Psychotherapy the Body in Jungian

Psychotherapy

The Body in Jungian Psychotherapy

In January of 2010 I was in a car accident. I sustained injuries on my abdomen and chest area creating bruising and swelling that resulted in medical treatment. At the hospital, I was punctured so that the fluid buildup could be discharged. I was then given an anti-inflammatory steroid (methylpred) as well as Cipro which then led to the creation of the following side effect symptoms: numbness of the chest, left arm, swelling of the lips and anxiety. As a result of the accident or the side effect of the medication (I could not tell at that point), I ended up going to the emergency room twice with several additional tests to rule out other possible conditions. At one point, I informed the ER MD that previously when I had been in an auto accident, what had helped me was taking a Homeopathic medication called Arnica which helped reduce swelling and bruising. The doctor then smiled and smirked and stated that the medication he was prescribing was stronger and that if I were to take Homeopathic medication, it could either not do much for me or interfere with the treatment he was giving me. At my core, this did not sound right and I got the impression that the doctor did not have much respect for alternative treatments. However, my projection upon the doctor as the all knowing in the field of medicine and healthcare made me chose to confide entirely in him in order to expect remission of symptoms: pain and bruising, including of those newly formed symptoms as side effects from the methylpred. I was desperate as I needed to hurry up to get back to work and not leave my patients waiting for me for too long; many of them experiencing depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation.

Just this past week, after my frustration with the doctors, I decided to consult my family's Chinese herbal doctor. I was desperate and despite having discontinued the medication two days before meeting with the Chinese doctor, I was still experiencing the numbness of the chest and arms, swelling of lips, anxiety and now, slight sadness. As I walked into the Chinese doctor's office, she immediately looked into my eyes and felt my pulse. All around I noticed posters of the human body marking meridian points and acupuncture points. There was a soft mellow music playing in the background and the lighting was very soothing and disarming. Her English was broken but I was able to understand what she said. One of the first things she stated that was wrong was that I was scared; "You have scare on your body." At first I thought she meant, scar. However after she repeated herself, I knew what she had meant. In the Mexican culture, there is a similar term called susto when an individual goes through a traumatic experience, the trauma gets stuck in the body. Perhaps this is better illustrated by Pert, Dreher, and Ruff: "bio-chemical substrates of emotion carry information across systems, from…mind…to…body [i.e., the endocrine, cardiovascular, digestive and immune systems] and back again. Neuropeptide receptors are not limited to the brain; they present on cells in tissues throughout the body. "Emotions are therefore a bridge between mind and body" (Shlitz, Amorok & Micozzi, 2005, p 63). I think the motorcycle accident left an emotional imprint on my chest and abdomen and the fear and dread of being too long away from treating my patients was being registered in my body. The methylpred hand only reacted to what was already present in my cells.

The Chinese doctor began to perform a massage on me she called chi gong as well as acupressure and acupuncture. When she began to work on my chest and in my jaw area, an overwhelming sense of sadness and melancholy overcame me; a lay there in tears as the doctor worked bringing me back into my body to feel these feelings and work through them. At the moment, my rational mind was through with trying to make sense of what was going on, but at a deep intuitive level, what was happening was that I had stored a lot of my own worries, pressures and stresses in my body. I also felt some of the patient's material enter me by way of images and became even more tearful. The Chinese doctor said "good," and kept on working on my body. After two hours of treatment, I left her office feeling very tired and sleepy and went straight home and slept that afternoon until the next morning. She had also prescribed me some form of mushroom root to take as tea as well as advised me to take arnica homeopathic pills if I wanted to. She did say to stop taking methylpred indefinitely and not to expose my body to any more radiation through x-rays that my body was fine.

It has now been a few days, and although I am only taking one western medicine along with the Chinese medicine, I feel better than before I even had the accident. However in retrospect and in light of the class readings, the subject of integral medicine has come up to the forefront for me in recent days. Marilyn Schlitz suggests that 21st century medicine must adopt an integral philosophy that "promotes an approach embedded in the scientific dimension that epitomizes the best in modern health care, while equally recognizing that human beings possess emotional, spiritual and relational dimensions…essential in the diagnosis and treatment…and the cultivation of wellness" (p. 3).

