Whats the story with body narratives?

Philosophical therapy for therapeutic practice

Shaun Gallagher
Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence
Department of Philosophy
University of Memphis
Memphis, TN 38152, USA

Professorial Fellow in Philosophy

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts,
University of Wollongong Australia

Email: s.gallagher@memphis.edu

Daniel D. Hutto
Professor of Philosophical Psychology
School of Humanities and Social Inquiry
Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts
University of Wollongong
NSW 2522, Australia
Tel: +61 2 4221 3987
Email: ddhutto@uow.edu.au
 Whats the story with body narratives?
Philosophical therapy for therapeutic practice

Shaun Gallagher and Daniel D. Hutto

Psychotherapy that integrates a focus on body sensations and

affect with a sensitive phenomenological and historical inquiry
provides the opportunity to address that which has never been
acknowledged and to create a verbal narrative that reflects the
bodys story

- Erskine, 2014, p. 21

Our ability to narrate to tell stories appears to do more fundamental work in our
lives than simply serving to entertain us. Narrative practices so some philosophers
and psychologists maintain are inherently bound up with and even responsible for
making autobiographical memory possible (Nelson and Fivush 2004); understanding
the reasons for which we act (Hutto 2008; Gallagher and Hutto 2008; Fiebich,
Gallagher and Hutto. 2016); and making us who we are by constituting not merely
our sense of self but our selfhood itself (Schechtman 1996; 2007; 2011; Rudd 2011).
In the domains of psychotherapy and psychiatry, it has been proposed that our
ordinary narrative tendencies operating against the backdrop of certain other
cognitive disorders may play a pivotal part fostering and maintaining particular kinds
of delusions (Gerrans 2013, 2014). With respect to certain kinds of psychopathology,
such as autism and schizophrenia the ability to provide folk psychological narratives
about reasons for action is often impaired and self-narratives may be disordered
(Gallagher 2007; Gallagher and Cole 2011). In line with this, some therapies focus on
improving the narrative competences for those in these clinical populations (Hutto
2010).
Beyond these proposals about importance of narrative practices in our lives and the
role they might play in psychiatric and psychopathological treatments, there are other
forms of therapeutic practice those that operate under the banner of body or body-
oriented psychotherapy which assume that narratives of another special sort also
matter for our mental wellbeing. Body psychotherapists invoke the, albeit relatively
underdeveloped, notion of a body narrative as a central construct. A body narrative is
not a narrative about a body (as in e.g., Charon 2006; Scholz 2000; Ling and Liu 2008)
but a narrative generated by the body.
For example, Erskine (2014, 25) describes himself as a psychotherapist who
focuses on the body and the unconscious stories requiring resolution. The
assumption behind his practice is that the body keeps unconscious score of
emotional and physiological memories (ibid, p. 22). He holds that there can be stored
experiences of a pre-symbolic, implicit, and relational kind that have never been
narrated by conventional means but for which there is, nevertheless, an emotionally
laden story waiting to be told (ibid, p. 22).
Bodily psychotherapy, as he conceived of it, provides the means and methods of
bringing to light the emotion filled story embedded in the body (ibid, p. 25). Thus
Erskine (2014) says of his clients:

They say they have no memories of being younger than ten or twelve years of age
yet they describe having anxiety attacks, bouts of depression or loneliness, digestive
problems, back aches, or like me, the tensions in their shoulders and neck. Each of
these emotional and physical symptoms may be the memories often the only
memories of despairing loss, neglect, or traumatic events. These significant
memories are expressed in our affect and through our bodily movements and
gestures (Erskine 2014, 22).

In similar vein, another body psychotherapist, Christine Caldwell (2014, 89),

classifies body narratives as a species of nonverbal narratives the body telling its
stories on its own nonverbal terms. She explains, conscious body movements
generate a fluid, nonverbal narration of self and identity no less important than the
verbal stories we may tell (ibid). Caldwell holds that those body narratives that
contribute to our sense of self and identity are also connected to a feeling of self-
authorship that can be restored in emotional and relational aspects of movement (also
see Koch, Holland, and van Knippenberg 2009).
These claims about body narratives prompt an immediate philosophical question:
How seriously, if at all, can and should we take the idea that bodies contain or
generate their own narratives? To properly assess the above claims, if taken at face
value, would require us to examine developed explanations of the nature, source and
production of meaning in the alleged body narratives. Ideally, this would be
accompanied by a specification of how body narratives add meaning and get
interpreted within therapeutic settings. Thus, even if it were allowed that body
narratives exist, there are a number of questions that would need answering about their
nature and how they relate to the narratives we tell using words and other media if we
are to take the notion seriously.
While we believe the idea of a body narrative points to an important phenomenon,
our aim is to cast philosophical light on the nature of that phenomenon while avoiding
theoretical difficulties and puzzles that arise from assuming that bodies narrate.
The action of the paper unfolds as follows. Section one reviews considerations
about the nature of narratives that set up an important prima facie challenge to the very
idea of body narratives. Section two explores a possible way of answering that
challenge by appealing to the idea that embodied activity has an inherent narrative
structure, drawing on ideas from three different disciplinary perspectives
developmental psychology, embodied cognitive science, and semiotics. We argue,
however, that although embodied activity is structured in a way that naturally lends
itself to narration, and that it is no accident that our most faithful narratives about such
activity should replicate or reflect that structure, the structure of embodied activity
itself is not essentially or already narrative in nature. Moreover, the existence of a
structure in embodied activity that is ripe for narration falls short of what is needed for
securing the idea that bodies actually tell their own stories.
Still, we argue, all is not lost. In the final section we explore whether the notion of
body narratives per se is really necessary for, or even the best way to, make sense of
practices of body psychotherapy. We propose an alternative way of understanding
what goes on in such therapy, which we think is both philosophically safe and yet still
serviceable to therapists. Thus, in the final analysis, we hold that it is possible to
replace the notion of body narratives with talk of structured, embodied activity
activity that is ripe for and benefits from narration in therapeutic contexts without
loss in all cases.

