The Role of Dreambody Concepts and Practice in the Development of Process Work: a personal memoir

Process Work emerged in Arnold Mindell's psychotherapeutic practice from a background of Jungian analysis sometime around 1973. Although much has been written about this emergence and what motivated it, I wish, from the perspective of some twenty years of Process Work, to look back on the initial structure of this emergence and how I believe it patterned the developments which have taken place in the following twenty years. I feel that this is a useful exercise because this evolution is still proceeding, and the pattern of its present development is very similar to the model established by Mindell at the very beginning.

The dreaming body

There are two events which Mindell cites as paradigmatic for his development of the dreambody concept. The first concerns a client of his who had just had surgery to remove a malignant tumor from his stomach. Although the tumor had been removed, he still insisted, in the altered state of consciousness immediately following his surgery, that he felt the tumor in his body. He began to strain and push from his abdomen. Mindell, committed to Jung's principle of expanding upon and amplifying his clients' perceptions, but fearing that his client would injure himself, invited him to follow his perception, first to continue to strain and push, but then to make an image of what was pressing in his belly. His client fantasized creating internal pressure until his belly exploded.. .and then recalled

that he had dreamt of an exploding skyrocket. In the dream, he had known that if he could become a skyrocket himself, his cancer would be healed.

This takes place against a background of Mindell's attempt to work on an illness of his own using the tools of Jungian analysis. In particular, he had noticed the dreamlike quality of illness but had felt powerless to deal with it using the usual tools of dreamwork available to him.

One of these tools is the Jungian concept of amplification, in which personal associations and collective mythology are used to add flesh to the bones of particular dream images. Another is active imagination in which the dreamer attempts to continue the dreaming process by actively interacting with the elements of her dream. Both of these techniques were originally developed as a way of interacting with dream images. These images are typically personified as dream figures, behaving, as they do, much in the way of flesh-and-blood animate beings. Having a life of their own, they could walk and talk and serve as partners in conversational interaction.

Talking to body parts

Seeing these similarities between dreams and physical symptoms, Mindell attempted to work with symptoms as though they were dream processes.

His first attempt to interact with his symptoms on an experiential level was based on his knowledge

of active imagination. He tried visualizing the part of his body in which he experienced the symptom and then talked to that part. But an ailing body part, when addressed verbally, frequently responded in a voice which was already familiar. There seemed to be little that was new or unknown about these voices. They did not seem to fulfill Jung's notion that messages from the unconscious brought new, often startling information to light. Although it was clear that physical symptoms carried information from the unconscious, talking to the affected part was evidently not the best way of getting to it.

Lessons from a child

An important key to accessing the messages of the unconscious through the body came from Mindell's work with a six year old child who had been brought to him by the boy's parents. He had injured himself in a schoolyard fall. His scraped arm was healing, but he could not refrain from picking at the scab. Instead of scolding him and telling him not to pick, Mindell had the idea that the act of picking at the scab could itself be meaningful, and therefore encouraged the boy to do it even more vigorously. As the child picked, Mindell observed and noticed that his hand was formed into a kind of claw as it scratched and picked at the scab. He asked the boy to emphasize the claw-like nature of his hand even further, at which point he hunched his shoulders, wrinkled up his face and said, "I'm a witch!" Mindell thereupon began to interact with the child-as-witch, and found out that he had dreamt about a nasty witch that went around scratching little boys. From this emerged a story about how the boy had gotten in a fight with another child in the schoolyard, but a teacher had interrupted it, telling him that fighting was forbidden. The boy's obstreperous nature, repressed by a teacherly Verbot, had re-emerged in the form of the witch's hand scratching his injured arm, and in the dream.

The key to accessing the symptom's information was in observing the child's total interaction with his symptom, rather than in prescribing a particular method for working with it. Mindell's young client

Except of course, if it is too painful, in which case I may it at all.

was amplifying the symptom on his own, through movement, by scratching open the old injury. It is unlikely that simply talking to the injured arm would have led to the clawed hand, the further scratching movement and the story of the witch.