The lived body is a central theme in phenomenology. It is the body that one is compared to the objective body one has.

The symbolic structure of behavior is the lived body compared to the body as a thing. The symbolic structure of behavior is what makes the body human because it radically reverses the relation of what founds and what is founded. The lived body becomes the founding term. The patient who walks into the therapy room is not a mechanism in motion. He or she in gait and posture is the expression of an intentional, often unconscious, movement. The gestural body is the radical foundation of our corporeal existence, the way in which we preserve and transcend the body as thing, the way that we redesign the space of the world into stages of performance. They also show that the gestural body is a situated body and a body whose flesh is inter-corporeal and whose gestures complete them in the reciprocal of the other. This awareness and knowledge is the tragedy of illness and it is the basis for the dialectic in the transference field between what I will describe as the gestural body and the symptomatic body in psychotherapy. The meanings that are generated in the praxis of psychotherapy arise within an interactive field where patient and therapist sense within themselves the carnal equivalence of the other (Romanyshyn, ).

For Jung the reality of the psyche always included both the physical and spiritual dimensions. He set down the affinity of instinct and archetypal image in his idea that the primordial image might suitably be described as the instinct's perception of self or as the self-portrait of the instinct. The word association studies that Jung conducted were the key to his understanding of how mind and body function as a unit. He demonstrated that emotional reactions corresponded with physiological innervations. Jung developed his concept of the emotionally toned complex with functions independently of the ego. He went on to describe the unconscious complex as having a somatic aspect that locates itself in the organic body. He believed that the durability of a complex is guaranteed by its continually active felling tone. If the feeling tone is put out then the complex is put out with it (Greene, 2001).

Most therapies that work with movement and body techniques are based on the assumption that the body has a long memory. Over the years the body becomes a repository of psychic conflict and affects laden events that cannot be integrated or resolved. The body part of the psyche is shaped from the beginning by its experiences of life, particularly those that are emotionally charged. Caught in the musculature and organs, these very much alive but split off portions of ourselves cannot always be accessed by verbal methods alone, especially the early traumas that are pre-verbal and do not yet have mental representations (Greene, 2001).

Archetypal energy is thought to carry a much higher charge than personal energy. The archetype is a magnetic energy field at the core of a personal complex. The archetype itself is not visible. It is a potential magnetic field of energy onto which a person attaches an image that is eventually projected out. That energy is thought to attract or repel other creatures that come within its path. It is also thought to attract or repel the ego so intensely that it can wipe out consciousness to the point where the ego is no longer present to makes choices (Woodman and Dickson, 1997, p. 3).

Many Jungians believe that in order to facilitate a patient with access to their unconscious and thus advance the individuation process, they themselves must access their own depths when treating a patient. This entails being aware of emotions, memories, symbols, and dreams that come out when treating a patient. This will often shed light on something of the patient's experience and the exclusive relationship created between therapist and patient. If devises and spoken to in an appropriate way by the therapist, patients can gain as they expand their understanding of themselves and their experience in relationship to one another (Simmons, 2010).

According to Jung, it is a power of the archetypes to impact people's lives in the most powerful feeling ways that lead one to feel linked with experiences of a spiritually moving nature. The most durable experiences of a persons life is, for the most part, created in relation to their encounters with these archetypal forms. It is impossible to know the archetypes themselves completely or directly but they can be felt by impact on people's lives and seen in their manifestations in various forms that affect us as sacred, including certain very special experiences that occur and for some, religious experience. In relation to this notion of the archetypes is Jung's idea about psychic energy in which he held that the psyche has a natural tendency to seek balance or compensation through shifts of energy between the conscious and unconscious levels of mind and body. All kinds of one-sidedness in development are rewarded by their opposite in the psyche. A good example is someone who is extremely taken with his or her self value on a conscious level and tend to experience the opposite in some other areas of life such as in dreams or in what happens accidentally in the real world (Zimmelman, n.d.).

