Let your body interpret your dreams

BOOK REVIEW cake. In the last three chapters the authors take us with them as they planned an intergenerational community involving 12 kindergarten children from a local school on adjacent ground (inner city, poor to lower middle class) and 18 residents from the nursing home (white, middle class). Perhaps because Sandel and Johnson are so capable of getting in touch with their own feelings and are able to articulate them so well, this is a particularly moving depiction of a human experience that transcends age, ethnic, race, and role differences. The therapists were both parents and children with these two groups, and present a provocative image of not countertransference-but reverse transference with the older individuals. For the authors and the children and senior citizens it was a positive and constructive therapeutic process. The significance of rituals was highlighted as the project progressed and culminated with the emergence of a special annual ceremony, now in its fourth year. The therapists also wisely remind us that as our patients~clients achieve new goals, such as closeness with others, there are also new problems. For some, the reprinted chapters in this book

may be a deterrent. Nevertheless, there is much to be learned here and I recommend this book to all creative arts therapists, especially to those working with geriatric and/or nursing home patients. Sandel and Johnson emphasize the understanding of the therapist’s role. Their willingness to share the positive and negative responses to patients and how they dealt with those responses is a healthy reminder to all of us of the imperative to be in touch with our own feelings in the therapeutic process. These two talented therapists/authors set out to describe the role of their modalities in transforming a nursing home into a healing community. Their creativity and honesty, supported by a skilled and caring staff, did transform that nursing home and touched the community around it. This book is good reading-and a testimony to the acknowledgment of human emotions. Myra F. Levick, PhD, ATR, HLM Professor and Consultant department Mental Health Sciences Hahnemann University PhiIadelphia, PA

Let Your Body Interpret

Your Dreams

Eugene Gendlin (Wilmette,II: Chiron Publications, 1986, 194 pages, $9.95)

This new book by Eugene Gendlin builds on the theoretical concept of the “felt sense” deveIoped in his earlier work, F~~~~~i~zg (1981). Let Your Body Interpret Your ~r~u~~~ instructs the reader to experience the dream in his or her body, not in the mind. This is not a traditional way to interpret dreams. Gendlin’s viewpoint and his hypothesis are turned into questions, which stimulate a physiological signal, a tension release, a “felt shift” authentically sensed in one’s body, making the information known consciously. This method can be taught and learned as a result of the question process presented.

Eugene Gendlin has been a psychotherapist for 30 years. He developed his method while teaching dream inte~retation during his three years at Richmond College, City University of New York. He references Bonime, Boss, FitzHugh, Freud, Hendricks, Ingram, Jung, Malamud, Perls, Vasavada, Whitmont, Winjgaarden, and Berry. His new method, the “bodily came from his research and philotouchstone,” sophical work on thinking and experiencing. Gendlin is a superlative guide in the search to find one’s individual center and personal truth. He offers us 16 questions that are a search,

BOOK REVIEW and are ways to check whether the work is clear or unclear, and whether one is really doing it. He urges the reader to take the next step and stay with it through whatever difficulty encountered. The checkpoints have a quality of dance, of moving back and forth and stretching, of taking steps, and of breaking them down into smaller, subdivided steps, as one would develop muscles through exercise, in little chunks of behavior that become manageable. Gendlin gives instructions for not following instructions and gives merit to contradictions that emerge, so that one does not get in the way of one’s own process. The instructions and questions help us fill in the dream content with sensory information from the body that articulates meaning more clearly to us. What is useful then emerges, whether it be translated into a re-enactment of parts of the dream or looked upon symbolically, metaphorically, or developmentally. The movement and imagery are always directed toward personal growth and developing alternatives, seeing choices, and facilitating decision-making. Gendlin specifically defines the important distinction between emotion or feeling and the felt sense. Practicing his method guides you to a body sureness of what most of your dreams are about and takes you through the stages of confusion to another stage, beyond interpretation, to a “growth step.” The felt sense, when lost, can be retrieved again and again. When something new appears, what came before and what is on the horizon converge and come into focus. His reference point is always what is more vitally alive in ‘the body and what intrinsically fits. Gendlin’s approach allows the flexibility not to be committed to any one theoretical framework of dream interpretation, since current methods are different in approach and often conflicting. He offers the bodily touchstone method, a physical feeling and releasing of what is puzzling in the dream, a freeing up in your body energetically of that which was blocked. Another original concept, “bias control,” is the process of getting information from the part of the dream one doesn’t like. The forwardly moving energy and expansion are not always comfortable in the process of an inward shift. Bias control helps you discipline your tendency to reject unpleasant parts of the dream, and it teases out what is suppressed and unknown. The

