This article was downloaded by: [McGill University Library]

On: 14 October 2014, At: 06:52

Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,
UK

Body, Movement and Dance in

Psychotherapy: An International
Journal for Theory, Research
and Practice
Publication details, including instructions for authors
and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tbmd20

On body memory and embodied

therapy
a b
Sabine C. Koch , Christine Caldwell & Thomas Fuchs
c

a
Institute of Psychology, University of Heidelberg ,
Hauptstraße 47-51, D-69117 , Heidelberg , Germany
b
Somatic Counseling Psychology, Naropa University ,
2130 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder , CO , 80302 , USA
c
Clinic for General Psychiatry, Centre for Psychosocial
Medicine, University Clinic Heidelberg , Voß-Str. 4,
D-69115 , Heidelberg , Germany
Published online: 18 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Sabine C. Koch , Christine Caldwell & Thomas Fuchs (2013) On
body memory and embodied therapy, Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy:
An International Journal for Theory, Research and Practice, 8:2, 82-94, DOI:
10.1080/17432979.2013.775968

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17432979.2013.775968

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the
information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.
However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or
suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed
in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the
 views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should
not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,
claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities
whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection
with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.
Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-
licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly
forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 06:52 14 October 2014
 Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, 2013
Vol. 8, No. 2, 82–94, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17432979.2013.775968

On body memory and embodied therapy

Sabine C. Kocha*, Christine Caldwellb and Thomas Fuchsc
a
Institute of Psychology, University of Heidelberg, Hauptstraße 47-51, D-69117 Heidelberg,
Germany; bSomatic Counseling Psychology, Naropa University, 2130 Arapahoe Avenue,
Boulder, CO 80302, USA; cClinic for General Psychiatry, Centre for Psychosocial Medicine,
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 06:52 14 October 2014

University Clinic Heidelberg, Voß-Str. 4, D-69115 Heidelberg, Germany

(Received 25 April 2012; final version received 7 February 2013)

Whether in clinical or scientific contexts the phenomenon of body memory has

become a central topic of interest within embodied and embedded theory
approaches. Between 2000 and 2012, Prof. Dr. Thomas Fuchs – professor for
philosophical foundations of psychiatry at the University of Heidelberg – has
put forth a theory on the phenomenology of body memory (Fuchs, 2012). The
professional mission of Prof. Fuchs is to combine a philosophical approach
based on phenomenology with psychiatric experience. More specifically, his
aim is to describe the structures of subjective experience as an embodied way of
being in the world and with others, and to investigate the disturbances that arise
in this way of being. Based on an interview with Prof. Fuchs and Prof. Caldwell,
who uses body memory in her clinical work, this article introduces the concept
of body memory and connects it with applications in embodied psychotherapy.
Keywords: body memory; implicit memory; phenomenology; trauma; gestalt
cycle; embodied therapies

Introduction
Phenomenology has given rise to a number of theories on body memory (Bergson,
2007; Casey, 2000; Fuchs, 2012). The phenomenological perspective assumes that
memory comprises not only one’s explicit recollections of the past but also the
acquired dispositions, skills and habits that implicitly influence one’s present
experience and behaviour. The term body memory refers to all the implicit
knowledge, capacities and dispositions that structure and guide our everyday being-
in-the-world without the need to deliberately think of how we do something, to
explicitly remembering what we did, or to anticipate what we want to do. It is the
basic know-how that is mediated by the body and that we need for our everyday
getting along with the world. This knowledge is acquired in the course of our
embodied experiences – mainly in early childhood – and then modified and
changed throughout our entire life (T. Fuchs, personal communication, June 30,
2011).

*Corresponding author. Email: sabine.koch@urz.uni-heidelberg.de

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

 Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy 83

The phenomenology of body memory

In the phenomenological tradition of Bergson (2007), Merleau-Ponty (1962) and
Casey (2000), and based on the idea of implicit memory from the cognitive sciences
(Schacter, 1987), phenomenologist Fuchs (2000, 2012) proposes an articulate
categorical differentiation, developing a descriptive taxonomy with six forms of
body memory (cf. Koch, Fuchs, Summs, & Müller, 2012; Summa, 2012a):

