AESTHETICS AND DANCE MOVEMENT THERAPY
Since dance is art, the ties between aesthetics and mental health should be delineated. The word aesthetics has different meanings, and one of them refers to the branch of philosophy that deals with the arts, their characteristics, and their workings (or mechanisms). Aesthetics also relates to discussions about beauty, the qualitative evaluation/judgment of the perception of a specific piece of art or perhaps an occurrence in nature. It is a subjective experience marked by the culture in which the individual is embedded as well as in early developmental exchanges (Bollas, 1978). Aesthetics is not only related to (classical) beauty, especially in contemporary art. Nevertheless, most persons are influenced by aesthetics in daily life, and we bring it to the clinic, so it is important to be aware of it.6 In this section, I shall introduce other meanings of aesthetics that are even more pertinent to DMT. Koch (2017) stated the ground for a model of embodied aesthetics in the arts therapies; the ideas presented here are close to her work and stand near to the conceptual tools psychodynamic dmts use.
Aesthetics, Perception and Knowledge
The word “aesthetics” derives from the Ancient Greek word aisthetikos, signifying sensitive, sentient, relating to sensorial perception, and knowing through the senses. Hence, aesthetics discusses sensorial-emotional processes. In 1735 the philosopher Baumgarten used this term to convey that arts are a way of knowing, an idea that has been furthered in the arts-based research model and its variations. This concept finds a home in the arts therapies, i.e., concerning self-knowledge and self-awareness through artistic activity. Dance provides a context for self-knowledge. Attention shifts from the functional body, and routine tasks shift towards presence. The experience of the dancer moves from exploration, creativity, and aesthetics to changes in body-self awareness that happen in and through the dance (Fraleigh, 1987, pp. 28-29). Fraleigh departed from an existential phenomenological angle by stating that she came to know herself (and her possible self) through the actions she takes in dance: “Dance works express not so much the self as the seemingly endless ways in which our bodily lived existence can be aesthetically (or affectively) moved” (p. 33). This statement resonates with the Spanish philosopher Trias who, according to the phenomenological tradition, conveyed that psychology should admit another aspect to the ways of being, apart from what one wishes to be or what the subject thinks has to be and the one the person is. Trias added “the possible self”7, or the possibilities one has to be (Trias in Wengrower, 2016, pp. 2+26).
Psychoanalyst Summers (2005) proposed to enrich the therapeutic process by adding a step after insight was achieved: to accompany the patient to find new manners of being and relating that to the integration of a new sense of self. He argued moving from understanding the present into helping the patients create a new future and giving them an active role in this quest. In DMT, we can escort our patients to discover/try the possibility of other ways of being through exploring movement and its effects on them in a path of self-creation.
Two examples from my own practice come to my mind to further illustrate the benefits of dance and creativity in therapy, experiencing different ways of being as pointed earlier. The first is of Elaine, an eleven-year-old girl who was thin, pale, and frequently rejected by her peers. Her usual movement was contained, her neck stiffly held, and her eyes simultaneously transmitted fear and sensitivity. In the DMT group sessions, she was joyful, alive, and had a leading role. Her teacher in the special school Elaine attended was completely surprised when I told her about this. She thought I might be confusing her with another girl. Dancing awakened the vitality that was turned off in other situations, and this child could experience another way of being in the world. Another example is embodied by Tomer, a 15-year-old boy who had learning difficulties based on emotional problems and some learning disabilities. He signed up for an inclusive movement and drama group I led in his junior high mainstream school. His creativity and humor in movement and acting was so great that he attracted the interest of the “best girl students” of his age group, “the queens of the group.” Obviously, he experienced another way of being in school that, for the first time (according to the counselor), allowed him a positive experience of himself. Months later he was accepted in an acting training for adolescents organized by the section of youth services at the municipality. These are examples of discovering different ways of being, possible selves as mentioned earlier.
Aesthetics and Creative Living
Aesthetics is part of our daily life, and we pay attention to it because we want to enjoy ourselves and our surroundings—sometimes even depressed persons do. This is manifested in our clothing choices, how we arrange our homes, how we serve our meals, and in many other situations of our daily life both intra- and interpersonal. The way we organize the place where we work, the manner in which we talk with our patients (intonation, wording, pitch of voice, gestures) are aesthetic forms consciously chosen or not. Alternately, as Bellas (1978) wrote, in “life, the aesthetic .. . constitutes the subject’s manner of holding and transforming internal and external realities” (p. 394). This is one of the possibilities DMT offers.