Many people are familiar with the idea of personal unconscious. It is often defined as a repository of thoughts and feelings obtained through personal experience that exist outside of ones' conscious awareness. Personal substance is often unconscious because it is forgotten or repressed due to its difficult or intolerable nature. In addition to a personal unconscious, Jung also thought that every person has entrance to the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious consists of things that are impersonal and have never been conscious. These things are universal, existing in the psyches of all human beings. They consist of elementary forms or basic patterns which serve as the building blocks for all psychological occurrences. These forms or patterns are known as archetypes. All through history, archetypes have time and again been observed in all cultures in association with the symbols and images that are found in art, myths, and fairy tales. Some common archetypal images include the hero, the wise man, the trickster, and the mother (Simmons, 2010).

While it may be difficult to grasp the theoretical nature of archetypes, one way to think about them in terms of human experiences is as a specific psychic impulse. As an archetype exerts its influence on an individual, a pattern of behavior or a set of thoughts and feelings may emerge. The exact nature of the individual's response to the force of the archetype will largely depend on the personal experiences they have had in their life. If a therapist is skilled at identifying archetypal forces and the way that these forces interact with personal experiences, they can assist their clients to better understand the etiology of their desires, fears, and in some cases, relational style (Simmons, 2010).

It is thought that mythological, archetypal narratives are woven into the fabric of a person's body. A person's center of attention is focused from haughty cerebral watchtowers and they often fail to hear and feel these narratives and mythological fragments speak softly within the neural pathways of their beings. A person's breath is held, their sensitivities faint and fixated by limited attention. The body is alive with archetypical stories waiting to be acknowledged. Archetypes being psychic structures that contain biologically related patterns of behaviors consist of certain qualities and expressions of being. They are related to the instinctive life forces motivating the world's mythological stories (Mijares, 2002).

The ability to hear and feel the sub-personalities, fragmented self parts and archetypal forces that are related to life narratives is greatly improved by breathing practices. Breath therapies help to release the tension that is stored in a person's muscular structures. They have a powerful effect upon the psychophysiology of the breather as they stimulate the neural system. The breather then begins to experience improved energy moving through the blocks and character armoring as neural winds begin to blow (Mijares, 2002).

The connection between the nervous, endocrine and immune systems in a person's body suggests that there is a unified healing system within us. It is thought that human beings experience helplessness when under chronic stress. This is thought to mean that no expression of emotion or active behavioral response will change inescapably unpleasant circumstances or alleviate the pain of loss. The idea is that expression of strong emotion, such as anger, fear or grief, will exacerbate interpersonal tensions. The response is helplessness which is dealt with by the long-term coping strategy of repression (Pert, Dreher and Ruff,, p. 68-69).

This idea of a mind body connection in the healing process has lead to a bridge between the fields of expressive arts therapy and Western medicine. This allows for the integration of both our intuitive and rational knowledge about healing. It is also a way for expressive arts therapies to become more widely accepted and used by people who have mostly been conditioned to believe that the mind and body are separate entities that do not reflect upon one another. The life/art process is based on the premise of a direct type of movement that anyone can do. When movement is liberated from the constricting armor of stylized, preconceived gestures, an innate feedback process between movement and feelings is generated. This feedback process is an essential ingredient of expressive movement. Movement becomes the vehicle for releasing feelings that are essential in the healing process. Repressed and incongruent emotions shut down the immune system and end up causing pain and illness (Halprin an Samuels,, p. 128-133).

Art, prayer and healing are all thought to come from the same source. The energy that fuels these processes is the basic fore of life. Healing is thought to take place when the resonating body-mind spirit balances ones physiology by thoughts in the brain, autonomic nervous system balance, hormonal balance and neurotransmitter balance. Healers work with imagery by having a patient picture their illness, their healing forces and the healing process in their mind. Healing art can be used by a patient in a number of ways. The images can be viewed and allowed to change a person's consciousness, or images can be used to help a person visualize the healing process or a healed state. Another way in which art heals a viewer is by showing patients images that move them. This allows them to discuss these emotions with their families, support people and healers. This often makes them feel connected, relieves isolation and releases deep emotions (Halprin an Samuels,, p. 140).