1. The very idea of a body narrative

Is the idea of a body narrative coherent? Anyone defending the existence of body
narratives must contend with a deep philosophical issue. It is fundamentally unclear
how any kind of bodily activity, even that which is consciously and deliberately
produced, could constitute the narration of a story generated by the body on its own.
How seriously, if at all, can we take the idea that bodies might be narrating their own
non-verbal stories?
Unavoidably, dealing adequately with this question requires first attending to a
rather hefty elephant in the room: what are narratives and what is involved in
narration? Many have tried to get a handle on narratives and narration, and just where
the boundary of these categories begin and end.
Narratologists, in particular, have been much concerned with trying to define what
narratives are (Herman 2007; Ryan 2007; Cobley 2014). Their motivation to put some
manners on our notion of narrative is grounded in the need to give:

a principled account of what makes a text, discourse, film, or other artifact a

narrative. Such an account would help clarify what distinguishes a narrative from
an exchange of greetings, a recipe for salad dressing, or a railway timetable
(Herman 2007, 4).1

Minimally, narratives are generally taken to be complex representations that describe

or depict a particular series of events or happenings happenings that are
meaningfully related over time in ways that cannot be captured in purely logical or
formal terms (Lamarque 2004, 394, see also Lamarque & Olsen 1994, 225). Narratives
do not merely represent token events as occurring in a temporally ordered sequence:
they depict such events as being related in significant ways in other words, they tell a
story.
Bearing these basic conditions in mind, Currrie (2010) offers a conservative
proposal for distinguishing narratives from other kinds of artifact. He contends that,
narratives are the means by which someone communicates a story to someone
else. Narratives represent their stories (Currie 2010, 1).2
In line with this emphasis on their essentially communicative function, Currie holds
that narratives do not occur just anywhere in nature. Rather narratives are a special
kind of representational artifact. They are products of a particular kind of labour:
story-makers make stories (Currie 2010, 3). On Curries (2010) account the vehicles
of narratives whether they are imagistic or verbal are always fashioned for the
purpose of telling a story (Currie 2010, p. 5).
In sum, to accept this account, narratives are, in essence, specially constructed
representations that have a particular purpose: they necessarily serve the
communicative end of story telling. In a similar vein, Cobley (2014, 2-8) also
understands narratives to be essentially representational creations creations that
involve the selective arrangement and ordering of discursive signs of some sort.
A great advantage of conceiving of narratives as representational artifacts with
specific storytelling functions is that it wards off any concern that the notion of
narrative is so loose that narratives wind up being found simply everywhere. To hold
such a view is to endorse pan-narrativism the idea that all things the world in-itself,
human lives are, at root, narrative in nature. Pan-narrativism arguably stretches the
concept of narrative so widely and elastically as to make it trivial or vacuous; it would
include any and all activities or performances and indeed all happenings of any sort.
Narratives, on such a view, are to be found even in the farthest reaches of the physical
universe, even in the absence of any agents who might relate or enjoy them.
Holding that narratives are representational artifacts produced for special
communicative functions provides a ready made prophylactic that protects against an
unattractive pan-narrativism. To adopt the relatively conservative view about what
narratives are, as propounded by Currie and Cobley, considerably limits the sorts of
things that might be counted as narratives. To take an illustrative example it is surely
possible to tell a story about the formation of layers of earth by reconstructing a bit of
geological history on the basis of knowing certain facts. Gibson (2004, 147) supplies
the example of a geologist who tells the story about how an ancient forest came into
being long after, and precisely where was once an ancient sea. This is based on the
findings that a layer of coal sits above a layer of limestone, where the coal is taken as
evidence of the ancient forest and limestone is taken as evidence of the ancient sea.
Here it is easy to see what is the narrative and what is its subject matter. For although
we tell such geological tales it seems perfectly clear that although, the earths strata
may be the material from which a geological narrative can be constructed they do
not themselves constitute a narrative (Currie 2010, 21). One could say only
metaphorically or figuratively that the mineral strata tell a story about the earth.
That is all well and good, but it appears to spell bad news for the possibility that
bodies might generate or embed narratives. For, unless a special case can be made to
distinguish them, what holds for stratified layers of earth also seems to hold for what
goes on in and with our bodies.