Winnicott’s (2005) concepts of creative apperception or creative living clearly relate to aesthetics. They allude to a non-submissive attitude towards life, a proactive full living, creating the world as a baby does: “being able to live the life one has, and to be oneself”
(Caldwell & Joyce, 2011, p. 261). Although Winnicott doesn’t use the word aesthetic experience, it is clear he refers to it and to its emotional effect when he shares this clinical vignette:
One can look at a tree (not necessarily at a picture) and look creatively . . . How often I have been told: “There is a laburnum outside my window and the sun is out and I know intellectually that it must be a grand sight, for those who can see it. But for me this morning (Monday) there is no meaning in it. I cannot feel it. It makes me acutely aware of not being myself real.
(Winnicott, 1986, p. 43)
Thus, an aesthetic approach to life and creative living are indicators of mental health.
Years before reading this excerpt of Winnicott, I worked with a woman in her thirties who was going through long physically and emotionally demanding medical processes; therefore, one of the foci in her therapy was to psychologically accompany her and help her to stand through this challenge. Here is a transcription of how one of our sessions ended:
H: Be good to yourself, look for something pleasant.
R: I do not have money to go to cinema.
H: You live in a rural area, surrounded by trees, open your door, walk around, look, feel them.
Her response sadly shows how people don’t always feel they can access art and beauty immediately and are thus limited in their creative living.11
Aesthetics and Emotions
Emotional experiences may have aesthetic aspects, and aesthetic experiences have emotional implications. Fraleigh sees them as one, as can be read in her foreword to this book. There are aesthetic experiences in therapy sessions or in daily life while discovering something about ourselves, a new meaning, the emotion of an insight, or in an intimate conversation, realizing the connection of a movement with a feeling, moments of harmony in a group, and so on. Possibly the aesthetic emotion we feel in many of these moments is what is called “being moved.”9 Somebody once told me that when walking in the streets after his first psychotherapeutic session, surprisingly he felt that the light was stronger and colors brighter than usual. What a wonderful example of seeing life hopefully clearer and in a new light!
As in the earlier example, we can see the overlapping of aesthetic experience and emotion in different situations. When we do something we feel is positively experienced and appreciated by others, it affects self-image and our sense of agency, and sometimes this comes with a sense of beauty. For instance, I remember David, an eight-year-old boy with a rigid, rough aggressive/defensive presence and hoarse voice. Once, while dancing to a waltz, he exclaimed smilingly, “They should come from the TV to watch at us!” The waltz wasn’t part of his cultural repertoire: however, the balancing-flowing movement shared with his group, colored by light scarves aroused in him an aesthetic experience of being beautiful, probably capable as well, and deserving an admiring gaze (Kohut, 1977). During this time, his expression was soft and his movement smooth.
Aesthetic Experience/Moment
An aesthetic moment is “an occasion when time becomes a space for the subject. We are stopped, held, in reverie, to be released, eventually back into time proper” (Bollas, 1978, p. 385) Bollas said this about literature and poetry; however, I think we can extend his theory to dance.10 A profound rapport is felt between a person and an object of art in an aesthetic moment. It affords an illusion of deep connection; it arouses a memory that is not cognitive nor visual but existential, and it is lived as an experience of being. Psychoanalyst Bollas indicated the origin of this aesthetic moment in early infancy when the baby lives the experience of being within intimate dialogue with the caretaker. The experiences of distress, hunger, and so on are dissipated/transformed into peacefulness/satisfaction, and the way these processes elapse and are managed by the caretaker through their own aesthetics are transformational for the baby. The acts of early care are carried out through time qualities, intensities, flow, and so on, which are primarily aspects of the performing arts and dance (Wengrower, 2016). Subsequently “[T]he aesthetic experience is not something learned by the adult, but is an existential recollection of an experience where being handled by the maternal aesthetic made thinking irrelevant to survival” (Bollas, 1978, p. 388).
In a DMT session, this experience is probably lived during moments of a dance/movement encounter with the therapist, with a member of the group, or the minutes after the encounter. As said earlier, it is probably unnecessary to talk about this moment, although sometimes sharing it through a nonverbal medium can give it validity when acknowledged by the partner/s in the experience.
