From the Body to the Psyche: Group Body Therapy with Hospitalized Adolescents

The body participates intimately in psychical life, particularly during adolescence. Corporal references are upset and the psychical apparatus works at reformulating its representations of a body that has become pubescent.In our practice of hospital treatment, we offer group therapy using corporal (or psycho-motor) mediation inscribed around corporal feelings, including the dimensions of sensations, emotions and fantasy. The set-up that we offer enables a therapeutic approach aimed at identifying sensations and putting them into words, then elaborating the perceptions associated with them, while maintaining a setting whose structure is supposed to offset the risk of narcissistic collapse associated with the lifting of certain kinds of splitting.