Dance Therapy and Depth Psychology

The Moving Imagination

Joan Chodorow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135854195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Dance/movement as active imagination was originated by Jung in 1916. Developed in the 1960s by dance therapy pioneer Mary Whitehouse, it is today both an approach to dance therapy as well as a form of active imagination in analysis. In her delightful book Joan Chodorow provides an introduction to the origins, theory and practice of dance/movement as active imagination.
Beginning with her own story the author shows how dance/ movement is of value to psychotherapy. An historical overview of Jung's basic concepts is given as well as the most recent depth psychological synthesis of affect theory based on the work of Sylvan Tomkins, Louis Stewart, and others. Finally in discussing the use of dance/movement as active imagination in practice, the movement themes that emerge and the non-verbal expressive aspects of the therapaeutic relationship are described.

Part One

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PERSONAL ORIGINS

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Chapter One

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DANCE TO DANCE THERAPY

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I took my first ballet lesson when I was 7, with Jane Denham, a wonderful young teacher who knew how to interweave a foundation of classical technique with time each class for free dance improvisation. Each child in turn entered a ‘magic circle’ where she could enter a pretend world and interact with or become any kind of imaginai being. For me, dance became not only an engrossing and challenging discipline, but also the purest form of imaginative play.

As I entered my teen years, I began intensive studies with Carmelita Maracci, a great artist and teacher. Her daily classes became the center of my life. She demanded utter dedication from her students and imparted an unusually strong classical ballet technique. But technique was never an end in itself, rather it was necessary to give form to powerful images, to express the heights and depths of human experience. Music, emotion and dance were inseparable. Carmelita's accompanists were usually pianists of concert caliber who played with great feeling. The beauty of the music moved many of her students to tears, so it was not unusual to dance and at the same time weep. Transcending the pain of aching muscles and blistered, sometimes bleeding toes that is part of a young dancer's life, added even higher intensity to the expressive quality.

Then I became a professional dancer and experienced a very different approach to dance. For a number of years I took the jobs that were available. That meant dancing in nightclubs, musical comedy and other forms of popular entertainment. Some of the work was wonderful, particularly when I had the privilege of working with a fine choreographer. But most of it was depressing — far from the imaginative, emotional experiences that had made me want to dance in the first place.

I began to teach. At first it was just between performing jobs. But in time, teaching felt more alive to me than performing. Teaching dance, particularly to children, helped me re-connect to an essential creative source.

The shift into full-time teaching occurred in my early twenties. I opened my own school in East Los Angeles and also taught classes in other schools and centers throughout the city. I loved teaching and tried to offer the children I worked with the same rich foundation of classical technique and imaginative play that had been important to me. At first, my orientation was to make professional dancers. Then, my world turned around completely when I was asked to teach a group of 3-year-olds. They were too young to learn any kind of ballet technique, so I had to find a new way of working. As I watched them, I realized that everything they did was a mirroring of the world in movement: while they were watching something, they would imitate it. When they remembered something, they enacted the memory. It was a revelation for me to realize that children learned about the world and about themselves through their bodies.

They liked bugs. So we paid careful attention to the bugs we found and developed a series of ‘bug walks’ that we did across the length of the studio. Whenever one of the children had a cut or scratch, all of the other children were intensely interested in it. We began to spend part of each class going round the circle while everyone took a turn to show their most recent ‘hurt’ and demonstrate how it had happened, in mime. We built cities, using imaginary tools and materials. We danced our way through every kind of holiday celebration, pretending to prepare the food, pretending to get dressed-up in the national costumes, and enacting the stories of that culture. We pretended to be every kind of wild animal. We also danced our pets. We pretended to be teachers, mothers, fathers, older and younger siblings. We danced being caterpillars and wove ourselves into cocoons where we slept peacefully until it was time to struggle our way out of the cocoon and emerge (to our own great astonishment) as butterflies. ‘Dance’ and ‘pretend’ were synonymous.

From working with such young children in the dance studio, I became increasingly interested in dance for children in nursery school programs. My studio was across the street from Height's Cooperative Nursery School. I began a collaboration with Ethel Young who was the Director. We developed some of the early courses and written materials for teachers on the role of the arts in early childhood education. All of the arts — dance, painting, clay, dress-up — were seen as many languages through which the children could express and interpret their experiences. Ethel helped me understand that the process we call child development is completely interwoven with the creative process. Those years of work with very young children, and their parents and teachers, gave me an understanding of development that has been essential to every aspect of my work as a dance therapist, psychotherapist and Jungian analyst.