Conceiving of narratives as representational artifacts raises difficult questions about
what it might mean for bodies to produce representational artifacts with story-telling
 impulses of another person by body contact, sight of the eyes in gesture and vocalization (Trevarthen, 198
face and hands, the sounds of speech, and gentle touching, and of infants less than 1 month old with no a
he or she can recognize the mothers voice (Condon and Sander, indulge in similar dramas of vocal and gestura
1974; Brazelton, 1979; Nagy, 2011). If calm and alert after the 2009). These are semiotic events of imagin
transition to a very dierent environment, the newborn may which, months later, develop into stories tol
contribute to a precisely timed imitative exchange of expressions of song (Bjrkvold, 1992; Malloch and T
functions. What are andthe pauses with another person,
representational vehicles a dialog
of such of movements
body narratives?that andWhereelaboratedoforms of language (Halliday, 1
evolves as an emotional event lasting a few seconds (Trevarthen, 1998). We are born to be story-making c
they get their content?
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even if a persons episodes
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embodied experiences associated withconversation, it lend or of music, appear to be essentia
themselves to, or callHuman out forexchanges
and benefit from narration.
of purposes and feelings are mediated regulation of all forms of movement (Dama
Anyone who endorses
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eyes, theor face,
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for conveying states of human consciousness (Trevarthen, 200
hands, and the whole body, all active in well-ordered sequences They make predictable patterns of engagem
narratives or that bodies might be the subject matter of stories. Yet while either of
from birth, and all conspicuously shaped to make signals that mutual sympathetic involvement in vocal and
these possibilities another
might be humanrealized, without
being will appreciatefurther theoretical
(Trevarthen, 1978,backing
2012). of there is noin feeling. As Adam Smith said
changes
good reason to thinkThethat bodies narrate
movements by telling
are synchronized to stories
express of a their
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energy showing of a regulatory tide of vitality (Figure 2), the to instrumental Music what order and method
rhythm of which relates to autonomic or visceral processes they break it into proper parts and divisions
2. Narratives in action?
that give the internal psychic time (Table 2) of an integrated enabled both to remember better what has
Self to arousal of sequences of cognitive elements, intentional frequently to foresee somewhat of what is to
It might be thoughtacts,thatandthetheidea that bodies
aective, can tell
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of expressions in own wouldofgain
enjoyment Music arises partly from memor
support if it turns out that embodied
communication (Delamontactivity has an
et al., 1999; inherent
Keltner, 2003; narrative
Wittmann, structure.
foresight.Some
(Smith, 1777/1982, p. 204). Imagi
2009; Meissner
developmental psychologists hold andthatWittmann,
embodied 2011). The movements
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from
intricately ordered with prospective sensory control common the times experienced in familiar episodes of ex
very early on. Thus,to allfororganisms
example,(Trevarthen
Delafield-Butt and Delafield-Butt
et al., 2011; Trevarthen (2015, et al., 1)the locate
vitality the
contours of which may be anticip
origins of narrative2012).
in the innate sensorimotor intelligence of a hypermobile shared human
with companions.
body. As these authors Within seetheit,first 2 months,structure
narrative developments in the alertness
is already presentand even inWethetrace the intensity contour of ener
focus of the infants attention to human signals, especially for over four phases of a message or shared
intentional and by their lights, intelligently planned movements of the prenatal,
finding and keeping eye-to-eye contact and precise synchrony the introduction attentive expressions invite
midterm fetus. with vocal and manual expressions, encourages a parent to purposefulness; the first response from a
The structure ofshare
fetaldialogs
embodied
described activity exhibits a distinctive
as proto-conversations (Bateson, pattern that unfolds
1979). partner provokes the development of the
Expressions of intention, awareness, and feelings are passed peak of coincident excitation in mutual int
over a fourfold temporal sequence, marking the following phases: introduction;
between infant and parent in proto-narrative envelopes of at the climax, after which the intensity of
development; climax;vitality and resolution
(Stern, 1999, 2010), (Fig.
with1).an evolving shape as celebrations eort reduces in a resolution. Then those
engaged, separate, or engage in a new narr
creating new meanings and revisiting old on
rise and fall in excitement and eort may
the semiotic rituals of animals (Tinbergen, 19
1994).
A narratives nature exists in its intern
feeling and form as well as in its rhythmic
created form between two or more persons,
aspects of the so-called inner lifephysical
have formal properties similar to those of
of motion and rest, of tension and relea
FIGURE

