World Wide Panic Series #7 Dance Therapy

Weekly series exploring different therapeutic approaches, patterns and frameworks to unlock understanding and transformation of human mind ranging from the scientifically evidenced to the downright controversial ones.

Why do we keep repeating the same patterns even when we know better? Thinkers across different cultures and history have developed their own answers to this question. Today we explore Dance Therapy approach.

Image: North West Coastal Art. The encyclopaedia of patterns and motifs: A collection of 5000 designs from cultures around the world. Studio Editions

Temperature: highly immersive

Therapist’s Role:  movement guide and interpreter

Dimension: embodied

Conceptualisation Model: the psyche expresses itself not only through thoughts and emotions but through movement, gesture and bodily patterns with unconscious material often emerging through the body before it reaches words

Patterns & Narrative: distress arises when emotional, relational or archetypal patterns become fixed in bodily habits, inhibitions or repetitive movement dynamics

The Goal:  accessing and transforming these patterns through movement, active imagination and embodied symbolic expression

Big Picture / The Reward:  liberation from inherited narratives, emotional reorganisation and a renewed sense of authorship over one’s life

Scientific Evidence: 6-7/10 (promising and growing evidence, though variable across populations and modalities)

Era: formalised as a therapeutic field in mid-20th century

Ideal patient:  individuals open to nonverbal exploration and bodily awareness

Dance Therapy, often referred to as Dance/Movement Therapy (DMT), is a therapeutic approach based on the idea that movement and emotion are inseparable. The way we move can reflect how we relate, defend, remember and feel. Tensions may be held in posture, conflict may appear in gesture and unspoken material may emerge through rhythm, impulse or inhibition. Rather than treating the body as secondary to the mind Dance Therapy understands movement itself as part of psychological life.

Whilst some forms of Dance Therapy focus on emotional regulation, trauma recovery or interpersonal attunement the Jungian-oriented approach developed by Joan Chodorow places special emphasis on movement as a form of symbolic process. Drawing on Carl Jung’s concept of active imagination Chodorow explored how spontaneous movement can become a way of entering dialogue with unconscious material. In this understanding, the body does not only express what the psyche already knows consciously but it may reveal what consciousness has not yet recognised. A repeated gesture, movement or an impulse emerging in improvisation may carry psychological meaning.

This is where the Jungian dimension distinguishes itself from more purely expressive or behavioural approaches. The aim is to encounter and integrate unconscious material through embodied symbolic process - a person may move with images that arise internally, allow gestures to evolve into spontaneous sequences or engage in what Chodorow described as movement-based active imagination. The process is about listening to what the psyche may be expressing through the body. This approach shares an affinity with Jung’s broader understanding of individuation - the process of becoming more whole through engagement with conscious and unconscious aspects of the self. In Dance Therapy that process can unfold not only through dream interpretation or verbal analysis but through movement as psychic dialogue and symbolic enactment.

Research on Dance/Movement Therapy suggests benefits in areas such as trauma symptoms, depression, anxiety, body image, emotional regulation and quality of life. It has shown particular promise in populations where verbal processing alone may be limited or insufficient including some trauma survivors and people living with neurological conditions. Koch et al. (2014) in a meta-analysis of dance and Dance/Movement Therapy interventions found significant effects for quality of life, mood, affect, body image and interpersonal competence with stress reduction and depression among areas showing promising outcomes. Particularly important was the finding that benefits were not limited to symptom reduction but often involved embodied and relational dimensions such as vitality, emotional expression and social integration. This is notable because these are domains conventional talk therapies do not always address directly. One implication of these findings is that movement may not only symbolise psychological change but help produce it.

Alongside depth-oriented and symbolic approaches Dance/Movement Therapy has also been developed within broader clinical and relational frameworks. As outlined in The Art and Science of Dance/Movement Therapy, DMT is understood not only as a means of emotional expression but as a modality that can support nonverbal communication, interpersonal attunement, body awareness and psychological integration. This broader perspective complements Jungian approaches by situating movement not only as symbolic process but also as relational, developmental and clinically grounded therapeutic practice. At the same time evidence varies depending on the modality and setting, and Jungian-oriented movement work in particular remains more difficult to standardise or study through conventional methods. Much of what depth-oriented Dance Therapy values like as symbol, subjective meaning, emergent process, resists easy measurement. The underlying idea of Dance Therapy is that patterns do not live only in thought. They may be organised through muscular habits, breath, gesture, rhythm and embodied memory so if distress can become structured in the body, change may also begin there.

In ecstatic and shamanic dance traditions where movement is understood as a means of altering consciousness, releasing psychic tension and entering relationship with forces larger than the individual self across many cultures, ritual dance has been used for healing, mourning, divination, communal bonding and spiritual transformation often through repetition, rhythm, trance and embodied surrender. What connects these practices to depth-oriented Dance Therapy is the idea that movement can access layers of experience that ordinary cognition does not easily reach. In a Jungian sense ecstatic dance can be understood as a way archetypal energies may emerge through the body whilst shamanic dance often frames movement as a journey into symbolic or imaginal realms where healing and insight can occur. Though these traditions arise from very different cosmologies than psychotherapy they share an underlying recognition that the body can become a vessel for transformation. And they also expand the understanding of movement beyond individual therapy into something collective and ritualistic where dancing becomes a way of dissolving boundaries between self and group, conscious and unconscious. So ecstatic and shamanic dance can be seen as ancestral counterparts to contemporary movement-based healing reminding us that long before therapy became a discipline, humans were already using rhythm, gesture and trance as medicine.

There are echoes here of ritual traditions in which dance has long served as transformation, mourning, healing and communion. But in therapeutic settings these ideas are often grounded in relational practice - the therapist may witness, mirror or help reflect emerging patterns, supporting awareness. The therapist’s role is to help create conditions where embodied material can unfold safely and become thinkable.

References

Chaiklin, S., & Wengrower, H. (Eds.). (2009). The art and science of dance/movement therapy: Life is dance. Routledge.

Chodorow, J. (1991). Dance Therapy and Depth Psychology: The Moving Imagination.

Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and His Symbols.

Levy, F. J. (2005). Dance Movement Therapy: A Healing Art.

Koch, S. C., Kunz, T., Lykou, S., & Cruz, R. (2014). Effects of dance movement therapy and dance on health-related psychological outcomes: A meta-analysis. The Arts in Psychotherapy.