Sometime in the early 1960s, a social worker from Los Angeles County General Hospital came to the nursery school looking for an enrichment program for one of the autistic children on the psychiatric unit. She watched me move with the children in one of the dance groups and invited me to come to the psychiatric unit and work with the children there. At that time, I had no psychological training.

The first day I went up to the sixth floor of a very old building. The doors were locked. About fifteen children between the ages of 3 and 12 were in treatment diere. Most of them were psychotic. Some were also blind, some were deaf. Some actively withdrew from contact. Others wanted to be held and hugged, but not for very long. One child tugged to get the attention of any adult he could find. He then pulled them to where diere was something he wanted, but couldn't get by himself. After pointing to it and making urgent sounds, he usually got it. He then did his best to try to stuff the new treasure in his mouth or inside his shirt or pants. Another child, perhaps 8 years old, walked around saying in a monotone: ‘I'm very angry. I'm a very angry boy.’

The day room had peeling yellow paint on the walls and old fashioned radiators. I walked in with a portable phonograph, records, scarves and a drum. One of the tired women attendants looked on. Some of the children were sitting, staring and talking to themselves. One little girl walked on her toes with her eyes rolled back. I couldn't tell whether or not she was blind. There was a lot of activity along the window wall where a whole group of children were climbing on and off the radiators.

Somehow, I had the sense that if I could just put on wonderful music, it would change everything. As I remember, I put on a Russian Hopak. Some of the staff and some of the children liked the music. We got into a loose circle, with the children moving in and out of it. Some of the kids were shrieking and boisterous. As I said, the circle was very loose — we just started running around, more or less in the same direction. We were stamping and doing different kinds of clapping and other things, and more children joined in. Now one of the boys who had been climbing the radi-ators joined us, but he didn't want to do what we were doing — he wanted to bark. Another boy joined him and soon they were both scrambling around on all fours, barking. Since that was becoming the most interesting thing going on, I too got down on my hands and knees and the rest of the children followed. I hoped we would soon all be barking and scrambling in some kind of synchrony, but then a little girl wandered off, one of the children on her toes with her eyes rolled back. Hoping to invite her back into the group, I took off the Hopak, put on a Debussy piece that sounds like clouds, and passed out the scarves. Since many of the children liked to stuff things inside themselves, a lot of the scarves disappeared under clothes, into mouths and ears and other body openings. Yet somehow, the energy and music and movement kept us connected. Later when I put on a Mexican Hat Dance, the children liked it and some of the attendants who had been watching smiled, and joined the dancing. At this point, ‘dancing’ meant jumping, stamping and running around a circle that had an imaginary hat in the center of it. But the music held it together and the session ended with children, attendants and some of the therapists dancing in partners and en masse. When it was over, some of the children clapped and cheered, others climbed back on the radiators and stared into space, others wandered off and mumbled to themselves. The tired looking attendants clapped and smiled. The chief psychiatrist had been watching through the one-way glass. Someone reported his comments to me: ‘The children have never got-ten such good exercise. She's a gem. Hire her.’

The following years were a major transition time. What contained it all was an analysis with Dr Kate Marcus, one of the founders of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. I had always been curious about psychoanalysis and felt especially drawn to Jung's psychology. But it was not my fascination with the unconscious that brought me into analysis, it was a life crisis. At the age of 24, I found myself in the midst of a bitter divorce. I had to find the resources to support my young daughter and myself. Two or three times a week, I sat in a chair across from a wise old woman. We talked about dreams. The integrity of that work remains with me. It served as a base and model for much subsequent growth.

I continued to teach in my storefront ballet studio in East Los Angeles as well as in a number of nursery schools and private elementary schools. But my direction had clarified. I was no longer interested in training professional dancers. Instead, I wanted to learn all I could about the therapeutic aspects of dance and the creative process. I continued to work with Ethel Young on the arts and child development. In addition to teaching, I began to do an increasing amount of therapeutic work at the hospital; developed some dance and movement programs for learning-disabled children at a number of special schools; and did some individual work with emotionally disturbed children, adolescents and adults. During this period, I began and continued intensive studies with Trudi Schoop and Mary Whitehouse, two of the major pioneers of dance therapy.

Chapter Two

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TRUDI SCHOOP

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I had taken my first class from Trudi Schoop when I was 19. She was a world famous dancer and pantomime artist who was beginning to bring her profound understanding of human expression and her marvelous sense of humor into the wards of psychiatric hospitals.