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of
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low-intensity
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(ii)
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p. 223). Co-created narrative engagement g
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Why think this structure is narrative in nature? Arguably because a similar
participants
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four-fold
the quality of individual experience and hum
From
Trevarthen
and
Delafield-Butt
(2013a).
structure is found in semiotic accounts of narrative and action, which identify the four
its structures are reflections of patterns of
stages as: contract; competence; performance and sanction. These stages are taken to
constitute the canonical structure of all narratives in semiotics (Greimas 1970; Martin
8
& Ringham 2000,Frontiers
31-32;in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
Paolucci 2016). September 2015 |

Interestingly, this kind of structure is found not just in the solo activity of fetuses
but also in affective expression, imitation and collaborative movements seen in early
infancy as well. In this regard, Trevarthen and Delafield-Butt (2013) speak of a
signature vitality dynamics inherent in infantile play (Stern 2010). Such play also
shows the same distinctive pattern, involving bodily arousal and points of focused
intensity a profile that is also reflected in embodied ways through changes in heart
and respiration rates, affective responses and expressive movements connected to the
drama of the unfolding situation. The end-directed movements of the prenatal fetus are
thus natural precursors for the structured movements of postnatal infants that target
distal goals, and their embodied engagements with others.
How do these allegedly unspoken, narratively structured activities come to be
connected with narratives of the more familiar sort? The claim is that embodied
activities eventually take on social meanings. Embodied activities can take on a
specific social meaning and significance if they are appropriately situated in
intersubjective contexts. Consider how pointing behavior emerges around the age of
nine-months in human children. If we follow Vygotskys (1986) analysis, an infants
spontaneous reaching movement for an object not within reach naturally becomes an
expressive movement of pointing in the right interactional context. The reach is
instrumental for the infant, but in the presence of the other it becomes expressive, and
its expressive character is reinforced for the infant by the action of the caregiver, who
moves the object to within reach, or gives the object to the infant. Through ongoing
practice and repetition, the infants reach becomes the action of pointing for a desired
object. We can see how, in this case, a movement that starts its life as nothing more
than an instrumental goal-directed embodied action is transformed into an expressive
communication in an intersubjective context.
Once children are able to use expressive, communicative actions the door is open
for yet more sophisticated forms of interaction with caregivers interactions that pave
the way for the development of narrative abilities proper. A childs first, rudimentary
attempts at pre-linguistic narration are found in their acts of pretend play. For in at
least some of those acts, children act out a particular sequence of happenings.
The creation of such enacted, playful narratives is often accompanied by rather
than [achieved] solely through language (Nelson 2003, p. 28). Much of the
language that goes along with acts of play is not part of the narration, but part of the
performance. The mother takes the toy car and says Zoom, zoom, zoom. The child
then takes a turn. The vocalization, and gradually, the words, become part of the
structure of the pretend play. Commenting on this, the mother says, The car goes
zoom. Later, taking the first steps towards linguistic narration, she says, addressing
the child, You played so nicely with the car this afternoon, didnt you? Later the
child appropriates this account saying, I play with car.
Mastery of the capacity to narrate begins in this small way and depends upon, and
is strongly scaffolded by the supportive contributions of others. Caregivers elicit
accounts of just-past actions or events and, children, as young as 2-3 years, begin to
appropriate the narratives of others as their own (Bruner 1996; Legerstee 2005; Nelson
2002; Reddy 2008, 2012; Trevarthen 2013). Upon the later, full-fledged mastery of
linguistic narrative capacities, in the words of Delafield-Butt and Trevarthen (2015, 2),
the elements of and key players in particular dramas the relations between objects
and participants, their motivation and character can become placed and named in
artificial, learned and conventional language.
This is the basis for the claim that fully-fledged narrative capacities emerge from
and are rooted in early proto-conversations and collaborative play of infants and talk
of children and adults (Delafield-Butt and Trevarthen 2015, 1). According to this
developmental story, the roots of narrative are present in a nascent way in the
embodied activity of relatively isolated individuals prenatal fetuses even though the
capacity to narrate only fully emerges after individuals are immersed in intersubjective
contexts and benefit from mastery of special kinds of sociocultural practices, relying
on the support of others.
All in all, if we accept this ontogenetic account, there is a direct developmental path
leading from intelligently structured embodied activity activity that starts in the
womb to meaningful narration.3 What is important is that, if these theorists are
correct, then in all of these cases there is an inherently narrative structure and
dynamics to embodied activity a structure and dynamics that is quite independent of,