1. Habitual or procedural body memory: Skill memory for motor processes,

such as driving a car, or playing an instrument, refers to the habitualisation of
the sensorimotor capacities of the lived-body. Habitual memory allows us to
acquire sensorimotor skills and attitudes, to get acquainted with perceptual
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 06:52 14 October 2014

and movement patterns and to develop an individual style of interaction with

the world.
2. Situational body memory: Memory of spatial familiarity (for interior and
exterior spaces) and atmospheric perception. Situational memory extends
into the spatio-temporal situation in which we bodily participate. As such, it
entails the involuntary emergence of memory images and impressions that
are related to the atmosphere of certain (mostly affectively charged) lived
situations. Moreover, situational body memory makes possible both the
feeling of familiarity with some situations and the feeling of alienation with
respect to others, thus allowing us to ‘get involved in’ or to ‘be detached
from’ particular situations.
3. Inter-corporeal body memory: Our early bodily encounters provide an
implicit template for our somatic reactions in encounters with others; ‘It is a
temporally organised, musical memory for the rhythm, dynamics and
undertones inaudibly present in the interaction with others’ (Fuchs, 2003),
this turns into implicit relational knowing – a bodily knowing of how to deal
with others (Stern, 1985). Inter-corporeal memory is related to the most basic
and bodily contact with other subjects. This form of memory makes possible
the pre-thematic and implicit interaction with the other, itself mediated by
bodily experience and skills. As such, inter-corporeal memory makes
possible the basic formation of dyadic and more generally inter-subjective
patterns of interaction.
4. Incorporative body memory: Family and cultural habitus, examples are the
adoption of poses, manners or gender roles (cf. Bourdieu, 1990).
Incorporative memory is mainly based on the phenomenon of bodily
imitation or identification, and implies the reshaping of one’s own primary
bodily schemata of expression and behaviour in social and cultural contexts
(Sax & Polit, 2012). Thus, it makes possible the development of specific
bodily attitudes and the assumption of embodied social roles. As such, this
form of body memory is based on the ‘interiorisation’ of the gaze of the other.
5. Pain memory refers to the impact that painful experiences still have on the
present moment. This impact manifests itself, for instance, in the unreflected
and spontaneous caution that our fingers, as it were, assume in touching a hot
stove if we previously got burned.
6. Traumatic memory refers to the impact traumatic experiences still have on
the present. Severe painful experiences, such as accidents, neglect, abuse,
 84 S.C. Koch et al.

torture, threat of death, are stored in the body, often suppressed from
consciousness, and can lead to psychosomatic diseases. In trauma, the feeling
of ‘at-homeness’ is often lost and needs to be regained. Research on post-
traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) teaches us about the rules of this memory
system (e.g. Ogden, 2006; van den Kolk, 1996). Traumatic memories may
emerge as displaced or in the form of bodily symptoms, without any explicit
awareness of the connection between the past and the present experience.
Traumatic events in many cases withdraw from any explicit representation
(Summa, 2012a).
Although these categories are not strictly mutually exclusive, the taxonomy
provides a first orientation as to the important dimensions of the construct. An
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 06:52 14 October 2014

empirical test of the construct based on qualitative interviews was conducted by

Koch (2012). Employing independent raters, the author found that all forms of body
memories were reflected in the interviews. Situational memory was a broader
category than the others, and was subdivided into memory forms actualised through
the different senses (e.g. auditory memory, olfactoric memory and kinaesthetic
memory). Instrumental use of body memory was added as one explicit category; and
pain memory was conceptualised as separate from traumatic body memory.
Body memory has been described by cognitive psychology as procedural or as
implicit memory (e.g. Schacter, 1987). Research on amnesic patients, unable to
retain any new memories, who may still learn simple motor tasks suggested the
existence of multiple memory systems. As a consequence, explicit or declarative
memory has been distinguished from implicit or procedural memory (Schacter,
1987). Explicit memory contains single recollections or information that can be
reported and discretely described (knowing that). By contrast, repeated situations or
actions have merged in implicit memory, as it were, and can no longer be retrieved
as single past events. They have become a tacit know-how difficultly to verbalise,
such as detailing how to waltz or play an instrument (knowing how). Thus, explicit
recollection is directed from the present back to the past, whereas implicit memory
does not represent the past, but re-enacts it through the body’s present performance.
Hence, body memory is our lived past (cf. T. Fuchs, personal communication, June
30, 2011). Other more recent phenomenological approaches on body memory stem
from Sheets-Johnstone (2012) and from Summa (2011, 2012a).

