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We believe that the body is central
in psychological experience...
This is especially obvious in infants, since they do not have
language to communicate. Adults tend to be less aware of their
bodies. Using 'body awareness' approaches, adults can experience
spontaneous capacities for the full use of their senses and
emotions that they experienced as an infant. These body awareness
approaches use combinations of talk, movement, and touch as
ways of increasing awareness of the body. These methods usually
deal explicitly with physical sensations, they provide an excellent
technique for gaining information about the salience of the
body in creating and interpreting psychological meaning.
There are various approaches to body awareness, such as the
work done by Moshe Feldenkrais and Marion Rosen. Dr. Fogel is
a Rosen Method Bodywork Practitioner and a licensed massage
therapist. In collaboration with Mark Reese, a certified Feldenkrais
practitioner and teacher, Dr. Fogel has developed Feldenkrais
Awareness Through Movement exercises that he uses in his undergraduate
Infancy course. These are available in Infancy: Infant, Family
and Society, 4th Edition. His students, aside from participating
in discussions and reading assigned texts and articles, also
try to understand infancy in an experiential way as they are
guided through Movement Awareness exercises that are designed
to aid them in evoking participatory memories of infancy. Body
awareness approaches are also insightful in our research. Next
to reading about infants and observing them on video, doing
infant movements provides us with another way of knowing infants.
Body awareness exercises, and imitating infant behaviors from
video recordings, help us to better understand what it may feel
like to be an infant in a particular relational setting. We
can never completely go back to being an infant anymore. However,
through such exercises we can, in a way, crawl into an infant's
skin. Dr. Fogel has conducted workshops using these methods
for Infant mental Health Practitioners in Utah, Arizona, and
California. For more information or to arrange a workshop in
your area:
Contact Dr. Fogel: alan.fogel@psych.utah.edu.
Arrange a workshop with Dr.
Fogel.
We are currently collaborating on a study with Dr. Sally Young.
In this study, Feldenkrais 'Functional Integration' is applied
on people with autism who are unable to speak. Our involvement
in this project is in investigating the effects that the Feldenkrais
exercises have over time for autistic persons' abilities to
engage in co-regulated communication.
We are also conducting a study on the effects of Rosen Method
Body Work to alleviate chronic back pain. The study assesses
client’s changes in perceived pain, fatigue, and psychological
wellbeing over the course of treatment. |