and which pre-exists any that might be supplied by narratives of a conventional sort
that would depict such activities and interactions.
These considerations can make it tempting to conclude that embodied action and
narrative have the same basic structure. Actions take time to unfold; they have a
beginning, they develop, they accomplish a goal, and they conclude. Indeed, it is
tempting to think that, Narrative structure is even inherent in the praxis of social
interaction before it achieves linguistic expression (Bruner 1990, 77, emphasis
added).
On the face of it, Richard Menarys (2008) account of embodied narratives appears
to offer a similar suggestion and good reasons to embrace it. Menary cautions against
accepting those narrative accounts of the self which conceive of selves as abstractions
that are disconnected from embodied experience. He cites Kerby (1993) and Hutto
(2006) who describe embodied experiences as having a dramatic pre-narrative yet
narrative-ready quality.
One of Menarys central concerns, however, is that we should not ask or expect
narratives to do too much work for us when thinking about selves. We should not
expect narratives to always structure our actions. In this respect, he resists the idea that
in every case our intentional actions are reflectively guided by our narrative
conception of who we are, as proposed by Velleman (2006), MacKenzie (2007), and
others. On this view, [n]arratives do not simply report sequences of events or actions.
By explaining the causal connections between the events or actions they recount, they
give shape and coherence to our lives, or at least to the various sequences that make up
our lives (Mackenzie 2007, 2689). Menary wants to safeguard the idea that most of
our actions are pre-reflective skillful accomplishments that do not require or involve
reflective guidance. He wants to resist reading a structure conferred by narratives back
into pre-narrative, pre-narrated action.
Strawson (2004) too worries about the claim that all of our structured actions have a
narrative character. He holds that the narrativist view becomes trivially true as a kind
of unhelpful and uninformative stipulation if it is held, for example, that making
coffee is a Narrative that involves Narrativity, because you have to think ahead, do
things in the right order (Strawson 2004, 439). In holding that our actions are not
inherently or primarily narrative in character, Menary (2008) avoids Strawsons charge
of triviality.
So, while Menary acknowledges the importance of narratives and draws a
connecting line between the actions of embodied agents and the narratives that depict
them, he also insists on drawing another line that demarcates pre-narrative embodied
activity from the domain of the properly narrative. This demarcation reflects the
difference he finds between two senses of self one as an embodied experiencer that
acts in the world and the other sort of self who is endowed with narrative capacities
and is thus capable of reflecting on and giving account of his or her own actions, and
the actions of others.
There is a threefold distinction here between (1) thinking of action as pre-narrative,
versus (2) thinking of action as implicitly structured by narrative, versus (3) thinking
of action as explicitly guided by narrative reflection (Velleman 2006; Mackenzie
2007). Menary rejects (3) as being the usual case, although allows that in some
significant instances such reflective guidance can happen. He also rejects (2), which he
attributes to Schechtman (1996). This is the idea that narratives reflecting norms and
customs, as well as personal experiences, start to inform our behaviors without our
being aware of it. For either (2) or (3), narratives impose structure on actions, either
implicitly or explicitly, bestowing coherency and meaning where there was none. In
contrast, for Menary, pre-narrative actions are neither incoherent nor meaningless to
begin with, and do not require the imposition of narrative structure to make them
coherent and meaningful.
Despite the line he draws between pre-narrative embodied activity and narrative
practices, Menarys conception of the embodied, acting self might be thought to allow
for, if not to encourage, the idea that there is a proto-narrative structure intrinsic to
action. After all, he tells us that, Our embodied experiences are ready to be exploited
in a narrative of those experiences. Narrative arises from a sequence of bodily
experiences, perceptions and actions in a quite natural manner (Menary 2008, 75,
emphasis added). In this context, he cites Marc Slorss (1998) idea that movement is
narratable because of its sequential structure, perceived by the agent as he is engaged
in action. Thus Narratives arise directly from the lived experience of the embodied
subject and these narratives can be embellished and reflected upon if we need to find a
meaningful form or structure in that sequence of experiences (Menary 2008, 76,
emphases added). A possible way of reading this claim is to take it as saying that
narrative is anchored in the proto-narrative structure of embodied activity, where
proto implies an original, first, primitive or early form of narrativity is already in
place.
Seen through this lens, this is a way of interpreting Menarys (2008) statement that
[i]t is not narratives that shape experiences [or actions] but, rather, experiences [or
actions] that structure narratives. Experiences [and actions] are the sequence of events
that give structure and content to narratives the temporal ordering, the structure is
already there in our lived, bodily experience (Menary 2008, 79). Read as advocating
the existence of proto-narratives, Menary would (2008) be agreeing with Bruner
(1990), and the position advanced by Delafield-Butt and Trevarthen (2015). Yet this is
not the best way to read Menary since he nowhere claims that pre-narrative structure
equates to proto-narrative structure.