Body memory and cognitive science

Differentiating the phenomenological perspective from the cognitive and the
neurobiological approach in conceptualising body memory, the neuro-cognitive
approach shifts the implicit to the sub-personal level, regarding it as a property of the
(neuro-)cognitive system that can only be detected by experimental procedures.
Implicit memory would then be inaccessible to the subject itself. In contrast,
phenomenology regards body memory as a dimension of the lived body that means,
as the constant background of our subjective experience (such as in the saying the
fish do not recognise the water . . . ). Body memory can well be experienced, but in
an oblique way, so to speak, namely in performing a capacity such as walking,
dancing, writing or playing piano, without exactly knowing how we do this – our
 Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy 85

body just does it. Phenomenology describes body memory as the habitual structure
not of the brain, but of ourselves insofar as we are living bodies (T. Fuchs, personal
communication, June 30, 2011).
An important problem for the cognitive sciences is how to measure and
operationalise body memory (Bermeitinger & Kiefer, 2012; Jansen, 2012; Suitner,
Koch, Bachleier, & Maass, 2012; Summa, Koch, Fuchs, & Müller, 2012).
Phenomenology does not measure phenomena, but primarily provides a way to
describe them. We can, for example, look at different types of body memory and
analyse the way our present experience is structured by our past: sensory, sensorimotor
or kinaesthetic memory, spatial memory, inter-corporeal memory, pain memory,
traumatic memory, etc. Next, we may take advantage of the connection of implicit and
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 06:52 14 October 2014

explicit memory: certain experiences, in particular bodily movements or perceptions,

may suddenly remind us of a former situation that we felt or experienced in a similar
way, and thus we feel transposed into the past – yet not through explicit recollection
but through a bodily similarity that arises spontaneously. One can then design
experiments in which these situations are established in a way that elicits or supports
this bodily felt sense of having experienced something before. In another context, this
is also done in the psychotherapy of PTSD, where people are guided to invoke
certain situations that are heavily loaded by bodily memories with the aim to cope with
the experience in a new way. In addition, there are experimental ways of investigating
the influence of past experience on our perception and dealing with present situations
– measuring, for example, the influence of bodily posture or gesture on the perception
and evaluation of an object (T. Fuchs, personal communication, June 30, 2011).
Deja-vu experiences, for example, are connected to a sudden sense of having
lived through an experience in exactly the same way, or even been carried back to
the former situation as if it were experienced once more. Deja-vu means the
concurrence of past and present body experience. So looking at deja-vu experiences
could be one way to investigate body memory. Another possibility would be to
investigate embodied behaviour styles, namely by looking at videotapes of, for
example, people walking, gesturing or otherwise behaving in certain situations, and
comparing this with their personality features. Personality styles and bodily
behaviour should be congruent in many ways (T. Fuchs, personal communication,
June 30, 2011).
A regular situation where I have misplaced my keys and trace back where I went
to find them would be a mixture of spatial, situational and state-dependent memory.
We always embody a certain situation, which means that the situation becomes part
of our embodied memory. So when we trace back the situation it should be easier to
explicate the elements or components of the former situation, for example to make
explicit what we forget later on, because the components are part of the embodied
situation that we retrieve.
It is important to note that body memory contains implications, one could also
say conglomerates of single memory components which may be explicated and
verbalised in a way that Proust has famously described in the ‘Madeleine’ episode of
‘Remembrance of Things Past’ where the narrator recognises the taste of a tea-
soaked cake known to him from his childhood and an overwhelming feeling suffuses
him (cf. Fuchs, 2012):
 86 S.C. Koch et al.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a
shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was
happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated,
detached, with no suggestion of its origin. ( . . . )1 Will it ultimately reach the clear
surface of my consciousness . . . ?
Finally, after several attempts, the core of the implicit bodily experience opens
up and its autobiographic content appears.
And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of
madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did
not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my
aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane.
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 06:52 14 October 2014

And all at once an entire world awakens:

. . . in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the
water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings
and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and
solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.
When we aim to describe how body memory works – also on a neurobiological
level – we phenomenologically first look at body memory as a system of
dispositions relating to the world. One could also say it is a system of open loops that
is centred in the body and that is created by the habits and capacities of the body, of
the limbs and of the senses. And this system is always searching or scanning the
environment for similarities, for complementary objects and situations on its search
for coherence and connection with the environment. The body is a ‘meaning-seeking
system’ searching the environment for coherence. We cannot but enact our body
memory in every situation that we encounter, for we are dependent on this
coherence. Once the coherence is established, then the loop of the disposition or
capacity is closed, the memory of the body is actualised and the achievement in
question may be realised. This corresponds to what Jacob von Üxküll has called the
‘functional cycle’ of Wirken (to effect/to affect) and Merken (to register/to perceive)
or Victor von Weizsäcker the ‘gestalt cycle’ of the unity of action and perception,
but it includes more, namely affect and interpersonal perception.
Looking at the neurobiological component, this is precisely a part of this
functional cycle, namely the part that runs through the brain. The brain is the major
organ of the open loops because it adapts to the functional cycles established in
earlier experiences of dealing with the world. In the course of these experiences,
certain neuronal assemblies and networks have formed that act as dispositions of
reconnecting with the environment and enable certain achievements. So through its
plasticity, the brain becomes a decisive part of this embodied system of dispositions;
yet only a part, because without our fingers and a piano we could certainly not
enact our embodied knowledge of playing, say, a Chopin etude (T. Fuchs, personal
communication, June 30, 2011).
The idea of open loops is the complementary idea to the concept of ‘affordances’
of Gibson (1966) that approaches the same circle from the side of the environment.
The open loop is just the complementary concept to the way the environment speaks
to us, appeals to us, presents us certain affordances, certain options, of things being
at hand, being available. Both ideas are joined in Piaget’s notion of adaptation as an
interplay between the ‘accommodation’ and the ‘assimilation’ principle. Piaget
 Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy 87

