Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP) occupies a distinctive, if undertheorised, position within the depth-psychology corpus — present most substantively at the intersection of Jungian active imagination, somatic trauma theory, and embodied arts practice. The library’s primary voices engage DMP less as a discrete clinical modality than as an instantiation of deeper principles: the body as threshold between conscious and unconscious, movement as epistemic act, and kinesthetic experience as a vehicle for individuation. Fogel provides the field’s most explicit definitional anchor, situating DMP among creative arts therapies that recruit movement to therapeutic ends. Tozzi and Chodorow, drawing on the lineage of Mary Starks Whitehouse and Joan Chodorow, articulate DMP’s Jungian genealogy most rigorously — particularly the thesis that dance/movement as active imagination dissolves the Western separation of psyche and soma. The Papadopoulos Handbook traces DMP’s institutional emergence alongside art, music, and drama therapies from Jung’s original contribution. Van der Kolk’s trauma literature references DMP as an evidence-adjacent resource for resilience and recovery, especially with populations for whom verbal processing is insufficient. Koch grounds DMP in embodiment science, emphasising bidirectional movement-affect feedback. A productive tension runs throughout: whether DMP’s therapeutic power inheres in symbolic/imaginal process (the Jungian position) or in neurobiological regulation (the somatic-trauma position) — a question the corpus raises but does not resolve.
Dance movement psychotherapy: A creative arts therapy that uses movement an
Fogel provides the corpus’s most explicit definitional statement of Dance Movement Psychotherapy as a creative arts therapy grounded in movement, situating it within a broader taxonomy of embodied self-awareness interventions.
, Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness, 2009thesis
Dance/movement as active imagination makes it possible to perceive psyche and body as a unity within which a series of bridges allow for passage and communication between one and the other.
Tozzi and Adorisio articulate the foundational Jungian claim that dance/movement as active imagination dissolves the psyche-soma duality and enables communication between conscious and unconscious.
, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017thesis
Antonella is a Registered Psychologist, Psychotherapist, Dance Movement Psychotherapist and Art Psychotherapist. She has been internationally teaching Active Imagination for many years. As a teacher of Authentic Movement, she studied with Janet Adler and Joan Chodorow.
The contributor biography explicitly names Dance Movement Psychotherapy as a registered profession practised in conjunction with Jungian active imagination and Authentic Movement, establishing the field’s institutional identity within the analytic lineage.
, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017thesis
the kinesthetic sense acts as a bridge between the unconscious and consciousness, or between the inside and the outside.
Adorisio argues that the kinesthetic sense — proprioceptively activated by both internal and external stimuli — is the somatic mechanism by which dance/movement mediates between unconscious and conscious realms.
, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017thesis
Art therapy, music therapy, dance therapy, drama therapy and poetry therapy emerged in the United States as separate professions in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Handbook traces dance therapy’s institutional emergence as a distinct profession from Jung’s original contributions to creative arts, situating DMP within the broader genealogy of depth-psychological arts therapies.
, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006thesis
D. A. Harris, ‘Dance/Movement Therapy Approaches to Fostering Resilience and Recovery Among African Adolescent Torture Survivors,’ Torture 17, no. 2 (2007): 134–55
Van der Kolk cites Dance/Movement Therapy empirical research as a reference resource for trauma recovery and resilience, particularly with survivor populations for whom verbal therapies are insufficient.
, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 2014supporting
a dance of joy to activate one’s resilience, or a poem to put a traumatic experience into words.
Koch positions dance within the embodied arts therapies as an enactive modality for activating resilience, grounded in the bidirectionality of movement and the cognitive-affective system.
, Embodied arts therapies, 2011supporting
movement can thus directly influence affect and cognition. For example, the mere taking on of a dominant versus a submissive body posture has been shown to cause changes not only in experiencing the self, but also in testosterone levels in saliva and risk-taking behavior
Koch grounds DMP’s theoretical basis in embodiment science, demonstrating that movement directly and causally influences affective and cognitive states — the neurobiological rationale underlying movement-based psychotherapeutic intervention.
, Embodied arts therapies, 2011supporting
Dance/movement therapy, music/sound therapy, dramatic
McNiff lists Dance/Movement Therapy as a distinct strand within expressive arts therapies, naming it alongside music and drama therapy in the context of video-mediated self-observation in therapy practice.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting
self-directed movement tends to develop a relationship to both sensory and imaginal realms. When bodily felt sensation emerges as physical action, an image may appear which will give the movement meaning.
Woodman, drawing on Chodorow, articulates the interplay of sensation and image in self-directed movement — the experiential logic underlying dance movement psychotherapy’s capacity to unite somatic and imaginal dimensions.
, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study, 1982supporting
dance can be so restorative. For instance, if a tribe performs a holy dance, it restores its social coherence. It unifies the people in their feeling and in their spirit.
Von Franz offers an archetypal-level account of dance as psychically and socially restorative — a mythological substratum that implicitly underwrites the therapeutic premises of dance movement psychotherapy.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997aside
Röhricht F. Body psychotherapy for the treatment of severe mental disorders – an overview. Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy. 2014; 10:51–67.
A citation references the journal Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy as a named scholarly venue, implicitly acknowledging DMP’s empirical research infrastructure within the broader field of body psychotherapy.
, Interoception in Psychiatric Disorders: A Review of Randomized, Controlled Trials with Interoception-Based Interventions, 2018aside