This is something many of us do. When something hurts, we are seldom content to let it be, but probe and test the injured part to "see if it still hurts." One would think that if something hurt, we would do everything in our power to make sure it stopped hurting and would be grateful for any lapse in the pain. There is, paradoxically, often an urge to keep re-accessing the pain. Mindell saw in this phenomenon something quite similar to a dream: the body itself was dreaming in its own way, through movement and feeling instead of merely through images and sound. His notion of the dreambody emphasizes both the tendency of somatic experience to be mirrored in nighttime dreams and the dreamlike quality of somatic experience itself.

The channel idea

Symptoms seem to yield the most interesting and surprising information when amplified in the way they are perceived. It is this discovery that led to Mindell's notion of channels of process awareness. The meaning inherent in the disturbance is most easily accessed through the modality in which it is perceived. If I experience my symptom visually, as when I see the redness of a bloodshot eye, then it may be most productive to use visual accessing techniques and active imagination to interact with it. If I feel the symptom, like the itching of a skin rash, then amplifying it proprioceptively may yield the most rapid results.1 If I perceive it as causing or influencing movement, as when an arthritic condition limits the motion of my shoulder, then movement may yield the most interesting information about that symptom.

These channels of perception are not freely interchangeable. Like different languages, each has its own structure and its own way of representing content. And while languages can often be translated one into another without losing the essential charac-

first need to work visually with it in order to be able to stand

Dreambody Concepts in the Development of Process Work

ter of their messages, the information carried in various channels of perception cannot be freely translated without some loss of meaning. It is usually difficult, if not impossible, to verbally describe a pain, or a feeling of ecstasy in sufficient detail to be sure that someone else really feels it in the way that we do.

Perhaps more importantly, the very act of trying to describe a body feeling verbally takes us away from that feeling and back into the realm of language. Asking someone to describe a body feeling or talk to a body part may serve as a paradoxical intervention which immediately diverts them from the feeling and into hearing. Instead of amplifying the experience, it may have quite the opposite effect of driving it underground and rendering it even less accessible to our awareness.

MindelPs lesson from his young client showed one way out of the dilemma: to try to follow as closely as possible what the client himself is doing and to see this as an attempt to unfold his experience in the channel in which it is occurring. But this is a difficult task. Mainstream culture in North America and Northern Europe is not finely attuned to either feeling or movement; it is, rather, a verbal and vi sual culture. Given the choice of focusing on either the verbal/visual or the somatic part of an interaction, we will almost always choose the verbal. It will be automatically chosen; we will, in most cases, spontaneously repress the feeling and movement aspects of the experience in favor of speech and image. Furthermore, this tendency is typically true of both client and therapist, so that the therapist will tend to be inattentive to precisely those somatic signals which, for the client, may be the key to following the way of the unconscious.

Do we have to invent a whole new way of focusing our attention on the somatic part of experience and communications, or has this work perhaps been done for us, in some already existing system of concepts and perception?

The role of bodywork methods

There are whole systems of bodywork which focus on particular aspects of somatic experience. Hatha Yoga, in a sense one of the oldest of body "therapies," amplifies proprioception through the assumption of particular body postures, the asanas. There are asanas which are specific to various internal or-

gans and which emphasize proprioception in many areas of the body. One of the more interesting features of yoga with respect to Process Work is the observation that people spontaneously recreate the asanas in their attempt to better feel their bodies. If the process worker can recognize an aspect of a particular asana in the client's posture, sometimes recommending that the client try a more complete version of that asana will lead to a dramatic amplification of the particular somatic experience that initiated the posture.

This is important for two reasons. In the first place, it suggests that many bodywork methods may have evolved through observation of the body's own attempts to amplify and complete experience on a somatic, rather than a cognitive level. In the second, it suggests that developed systems of body therapy may provide us with a rich vocabulary of patterns of somatic experience which we can then use as "templates" to enable us to differentiate a wide variety of otherwise similar-seeming experiential patterns.

