Slang Term for Psychoanalysis in Popular Culture

¶ … slang term for psychoanalysis in popular culture is 'talk therapy.' This is because the first forms of psychoanalytic discourse, as developed by Sigmund Freud, relied upon a release of verbal free associations on the part of the patient to enable the analyst to better understand the patient's mind. However, various other forms of psychological counseling have developed and evolved since psychoanalysis was conceived in Vienna, Austria. It has become acknowledged that human beings are not simply minds attached to bodies, but that the treatment of the body affects the mind and vice versa. Perhaps the most famous examples of Freud's determination that the mind was an isolated entity was his insistence that women alleging sexual abuse at the hands of male relatives were merely expressing female fantasies of sexual involvement with their attackers rather than recounting actual episodes. Now, the difficulty of healing the body and the mind that have both been hurt because of damage done to the patient's body has been acknowledged by those in the counseling professions. This is evidenced by even the title of Molly Young Brown's text on psychosynthesis, entitled The Unfolding Self: Psychosynthesis and Counseling. Synthesis is a form of integration, an integration of mind and body of the patient and an integration of mind and body in the treatment administered by the therapist. Furthermore, there is also a larger, more practical concern as to what to do about individuals who cannot fully articulate themselves in a therapeutic environment yet are in need of psychological healing. This issue is dealt with in Fran Levy's book Dance Movement Therapy: A Healing Art.

Levy's work mainly focuses around her counseling of children through the medium of dance therapy. Children do not always have the verbal tools to express themselves and their problems in an articulate fashion, particularly children in the early stages of cognitive development. This is particularly true of children whose means of relating with the world in a verbal fashion are impaired, such as autistic children. Also, because of the way children experience the world, through play and through physical exploration, children are often able to express themselves kinesthetically in a way that adults are not. Levy's work demonstrates that even children whose physical movement is impaired in some fashion, such as physically disabled children, can benefit from the expressive qualities of dance therapy. By expressing their feelings in the form of movement, children in dance therapy are able to gain a more positive sense of themselves as physical beings. They are also better able to relate to the world physically, a world that is often at odds with their means of perceiving. This can be seen by the examples of the blind children whom Levy counsels in her work. Children who are visually impaired can gain a sense of a physical self through dance therapy. This is true even though a therapist's immediate assumption might be that such a therapy would be inappropriate for a child whose means of relating to the world on a physical level limited by their lack of sight. By stressing the ways impaired children can connect with the world, for instance in terms of touch and smell and hearing, Levy is able to give these children a positive sense about themselves as active, sentient beings. The value of dance therapy for damaged children is also seen on a more psychological level with Levy's analysis of autistic children in dance therapy. Autistic children are more fascinated with things than people and have severely impaired or out-of-sync motor functions. Their brains cannot pick up on the subtle social cues that "normal" individuals possess. But through dance therapy, these children are encouraged to relate to their bodies, to relate to the world and to others in a concrete, emotional fashion. Furthermore, Levy makes it clear because autistic linguistic expression of emotions is so impaired; dance therapy presents an ideal form of healing, of ways of releasing emotion that cannot be expressed verbally or in ordinary, daily social interactions.