Bodies In Treatment: The Unspoken Dimension (Relational Perspectives Book Series)
"Is our field open enough to offer this book the reception is deserves? Are we ready to admit into our work the physical part of our experience, what Fran Sommer Anderson, the book’s editor, call a ‘visceral, sensory, imagistic’ part of our world? Are we ready to accept that we cannot know everything in verbal terms, that part of our work must be and remain an experience of the body, ‘ineluctable, numinous, often ineffable’? I hope so. We need to accept this perspective, and in the process we need to rework the longstanding overemphasis in psychoanalysis on words and linear thought. This book, along withRelational Perspectives on the Body,the first book Anderson edited (with Lew Aron), are the best places I know to begin this overdue project."- Donnel Stern, Ph.D., Co-Editor,Contemporary Psychoanalysis"This book sizzles with new approaches to the Body in therapy. Some so challenging that the analyst may wish to say no, this is a step too far. But no's can mean, and in this instance do, that there are ideas which we are unused to which are worth engaging. The body is not just a vehicle for dissociation, projection or symbolization. It is the physical manifestation of ourselves and as such demands theory and practice that help us recognize our bodies and those of our patients.  This book contributes magnificently to the project first started by Freud to understand the relation between mind and body"- Susie Orbach, Ph.D., Author,Fat is a Feminist Issue, Hunger Strike,andOn Eating"Having been intrigued by new theories that connect mind and body, and puzzled about the body treatments my patients sometimes talk about, I found this book a revelation. It discloses a startlingly wide range of body-focused thoughts and practices, extending from the use of unworded representations in talking treatment to evocative action directly on the body, with illustrations of many combined treatments between them. There is an especially useful balance of patient phenomenology and practitioner accounts. What is really an eye-opener is the variety of rationales and theoretical apparatuses that underpin these practices, referring to cognitive psychology, recent neurophysiology, the technology of Yoga and much less familiar, far more radically different ways of thinking." -  Lawrence Friedman, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Weill-Cornell Medical College, USA"[Bodies in Treatment] is a good volume that contains many chapters that deepen our understanding of psychoanalysis in the nonverbal, bodily dimension of experience.  The chapters by psychoanalysts make sophisticated use of and integration of new findings in biological sciences...The book also contains a number of contributions, which were of some interest, by body therapists - practitioners of various kinds of body therapy,"- Christine Kieffer, Ph.D.,PsycCRITIQUES53, 2008“…intimate and thoughtful…Bodies in Treatment: The Unspoken Dimensionaims to move talk and body therapists closer to one another, so that each appreciates the narrative and cisceral and so that, together, they can care for patients as wholly as possible…It succeeds strongly in bringing needed attention to a dimension of treatment that has been largely ignored, and sometimes exploited, by therapists. This book will be of particular interest to clinicians who treat patients with eating disorders and/or trauma histories, patients who somatize, and patients who suffer from chronic illnesses… Frances Sommer Anderson is brave to have written about the ways her own profession of talk therapy failed to touch and heal some aspects of her patients and some aspects of herself.”– Julie E. Sheehy, Ph.D.,Psychoanalytic Psychology