brother who died when I was four who I had seen in the hospital and who then disappeared. Or when I think of my premature body that my mother told us looked like a "dead chicken." (How was I received, in my body, by my mother who wasn't sure how to live in hers?) Or my overweight "husky" boy's body uncomfortable in my clothes or the ravages of the cystic acne that scarred me, but worse, brought me public shame and embarrassment.
I get scared of living, in this body, scared of the pain, scared of the difficulty, scared of loss, scared of feeling. It is my body that got punished, my body that learned to express or stifle certain expressions, my body that was disciplined to sit in school. It is in my flesh that my exuberance and lustiness and excitement about the world was both encouraged and stopped.
I feel myself. What realms of my fleshy existence were encouraged and when. It is complex here, of course. Going to the health club with my dad I was encouraged to feel and move myself. In play and sport I learned to swim and play ball of all kinds. I learned that dance was good and playing music ecstatic. And then there was this other part. The shaping of my rage. The training of my withholding. The building of my anxiety, in my body. A mixed bag.
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My father actually died on my birthday. I first thought of this as a cosmic trick, but now, a year later, I am moved by what I see as a twin mystery—life and death—to be remembered by me for the rest of my life.
It is the body itself that is often reviled, and along with it, life and its vicissitudes. To be in this body is to be in life, to be with the immediacy of the possibilities of ecstasy and suffering and meaning that we make in our human living. It is to deal pain and suffering from disease, from war, from natural disaster, from work, from the vicissitudes of daily social living. It is also to live with the praises and haljelujahs of the religious ecstatic, the feelings of wonder and curiosity and awe and love, the immediate sense of connection with the surround, our fear, our pride, our hate.
In the experience of the flesh, in our attitude to that experience, we choose life or death, choose this world or try to escape from it. From our life experience we make a relationship to, a way of living, our body itself, our sense of touch, of movement, of feeling, of tenderness or softness or intractable hardness, all of which contain a stance towards living and an incorporation of meaning.
From the somatic psychodynamic point of view, a crucial, underlying question follows. What qualities of the flesh do we adopt to avoid feeling our flesh, feeling our pain, feeling our mortality, feeling our life? We see the pain and suffering and dying of those around us, feel our own pain and suffering, and we carry on. But how? How do we live our bodies to avoid or dampen or ignore? How do we live towards or away from pleasure and joy?
These questions were raised in a strong and poignant form in a class paper written by Stuart Gold, a professor of dance who was then a student in our Somatic Psychology Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He writes:
• What do I do with the body that does and feels shameful things?
• What do I do with a body that is ridiculed for being fat?
• What do I do with a body that quivers and locks down with each threat of another punch?
• What do I do with a body that houses a life-threatening disease?
I don't know how to honor that of me which is ugly and smells. I don't know how to honor that of me which keeps me from me. Theories make sense but remain distant from my experience.. . / walk. I stumble and hurt. Me hurting. Me stumbling. Me walking. It is in body, like a wide basin containing life, I walk darkly towards me.
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Social Somatics
A fourth area for a future psychodynamics is what I have called Social Somatics. One of the great errors in a good deal of psychodynamic thinking is the tendency to reduce the formation of self-identity, senses of meaning, and social enactments to early childhood, seen as occurring exclusively within an isolated nuclear family
What is left out of this \iew is the role that extra-familial agencies play in shaping the li\'ed somatic experience of persons. Play with other children and the influence of other adults in environments such as day care, school, and church are ignored; and the role of the media, the culture, the workplace, and their demands upon our somatic conduct are not taken into account. Indeed, "early childhood" is itself a socially constructed notion, as are the various ideas we have about "good" parenting and "proper" development.
Most somatic psychotherapies have followed the tendency to limit images of somatic development to the nuclear family, ignoring other social influences upon the emotional life. But the somatic forming of the sense of self, the complexities of somatic representation of self and other, are not limited to the caregiver in infancy or to the family of origin.
It is ultimately not useful, for example, to try to explain the hyper-alertness of a young black man in South Central Los Angeles solely on the basis of his early childhood interaction with his caregivers. It is also important to see how representations of gangs, employment opportunity, and life expectancy impact the conduct of his flesh.
