Biodynamic Body Psychotherapy: The Therapist's Role in the Developmentally Sensitive Reparative Process: Providing "Corrective Emotional Experience"
The poster, "Biodynamic Body Psychotherapy: The Therapist’s Role in the Developmentally Sensitive Reparative Process: Providing “Corrective Emotional Experience,” explores BP's work with bodily subjective experiences of benign regression (Balint 1968), reliving the experience rather than remembering (Frewen & Lanius 2015), and then providing the “corrective emotional experience” (Alexander & French, 1946) to support salutogenic development (movement towards health [Antonovsky, 1979]) of the client's inherent potential; rather than pathogenesis.
In regression, there is a reliving of the traumatic past. However, the claim is that benign regression, in contrast to malignant regression (traumatic flashback), bears the functions of the time-traveller that are based on the default mode system are preserved.
Integrating unique clinical tools and techniques, BP enables psychological and physiological "corrective emotional experiences" that are offered during the reliving of benign regression to re-establish authentic affective states as allostatic phenomena (the synchronised ability of all bodily systems to achieve dynamic stability through change, [McEwen, 1998]).
This poster illustrates, on the one hand, the neurobiological theoretical understanding of regressive processes and, on the other hand, practical ways in which biodynamic psychotherapists become a "good enough" presence in the Winnicottian sense when considering the impact of regression in re-establishing bio-psycho-social functions.
