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Understanding Spontaneous Symbolism in Psychotherapy Using Embodied Thought
Version 1
: Received: 8 March 2024 / Approved: 11 March 2024 / Online: 11 March 2024 (13:05:20 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Goodwyn, E. Understanding Spontaneous Symbolism in Psychotherapy Using Embodied Thought. Behav. Sci. 2024, 14, 319. Goodwyn, E. Understanding Spontaneous Symbolism in Psychotherapy Using Embodied Thought. Behav. Sci. 2024, 14, 319.
Abstract
Spontaneous, unwilled subjective imagery and symbols often emerge in psychotherapy that can appear baffling and confound interpretation. Moreover, early psychoanalytic theories seemed to diverge as often as they agreed on the meaning of such content. Nevertheless, reviewing key findings in the empirical science of spontaneous thought, as well as insights gleaned from neurosciences and especially embodied cognition, it is now possible to construct a more coherent theory of interpretation that is clinically useful. Given that thought is so thoroughly embodied, it is possible to demonstrate that universalities in human physiology yield universalities in thought. Such universalities can then be demonstrated to form a kind of biologically directed universal “code” for understanding spontaneous symbolic expressions that emerge in psychotherapy. An example is given that illustrates how this can be applied to clinical encounters.
Keywords
Embodied Metaphor; Depth Psychology; Cognitive Neuroscience; Affective Neuroscience; Psychobiology; Hypnotherapy; Evolutionary Biology; Code Biology
Subject
Medicine and Pharmacology, Psychiatry and Mental Health
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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