SILVIA BIRKLEIN, PhD, MA, LCAT, BC-DMT, CMA, KMP
My background as a dance/movement therapist, movement analyst and dancer influence the way I work as a psychoanalyst. I believe these disciplines can enhance and inform each other, and that viewing the language of the body and movement through psychoanalytic lenses can give insight into dynamic interpersonal processes. What happens when a patient enters the room? What do we make of a particular way of holding oneself ? How do we make sense of a movement vocabulary a patient uses? Movement is always relational. From the beginning, our movements are interconnected with other human beings.
Manque à être
(Photograph, Apple iPhone 6s, 876 x 1170 pixels)
Our bodies and psyches are shaped by our caregivers, by their bodies and the ways in which we are being sensed, touched, held, attended and attuned to. Our somatic and emotional elasticity and plasticity (i.e. , contours of vitality) cannot be thought of absent the other body that shaped us. This is to say that intersubjectivity is not only generated by two minds, but also by two bodies. It is in these co-constructed relationships that we develop the embodied affect of our early lives. As the body continues to hold these early relationships, memories, traumas and other affective states, they are expressed in postures, gestures and rhythms, in subtle shifts, in moment-to-moment changes in affect states. Contours of vitality emerge in lively interplay with others, giving rise to expressive and symbolic forms of feelings. This, to me, is a dance, a trace form in space, two bodyminds dancing.
During COVID, the dance stopped. My photo is a snapshot of a feeling, a stillness, emptiness, a portrait of loneliness, disconnect and isolation felt during the pandemic. I choose a photo, frozen in time, in black and white, as temporality has collapsed during this time; the gaze has shifted inward.