Emotional dances: Therapeutic dialogues as embodied systems

Abstract

The mind/body dualism, although scarcely relevant in clinical practice, remains unsolved theoretically. The pragmatic wisdom of the founders of family therapy, which implied that bodies and minds in therapy were one, has been easily forgotten. Such a situation had practical results, leading to naive solutions, both on the materialistic and idealistic sides, represented by biological psychiatry on the one side, and by most postmodern therapies on the other. This article proposes to consider the role of emotions in therapeutic dialogue to solve this dilemma within the field of systemic therapy. © 2008 The Authors.