(1929) reminds us that in adaptation there is a mutual interaction between the

structure of the environment and the structure of our dispositions and capacities. In
one case, we interpret or use the environment in a way that is already enabled by our
existing dispositions (assimilation), and in the other case, we adapt our capacities to
a new environment (accommodation). There is a continuous interaction between the
complementary structures which are ‘organism-bound’ and which are ‘environ-
ment-bound’, assimilating and accommodating at once. Body memory connects
both structures (T. Fuchs, personal communication, June 30, 2011), e.g. if I bite into
an expected good food (assimilation; approach; ‘here with it to me’) and then find it
to be uneatable, I will spit of the bite I just took (accommodation; avoidance; ‘away
with it from me’). Relating body memory to somatic physiology, Warnecke (2011)
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 06:52 14 October 2014

states:
If we look at muscular tonus as one of the ways in which our organism regulates itself,
then we need to expect that such self-regulative activity is experience dependent; i.e.
our individual capacity to regulate affective states is built on and developed from our
experiences (Schore, 2003). Such dependency on experience not only suggests the
ability of muscle to experience but also forms the basis for the relational dimension of
muscles. Bainbridge Cohen highlights the significance of the relational experience for
the development of tonus: After birth, the tone continues to be a response to gravity and
is further modified by the way we are related to physically, perceptually, and
emotionally. Tone is relative and is reflective of the interaction between one’s inner and
outer environment. (Bainbridge-Cohen, 1993; quoted after Warnecke, 2011, p. 1).

Body memory and embodied therapies

Body memory can be evoked by sensing or by moving. Some body-oriented schools
focus on the sensing path such as Functional Relaxation (e.g. Loew, Sohn, Martus,
Tritt, & Rechlin, 2000) or Focusing (e.g. Gendlin, 1996, 2012; Kruithoff, 2012).
Movement therapies emphasise the moving path to work with painful and traumatic,
and also with joyful and resourceful memory content (e.g. Eberhard-Kaechele, 2012;
Koch & Harvey, 2012; Röhricht, Priebe, & Papadopoulus, 2009).
One of the major applications of the concept of body memory concerns what
Eugene Gendlin has called the ‘felt sense’, that means, a pre-reflective and preverbal
reaction of the body towards a certain situation, be it an environmental situation or a
present life situation that you are faced with (Gendlin, 2012). There is a bodily
sensation and feeling of how this situation is taken up and evaluated, as
conceptualised in Antonio Damasio’s ‘somatic marker’ hypothesis (Damasio, 1994,
1999). Body-oriented therapy provides a way of focusing on these preverbal
experiences, making them explicit step by step, so that there is an interaction
between the pre-reflective and the reflective side of the process, in the sense of ‘what
does it mean what I feel right now?’ This meaning-seeking changes the feeling,
makes it a bit more differentiated and more explicit. And this enables the client to
verbalise the experience and to see what it implies (T. Fuchs, personal
communication, June 30, 2011).
On the moving side, there are important applications of the concept of body
memory, for example in trauma therapy, where certain painful memories are re-
actualised with the aim to cope with them and enable a new perspective on life
(Caldwell, 2012; Eberhard-Kaechele, 2012). There are also approaches to deal bodily
 88 S.C. Koch et al.

with the world by experiencing new attitudes, new postures, acquiring new capacities,
such as being more outgoing, showing more self-assertiveness or less aggression and
so on. These are types of bodily behaviour that go hand-in-hand with new ways of
interacting with our conspecifics. Common psychotherapy methods such as role-play
or psychodrama may be regarded as ways of establishing new bodily behaviour
enabling new possibilities of feeling and interacting. Taken together, this suggests an
embodied approach to behaviour change based on body memory (T. Fuchs, personal
communication, June 30, 2011).
To work professionally with body memory, body-oriented therapists should have
sufficient self-experience with their own body: body awareness, bodily grounding
experiences, and also embodied skills – skilful ways of doing arts, sports, dance,
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 06:52 14 October 2014

