CLOSING REFLECTIONS

The immanent and irreplaceable aspects of dance are above all, sensed. They include vitality, authenticity (the sense of being true to oneself), self-integration, presence/embodiment, affinity between persons moving in attunement, aesthetics and its psychological values. All these aspects are fundamental in life; dance is a way of accessing and enhancing them in mental health in a psychotherapeutic setting such as Dance Movement Therapy. When they are an empathized experience, they can be reflected upon (although this is not always necessary, as said earlier, since sometimes empathy might be enough), verbally shared, or expressed in other ways. Dance movement therapists can create specific modalities of practice that do not necessarily echo verbal psychotherapy and merge aspects, structures, and forms of dance. Experiences offered may have different degrees of structuration according to the needs of the patients. Remember Bollas’s assertion that the aesthetic is the subject’s way of “holding and transforming internal and external realities” (Bollas, 1978, p. 394).

Freud’s saying that the ego is first a bodily experience is still valid—no matter how the concept of ego has been metamorphosed. We begin being in our bodies and continue to be our body when we develop and add important components to our being. We embody and perform, unconsciously, our history, emotions, sufferings, and happiness, and we can actively be aware, imagine, explore, and change them. Through dance/movement the patient can explore and enact possibilities of being in the world and with others, as philosophers mentioned here asserted. Psychoanalysts like Alizade and Summers include widening the possibilities of being in their Weltanschauung

Vitality in its various forms (Stern, 2010) can help to confront predicaments and be part of our resilient presence; the recognition that feelings have forms and are not always speakable but can still be expressed and worked through is crucial. Aesthetics and dance have a core place in DMT’s practice because they are part of well-being/mental health. Looking at positivity in psychotherapy has been legitimated, asserting the efficacy of a therapeutic approach that sees exploring joy as important as delving into sadness.

This is not a complete study of all the values intrinsic to dance, nor has empirical research been introduced here. One of the purposes of this chapter is to lay the groundwork for reflection and encourage new lines of investigation and practice unique to our roots in dance. This does not mean leaving aside the knowledge acquired and built upon during the last decades incorporating psychological understanding. As Kelso (1997) wrote: “the aim of science is not things themselves . . . but the relations among things; outside these relations there is no reality knowable.” Therefore, this chapter suggests delving onto the dance experience, thereby contributing valuable and unique gains in the field of Dance Movement Therapy.

NOTES

• 1. Sabine C. Koch has been developing research on the active and specific factors in arts therapies. See Koch (2017).
• 2. The stability in the instability and the permanent impermanence mentioned earlier, which refer to the transient characteristic of dance: movement is performed and disappears to give space to another one.
• 3. Thus coinciding with Nietzsche, Birringer, and Schoop, mentioned earlier.
• 4. Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson (1967) distinguished between two modes of communication: the digital mode and the analogical mode. The first mode is mainly verbal language in which the relationship between significant and signified is a matter of convention. Digital has rich and complex syntax, but alone is less efficient in expressing emotions or conveying relationships, and in this aspect is semantically limited. In contrast, the analogical mode is more closely related to the signified; it is based on similitude and equivalence and has more freedom from conventions but is far from being univocal. This is the case of gestures, movements, body posture, the use of space and interpersonal distance (proxemics), and the nonverbal aspects of speech (speed, modulation, and so on). Various authors agree that analogical patterns are the privileged mode of emotional expression (Wengrower, 2016, pp. 26-28).
• 5. These component elements of forms of vitality make them dynamic and were first studied almost a century ago by Rudolf Laban (White, 2016), who laid the groundwork for several systems of movement observation used in DMT.
• 6. See Donna Newman-Bluestein in this book and Wengrower (2017) for more information on this argument.
• 7. For more, see the chapter “On the Possibility of Authentic Movement: A Philosophical Investigation” by Rona Cohen in this book.
• 8. I am thankful for Jane Wilson Cathcart’s reading of this chapter and her comments; this idea is inspired by her.
• 9. For more on being moved as an aesthetic emotion, see the chapter “Being Moved as a Therapeutic Factor of Dance Movement Therapy by Sabine C. Koch in this book.
• 10. As said elsewhere, most psychoanalysts writing about aesthetic experiences do not relate to dance (Wengrower, 2016).
• 11. Authentic Movement is self-exploratory movement practice based on inner impulses.
• 12.

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