Physical Touch in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: Transforming Trauma through Embodied Practice

This groundbreaking book presents a new model for incorporating the  human body, and specifically physical touch, into psychoanalysis and  psychotherapy, particularly for patients who have experienced trauma.

Novak’s  model of informed and disciplined touch articulates five categories of  touch and three phases of therapeutic body work, all of which can help  move the patient and therapist directly into bodily experiences that  enable trauma memories to be processed, and then analyzed and  transformed. This transformation leads to patients experiencing their  bodies in fundamentally new ways, both relationally and  intrapsychically. The book also grapples with the risks and ethics of  working directly with patients’ bodies, outlining theoretical and  clinical elements that help create a safe and sacred therapeutic  structure. Novak’s model offers a continuum of touch from everyday  physical interactions, such as handshakes or hugs, to more complex and  complete ways of working with the body that are safe and meaningful and  that create an integrated experience of the patient’s mind and body.

Physical  Touch in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy is of interest to therapists at  all levels of experience in the fields of counseling, social work,  psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis. Practitioners in other helping  professions such as healthcare, massage therapy, and physical therapy,  as well as providers of wholistic medicine, will also be able to make  use of the comprehensive clinical model and case studies detailed in the  book.