Both of these aspects of Mindell's experience with bodywork were to form basic elements of his further development of Process Work in the areas of interpersonal relationships, coma work, extreme states of consciousness, group process and conflict resolution. They therefore merit a closer look, as they hold the key to maintaining the openness to new data which has been a mainstay of the process approach.

Why study bodywork?

Studying existing systems of bodywork has three benefits for the process worker:

It directly increases the process worker's somatic awareness by focusing awareness specifically on somatic channels.

It provides access to a vast body of technique through a huge number of ready-made patterns of somatic experience to serve as templates for amplifying somatic experience.

It keeps the process worker's viewpoint open by providing not one but a multitude of possible patterns for a given emergent experience. Some systems, by contrast, offer only a limited number of patterns as descriptions of clients' experience; this, in turn, limits the number of different sorts of phe-

nomena which the therapist perceives and tends to force the client's experience into a one-dimensional mold.

Three principles

Mindell abstracted three basic principles from Jungian psychology to deal with the dreamlike quality of somatic experience. These, in turn, form the groundwork for unfolding the dreamlike quality of any form of experience.

They are:

Spontaneous amplification points the way toward the unfolding of experience. "Following the process" means noticing the ways in which experience and behavior spontaneously unfold and helping them to unfold further in those directions.

Existing methods of bodywork and somatic mythology form a store of patterns useful in helping somatic experience to unfold more fully. The more details of a person's somatic experience we can gather, and the broader our knowledge of somatic experiential patterns, the more specific we can be in recommending a trial pattern as a momentary path for amplification of the somatic experience.

A knowledge of the field of bodywork and somatic mythology broadens the range of phenomena which it is possible for the process worker to perceive at all. Without a knowledge of the vast range of possible body experience, it is unlikely that the process worker will be able to differentiate more than a handful of distinct body experiences, and will therefore be less useful to the client in unfolding the breadth and depth of her somatic experience.

A conceptual leap

Since the days of the dreambody, the scope of Process Work has expanded to include a broad range of human experience. Process Work is now applied to people in extreme and altered states of consciousness, including near-death and comatose states and to collectivities of all sizes, from couples to large groups, organizations and even political systems, in addition to its role as a broad-spectrum form of psychotherapy. In all of these activities, the stamp of the original dreambody concept is clearly visible. In one sense, the theoretical framework suggested by Mindell's original explorations of the body still

forms the conceptual core of the entirety of Process Work. And this has been done without a significant proliferation of core concepts! It seems that whatever principles Mindell established in his research of disturbing somatic experience are applicable to human experience in general, and that the "rule" for performing this generalization can also be abstracted from his original dreambody work.

The process paradigm

Although much has been written about the so-called "process paradigm," I would like to give you a version which captures, for me, its conceptual core. Although it would be inane to speak of "unexperienced experience," certain aspects of our experience are closer to our awareness than others. For example, we may be deeply engaged in conversation with someone but be unaware that we are tapping our fingers on our knee. Even if our conversational partner calls our attention to that fact, we are likely to note it and then slip back into conversation, while continuing to drum with our fingers. The experience of conversation is the one that we embrace. The experience of drumming with our fingers is, by comparison, largely disavowed. We experience it, but do not attend to it. We identify more with conversing than with drumming. The difference in the way we relate to these experiences is great enough to warrant making two categories of them:

Primary experience is that which we embrace, to which we attend and with which we identify.

Secondary experience is that from which our attention is easily diverted, with which we are reluctant to identify and which is generally disavowed as being foreign to some essential quality of our self-image or self-experience. When we are encouraged to attend to secondary aspects of our experience, we are generally reluctant to do so. If we are pushed further, all manner of behavioral incongruities arise, and we exhibit edge behavior. The word "edge" refers to the boundary of our self-experience, the world of experience which we embrace and preferentially attend to. Beyond the edge is the world of experience which we attend to only with difficulty, with which we are reluctant to identify and which we generally disavow as being foreign or threatening to us. Yet it is just this disavowed experience which, when embraced, we feel to be the

10 Dreambody Concepts in the Development of Process Work

agent of personal growth. Seen from this angle, disturbance originates in experience which is disavowed but nevertheless present on the fringes of our awareness.

