ABSTRACT
This chapter delineates living realities of being a body that are integral to dance, to creative art psychotherapies, and to body psychotherapy. It specifies and investigates these living realities to begin with in terms of ‘the self’, specifically, in terms of two notable conceptions and formulations of the self: both the emergent self and core self as described by infant psychiatrist and clinical psychologist Daniel Stern (1985) and the self as phenomenologically described by Husserl (1973), a description that singles out what is essentially present in the experience of an animate organism. The striking complementarities between the two descriptive analyses show that the self is basically rooted in being a body, in kinesthesia, and in affectivity, an anchorage that recalls Freud’s observation, ‘The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego’ (Freud, 1955, p. 26). Such anchorage furthermore brings to light certain affinities with the Buddhist notion of self as a construct (Kornfield, 2009; Goldstein and Kornfield, 1987; Thera, 1965) in that it makes evident a range of temporally enlightened aspects of self: being a body is a whole-life developmental reality, an ontogeny that spans the whole of life; kinesthesia is a matter of movement and is hence the experience of an inherently temporal qualitative dynamic; affectivity is dynamic: affective feelings move through bodies, moving them to move.
