To cite this article : Michael Soth (2006) What therapeutic hope for a subjective mind in an objectified body?, Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, 1:1, 43-56, Abstract This is an article based on a presentation given at the United Kingdom Council of Psychotherapy (UKCP) conference 2004. Our modern attempt to re-include the body in psychotherapy brings with it the inevitable danger that we import the culturally dominant objectifying construction of the body into a field which may represent one of the last bastions of subjectivity, authenticity, and intimacy in an increasingly virtual world. The paper addresses the question how embodied subjectivity can be found within a relational matrix pervaded by disembodiment and self-objectification.The ubiquitous objectification of the body in our culture and in the field of psychotherapy is illustrated in the paper. It is described as a manifestation of an underlying experience of dis-embodiment. Two ways of re-including the body in psychotherapy are then distinguished: one based on a ''third-person'' ''medical model'' stance and the other on a ''first-and-second-person'' ''intersubjectiverelational'' model. By formulating these two contradictory and complementary ways of using the body in terms of the therapist's implicit relational stance, attention is drawn to what is considered an underlying paradox inherent in all types of psychotherapy. I am hoping that practitioners from across the approaches will be able to recognize and relate to both sides of the dilemma, and through this to both ways of re-including the body in psychotherapy.As the medical model stance was the prevalent default position of what we may therefore call traditional body psychotherapy, and the relational one has become available only in the last decade, a case illustration is used to trace some of my own development as a therapist through the shadow aspects and pitfalls of an exclusive reliance on the first towards an integration of the two and to an appreciation of their necessarily conflicted co-existence in the paradoxical core of the therapeutic position.Correspondence: Michael Soth, 14 Hawthorn Close, Oxford OX2 9DY, UK.

This article discusses Ray Little's (2013) integration of humanistic transactional analysis with both traditional and relational psychoanalysis from the vantage point of a wider, broad-spectrum integrative perspective, with particular emphasis on TA's sister tradition of body psychotherapy. The growing consensus across diverse therapeutic approaches regarding the developmental origins of relational patterns is acknowledged. The problems, inconsistencies, and contradictions within the integrative project are discussed, with particular reference to the origins of humanistic psychology during the 1960s and their partially reactive differentiation against psychoanalysis, which leaves today's practitioners with unresolved legacies in the form of fixed assumptions regarding both theory and practice as well as key concepts such as ego and working alliance. Taking the key notion of the therapist's equidistant position between the needed and repeated relationship as its starting point, the author suggests that enactment is the central notion of relationality. A multiplicity of diverse therapeutic kinds of relatedness is affirmed as valid, and different notions of the relational and inconsistencies and ambivalences in integrative formulations are addressed. The aim is to reach a more solid, robust integration that is grounded in a bodymind understanding of enactment as the paradoxical essence of therapeutic action.Ray Little (2013) does an urgent, significant, and sterling job in bringing together transactional analysis and psychoanalysis (especially its relational branch). His grasp of the two traditions and their historical roots, respective metapsychologies, and, in some respects, contradictory paradigms allows him to fashion an attempt at integration that combines the best of both worlds, one that is larger than the sum of its parts. This work constitutes a quantum leap that takes transactional analysis a long way beyond its origins in the 1960s toward the twenty-first century.

Whilst appreciating the quality of containment in Turp's work as a learning point for the Body Psychotherapy tradition, the author argues that Turp does not represent a psychotherapeutic way of 'working with the body'. This would require a deconstruction of the body/mind dualism inherent in much psychotherapeutic (and psychodynamic) theory, so that the complexity of the spontaneous and reflective body/mind processes, especially in their polar extremes (body/mind dissociation -body/mind integration / 'psyche/soma unity'), can be contained. An holistic body/mind formulation of countertransference is approached by which -rather than being used as a gratifying or cathartic therapeutic shortcut which avoids the intensity of the transferencethe body can be seen to constitute an avenue into the full experience of the transference/countertransference process and its relational sources in early development.

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