Concentrative Movement Therapy - General

General

Through the concentrative engagement with early levels of experience, memories are brought to life which appear in bodily expression as posture, movement and behaviour. Like the material which appears in dreams, subjective bodily experience also contains information which can extend back to preverbal times. Bodily movements or bodily contact call forth a patient’s basic postures. Through the movement work the biographical material is made topical so that a correlation can be made between what a person has experienced and that person’s life story. “The primary process-like level of experience and the secondary process-like level of spoken expression constitute a unity. Through this, speaking acquires the following meaning: What has been experienced is, in the act of being spoken of, conceptualized, and consequently brought to the levels of thought, association, reflection and communication. This is how the sensory-emotional is linked to the linguistic-cognitive cycle in the sense of V. v. Weizsäcker’s Gestaltkreis.

When we speak of movement therapy, by movement we understand the following:

• To-move-oneself, the experience of movement includes a person’s sensorimotor functions.
• To-be-moved, what internally moves and has been moved (affects and emotions).
• To-be-on-the-way, that means the person’s developmental steps and his gradual progress in the overcoming of actual or fantasized external or internal impediments.