reference point is always the body, and the response is active listening physiologically with friendly understanding. The bias control does not pressure us; it gives us more patience to examine what is emerging in the human organism that cannot be forged in logic, that needs to tap into uncovered depths of language. Dreams are sometimes scary. In general a dream does not take sides. A dream doesn’t say what one should do; it is a story to be decoded. Gendlin says that all dreams are friendly and that one may trust that each step has another side to explore experientially so as to permit interaction with each side, and the process of integration can occur. He believes that the loving relationship to one’s dream is a positive act. He also makes the point, “Enjoying the dream is more important than interpreting it. Therefore, don’t work so hard that it stops being pleasant and exciting.” Gendlin notes the value of working with a therapist/guide or partner in a dyadic situation, although this in-depth work can be done alone. Gendlin is an expert on how to work with oneself, not on what to be. He dissuades you from tampering with anyone else’s material. Rather, he supports the exploration of the dream so that the dream material is not contaminated by the interpretations and projections of the therapist. His method allows others not to intrude. Throughout the book there is a respect for each one’s process and the texture of one’s own experience. Concise, the book seems simple, nevertheless requires of the reader/participant the concentration necessary to master concepts based on the focusing work, and a commitment and a willingness to search out one’s center, getting past discomfort. There are many paths to the center of our being. Gendlin reinforces the belief that our dreams hold the key to the quality of our lives. His dream lesson plans will keep one on target while uncovering layer upon layer of information at one’s own pace. The reward is finding an auto-pedagogy that is challenging and worth the investment. What is very clear is the author’s reverence for each human being’s unique experience, and his respect for one’s personal space. He encourages the reader to go to the next step with him, feeling his integrity along the way. His dedication to the human experience is not taken lightly, as his method does not close down the

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86

dreamer’s life force. Rather, it allows each participant to be free and in control. In this complex time of overwhelming external forces, we are required to take responsibility for developing a clear internal voice. For this reason this book is personally and professionally recommended. The how-to questions are brilliantly developed and immediately motivate one to work on his or her own dream material. The book creates an alive, action-oriented experience and is a valuable follow-up to the author’s original

Stage

Fright:

work in Focusing, putting it on the cutting edge of integrating body, mind, “sensory awareness,” spirit, and the power of active listening.

Elaine Rapp, ATR Pratt Institute Graduate Creative Arts Therapy Department 200 Willoughby Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11205

Its Role in Acting

Stephen Aaron (Chicago:

University

of Chicago

Stage Fright was written by an accomplished theatre director and psychotherapist. It is a book of deep subtlety and authority. It draws on the acting experience of a group of successful actors and directors, and applies classical and current psychoanalytic theory to a rich and vivid experience. Through the mix of theory and practice, the reader receives a fresh view of acting, creativity, and anxiety, their application to work with patients, and to thoughts about roles and performance in everyday life. Dr. Aaron wonders why some of our finest Stapleton, for Burton, actors-Olivier, instance-have suffered nightly performance terror for years. Is stage fright a necessary part of an actor’s creative process? He concludes that it is. The actor who suffers no such panic has probably lost contact with his or her role and any hope for creative transformation into a character. It is an artistic problem for an actor, and this slim book explains why it is so. An actor must make a journey night after night from an everyday self into a performing self. One must give up personal movements, language, voice, context, and content and become someone else. This must be achieved by reaching into one’s deepest emotional and creative resources while being someone else. And it must be done in front of “a convincingly, “spontaneously,”

Press,

1986, 142 pages,

$19.95 est.)

thousand strangers.” Actors cannot see themselves act; they are without an observing ego. The director takes on the job of being this ego for the actor. The director, therefore, is as an analyst to a patient, or a mother to a young child. The director provides a holding environment while the actor creates a new self-the play’s character. The book beautifully describes the powerful developing relationship between director and actor as the mastery of the play occurs. After the last rehearsal, the director and actor separate, and the actor is left alone to face a roomful of strangers. Stage fright fills this empty space. Drawing on the resources of Winnicott, Mahler, Louise Kaplan, we learn that this fright signals the utter aloneness that a human being, whether actor or young child, feels when compelled to form a new self alone, without the protection of the director/mother. Thus, the actor who suffers no stage fright has not made the step of leaving the personal self and becoming the character. The fear leaves when the actor feels contact with an audience (even negative contact will do). When contact is established the actor is free to be the performing self; the audience and actor believe in its reality. There are many points of interest in this book. To demonstrate the feeling of danger an actor can have regarding the audience, Dr. Aaron cites