Developmental process is not linear It is based on accretions of interactions and feehngs coming from the culture as well as the family of origin. As many social and cultural theorists have noted, we all learn—in schools, from friends, in clubs and gangs, from the media—different messages and images concerned with how^ to live and comport ourselves bod-
ily.'^
What is not often talked about is how we actually incorporate these images. From the somatic psychodynamic point of view I am developing here, social representations are imitated, internalized, and enacted in the same ways we imitate, internalize, and enact aspects of our families of origin. Simultaneously, along with the creation of self-images, self-soothing, and self-criticism in the family, social images and values are embodied as somatic structurings in which we both create, and are unconsciously tuned to, the values of the social surround.
A prime example here is the sexual. We do not simply learn sexuality at the breast of our mothers or in the conflict with our fathers (or mothers) in the Oedipal stages of development. We learn about sexual roles and
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attractions from our friends and the movies, the TV, from people we see walking down the street. We look at various images of sexuality, try them on, practicing ways of walking and standing. There are many images of attractiveness and sexual signaling that we emulate and incorporate.^^
We learn about what is attractive from the culture, and there are significant differences in images of beauty and sexual allure that are promulgated. The images of beauty in Jet are different from the images in Ebony and different again from those in Seventeen, Elk, Mademoiselle, or The Transsexual News Telegraph. In our sexual experience there are many images of passion, rectitude, and tenderness that come into play as somatic usages, the way the breath is held, the holding of the musculature, the riding or inhibiting of waves of excitation.
Gender roles are also shaped socially. In the case above, Margaret is also caught in societal shapings that have impacted her both within and outside of her family. Some of the dynamics in the family also revolved around gender issues from the culture. Her family is steeped, for example, in a value system that elevates the role of the male and denigrates the role of the female. Her brothers achievements were lauded while hers were not. Women in that system are only supposed to be housewives and not be creative or have careers. For her to take her place as a strong and creative force has been to challenge not only the immediate family but the social values they represent. Again, this is all enacted bodily She is strong but feels weak. Her assertion can collapse as a disoriented confusion.
The social also mediates our connection to the natural surround, and this too is enacted in attitudes we adopt both to our own flesh and the environment. We can easily forget the complexity of our embeddedness in the natural world because the social world emphasizes one or another aspect of the natural or ignores it altogether
By contrast, there are other, highly developed, proscribed relationships to the natural world valorized in some indigenous cultures and in systems like homeopathy that look to its "medicine" aspects. So there is bear medicine, coyote medicine, or elk medicine. Rocks are seen to have both presence and efficacy. In these images the air, the waters, the sands, the trees are not simply separately there. We are in relation to them and affected by them. And this means organizing our movements and senses to take them into account.
There are organizations of pleasure, meaning, ritual, and right conduct as well as representations of emotional repression that come from the surrounding culture. These are imitated, modeled, participated in, and incorporated as movements of the body, as qualities of the tissue, which are organized over and against other qualities of the flesh.
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In a recent book Edward Said looks at representations of the intellectual.'^ He suggests that the intellectual is a particular character in the cultural play and that intellectuals.come to enact themselves along certain proscribed lines.
In the outpowing of studies about intellectuals there has been far too much defining of the intellectual, and not enough stock taken of the image, the signature, the actual iriten'ention and performance, all of which taken together constitute the very lifeblood of the real intellectual...Wl^en we remember an intellectual like Sartre we recall the personal mannerisms, the sense of an important personal stake, the sheer effort, risk, will to say things about colonialism, or about commitment, or about social conflict that infuriated his opponents and galvanized his fiends and perhaps even embarrassed him retrospectively.
When I read this, I recalled how I had in fact modeled myself on Sartre and Camus and a host of others, read their books, assumed the airs of the bohemian intellectual as a teenager I practiced and incorporated mannerisms and habits of speech and gesture and thought. I saw Martin Luther King, Jr and Adam Clayton Powell and Allen Ginsberg and wanted to be like all of them.
What was meaningful in life, what was important to do, was given me in the books, and li\'ing images of the novelists, social critics, and philosophers I read. Again, what is important to note is that all this was shaped bodily, as movements, rhvlhms, gestures, qualities of tissues, insistences upon speaking out and speaking out with passion and song. I practiced, in my body, being critical, hawk-like, focused, penetrating in gaze. All this meant being an intellectual. It is just this kind of social image and incorporation that has been looked at by feminist and other social critics as not being widely available to women and various ethnic minorities.
For the past couple of years I hax e been conducting seminars and groups that explore social somatic organization. We do exercises and talk and write about what we are experiencing, looking at such areas as work, gender issues, and ethnic and racial representations and interaction.
