By Charlotte Howorth

Notable body-oriented practitioners, Reich, Gindler, Lowen, Pierrakos, Hanna: these early body-oriented practitioners attended to how psychological experience was expressed through breathing, posture, muscular tension, movement, and bodily patterning. More recent developments in trauma treatment, attachment, neuroscience, and relational and experiential psychotherapy have brought greater attention to autonomic regulation, defensive responses, bodily memory, mindful bodily awareness, relational attunement, and co-regulation (Brothers & Sletvold, 2022; Caldwell, 1997; Fosha, 2021; Levine, 1997; Ogden et al., 2006).

These developments have profoundly changed psychotherapy. Eugene Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit further expands this somatic awareness and leads me to ask: what do we mean by “body” in somatic psychotherapy and what is this body that experiences?

For Gendlin, the body is more than merely physical. What we sense bodily from within is not limited to the five senses we usually think of. It is a concrete felt experience of the unity of mind and body – it is palpable as well as inherently meaningful. He points to the “living body,” the body felt from inside. He brings our awareness to a subtle, bodily felt grasp of the whole situation in which we are embedded – an implicit knowing that is often unnoticed. It is more intricate than we can think or say. Before experience separates into clearly defined thoughts, feelings, memories, and meanings, a bodily process of interaction with the environment is already underway.

Interaction First

Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit turns our usual understanding of the body on its head. We commonly imagine the body as an individual organism that exists first and then enters into relationship with other people and the environment: I have experiences inside my body, you have experiences inside yours, and through relationship we communicate and affect one another. Gendlin reverses this order. We are not separate organisms who first exist and then interact with our situations; our living is already an ongoing organism-environment process (Gendlin, 1997). As he writes, “A body lives its relationships; it IS interaction” (Gendlin, 1992, p. 21).

Consider something as basic as breathing. We cannot adequately describe the living body without lungs, air, atmosphere, and exchange. Eating similarly involves an organism-environment process through which what was “outside” becomes the living body. Gendlin extends this understanding further: relationships, histories, culture, language and situations are not merely external influences acting upon a separate self. They are already participating in how our living occurs (Gendlin, 1992, 1997). The body is therefore not simply in relationship. It bodily lives its relationships. For psychotherapy, this opens a more radical question than simply: What is happening inside the client? Or even: What is happening between us? But rather asking: What is this interaction becoming, differently, in each of us?

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