Three core ideas of Embodied Fantasy Therapy
Three Core Ideas
1. It is healthy for patients, both in individual and group therapy, to feel a confluence between their thoughts and feelings. The illusory, Cartesian mind/body divide dissolves. So often, mental illness involves a painful disconnect between body and mind, e.g., oacute trauma when the body keeps re-experiencing symptoms that the mind wishes it could be rid of. See also clinical depression and its pervasive sense of numbness, with which the mind struggles. Anxiety is another example of how the body acts contrary to what the mind desires, becoming frenetic with fear when the conscious mind wants peace. Balance is key in terms of feelings and thoughts working together for healthy decisions, recognizing ambiguity and how absolutes often distort when situations are gray.
2. The source of transformation and amelioration in therapy often lies in fantasy: constructive ones that people are conflicted about embodying and destructive or unhealthy fantasies. Therapy must help patients to embody healthy fantasies and also to recognize their poisonous ones, based on distortions, often unconscious. The patient can then become free from such insidious fantasies, altering and resolving what were early defenses against basic anxiety. For example, someone may feel an unconscious fantasy that they can only be loved if they become an idealized image (Karen Horney). Pursuing this ideal leads to a disconnect with oneself and one's true feelings and towards self-denigration when the ideal is not attained. Accepting that one can not be truly loved as an idealized image, what was believed unconsciously, can help the patient to explore their real self (however much we may say that this "self" consists of disparate self-states threaded together or not, see Phillip Bromberg) and then to actually feel loved.
3. Recognizing the absurdities, ironies, uncertainties and paradoxes of human experience can be healthy. Realizing the unfathomable amount we do not know about ourselves and the nature of reality is what we all need in this zeitgeist of arrogance and narcissism.
Recognizing absurdity and illusion is particularly helpful when one has already gained in experience a confluence of mind and body and recognition of one's dynamic, imperfect self-states where the kernels of great personal potential exist. This recognition involves seeing toxicity and falsity in social and cultural systems (not to mention unpredictability in people one loves) with a compassionate sense of human absurdity. One develops honesty with oneself and a healthy non-attachment at times. This partial non-attachment allows one the space within which to choose to imaginatively become who one chooses to be within so many perimeters they must accept. There can be liberation though in being attuned to one's natural dynamic ways.