The lessons of dreambody work go even further. They tell us that experience is not only a state or an object but also a process. Disavowal of aspects of our experience tends to render that experience statelike, since it is then pruned of any spontaneous extensions which tend to develop. Process Work can be seen as a way of facilitating the spontaneous extension of experience by encouraging the unfolding of its disavowed aspects. Viewed in that light, experience may be seen as a dynamic whole which, through selective attention and disavowal of some of its aspects, is maintained as a relatively coherent, but limited and static whole.

Toward a science of experience

Dreambody work not only suggests this theoretical framework, it provides us with methods for performing the unfolding of disavowed experience which forms the core of Process Work. These methods are far more than a body of mere technique; they are nothing less than the seeds of a new science of experience.

Patterns of experience

There is no such thing as chaotic, or unstructured, experience. Experience is structured by specific patterns; experience in new or unfamiliar domains tends to be structured by related experience in familiar areas.

Before we are taught to recognize the constellations of stars which belong to our own cultural heritage, we may either perceive the heavens as a uniform cloud of randomly placed stars, or we may order them into patterns of our own invention which have no relationship to the "official" constellations which are a part of our cultural heritage. At a certain point, we are taught that a particular group of stars is called "Orion" and that they form the picture of a mythical hunter. Our perception of these stars then becomes structured by this knowledge, and we come to perceive them as an orderly whole, as a pattern which literally did not exist for us before we were taught to see it.

Our perception of the constellations is patterned by a cultural template. If we grow up in another culture which sees other constellations, then we will apply a different perceptual template to the same set of stars. Which constellations "really" exist? We cannot say; the existence of the constellations is a function of the cultural heritage of the observer.

The experiential realm of "constellations" has yet more to tell us about the nature of experience. It is possible, for instance, to have a particular realm of experience structured by more than one experiential template. If, in addition to recognizing the constellation of Orion, we are taught the names and appearances of its component stars, we now have two ways of experiencing the same bit of reality. At certain times, we may see the whole pattern and think, "That's Orion," or we may think, "Ah, that star there is named Betelgeuse, and that one, the bright one in his leg, is called Rigel." Finally, we may study the "archaeology of constellations" and find that certain cultures of antiquity assigned some of the stars of our Orion to one constellation, and others to yet another. We could study these "ancient" constellations and have still a third way of perceiving structure in the same group of stars. We would have three different experiential templates with which to structure the same bit of the universe.

As abstract as this may seem in the realm of constellations, a completely analogous phenomenon tends to structure our experience of human collectivities. We may perceive a certain group of people as "the family who lives down the street," and see them only as a unit. But should we happen to take an interest in them and learn their names, they become, in addition, a group of individuals. Meeting one of them on the street, I may either think of her as Jenny, a 12 year old schoolgirl, or as "one of that family." Same person, different experiences. In learning more about the family, I might learn that their father has been in prison, or that all the children are virtuoso musicians or that they are all refugees from the political regime on Haiti. These experiential templates will form a multiplicity of ways in which I perceive the reality of that family's existence. The more ways I have of viewing them, the more details of their everyday lives and history I have, the richer and more complex will become my perception of them, and the greater will be my

difficulty in stereotyping them to fit the needs of my own projections.

It seems that perception of an experience is conditioned by the totality of firamewoiks in which that experience is embedded. Frameworks for somatic experience in Western mainstream culture are rather limited. Proprioceptive experience is usually pretty well covered by patterns from categories like sexuality, eating, elimination and physical symptoms. And since many people view such experiences as taboo, or as pathological, perceptual templates have been mainly provided by the pornographers and the medical profession. This is one reason why people will often giggle and make jokes when the word "body" is mentioned; body experiences are largely disavowed in our culture and this leads to a paucity of templates for the structuring of somatic experience.

What is chaos?

