Primitive Bodily Communications in Psychotherapy

Every psychotherapist will be familiar with what it means to experience the hatred and despair of one's most vulnerable patients in the midst of a psychotherapy session. Most often these patients will manage to express their feelings verbally, but what about those patients who never developed the capacity to speak? Or those patients who are capable of talking, but carry a complex range of unprocessed embodied feelings that cannot be verbally expressed? Some patients must rely on another type of language in order to communicate their dissociative states of mind. When the Body Tells the Story explores how the 'talking cure' can still work when words fail and body talks. Non-verbal communication can be thought of as a form of body language and, even though this is a topic not frequently discussed, many practitioners have experienced working with patients who communicate through the use of their bodies. In this book, a wide spectrum of clinical cases illustrate how the 'talking cure' can help these patients reach a state of better physical and emotional containment and, when possible, of verbal communication.