playing an instrument – which means to have experienced how one’s lived body
changes through learning processes. This includes the experience of flow
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), of being connected to an instrument, an object or a partner,
and dealing with them in a more and more skilful way, after many weeks, months or
years of training. For this is the basic way of experiencing body memory and the bodily
connection to the world (T. Fuchs, personal communication, June 30, 2011).
The therapist needs to be able to read those cues, supported by systematic
approaches of movement analysis (Kestenberg, 1995; Koch, 2011), but she also
needs a specific capacity for increased reciprocity of her own and the other’s body,
the kind of bodily skills which may be, but are not necessarily related to
intersubjectivity. But, of course, the next requirement for therapists who work with
the body is to develop an intuition as well as a body of knowledge for how the body
expresses the self, for how feelings are visible in very slight cues and slight changes
of behaviour, even in the first encounter with the patient. Therapists should be
experienced in the manifestation of bodily signs. On the next level, there are the
different ways of doing body psychotherapy as such, and going into the encounter
with the patient also on a bodily level (Pylvänäinen, 2012), including joint
movement or touch (Winther, 2012), including ways of helping the patient verbalise
experiences and recollections that come up with them (Konopatsch & Payne, 2012,
Kruithoff, 2012; Michalak, Burg, & Heidenreich, 2012). Some memories emerge in
terms of metaphors in search for some translation (Kolter et al., 2012), some want to
be processed merely in the non-verbal realm (Panhofer, Payne, Parke, & Meekums,
2012), both skills are usually part of the professional training in body-oriented
psychotherapies.
With respect to different populations, body memory seems particularly relevant
in the treatment of trauma survivors (e.g. Koch & Harvey, 2012) and in dementia
(Summa, 2012b). In dementia, while explicit memory is distorted, implicit memory
remains intact and can be utilised in embodied therapies: positive affect,
contentment and resilience can be evoked and even developed by working with
intact body memories. In the light of the demographic change, this provides a
hopeful perspective for an increasing number of patients.

Clinical applications of body memory

Traumatic episodes can often provide vivid examples of Fuchs’ types of body
memory, and offer specific insights on how to work therapeutically with body
 Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy 89

The case of Mona

From the standpoint of declarative or explicit memory, the survivor (to be called
Mona) was able to calmly but shakily narrate the sequence of events that
occurred when she was vacationing with her young teenage son in Phuket that
Christmas. They were outside and saw the wave coming, and then they grasped
hands and tried to run away from it. The wave overtook them and they lost
contact with each other as they were tumbled in the muddy, debris-filled water.
Mona recalled inhaling the muddy water, having her body be completely out of
her control as it was tossed in with the debris, and at one point a piece of debris
hitting her left knee and twisted it. She was terrorised, out of air and thought she
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 06:52 14 October 2014

was going to die. At that moment, she was ejected out above the wave and was
able to breathe. She grasped onto a fixed object and was able to hold herself out
of the water until it receded. At this point the new terror of losing her son took
over. For over an hour, she tried to climb around the debris and find her son,
screaming for him until she lost her voice. At one point in that hour, a nameless
local person realised that she had no shoes on and was hurting her feet, and
silently set a pair of shoes in front of her. Miraculously, she found her son unhurt,
having also clung to a tree while the waters raged.
This ability to verbally narrate the sequence of events (declarative memory)
bodes well for recovery from an intense trauma such as this one. However, she
was still emotionally dysregulated, experiencing panic attacks, intrusive feelings
of terror and an inability to regulate these feelings (emotional memory).
Physically, she experienced uncontrolled shaking (body memory), coupled with
strong pains in her leg (pain memory), so much so that her doctors were thinking
she might need an operation on her knee. She was able to articulate that ‘my head
knows I have survived and that we are safe, but my body doesn’t. My body is still
in the tsunami.’
What we did was we began to carefully and slowly find ways that she could
consciously approximate some of the shapes that her body tumbled in, in the
tsunami. It is important at this point to create a distinction between simply re-
enacting the event and the emotions associated with it, which can often be re-
traumatising because there is no distinction between past and present, and working
with the body memory, which is a way of helping the body itself to find a coherent
narrative of the event via its own movements, and to feel relieved and empowered by
that coherency. Working with the body memory involves allowing the body to
‘remember’ the event via precise, conscious actions, while keeping ones attention
and focus on the body in its present circumstances, which in this case was safely
lying on the floor of a dance studio with a therapist holding you and coaching you
and keeping you oriented and cared for. This can change the body memory so that it
does not become an implicit procedural memory re-enacted as PTSD, plus create a
new association with intercorporeal body memory, where one is not alone anymore.
It is important that the client leads this experience, rather than be imposed by the
therapist, as part of the meta-processing is the lived experience of the client finding
the movements that her body wants to make in order to generate physical coping.
Physical coping is strongly related to a sense of agency, and agency is strongly
correlated to recovery.
 90 S.C. Koch et al.