If, as I have asserted, "truly chaotic," unstructured experience doesn't exist, then what is chaos? Chaos is a particular way of experiencing certain aspects of reality for which we have an unclear or limited pattern. Chaos is a description which people use when contemplating an emerging facet of their experience for which they do not have a clear conceptual structure, or for which their conceptual structure leads to something inordinately unpleasant or even disastrous. For this reason, for instance, many people are unwilling to contemplate their own deaths. Their experiential structure for death is essentially a disastrous world of half-imagined torture and suffering, or perhaps a simple cessation of being, which is itself a barely imaginable situation.

Truly unstructured experience is generally not perceived at all! There is a story, which I believe is told by Marshall McLuhan, but whose origins I have lost, in which a group of well-meaning film makers went to an economically disadvantaged country to develop materials for teaching hygiene to the people. They made a film showing proper handling of food, waste disposal procedures and the like, and showed their production to a group of the people for whom it was intended. They then asked the people what they had seen in the film. Several reported having seen a chicken. The film makers were dismayed, first because the viewers had evidently missed the message of the film, and sec-

ondly, because they had no memory of having filmed a chicken! Since the viewers insisted that they had seen a chicken, the film makers reviewed the film, seeing nothing, and then examined it frame-by-frame. Sure enough, they found a segment in which a rather blurred chicken ran through a corner of the frame. Why had the viewers seen the chicken, which had been invisible to the film makers, but missed the whole message of the film?

Film turns out to be highly structured by perceptual templates. We must learn the conventions of film in order to understand it at all. The termination of a scene, in which a person suddenly disappears from the screen, is without its match in everyday visual experience. People disappear into the distance, they go through doorways or around corners, but they do not simply vanish. The chicken, on the other hand, was without salience for the film makers, who were focused only on their educational goal. It therefore went unperceived.

When an experience lacks coherence or salience within a particular perceptual framework, it simply goes unnoticed. Another example comes from the realm of medicine. A radiologist, showing you a chest X-ray, will point out features and anomalies of the lungs in what looks to you like a completely unstructured grey blob. Or where a city-dweller sees the woods as "a lot of trees," a walk with a seasoned naturalist will open a wonderland of hundreds of diverse plants and animals living in a microcosm of interdependent unity.

This sort of experience is not disturbing; it is merely absent. The woods are not threatening if our experience of them is limited to "a bunch of trees." But what of the terrifying screech which resounds through the woods at dusk? What of the dark shadows that flutter about in a clearing, dimly seen in the last light of day? These things, in the absence of a conceptual framework for owls and bats as harmless (for humans, at least) denizens of the night, excite our fantasy and invite us to supply our own versions of horrid and frightening beings to complete these bits of new and relatively unstructured experience.

Experience as conceptual structure

Somatic experience is disturbing to the degree to which it is unstructured in our perception. We tend to impose a structure on disturbing experience

Dreambody Concepts in the Development of Process Work

which is based on what we already know about similar experiences. The hard lump we find under our skin must be, in our thinking, cancer. We know all about cancer, the chances of it being cured, and where it will lead us if the cure fails. The "cancer experience" comes pre-structured with fears, hopes and expectations. It is already a "closed" experience in the sense that as soon as we discover it, it is devoid of mystery.

There are moments when this tendency to structure our experience breaks down. These occur in what we call altered states of consciousness. The story which I told earlier, of Mindell's patient who had just had surgery to remove a tumor from his stomach, experienced the continuing presence of the tumor in the strongly altered state of consciousness following his general anesthesia. He was relieved of his "normal" or consensus state of consciousness which would have supplied a linear, medical model for events surrounding his tumor and his operation.

There is quite a contrast between this experience and the "standard" experience of cancer. The stan dard experience is structured by appeal to common knowledge, as well as to one's inward experience (feeling the lump, the sensations associated with medical procedures, any pain or pressure associated with the tumor). In general, we are encouraged to pattern our experience according to the common fund of knowledge, be it common sense, medical science or the authority of cultural convention. Our inner, personal experience is considered peripheral to the cancer process, so that it is no longer even considered part of the medical diagnosis. This is true to the point that many cancer patients have no immediate experience of their disease apart from their fear of its progression and whatever medical interventions are performed on them.