In one seminar, I asked people to find a place they were not moving bodily and to begin to move in that area, employing small movements, to allow a slight vibration or a small movenient or feeling. I then asked them to expand and enlarge that feeling or movement, allowing it to lead them to express something. A woman I will call Anne talked about finding an area in her upper back that had no feeling. It became clear to her, she said, that there was a nun on her back.
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Anne grew up Catholic and had thought seriously about becoming a nun. So she adopted somatic attitudes about what was supposed to be good comport—good behavior modeled on the nuns she knew. In the town where she grew up there were two choices as role models that meant anything, she said: nuns or the scantily clad showgirls pictured on billboards throughout the town. Being a mother or a secretary didn't seem a meaninghil choice.
In doing the somatic work in the group Anne had found a playful movement developing in her upper body which she then stilled. The stilling was connected to her image of the nun. She became angry that she was still feeling this conflict in her body, conflict that had been formed from ages eight to fourteen. ^
Because a prime place of social learning is the school, I have looked at how schools somatically impact our sense of self.^^ For example, I ask people, in a series of exercises, to explore how they enacted themselves in their schools. I ask them to close their eyes and imagine themselves first at age six or seven entering their school, smelling its smell, walking down the halls and into the classroom. I then ask them to allow themselves to move into a bodily stance that is like how they feel themselves in the school, to exaggerate the posture and feel what is permitted and what is not.
After doing these exercises in one group, many people were filled with deep emotion. One woman was sobbing and explained that she was not permitted to move ahead a grade even though the school had wanted her to. Her mother did not want her showing up her younger sister who was not as bright. The woman withdrew and was soon placed in a class for mentally retarded children, where she stayed for two years despite the fact that she was getting excellent grades. All this had strongly a^ected her sense of self.
An African-American woman described having gone to an all-black school for the first two years of her schooling and then having to go to an all-white school. The kids were ahead in the learning, she said, and there was also a cultural problem. The school wanted to put her too in a class for mentally retarded children, but, she said, she fought for herself and had a good mother She described how she walked into the principal's office in the fourth grade and said, "I'm not dumb. I'm not dumb."
Another woman in the class described how she was shy and also did not feel met either emotionally or intellectually. She demonstrated how she hid, how she closed down somatically by curling her shoulders and pulling in the neck while averting her gaze. Some people described how excited they were to go to school, and others how they felt squashed. Some who were excited told stories about some incident or another—either
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with learning itself or with fellow students—in which their excitation and enthusiasm changed to withdrawal or humiliation.
I repeated the exercise, this time asking people to experience themselves in Middle School or Junior High School. Again, the instructions directed people to their bodily stance, which they then exaggerated. Again there were people who were cr>'ing. Sexual conflicts were talked about, and identifications with various social groups and styles. One man reported that he felt liberated at this age. People talked about hiding or trying to work hard and stand out.
Again we repeated the exercise, this time exploring the High School stance. One woman's demonstration was dramatic. In the first grade she had had her head in the air, was a little disoriented, and at the same time was trying to see what the situation was. In the fifth grade she was direct, challenging, and assertive. She was the class president and was very much in charge. She looked directly ahead with her legs set firmly, and her jaw thrust forward. In the eighth-grade posture, however, everything had changed. Now her legs were turned in at the hip, her head was held off to one side, she said she felt, "ditzy and out of it and scared." All of her fire and assertion had disappeared.
After a similar exercise in another setting one woman talked about an incident that happened to her when she was an undergraduate. There was a Senior presentation that everyone had to make, and in the course of preparation she was called in by the instructor The teacher proceeded to tell her that she was a bright girl, etc., but the use of her hands in hand gestures when she was speaking was distracting. She would have to do something about this and if she didn't—if she used these gestures while she was doing this final presentation—the woman would have to fail her
"Fail me," the woman said to us with incredulity. "Fail me. Not even lower my grade. Fail me. Without regard for content, meaning, work."
She had to do what the teacher asked in order to get through. The way she solved the problem was to sit on her hands—literally—throughout the presentation. As she was talking with us, the woman assumed the somatic position she had taken. She became aware of the holding in the legs, the hunched-over and subdued quality. The obvious cutting off of the expressiveness of the hands. She said that large hand and arm gestures were how she made contact and that this was missing. She also said that eye contact is important to her, but when she thinks back about the incident she cannot remember seeing any of her classmates looking at her As she sat there her eyes were literally downcast.
