Orit Sônia Waisman

Dr. Orit Sônia Waisman is a Jungian analyst, dance movement therapist, linguist, and artist based in Jerusalem. She served as the head of the Dance Movement Therapy Master's programme at David Yellin College of Education in Jerusalem for seventeen years, from 2005 to 2022, and continues as a senior lecturer in the Arts Therapies Institute. She teaches at the Israeli Institute for Jungian Psychology in honour of Erich Neumann and serves on its curriculum committee.

As a Jungian analyst, Dr. Waisman envisions the role of the body within the analytic framework developed by Carl Jung and his followers, with the phenomenology of the body explored through those theories. Her pioneering work centres on the concept of "mismatch" between verbal and nonverbal communication, a phenomenon she first observed during conflict situations between Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Jewish students, where participants displayed gestures expressing meaning that diverged from their accompanying words.

Her published works include the monograph "Body, Language and Meaning in Conflict Situations: A Semiotic Analysis of Gesture-Word Mismatches in Israeli-Jewish and Arab Discourse" (John Benjamins, 2010), as well as research on polyvagal theory and its application to multi-generational trauma healing through dance movement therapy. In her private practice, Dr. Waisman works with individuals of all ages and provides supervision to students and qualified therapists. Her integrative approach draws on the convergence of depth psychology, somatic awareness, and linguistic analysis.