The concepts of "embodiment" and "embodied cognition" have created a boom in several fields of science recently. In the humanities, scholars speak of a "corporeal turn" emerging in the philosophy of mind and social sciences. Turns towards an embodied conceptualization of the mind are also on the agenda of psychology, especially social psychology. One may ask, therefore, what implications for psychotherapy and psychotherapy research may originate from such approaches. I wish to point the attention of readers to this topic through my review of a recently published volume on the "Implications of Embodiment", edited by Wolfgang Tschacher and Claudia Bergomi. I will first leaf through the book cursorily, and then focus on several chapters which have specific implications for psychotherapy.
In their foreword, the editors attempt a definition but concede that embodiment may denote different things, “... a theory, a paradigm, a perspective, a methodology, or a scientific field.“ This absence of a unified concept of embodied cognition is directly expressed in Shaun Gallagher's chapter. Jiří Wackermann shows that this concept, however, has a long-standing and continuing tradition in discussions of the mind-body dichotomy since early Greek thinking and had culminated in concepts suchs as the Gestaltkreis (v. Weizsäcker) or the organismic and Gestalt approach (Goldstein) nearly one century ago. Besides an excellent introductory overview of the many concepts concerning “embodiment”, Wackermann´s contribution is a plea for a rational scientific, yet non-reductionist perspective on human being. Matej Hoffmann and Rolf Pfeiffer show, from the point of view of robotics, that the morphology and material properties of the body are computationally (i.e. "mentally") highly relevant. Karl Friston tackles the body-environment problem in neurobiological terms: Biologically embodied agents realize cognitive predictions following a free-energy principle. This principle parallels the treatment of embodiment in the context of complexity theory, especially Hermann Haken's synergetics; embodied cognition rests on self-organized pattern formation, as Hermann Haken and Wolfgang Tschacher point out. Karl Grammer and coworkers put body movement in the context of social darwinism, namely mate selection rituals. Naoya Hirose describes some aspects of embodiment from the perspective of affordances in ecological psychology. Wolfgang Tschacher and Martin Tröndle finally discuss embodiment and the arts: The attractor spaces of paintings in a museum influence visitors' physical locomotion and physiology.
The largest section of the book is on "Social Embodiment". Here the implications of embodiment for psychotherapy become tangible because social interaction and communication is especially affected by bodily variables. This is true for the early steps of cognitive development: Sanneke de Haan, Hanne De Jaegher, Thomas Fuchs and Andrea Mayer point out the importance of an embodied account that helps us to understand how children learn perspective-taking in early life. Other than conceptualized in conventional Theory of Mind (ToM), the managing of social situations cannot be reduced to an abstract thinking capacity. Real social cognition is developed by taking second-person perspectives and by becoming aware of another's perspective beyond the cognitivist model. A further chapter suggests that embodiment is significant in the concrete setting of psychotherapy, i.e. the bodily encounter of therapist and patient: Sabine Koch provides an overview of social embodiment approaches starting from static body feedback and moving towards dynamic body feedback. Assuming that the body plays a central role in thinking, feeling, perceiving and acting, as has been shown by corresponding feedback experiments, she elaborates a theory of movement rhythms and qualities. The theory was tested in several experiments on the meaning of movement qualities and shapes of movement. The 'how' of movement systematically influences attitudes and affect. In handshake experiments, for example, Koch was able to show that smooth versus sharp movement rhythms transmitted affect and personality characteristics readily identified by all participants in the study.
Two more chapters on social embodiment focus directly on the psychotherapy setting. Here it becomes evident that embodiment is a viable perspective for psychotherapy research. Fabian Ramseyer is concerned with nonverbal synchrony in psychotherapy. In his studies he refers to the observation that people in dyadic interaction become aligned with each other in their verbal and nonverbal behavior. He reports empirical evidence that this same movement coordination is present in therapeutic interaction: Ramseyer found that the quality of the therapeutic relationship is embodied in coordinated movement between patient and therapist. High synchrony in the psychotherapist-patient interaction predicts the overall positive outcome of psychotherapeutic treatment. Wilma Bucci likewise emphasizes the dyadic exchange as a foundation of psychotherapy. Her theory of multiple coding and the referential process provides a framework for understanding the nature of the problems that bring patients to treatment, and the process of change. This is mainly a process of changing emotion schemata with a specific focus on subsymbolic processes of which therapists should be aware. Again, as in movement coordination, the body has the last word in what is going on emotionally and bodily in patients and between patients and therapists.
This interdisciplinary book brings together leading proponents of their respective fields. Their contributions paint a compelling and comprehensive picture of the scientific perspective of embodiment and its implications for research and social practice, not least psychotherapy. In my view, Tschacher & Bergomi's book puts forward strong arguments that embodiment has profound implications for psychotherapy.
In looking back on the last century of psychotherapy development, there have been several proponents of body-oriented perspectives in psychotherapy, such as Wilhelm Reich and Alexander Lowen, Frederic Perls, Jacov Moreno and others. All have said basically the same thing: Let us mind the role of the body in psychotherapy, and let us not forget to refer to the body in interventions. These people, however, somehow did not 'make it' into the contemporary, evidence-based landscape of our field, and one may wonder why that happened. My own suggestion is that research on such a holistic approach – including the dynamics of the body, the psyche, the interpersonal and cultural dynamics, and the interdependence between these processes – needs a more complex and sophisticated approach, as Haken and Tschacher have shown in this volume. To meet these demands it will not suffice to merely analyze input-output relations of treatment versus control groups on the basis of a linear common variance model – which is still the main tool of contemporary psychotherapy research. Taking embodiment seriously requires overcoming the limitations of an ideology that 'randomized controlled trials' are the only adequate scientific approach. Restriction to RCT-studies would narrow down the complexity and nonlinearity of the processes in real psychotherapy to an artificial pigeonhole, which is too small for most phenomena of embodiment.
The present volume must be applauded for bringing the richness of human life and the complexity of psychotherapy into our awareness and, moreover, to look carefully at this subject from different scientific, methodological, and philosophical perspectives.
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kriz