At this point, the woman did not remember the content of what she had talked about, although she did remember other papers from that time of her life. The real lesson was in the demand that she sit on her hands,
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that she squelch her expressiveness, that she enact a particular code of somatic interaction.
It was a very strong lesson. She described a recent event in which she was driving back in a car with her friend, telling her about some things that were happening in her life. As she was talking with her friend, she was sitting on her hands.
The Creative, the Ecstatic, and the Suffering of Daily Living
The last dimension of somatic psychodynamics that I want to sketch here is the realm of the creative and the ecstatic. In somatic work we can help people to experience, and live from, th^ embodied process of continual creation that, I think, characterizes human experience.
A simple example of this can be seen in my work with one man over a two year period. Although Roger has a wonderful imagination, his movements and expressions tend to be rigid and awkward. He always rationally plans his way in the world, and does not experience himself as creative or playful. When he came to see me he paid no attention to his dreams and was not very feelingful.
In one exercise I asked Roger to do an improvisatory sequence of allowing one movement to lead to another I demonstrated by moving myself, showing how an extension of the arms and a lean to the side, for example, would shift my weight, throwing me off balance. I then did a stutter step recovery that, in turn, led to another movement. I allowed the new movement to take me to another Nothing was planned. My movement was moving me.
When Roger tried to do the activity, he was at first utterly lost. He could not follow his own movement from place to place. He experienced a fear of falling and a dizziness in the very attempt. He would stumble without recovery or rhythm.
In working with what had come up in the exercise, we found that his mother had been very protective of his^ movement. She had little tolerance for his making mistakes and didn't understand that somatic learning occurs through falling, that creativity comes with trial and error I asked him to jump on a trampoline for a while and asked him to note how, by following his movements, he would begin to organize capable jumping. He felt more confident. To illustrate how his movement had been disrupted and how this disruption had been internalized I would from time to time say "watch out" or "take care." This would throw off the jumping. He would lose coordination and stumble. There was an incorporated restriction and fear of permitting himself to learn bodily.
Roger is an example of a common inability to be with what is emerg-
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ing, to follow it, to permit somatic associations to lead one from place to place. An internalized disruption does not permit the mounting of feeling or a particular set of feelings to occur Through a long series of similar somatic work, dream work, and interaction, Roger became able to identify how he w£is restricting himself and was more able to be somatically and emotionally expressive.
In somatic work we ha\'e the opportunit\' to move with, to explore subtle manifestations in self-use, cryptic somatic messages that, when felt and moved with, open us out to deep aspects of our structuring of reality. I can challenge the structures in me, in my flesh, that prevent me from feeling. I attend to slight movements and actions and amplify them to feel what they embody. I can attune myself to different ages and meanings in my bodily structuring of experience.
Qualities of feeling, gestures, occur in a situation and I am not yet aware of their meaning or the inflection they give. I hitch my belt and roll my shoulders, for example, as I head off for an important meeting and only later realize that I am preparing to do battle by enacting Toshiro Mifune playing a samurai in the movie Yojimbo.
Or I feel disconnected. At first I don't feel it. I am suddenly aware that I have wandered away from what I was thinking about or doing. My eyes have fixed. I am staring and not seeing anvthing. My breath is quite shallow, I don't feel my body much. I am relatively unmoving. When I explore this m.ore, I begin to find that there is an anxiety underlying the disconnection which seems like a fear of annihilation or disruption. I can't tell which. I assume both. I explore it more, try to feel what happens bodily.
In one kind of exercise I do in my practice, I ask people to find a somatic expression for the part of them that is critical of themselves and then to feel their somatic response to the critic. I ask them to explore, in the bodily organization, how they formed this critic, and who it resembles from their past. I also direct them to feeling the response to criticalness— how it restricts their range of possibility. I ask them to see how their current behaviors are affected by both these somatic shapes.
One man showed us a postural stance that was tight, pursed, squeezed, and strained. He particularly felt pain and tension in his legs. His critic had been strongly present in his psyche recently, he reported, and he also had had difficulty sleeping at night because of the pain in his legs. He had not connected the two until the exercise.
This is an important point. The psyche mixes and matches. A piece here is combined with a piece from there. A fragment of manifestation and association is felt, rarely the full-blown thing. So the leg hurts, but the rest is unknown. Or we find ourselves making a gesture or feeling a removed absence in ourselves in a situation that we do not understand.
