Body as Shadow

Erica Lorentz fell in love with dance as a child. Later, she was interested in a broad range of dance and movement modalities that brought her into energic, emotional, and imaginal expression. At the age of twenty-three, she began working with her authentic movement (Movement as Active Imagination) mentor, Janet Adler. Adler put her feet on the path of an embodied approach to psychology. Authentic movement taught her not only how to tune deeply into her own embodied soul (energy, emotions, imagination, somatic unconscious, and subtle body), but also it taught her how to sit with and witness others without judgement or interpretation. This became a foundation for her analytic work.In graduate school, Erica Lorentz focused on object relations under the tutelage of psychoanalyst Dr. Elaine Seigel. Working with autistic and schizophrenic children and adolescents demanded that she use an embodied nonverbal approach to create a transference relationship. After graduating, she taught object relations at Antioch Graduate School of Professional Psychology for four years.Her training did not feel complete. It left out the creative and archetypal power of the unconscious world. In 1988, she began training to become a psychoanalyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts (IRSJA). At this time, she had a clinical practice and taught courses and lectures on Jung and the expressive arts at the Jung Center in Houston TX. Eventually, she became the Director of the School for Expressive Arts.In 1998, she wrote her thesis on “Jung, Spirituality, and the Body” and became a Jungian psychoanalyst (IAAP). The research for her thesis revealed how much Jung honored and spoke of the importance of embodied experience for transformation and how central it was in his theory. She became a training analyst for the IRSJA. Presently, she is a training analyst in the C. G. Jung Institute of New England and has a private practice. Since 1986, she has given lectures and taught workshops focused on Jung and the body and embodied active imagination throughout the US and Canada, and in the UK. She has created several webinars for the Jung Platform and has been interviewed by Pacific radio. One of her lectures was filmed by New England Public Radio. In 2024, she had the honor of teaching in India for the Jungian psychoanalytic router training program, SMART, an expressive arts training program, and Christ University, where she gave a brief talk at the inauguration of the Indian Psychology Lab and a lecture for the graduate psychology department.

‘In her compelling new book, Erica Lorentz has provided us with both a practical and theoretically grounded approach to working with what she calls “embodied active imagination.” Beginning her book with an illuminating review of Jung’s own attention to what he called the “somatic unconscious” or “subtle body,” Lorentz shows how the simple inward-directed attention to an emotion, a sensation, or a symptom – all resident in the body – can ignite the imagination and restore the healing connection between childhood trauma and the psyche’s archetypal depths.‘Those of us who work in the trauma field know that one cannot access the original wounds of our patients, or the intensity of the original emotional experience itself (where potential healing energies lie), through left-hemispheric interpretations or verbal insight alone. For this we need what Lorentz (citing Janet Adler) calls the “grace of direct experience.” Her many case studies demonstrate the ways in which “embodied active imagination,” carefully applied within the context of a secure therapeutic relationship, can access such direct experience and lead to the healing of those dissociative splits that have resulted from early unremembered trauma. Reading her book has already increased my understanding of the wounded psyche and the methods that best lead to its healing. I highly recommend this book.’

• About the authorIntroduction1. The embodied soul2. Body as shadow3. Jung’s embodied individuation process4. Psychoid phenomena and subtle body5. Embodied active imagination6. Movement as active imaginationConclusionWeaving theory into practiceReferencesIndex