3. Structured embodied activity sans narrative

Is there another way to make sense of the idea that bodies tell narratives of their own?
Might we accept that embodied activity is proto-narrative in the sense that it supplies
structure and content to the narratives we tell by more conventional means?
While the developmental evidence supplies a reason to think that embodied activity
has a signature structure (we will return to the question of whether this is a narrative
structure), it is much harder to account for the original narrative content that bodies are
meant to supply.
With respect to the question of content, Goldies (2012) account of narratives
which is more liberal than that of Currie (2010) or Cobley (2014) might appear to
offer a way of making sense of the idea that bodies embed and can tell their own
stories. Goldies account does not insist that all narratives are artifacts or that they
must have an essentially communicative function. Instead he maintains that, a
narrative or story is something that can be told or narrated or just thought through in
narrative thinking (p. 2). Elaborating on the idea of narrative thinking he tells us that
it, involves not text or discourse, but another kind of representation: thought (p. 3).
Goldie (2012) is thus open to the possibility that narratives can be processes as well
as products, and that many narratives are, publically narratable but not necessarily
publically narrated (p. 4). On the face of it, this makes Goldies (2012) account much
friendlier to the possibility that body narratives might exist without being publically
narrated. This is especially the case as he seeks to remain as neutral as possible about
the content and vehicles of narrative thinking (p. 5).
Also, on the positive side, Goldies (2012) view of narratives, although less
restrictive than that proposed by Currie or Cobley, is not so lax as to be at risk of pan-
narrativism. Thus, for Goldie (2012, 6), it is always the case that, a narrative is
distinct from what it is a narrative of. He thereby respects the distinction between
representation and what is represented (Goldie 2012, 4). Thus he draws a clear line
between narratives and what they narrate, thereby blocking any threat of creeping pan-
narrativism.
Yet, even on Goldies (2012) more liberal construal of what narrative might be,
there is a sting in the tail for advocates of the idea of body narratives. This is because,
for Goldie, narratives are always and everywhere representational. Indeed, for him this
is one of their most fundamental, non-negotiable characteristics. This raises an
important question about whether representational thoughts need to, or in fact, feature
in most of what we do and experience namely, whether our structured actions require
anything that might be thought of as unconscious or implicit bodily narrativizing.
It is not clear what verdict Goldie (2012) would give about the kind of thinking that
goes into structuring everyday embodied activities, such as reaching for objects or
making cups of coffee. Does all such activity involve representing the sequence of
events in question in such a way that would qualify as narrative thinking or not? Does
it involve representing events narratively, even if only implicitly?
A major agenda item of the more radical embodied and enactivist approaches to
mind that we have elsewhere defended has been to establish that all or even most of
our goal-directed everyday activities do not depend on contentful mental
representations at any level or in any fashion (see Chemero 2009; Gallagher 2008;
Hutto and Myin 2013; Thompson 2007). Radical embodied and enactive approaches
are united in their wholesale opposition to the mainstream view that cognition
essentially involves the collection and transformation of information in order to
represent the world. They offer an alternative to accounts of cognition that take
representation as their central notion (Varela et al., 1991, 172).
Anyone who doubts that we need to implicitly, tacitly, or sub-personally represent
possibilities in contentful ways in order to act on them will see a fundamental problem
in making appeal to Goldies account of narrative thinking as a way of making sense
of the content of body narratives. This is because, as noted above, Goldie takes
representation to be a necessary condition for narrating, and thus for narrative
thinking. Consequently, if bodily activities and movements do not involve intrinsic
representational processes, they cannot embed narratives or tell stories of their own.
So much, then, for the idea that bodies might tell their own contentful narratives.
But what of the idea that embodied activity has an inherently narrative structure? How,
if not by assuming the existence of proto-narratives, is it possible to make sense of the
idea that there is an inherent structure to experiences and actions that makes them ripe
for narration? There is another possibility to explore in this vicinity. We can accept
that narrative taps into the inherent structure in sequences of action and interaction,
while resisting the idea that such structures are already inherently narrative in
character.
We propose that the reason it is no accident that the contours of our narratives
naturally conform to the structures of actions and events they narrate is that narratives
in general are meant to and strive to capture the most salient features of the sequence
of happenings they describe. This is a feature of any well-crafted narrative.
What do most narratives depict? In principle, it is possible to narrate any
describable sequence of events as we might in telling the story of a piece of
geological history. The events in question might fall into the domain of the personal or
impersonal, the human or non-human, the microscopic or the macroscopic. However,
as a matter of fact, we are primarily interested in and, hence, narrate our own actions
and the actions of others, and the dramas that surround them at the familiar scale in
which we encounter middle-sized dried goods (Austin 1962, 8). Moreover, as
Herman (2007, 11) observes, narrative prototypically roots itself in the lived, felt
experience of human and human-like agents interacting in an ongoing way with their
cohorts and surrounding environment. Thats hardly surprising. We are wired up to
be especially interested in such happenings.
When it comes to narrating embodied activity or intersubjective engagements our
interests drive us to focus on the most salient joints typically the emotionally
charged moments of such dramas. Here it must be recalled that selective depiction
lies at the heart of narrating. Indeed, the act of selecting what is depicted is
crucial to the process of narrative and provides a demonstration of a general fact about
representation: that representation allows some things to be depicted and not others
(Cobley 2014, 6).
Since these dramas naturally unfold in particular sequences of actions and events
occurring at a spatio-temporal scale at which we ordinarily witness things happening,
it is easy to see how narratives draw on the pre-existing structure of action: The baby
really enjoyed playing with that toy; she let me know when she wanted to play with it;
but after a while she threw it to the ground and was done with it. Action structure gets
built upon, but predates the structure built by narrative.
Thus rather than thinking of narratives as reading structure back into action or
imposing it on embodied activity, we can think of narratives about what we do as
attempts to get at the structure that is already there in a given bout of embodied
activity. The narratives we tell about events, can tap into the dramatic structure of
action and depict it more or less faithfully. But there is no reason to think that such
structure is already inherently narrative in nature in any stronger sense than that it
lends itself and is ripe for narration.
What are we to make of these results? Summing up, we appear to be at an impasse,
torn between the needs of theory and the needs of practice. On the one hand, there are
theoretical reasons to be cautious about endorsing the view that bodies narrate. Yet, on
the other hand, the notion of a body narrative appears to do important practical work in
body psychotherapy.
In the next and final section we examine whether structured embodied activity
and not body narratives per se might be doing the required work in body
psychotherapy.