The experience of Mindell's patient is structured, but in quite a different way. It is an "unfolding" experience. Each aspect of the experience evolves out of that which immediately precedes it It is only marginally influenced by "common knowledge." The unfolding of this process is, however, not totally spontaneous. It is structured by the interaction between Mindell and the patient.

If the patient had been left on his own, it is likely that the experience would have remained on the level of his being tormented by the feeling in his

belly. If he had interacted more strongly with that feeling, he might have wound up ripping out his stitches, with very little consciousness of why he had done so. Certain features of Mindell's attitude toward the patient's experience were instrumental in helping the patient unfold his experience into increased awareness and to render it coherent with the mainstream of his pre-cancer life story.

Dreambody work as the master pattern

Our desire to explore experience is founded upon a seeming impossibility, a contradiction. We wish to follow a person's experience into uncharted waters, into the unknown. But we have seen that where there are no charts, there is no experience. We simply do not perceive things for which we have no pre-existing conceptual model. Similarly, what we experience in a given situation can be drastically altered by what we expect to experience. To help others follow the trail of their own unfolding experience into unknown territory is to risk, on the one hand, imposing an arbitrary structure upon it, and on the other, being unable to perceive any structure to it at all, seeing it as purely chaotic. But to see someone else's experience as chaotic is to risk exposing them to the condemnation of mental illness and to throw them to the dogs of arbitrary psychiatric power. To profess to follow someone's experience is therefore a serious and delicate business which calls for a profound understanding of both the philosophical and practical problems on the part of the process worker.

It is here that a generalization of dreambody work shows us a way out of the dilemma. We cannot unfold truly unstructured experience, but we can use the principles of dreambody work to help disavowed experience to unfold in its own direction.

We apply the first principle, that experience tends to amplify itself, to avoid imposing, at the beginning, any outside structure on a person's evolving experience. We observe instead of prescribing.

We apply the second principle, that existing bodies of method and myth pertaining to specific modes of human experience have evolved out of just such detailed observations of experiential patterns, to provide us with a series of hypotheses for amplifying the unfolding experiential process. By having access to a vast variety of such patterns, we reduce

the risk of imposing a single pattern and forcing the experiential process into a one-dimensional mold.

We apply the third principle, that a knowledge of a large range of experiential patterns is necessary to keep the therapist's perception open, to open ourselves to the greatest possible variety of human experience and behavior in order that we may remain empathetic and curious about the world unfolding before us. Otherwise, we run the risk of setting experiential and behavioral norms, along with the judgements of pathology which always form the shadow side of normative psychology.

With these three principles alone, I believe it is possible to extend Process Work as a general science of human experience. Much of the research that remains to be done in Process Work is research on patterns of experience. Almost any sphere of human endeavor would benefit from such research.

Human experience and the future of Process Work

Many questions remain unanswered. We know, for instance, that particular experiential patterns seem to be purely individual, yet there also seem to be recurring patterns which repeat in many places, throughout history. Were it not for these typical patterns, we would have nothing with which to amplify individual experience. As important as the elucidation of the relationship between individual

and shared experience is for psychotherapy and work with physical symptoms, it assumes staggering importance in the area of conflict resolution and relationship between individuals and groups with widely differing world views.

Other questions arise in the field of psychiatry. Much psychiatric diagnosis is based on the evaluation of an individual's experience by reference to consensus experience and behavior. A broadening of our view of the experiential basis of behavior may be essential if we are to avoid using psychiatry as a way of artificially imposing mainstream values on humanity as a whole.

The world's biological community is presendy engaged in the Human Genome Project, which has as its goal to completely map the human genetic code. It is tempting to dream about a similar project whose goal would be to amass an encyclopedia of human experiential patterns from historical, cultural and individual perspectives. Perhaps then we would begin to understand what an awesome project it is to be truly human.

Joe Goodbread, Ph.D., practices and teaches Pro cess Work in Portland, Oregon and throughout the world. He is the author of The Dreambody Toolkit and numerous articles and manuscripts on various aspects of Process Work.

14 Dreambody Concepts in the Development of Process Work