She would enter the movement memory just slightly, and the shape and flow
and direction of it would cause her to experience a lot of charge and arousal and
affect (emotional memory) that was incoherently stored, because the original
event was so outside of what she could process. I would hold her knee, while also
often holding her head or her arm, supporting her body to move in ways that ‘felt
right’ (note that these movements did not necessarily exactly replicate the
tsunami experience, but they created a lived, phenomenological experience in the
present moment that connected her in a coherent and empowered way to the past
experience – similar to verbally retelling a story not being the same as reliving
it). She would alternate this with resting and relating to me, listening to my voice
and sharing eye contact. She was able to feel her feelings and move them in a
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 06:52 14 October 2014

harbour of safety rather than a life-threatening context, and this is what her body
needed – to create different states that can hold and manage the experience.
Eventually she was able to get to some very complex and precise movement
sequences that actually healed her knee – as a byproduct – because she was able
to physically unravel the twisting and distorted shapes that had been imprinted in
the flesh.
What is so fascinating is the precision that the body craves at these moments.
Quite literally, a movement that raises the arm 5 cm is experienced as a ‘no’,
while the same arm movement rising 10 cm is felt as a ‘yes.’ The skill of the
therapist at this point to is to help the client to stay very oriented and focused on
the implicit body memories revealing themselves very precisely, without the
distortions of the analytical mind and without the environmental cues from the
original trauma experience. This sense of finding the exact movements that
stabilise and connect explicit and implicit memory systems may be at the heart of
helping a traumatic event not become an enduring and constantly re-stimulated
post-traumatic stress.
On a body level she was able to tell a coherent story about what had happened
to her. She could already tell a story on the verbal level of what happened, but it
was not until her body could find it and tell the story without words in its own
language system that she was able to find some peace with the experience.

memories. Trauma, by definition, is an experience that is intense enough and

threatening enough that it overwhelms our coping resources. This occurs at the time
the trauma occurs, and it also occurs as the traumatic memory is encoded, stored and
retrieved in the various memory systems as an overwhelming and incoherent event.
The case study below stems from Caldwell’s work with a high functioning adult
survivor of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, one month after the event.
Body memory is a type memory that has been marginalised in our modern
cultures. When we overvalue the declarative memory systems, we lose sight of the
phenomenological centrality of the body and how our lived experience forms the
core of our identity, our attitudes and our actions. We are what we repeatedly do, and
by consciously unravelling procedural memories that obstruct our current well-
being, we can locate our lived experience in the present moment, where it can
nourish and sustain us.
Body memories are actions performed by the body that play across working
memory and if they are significant enough to be repeated or dramatic enough to be
 Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy 91

imprinted they go into long-term memory and into an implicit memory storage. But they
are not stored in the way we understand images are being stored, autobiographical,
hippocampal memory is stored, they are stored particularly affect-laden. There is a
strong relationship between the affect centres and the movement centres. We store these
memories in our neural networks, as well as in firing patterns in the muscle fibres. That
becomes body memory and is very important for how we organise things along a
movement continuum from reflexive movement, to motor planning, to drive states, to
the very spontaneous, creative movements. Thus, body memory is very strongly a
Gestalt between the brain and the rest of the body, whereas for autobiographical
memory there is not much evidence outside the hippocampus. As body-oriented
therapists, we have to understand that there are many different forms of memory that we
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 06:52 14 October 2014

are constantly accessing, encoding, storing and retrieving (C. Caldwell, personal
communication, October 2010).
There is a special skill involved in dealing with implicit processing and very
strong client-initiated and client-directed remembering on the body level. One of the
primary components is the process of paying attention. Caldwell spends a lot of time
on training students how to oscillate their attention – oscillating from inner
experience to outer world, from panoramic focus to narrow focus, and from one
sense to another. What happens in trauma is that attention is pulled involuntarily in a
certain direction, and it fixates. Training therapists so that they become attentional
athletes allow them to hold and deeply connect to a client’s body memory systems
while also maintaining their own separate and facilitative identity. It makes attention
a strong beam that can bathe the client in basic resources for working with their
difficult experiences in a productive way. The beam has to be free of content and
analysis, and in this way the beam itself creates the holding environment for the
implicit memory on the body level to be situated in the self in an integrated and
fruitful way. Thus, high-quality attention partners with body memory in effective
therapeutic environments.