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In our work we find people in background states of panic of which they are not aware. One woman I worked with reported becoming aware, only after a good deal of work, that she would always enter a room in such a way as to be alert of everything that was going on. She had heightened perception, particularly in the telenceptors, but felt no anxiety or adrena-lization. Slowly, she began to put into place the memory of her brothers waiting to attack her. At this point she felt the panic. The only thing that had been available to her before this realization was the hyper-alertness.
Another client was intrigued to discover at work that he was more agitated when he couldn't see the people who were looking at him. We did a series of somatic experiments where he worked with his eyes closed to see what would occur. He immediately got cold, he reported, and felt the need to have a blanket over him to get warm. In subsequent experiments he said that he kept expecting something horrible to lurch out at him and shake him.
For several weeks we worked with him simply lying down and breathing. He would breathe for a while and then would get cold. Or his breath would catch and he would want me to move my chair back. Interestingly, he reported that he was not feeling afraid. He just had these other responses.
In other cases a client may come to the somatic work with a vague dissatisfaction that is linked to an inability to feel or permit the creative play of the imagination. The person is caught in repetitive, restrictive, socially objectified movements and expressions that do not lead to feelings of renewal and participation in life. I work here with immediate feeling, expression, and movement and also employ embodied dream work, art, music, and writing.
This loss of the creative is invariably felt, when some possibility for its expression has become recognized, as a great grief. Conversely, its re-experience and its emergence at the center of a life is felt as a great joy and a healing. This is not to say that the embodiment of the creative is simply happy or nice. Rather, there is a different situating of oneself in one's own flesh. Vague and inchoate and disturbing feelings become manifest; images in dream and movement are worked. Joyful effusion, mourning and the sufferings of daily life are all experienced. New forms, new behaviors, new connections with ourselves and others are brought forth. The body comes to be felt as the daily creating of meaning and possibility.
In this place we move for its own sake, for the feelings that emerge, the joys or sorrows that form connections with the world. We paint for the color and form that move us, move with what has emerged in our dreams, and make music and write and sing for the sheer exuberance and wonder and pain and felt awe that come from being embodied.
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Sitting by the sea after working with myself somatically I began to vibrate and sing ecstatically as the waves swirled about me and the light radiated off them. "Nishmat Kol Chai," I sang out, singing a phrase from a Hebrew chant I love because of its mounting ecstasy. "The souls of all the living shall ever sing thy praise." I dance in the light and sing praises.
There are dark feelings here as well as the light and joyous. I think of Lorca talking about the Duende:
Through a)i open arch comes a wind, a mental wind blowing relentlessly over the heads of tJie dead, in search of }iew landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby's spittle, crushed grass and jellyfish veil, a^mouncing the baptism of newly created thingsJ^
In feeling ourselves bodily we can come to experience the existential despair of the li\ing or what the Buddhists call the Great Grief. Or feel places of meaninglessness or loss or the storms of the archetypal. But in all this, in our bodily experiencing of ecstasy or pain, the somatic work begins to put us in different relation to ourselves and other people and to both the social and natural sunound.
We can come to challenge the restrictions placed upon our ability to experience the creative, the ecstatic, the pain of existence. Or the simple pleasures of the eveiyday. We can begin to understand, in our flesh, how we have shaped our li\ es, to see how somatic organizations from different epochs of our li\ es interact with, block, or enhance each other We can see in our restriction and difficult\; as one of my client has it, "more material for self-forgiveness."
We begin to feel ourselves as part of the world, connected to it, influenced by it and influencing it. We take our stand in the complex making of possibility and creation that is our somatic lot. We feel, in our flesh, the distortions and illusions, the degradations and wonders and sweetnesses and passions of the living.
And we are moved to participate again, to create again, to dance the ephemeral dance of the making and destroying of worlds. We find a way, a daily practice, of bodily feeling, and creating, the world.
Biographical Note
Ian J. Grand is Program Director and Core Faculty in the Somatic Psychology Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is Director of the Social Somatic Research Project and the Institute for Social Physiolog>, both of which are concerned with social and cultural understandings of somatic psychological processes in development, interpersonal and group relations. Formerly, he was editor of The Journal of Biological Experience: Studies in the Life of the Body.