That first meeting had been in 1956 when she was teaching a class in ‘Improvisation’ at Dance Center on Western Avenue in Los Angeles. I had been teaching ballet classes there. I signed up to take her class, along with most of the other members of the Dance Center faculty, as well as students.

After an energetic warm-up, she led us through a series of progressions in a long diagonal across the studio floor, one after the other. We improvised around a variety of sensory images, i.e. played with imaginary balls of different sizes and weights, did lopsided walks as we struggled to carry an imaginary suitcase. We then began to imagine more freely and went on to explore and express the widest range of dramatic and emotional experiences.

As I think back to that afternoon, I realize I was thrilled, yet at the same time increasingly uneasy. As a ballet dancer I was used to being in control of my body. I loved to improvise, but was more comfortable with themes that could be expressed through the stylized vocabulary of ballet.

Trudi's class demanded more than I could handle at the time. At a certain point, I lost touch with the motivating images. It seemed to me that people were simply giving themselves over to the compelling, rhythmic music and letting it carry them across the room. When it was my turn, I felt a moment of panic — and then hurled myself into space. I must have become unconscious, because I couldn't remember what I had done. I just found myself landing on both feet, hard, on the other side of the room. I was out of breath. My heart was pounding. I was shocked, almost numb. I had a terrible feeling that somehow my ultimate shadow had emerged and I hadn't seen it, but everyone else had. I felt embarrassed and awkward, but didn't want anyone to know how bad I felt. So I just kept going in the same direction, around the piano, up the steps and into the dressing room. I pulled some street clothes on over my leotards and left. It took five years of growing up before I felt ready to come back and study with Trudi Schoop.

In the early 1960s, she began to train a small group of students who wanted to learn about dance therapy. By then, I felt ready and eager to immerse myself in studies with her. We met regularly at a large, professional dance studio in Van Nuys where Trudi taught her classes. We also participated in group dance therapy sessions she led at Camarillo State Hospital.

The first time I went there, I was struck to realize that many of the patients assumed that Trudi too, was a patient. Most staff people wore uniforms then, or at least white jackets. The profes-sional staff tended to wear formal looking street clothes. But Trudi was dressed to move. She (and her students) wore an odd but colorful assortment of dancewear and loose fitting garments. Another reason she was seen and accepted as if she were a fellow padent is her completely unpretentious attitude. There is no professional persona. She is simply herself.

When we went to the hospital, Trudi led two or three sessions, one after the other, each with a different small group. Most of the patients she worked with were diagnosed chronic schizophrenics. Many were mute and engaged in various, perseverative actions: some of the actions were relatively safe, others were self-destructive or threatening to others. As we entered one of the back wards of women, there was a loud banging sound, like the slow reverberation of a drum beat. A heavy set, middle-aged woman with hard, staring eyes sat on the floor with her back to the wall. With great force, she was repeatedly crashing her back against the wall. Another woman there had skin that was raw from constant hand wringing. In the men's ward, a man walked around in a seemingly frozen state of fear: tense, raised shoulders, bulging eyes, open mouth. Another man walked in a shuffle, with his legs turning in-ward toward each other. One hand covered his face, while the other arm stayed close to his body in a shrinking, constricted gesture that felt like shame. I remember also a catatonic woman with eyebrows raised and open mouth, as if suspended in a perpetual state of astonishment. So many of the patients seemed to be living their whole life through the filter of a single primal emotion. Trudi had first noticed this in her native Switzerland:

How vividly I remember Professor Bleuler's patients in Zurich when, many years ago, he asked me to perform for them. How black and white were their expressions — without any shading — only angry, only fearful, only …

(Schoop 1974, p. 16)

As she developed her work, she became aware of other patients whose bodies were split.

I remembered Bleuler talking about die Spaltung — ‘The Split.’ I was now seeing in the schizophrenic body the term he used to define the schizophrenic mind. They were split in tension; they were split in expression. Soft, smiling face was mounted on stiff, stubborn body. Angry, contracted feet belied tender, limp hands. A boldly thrust out chest loomed over a weak, collapsed pelvis. These separations seem to occur in every element of movement, or in any combination of elements.

(Schoop 1974, p. 107)

Now in the United States, she was no longer performing, but making a major contribution to the development of a new profession, dance therapy. As a dancer, she had studied the bo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Personal Origins
• Part Two Depth Psychology and the Emotions
• Part Three The Moving Imagination
• Appendix: Emotions and the Universal Games
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index