Conclusions
Body memory is a new interdisciplinary topic helping to shed light on the
mechanisms of implicit memory, and connecting it to applications in embodied
therapies. Fuchs’ taxonomy of body memory shows that the phenomenon reaches
beyond the formation of bodily habitualities as mainly addressed by theories on
implicit memory in cognitive science, and includes the different modalities of our
situated and intersubjective embeddedness in the environment. It helps to
conceptualise certain treatment aspects in embodied therapies. However, the
essentially dynamic character of body memory needs further investigation (Koch,
2011), and this is more generally true for the role of bodily movement in
embodiment research. We are only beginning to investigate this rich field... and at
the beginning there was movement.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Annabelle Humm for the transcription of the original interview with
Prof. Fuchs.
 92 S.C. Koch et al.

Note
1. This and the following passages are quoted from Proust (1913/1981, 1913/1934, pp. 48–51).

Notes on contributors
Sabine C. Koch, psychologist, and dance/movement therapist, MA, DTR, did her PhD about
microanalysis of gender-related non-verbal communication at the workplace within a social
psychology framework, and her habilitation about the effects of movement on affect, attitude
formation and cognition within an embodiment and phenomenological framework. She holds an
MA in Dance/Movement Therapy from MCP Hahnemann University in Philadelphia (USA) and
specialised in movement analysis with the Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP). She coordinates
a BMBF research project on ‘Language of movement and dance: movement and meaning,
emergence of metaphors in movement, and body memory’. As an embodied practice she started as
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 06:52 14 October 2014

a gymnast, went through different dance forms and is now doing Capoeira.
Christine Caldwell, PhD, LPC, BC-DMT, NCC, ACS, is the founder, former director and
professor in the Somatic Counseling Psychology Department in Boulder, CO, USA. She teaches
and trains internationally, and has authored two books and over 30 chapters and articles on topics
ranging from research, addiction, conscious movement, prenatal and perinatal imprints, diversity
issues and contemplative practice. Her embodied practices include movement meditation and
hiking in the wilderness. Email: caldwell@naropa.edu.
Thomas Fuchs, psychiatrist and philosopher, MD in history of medicine, PhD in philosophy,
professor of philosophical foundations of psychiatry at the Department of Psychiatry in
Heidelberg, coordinates the European Marie-Curie Research Training Network ‘TESIS –
Toward an Embodied Science of Intersubjectivity’ (2011 – 2015) and of the Joint National
Research Project ‘The brain as an organ of interrelations’, funded by the Volkswagenstiftung
(2008 – 2011), both including major centres from philosophy, neurobiology, developmental
psychology and psychiatry. As an embodied practice, he plays the piano and is doing
mindfulness meditation. Email: thomas.fuchs@med.uni-heidelberg.de.

References
Bainbridge-Cohen, B. (1993). Sensing, feeling, and action: The experiential anatomy of
Body-Mind Centering. Northampton, MA: Contact Editions.
Bergson, H. (2007). Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit [Matter and
memory. Essay on the relation of body and spirit; orig. published 1896]. Paris: PUF.
Bermeitinger, C., & Kiefer, M. (2012). Embodied concepts. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M.
Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor and movement (pp. 121– 140).
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. (R. Nice, Trans.) Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Caldwell, C. (2012). Sensation, movement, and emotion: Explicit procedures for implicit
memories. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory,
metaphor and movement (pp. 255– 265). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Casey, E. (2000). Remembering. A phenomenological study. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York, NY:
Harper & Row.
Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. London: Vintage.
Damasio, A. R. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of
consciousness. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace.
Eberhard-Kaechele, M. (2012). Memory, metaphor, and mirroring in movement therapy with
trauma patients. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory,
metaphor and movement (pp. 267– 287). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
 Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy 93

Fuchs, T. (2000). Das Gedächtnis des Leibes [The memory of the body]. Phänomenologische
Forschungen, 5, 71 – 89.
Fuchs, T. (2003). The memory of the body. http://www.klinikum.uni-heidelberg.de/
fileadmin/zpm/psychatrie/ppp2004/manuskript/fuchs.pdf
Fuchs, T. (2012). The phenomenology of body memory. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa
& C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor and movement (pp. 9 –22). Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Gendlin, E. T. (1996). Focusing-oriented psychotherapy. A handbook of the experiential
method. New York, NY: Guilford.
Gendlin, E. T. (2012). Comment on Thomas Fuchs: The time of the explicating process. In
S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor, and
movement (pp. 73 – 81). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 06:52 14 October 2014