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Notes
am interested in a convergence of work from different disciplines. There are, for example, analytic writers who think about bodily experience in profound ways, but who seem reluctant to actually engage bodily experience directly. Cf. Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Lawrence E. Hedges, Working the Organizing Experience; Transforming Psychotic, Schizoid and Autistic States (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994); Didier Anzieu The Skin Ego; John Fiscalini, "Narcissism and Coparticipant Inquiry," Contemporary Psychoanalysis. There are also somatic works that develop psychodynamic theory in terms of ego psychology, object relations, archetypal, or intersubjective psychology. Even here, however, the attempts tend to base the worii solely on one or another strand of psychodynamic thought. It seems to me that we need to rethink the whole of psy-chodynamics from a somatic point of view. See also the other articles in this volume for specific somatic references.
^Kemberg, for example, lays out several areas of representation that I think should be understood somatically:
Introjections, Identifications, and ego identity are three levels of the process of internalization of object relations in the psychic apparatus; all three will be referred to comprehensively as identification systems...All these processes of internalization consist of three basic components: a) object-images or object-representation, b) self-images or self-representations, and c) drive derivatives or dispositions to particular affective states.
Otto Kemberg, Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1990) p. 25.
^Cf. Eugenio Gaddini "On Imitation" in A Psychoanalytic Theory of Infantile Experience, Adam Limenani (ed.) (London: Tavistock/Routledge)
'^William S. Condon, "Neonatal movement is synchronized with adult speech: Interactional participation and language acquisition," Science, Vol 183 (1974): pp. 99-104,
^A. Meltzoff and M.K. Moore, "Infants Understanding of People and Things: From Body Imitation to Folk Psychology," in J. L. Bermudez, A. Marcel, and N. Eilan (eds.) The Body and the Self. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
^Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object. It is with the mother the child first learns it can transform its experience of the world and be transformed in it.
''Allan Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994).
^Rene Spitz, "The derailment of dialogue: Stimulus overload, action cycles and the completion gradient," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Vol.12, No 4 (1964).
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^Gish Jen, "The Water Faucet Vision" in Jessica Hegedom (ed.) Charlie Chan is Dead. (Penguin Books: New York, 1993).
'^J. Zinner, and R. Shapiro, "The family group as a single psychic entity: implications for acting out in adolescents," hUeniational Review of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 1. No 1. 179-186. Cf. Syhia Schmidt "Boundarv' making in the family body," Journal of Biological Experience. (Fall, 1981).
Arthur Colman, Up From Scapegoating (Wilmette, II: Chiron, 1995).
'^Michael Michael, Atalanta Fngiens (Ann Arbor: Phanes Press, 1989).
'^Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961). Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961).
''^Stuart Ewen, for example, has shown how the adxertising images we are surrounded by lead us toward particular kinds of desiring and ways of enacting ourselves bodily. In one set of images, for example he links the current image of hard bodies to larger social forces and contrast these bodily exhortations to those of different eras. Arlie Hochschild has demonstrated the impact of work conditions on self-image using the example of airline flight attendants. Penny Eckart has shown that within a week of entering high school students have identified themselves as either "jocks" or "burnouts" and subsequently organize relationships, images of self and ranges of feeling and expression around these choices. Edward T. Hall has noted that there are cultural personalities that we live as the way we enact interpersonal closeness and distancing, bodily, the manner by which we present ourselves, the expectations of specific cultural rhythms of interaction and response. Cf. Theodore Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter (Eds.) The Social and Political Body (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996); Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan Turner (Eds) The Body: Social Process afid Cultural Tlieoty (London: Sage Publications. 1993); Anne Cranny-France, The Body in the Text. (Victoria, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1995); Arlie Hochschild, Tlie Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language (Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett, 1963); Penelope Eckert, Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School (New York: Teachers College Press, 1989); Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
'^D'Andrade and Strauss elaborate a theory of how cultural images are internalized and Moscovici and others who are doing work in "social representastions" are de\ eloping theor\' concerning how social images are developed held collectively. In my work here I am looking specifically at how this gets structured somaticallv. Cf. Rov D'Andrade and Claudia Strauss, Human Motives and Cultural Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
'^Cf. Virginia Wright Wexman, Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance (Princeton: Princeton University Press) (1993).
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^Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York) (Vintage Books, 1994).
^Cf. Paul Goodman, Compulsory Miseducation and the Community of Scholars (New York) (Vintage Books, 1966); Penelope Eckart, Jocks and Burnouts (New York: Teachers College Press, 1989).
^Federico Garcia Lorca, "The Theory and Play of the Duende" in Deep Song and Other Prose (New York: New Directions, 1980).
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