Connection through separation: negotiating boundaries in dance movement psychotherapy with psychosis

This chapter inquires into body-based psychotherapeutic work with people with an experience of psychosis, reflecting in particular on questions of boundaries. In psychotic states, psychic and bodily boundaries can be experienced as porous or absent, disrupting the person’s sense of self and embodied cohesion. Through this loss of oneself, relationships with others can become extremely inhibited, leading to isolation and problems with communication. By mobilising psychoanalytic theory and a fictional vignette from a longterm dance movement psychotherapy group, this chapter proposes that dance and movement can be utilised as creative methods to support people in a process of psychic and embodied separation, which, in turn, may allow them to (re)inhabit their bodies subjectively, creating new possibilities for connection.