Gibson, J. J. (1966). The senses considered as perceptual systems. Boston, MA: Houghton.
Jansen, P. (2012). Implicit body memory. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa & C. Müller (Eds.),
Body memory, metaphor and movement (pp. 115–120). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kestenberg, J. S. (1995). Sexuality, body movement and the rhythms of development.
Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Koch, S. C. (2011). Basic body rhythms and embodied intercorporality: From individual
to interpersonal movement feedback. In W. Tschacher & C. Bergomi (Eds.), The
implications of embodiment: Cognition and communication (pp. 151– 171). Exeter:
Imprint Academic.
Koch, S. C. (2012). Testing Fuchs’ taxonomy of body memory – A content analysis. In S. C.
Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor and movement
(pp. 171– 186). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Koch, S. C., Fuchs, T., Summa, M., & Müller, C. (2012). Body memory, metaphor, and
movement. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Koch, S. C., & Harvey, S. (2012). Dance therapy with traumatized dissociative patients. In
S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor and
movement (pp. 369– 385). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kolter, A., Ladewig, S., Summa, M., Koch, S. C., Müller, C., & Fuchs, T. (2012). Body
memory and the emergence of metaphor in movement and speech. An interdisciplinary
case study. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory,
metaphor and movement (pp. 201– 226). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Konopatsch, I., & Payne, H. (2012). The emergence of body memory in Authentic Movement.
In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor and
movement (pp. 341– 352). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kruithoff, E. (2012). Focusing, felt sensing, and body memory. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M.
Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor and movement (pp. 387– 392).
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Loew, T. H., Sohn, R., Martus, P., Tritt, K., & Rechlin, T. (2000). Functional relaxation as a
somatopsychotherapeutic intervention: A prospective controlled study. Alternative
Therapies in Health Medicine, 6(6), 70 – 75.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Michalak, J., Burg, J., & Heidenreich, T. (2012). Mindfulness, embodiment, and depression.
In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor and
movement (pp. 393– 413). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ogden, P. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. New
York, NY: Norton.
Panhofer, H., Payne, H., Parke, T., & Meekums, B. (2012). The embodied world. In S. C.
Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor and movement
(pp. 307– 325). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
 94 S.C. Koch et al.

Piaget, J. (1929). The child’s conception of the world. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace.
Proust, M. (1981). Remembrance of things past. Volume 1: Swann’s way: Within a budding
grove. (C.K. Scott Moncrieff & T. Kilmartin, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage. (Original
work published 1913).
Proust, M. (1934). Remembrance of things past. Volume 7: Time regained. (C.K. Scott
Moncrieff & T. Kilmartin, Trans.). New York, NY: Random House. (Original work
published 1913).
Pylvänäinen, P. (2012). Body memory as a part of the body image. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M.
Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor and movement (pp. 298– 306).
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Röhricht, F., Priebe, S., & Papadopoulos, N. (2009). Ego-pathology, body (self) experience
and body psychotherapy in chronic schizophrenia. Psychology and Psychotherapy:
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 06:52 14 October 2014

Theory, Research and Practice, 82, 19 –30.

Sax, W., & Polit, K. (2012). Moved by god: Performance and memory in the Western
Himalayas. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory,
metaphor and movement (pp. 227– 242). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Schacter, D. (1987). Implicit memory: History and current status. Journal of Experimental
Psychology, 13(3), 501– 518.
Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect regulation and the repair of the self. New York, NY:
W.W. Norton & Company.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2012). Kinesthetic body memory. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa
& C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor and movement (pp. 43 – 72). Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Stern, D. N. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant. A view from psychoanalysis and
developmental psychology. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Suitner, C., Koch, S. C., Bachmeier, K., & Maass, A. (2012). Dynamic Embodimnet and its
functional role. A body feedback perspective. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa & C.
Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor and movement (pp. 155– 170). Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Summa, M. (2011). Das Leibgedächtnis. Ein Beitrag aus der Phänomenologie Husserls.
Husserl Studies, 27(3), 173– 196.
Summa, M. (2012a). Body memory and the genesis of meaning. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M.
Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor and movement (pp. 23 – 41).
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Summa, M. (2012b). Zwischen Erinnern und Vergessen. Implizites Leibgedächtnis und das
Selbst am Beispiel der Demenz Erkrankungen. Phänomenologische Forschungen, 2011,
164– 182.
Summa, M., Koch, S. C., Fuchs, T., & Müller, C. (2012). Body memory – An integration. In
S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor and
movement (pp. 417– 444). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
van den Kolk, B. (1996). The body keeps the score: Approaches to the psychobiology of
posttraumatic stress disorder. In B. van der Kolk, A. C. McFarlane & L. Weisaeth (Eds.),
Traumatic stress: The effects of overwhelming experience on mind, body, and society
(pp. 214– 241). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Warnecke, T. (2011). 25/2003. Retrieved from www.integralbody.co.uk Some thoughts on
involuntary muscle. AChP Newsletter.
Winther, H. (2012). Nakedness, hunger, hooks, and hearts. Embodied memories and
movement. Psychological processes in dance therapy and movement pedagogy. In S. C.
Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor and movement
(pp. 353– 367). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.