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Distributed for Intellect Ltd

The Impact of Touch in Dance Movement Psychotherapy

A Body–Mind Centering Approach

A presentation of clinical outcomes that demonstrate significant new insights into the value of touch to the therapeutic process.

In this book, dance movement psychotherapist Katy Dymoke presents an in-depth case study of work with a client with a profound learning disability. The research stems from a postdoctoral thesis sponsored by the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, where Dymoke was employed at the time of the clinical outcomes relayed in this work. The volume includes transcripts of the session content; descriptions of how incidents of touch were initiated and undertaken within the process; subsequent categorizations of the incidents of touch as self-directed, passive, or reciprocal; and commentary and discussion of the therapeutic process. As we see, the incidents of touch contribute to the client’s process of mental distress, trauma, lack of capacity, and more. Finally, Dymoke includes sections on the ethical issues of this work in the NHS, on doing research with such a client group, and on the theoretical models that emerged.

312 pages | 16 halftones | 6.69 x 9.61 | © 2021


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Table of Contents

List of figures
Preface and chapter summary
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations


Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1 Background: Touch a natural language
1.2 A “touch revolution” in a dance –sport called contact improvisation 
1.3 The sensory and sexual differentiation of touch, co-operation and responsibility
1.4 Touch - a way of ‘seeing’ or a mutual place of being?
1.5 The psychotherapist becomes researcher


Chapter 2. The personal and professional quests 2.1 The sensory acuity of touch – contemplating a pathway of change

2.2 Literature on touch; the absent body - the “touch or no-touch” debate 
2.3 The pro-touch discourse explored and explained
2.4 Relational aspects; the subjectivities of ‘touching subject’ - ‘touched object’

2.5 Theories of consciousness
2.6 The matter of the psyche; or what matter is the psyche? Summary


Chapter 3. The research design – defining roles
3.1. A qualitative framework and mixed method approach

3.2. Defining the selves: The multiple subjectivities 
3.3. Data analysis – methods and implementation


Chapter 4. Embodied Ethics
4.1. Earning legitimacy and ethical approval
4.2. Towards an embodied ethics; a phenomenological insight
4.3. The Research Governance Framework, an intransigent construct
4.4. The ethical demise of embodied ethics
4.5. The Integrated Research Application System (IRAS)

Chapter 5. CASE STUDY SESSION 1: Transcript and data analysis
“You child angry heart?”
Amanda as participant; managing autonomy.

Chapter 6. CASE STUDY SESSION 4: Transcript and data analysis
Establishing a mutual language; beyond good and bad touch
Towards introspection, an intrapersonal and transpersonal approach
Tying in the thread of integrative approaches to Dance Movement Psychotherapy


Chapter 7. CASE STUDY SESSION 6: Transcript and data analysis

Chapter 8. FINDING AN ENDING AND EMERGENT THEORY

Chapter 9. TOWARDS A THEORY OF RECEPTIVITY; Touching once again upon touch
Arriving at receptivity – an ‘ethic of care’ (Etherington 2007: 604). 
The pre-ontological space and time domain of the body


Appendix 1. Embodied Ethics continued
Part 1. The co-researcher role and the ethics of inclusive research-seduction or sensitivity, occlusion or collusion; a question of “capacity”?
Part 2. Ethical issues in mixed methodological research
Part 3. Hope at Hand – the ethics of research and the ethics of treatment

Summary

Appendix 2. For chapter 5, diagrams 1-4 and 5. (i) and (ii)
Appendix 3. For Chapter 6. Prehension theory diagram,
Appendix 4. For Chapter 8. Client competence, session 1 and 10
Appendix 5. Martz and Lindy, The trauma Membrane Concept (2010)
Appendix 6. Perceptual-Response Cycle 

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