4. Body psychotherapy without body narratives

What is the nature of the work that needs to be done in body psychotherapy? As
described by Payne (2006), for example, body-related therapy may be based on a
movement dialogue between therapist and patient. The therapist may move and
posture to reflect or mirror the patients movement patterns (see e.g., Koch et al.
2015), which may allow the patient to gain a perspective on her own movement, and
for the therapist to grasp the significance of the patients movement and emotional
state via a form of interaffectivity (Fuchs & Koch 2014). The therapist may also
engage with and respond to the patients emotional expression as manifested in their
movements, with the aim of creating a non-verbal communion a form of kinaesthetic
intersubjectivity (Samaritter & Payne 2013).
To understand this structure, endorsed both by ontogenetic and semiotic analysis,
we think it best to translate it into terms related to enactive, embodied approaches to
cognition:

Introduction or contract: taken as response to an affordance that which

 presents itself as a viable action in a particular context
Development or competence: as part of the relational structure of affordance,
what the actor is capable of, in terms that can be defined by skill, interest and
focus
Climax or performance: the actual doing of the action.
Resolution or sanction: the resulting situation that can be judged or evaluated,
by oneself or others.

One can typically work backwards from an evaluation of the resulting situation to
ask whether in the doing of the action something went wrong, or whether the skill,
interest or focus was misaligned with the situation a misalignment of agent and
environment. When the action is part of an interaction with others as when the
affordances are social in character the details are more complex.4
This intersubjective embodied engagement may be described, more or less
faithfully, through narrations that reflect on the interactions that occurred (Panhofer &
Payne 2011). The interaction itself, as well as the narrative reiteration of it, can inform
the therapists clinical reasoning process, in situ, with the patient (Gallagher and Payne
2015). The way the patient moves with the therapist, or does not move, will inform the
therapist and help her to assess ways forward for the patient; or indeed, in the
movement process, the patient may find his or her own ways forward, or may lead the
therapist to a certain assessment. Thus, reflecting on the interactive movement can
allow the patient to tell a deeper, richer story about their situation, and the experiences
of both the therapist and the patient their feelings, sensations, thoughts, images that
get expressed in bits of narrative may inform clinical judgment and promote
understanding for both of them.
The embodied action begins with an affordance presented by the therapist herself,
as part of the therapeutic situation. Given the skill, interest and intention of the patient
in engaging with the therapist, as well as the skills of the therapist, a performance
follows, and the resulting situation can be judged or evaluated, through narrative, by
the therapist or by the therapist and patient together. In this regard, the final structure
of the action includes the resolution, which forms a new affordance to continue into
further interaction.
In this kind of therapeutic interaction, with individuals presenting with socio-
emotional disorders, the therapist can identify disruptions in prospective timing and in
the affective integration of motor intentions. Recent research on Autism Spectrum
Disorders (ASD), for example, has shown characteristic disruptions in basic sensory-
motor and proprioceptive processes (Brincker and Torres 2013; Torres 2013; see
Gallagher and Varga 2015 for review). Thus, in subjects with ASD, one would expect
to find errors in sensorimotor capacity to efficiently enact desired intentions
regularly thwarting success, creating distress and isolation, and consequent social and
emotional compensations (Delafield-Butt and Trevarthen 2015, 12; see Trevarthen et
al. 2006).
Likewise, more nuanced movement-rhythm disruptions may occur in anxiety
disorders, negative symptoms of schizophrenia, depression, or post-traumatic stress
disorder (see Fuchs 2013; Fuchs and Koch 2014; Martin et al. 2016; Rhricht and
Priebe 2006) leading to misunderstandings on the part of others. Therapy for such
emotional disorders, through the sharing of imitative and creative movement projects
such as non-verbal expressive movement, dance, play, drama, and so on, can derive
benefit from understanding of core intentional and affective dynamics and their
regulation (Delafield-Butt and Trevarthen 2015, 12).
The non-verbal, or minimally verbal conversation in this interaction is a case of
coordination-with (Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009) that goes beyond individual
unidirectional embodied actions, therapist to patient. Coordination-with involves
coordination or attunement between patient and therapist who give and take as they
engage in a variety of bodily expressions, including gaze direction, positioning,
utterances and intonations, gestures, facial expressions, hands-on or other physical
intentional interactions, leading to a mutual enactive coupling in instances of joint
attention and joint action.
Why should this work as therapy? As Delafield-Butt and Trevarthen (2015, 8)
suggest, episodes of dramatic or more aroused action, of speaking in conversation
appear to be essential in the emotional regulation of all forms of movement and to
all forms of inter-subjective co-creation of meaning in dyadic states of human
consciousness They make predictable patterns of engagement, and lead to mutual
sympathetic involvement in vocal and motor expressions of changes in feeling.
The point is that structured, dramatic engagements with others reveals more than
the individual agent can discover for herself; such movements, and their affective and
self-related dimensions, can be extended and restructured through narrative.
Rather than seeing this as a matter of deriving a pre-existing proto-narrative
structure and content, we can see the narrations as complementing the embodied
activities and engagements by adding something new and quite important into the
therapeutic mix.
Morag (2016), for example, stresses the need for the therapist to recognize the
importance of what gets added to our memory of specific past events when we narrate
such events much later on using conceptual and descriptive resources that were
unavailable at the time the target memory was formed. She readily admits, the
relation between the memory and the emotional symptom lends itself to the kind of
storytelling familiar from everyday life and the therapeutic setting (Morag 2016,
126). Nevertheless, given that she denies that emotions come with subtitles in the
form of conceptual contents, she is sensitive to the fact that When we remember what
we did, or what other people did, we may also rethink, redescribe, and refeel the past
(Hacking 1995, 249).
Acknowledging that embodied activity does not come pre-narrated also emphasizes
the importance for body psychotherapy of the bodily aspect itself, without reducing it
to or already inflating it into a narrative format. Consider Rucinska and Reijmerss
(2014, 39) suggestion that in play therapy:

the action of playing [ . . . ] counters the tendency to focus exclusively on the

meanings of words and narratives, text and discourse. Instead, playing adds and
 reinforces the narratives, allowing new perceptions and meanings to be created
through the use of objects and interaction with the therapist. That is because playing
should allow mutual creation of meanings to a greater extent than mere speaking as
it incorporates non-verbal communication, and so, has more degrees of freedom in
how to interpret it. When therapist and client play with objects, [then] words,
[verbal] narratives, text and discourse are less important as the playing takes over
their role. The meanings get offloaded to the objects one is playing with, and
through staying in the play discourse, a new dimension to narrating the problems
emerges.

In the final analysis, it seems possible to understand the complementary roles

played by embodied engagements and narration and how they work together to build
upon and add to the existing resources of clients and practitioners of body
psychotherapy without embracing the idea of a body narrative as anything more than a
metaphor. Embodied activity can invite and encourage narration without it being the
case that body psychotherapy uncovers and gives voice to a pre-existing body
narrative. We maintain that accepting this conclusion makes better sense of the
practice of body psychotherapy and the important role that narratives have to play in
that practice even though, as appears to be the case, bodies do not generate or tell any
narratives of their own.

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1
As with other important concepts, it is questionable that it is possible to give a
precise definition of narratives in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. In
line with this, some narratologists question the value of trying to identify such
 criteria in order to answer the binary question of whether a given text qualifies as
a narrative. In line with this shift in thinking, it has been proposed that it is more
productive to assess the narrativity of particular texts where narrativity is
understood as a fuzzy set allowing variable degrees of membership, but
centered on prototypical cases that everybody recognizes as stories (Ryan 2007,
p. 18). Of course, there are different lists of what the core properties of what any
such fuzzy set ought to include. Ryans (2007) stresses the importance of spatial,
temporal, mental, formal and pragmatic dimensions. By her lights, if texts lack
these dimensions they would not be prevented from appearing in a narrative
text, but they cannot, all by themselves, support its narrativity (p. 19).
2
For certain purposes it will be important to distinguish stories, narratives and
narrations. The content conveyed by any particular narrative is its story the
particular happenings of some world. A narrative is a particular way of telling a
story. As such, stories and narratives, narrations can stand in one-to-many
relations, depending on how finely we choose to carve things up. For example,
there is more than one way to narrate and also more than one narrative version of
the story Little Red Riding Hood.
3
Delafield-Butt and Trevarthen (2015) characterize this path as one in which
single, non-verbal actions are organized into complex projects of expressive
and explorative sense-making and where the latter eventually become
conventional meanings and explanations with propositional narrative power (p.
1).
4
Indeed, such interactions may require the kind of detailed microanalysis found in
Goodwin (2000).