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Forms of vitality. Exploring dynamic experience in psychology, arts,

psychotherapy, and development, by Daniel N. Stern

Article  in  Body Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy · August 2012

DOI: 10.1080/17432979.2012.674062

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Ulfried Geuter
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Author(s): Ulfried Geuter

Article title: BOOK REVIEWS
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Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy

Vol. ??, No. ?, Month?? 2012, 1–5

5 BOOK REVIEWS

Forms of vitality. Exploring dynamic experience in psychology, arts, psychother-

apy, and development, by Daniel N. Stern, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1 2010, 174 pp., £21.99 (22), ISBN 978-0-19-958606-6

10 In his outstanding book The Interpersonal World of the Infant, psychoanalyst

and developmental psychologist Daniel Stern (1985) had proposed the concept
of ‘vitality affects’. By this term, he wanted to conceptualise the fact that
categorical affects, such as rage or fear, are experienced in patterns of intensity,
time, and Gestalt. Now, Stern enlarges his view on the dynamic forms of
15 vitality. In his new book, he argues that forms of vitality are an aspect of
human experience in their own right. We come to know them by movement,
time, force, space, and intention. In language, they are described by words such
as floating, pushing, bounding, swinging, rushing, swelling, gliding, or
exploding.
20 In the first three chapters of his book, Stern outlines his general concept. He
holds that movement has a primacy of experience: ‘Vitality dynamics refer
mainly to the shifts in forces felt to be acting during an event in motion’ (p. 45).
Before we realise the ‘What’ and ‘Why’’ of any movement, we experience its
‘How’. Forms of vitality are the experience of this ‘How’ and they carry mental
25 contents: but they can also be experienced separately from them. They are
recorded in another strand of representation that is seen by Stern to be the
most fundamental one.
In Chapter 4, Stern argues that the arousal systems might be the possible
neuroscientific basis for vitality forms. He discusses five systems ‘with different
30 loci of origin in the brainstem’ (p. 60) using different neurotransmitters on
specific pathways. These systems are supposed to have ‘the finesse and
flexibility to shape the timing and intensity of arousal’ (p. 61). In the next
chapter, Stern refers to the arts to elucidate his thesis. A piece of music can be
‘andante’ or ‘allegro’. If we dance after it, we show it’s dynamics in the force,
35 the Gestalt, and the speed with which we move through space. ‘The arts have
paid far more attention to this aspect of experience than has psychology’, Stern
writes (p. 89). In contrast to psychology the arts had the intention to express
human aliveness.
Chapter 6 discusses the development of the vitality forms starting from the
40 movements of the foetus. Stern shows that regulation of arousal is a central
task in the development of a baby fostered by mothers. He argues that forms of
vitality are primary in human development. As he has extensively shown in
earlier writings, mothers attune to babies by matching their forms of vitality

ISSN 1743–2979 print/ISSN 1743–2987 online

ß 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17432979.2012.674062
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2 Book reviews

and mirroring what the baby is experiencing in a different modality, e.g.

45 answering their joyful kicking by the rhythm and intensity of sounds of the
mother’s voice.
The last chapter extensively deals with the implications of his concept for
psychotherapy. Dynamic forms of vitality are part of our episodic memories.
Thus, they can lead us to non-conscious experiences and implicit relational
50 knowledge. For this reason, the concept of the forms of vitality is of central
importance for psychotherapy. As Stern demonstrates, patients often reveal
more in the way that they move than in the words that they say. He gives an
example showing how he explores the dynamic forms of a man’s spontaneous
gesture, who talks about going to the fridge to get juice. By exploring the
55 gesture, the man became aware that he was often playing with the boundaries
of risks in his life. This example demonstrates something that is often done in
body psychotherapy: to explore the patient’s character, or his affect motor
schemas, or to track the emotional meaning of what he is talking about by
thoroughly observing the language of his body and behaviour. This is what
60 Pesso (2006) calls the ‘stage of the body’, which is unconsciously presenting
what is going on in the person. By observing behavioural signals, Reich had
tried to ascertain character structures. Stern’s aim, however, is not exploring
structure, but is in exploring form.
Stern gives a telling example of how the focus on vital experience can be
65 used clinically. A young patient suffered from a severe breakdown after his
girlfriend had separated from him. He had withdrawn into an impenetrable
anepia. No words got through to him. He only came out of this state when the
therapist asked him how he had felt the weight of his girlfriend shift on his
thighs when she last sat on his lap. This is a verbal intervention focusing on
70 body sensations belonging to verbal body psychotherapeutic interventions that
were named ‘inner techniques’ by Downing (1996).
Reading Stern, I missed that he neither refers to the clinical nor to the
theoretical body psychotherapeutic tradition, even if he did not want to do
that. Some ideas were already common beforehand. For instance, Stern has
75 taken central categories for describing forms of vitality from the dance
theoretician Rudolf von Laban, e.g. analysing movement by time, flow, and
space, but he does not mention that, even when he refers to von Laban (p. 85).
Also, Stern’s attempt at conceptualising vitality is not new within psychother-
apy and psychology, and was common within the vein of philosophy of life: a
80 philosophical movement against rationalism of enlightenment that pointed to
the difference between experiencing life and measuring natural phenomena at
the beginning of the twentieth century (Fellmann, 1996). This philosophical
school of thought, represented by Henry Bergson, was a pivot for Reich’s
thinking and he explicitly referred to Bergson (Reich, 1942) who had linked
85 perception to movement. Reich’s central question, ‘What is life?’ was the main
question of the European bio-philosophical discourse of the 1920s.
The effort to help people to feel their innate vitality also stood at the centre
of working with the body in the second big tradition of body oriented
psychotherapy, stemming from reform gymnastics in Germany, which was
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90 introduced to some important psychotherapists, such as Otto Fenichel and

Fritz Perls, via Elsa Gindler (Geuter, Heller, & Weaver, 2010).
Functional Relaxation, a body oriented psychotherapy method strong in
the German-speaking world founded by Marianne Fuchs aimed her work
explicitly at looking for ‘what is vital in somebody’ (Dietrich, 1995, p. 105).
95 Moreover, German expression psychology, based on the life philosophical
system of Ludwig Klages, focused on expressive movements realising the
Gestalt of mental impulses with respect to the three features of intensity, time,
and direction; and not on the expression of emotions (Geuter, 1992, pp. 94ff).
Expressive psychology, however, was more interested in traits to diagnose
100 character. In contrast, Stern observes processes. By pondering on these
different traditions Stern’s standpoint could have been made clearer.
Clinically, while building a bridge towards more body oriented psy-
chotherapies, Stern only looks at arts therapies, i.e. music therapy and
especially dance movement therapy. He focuses on movement and does not
105 seem to care about approaches focusing on experience in psychotherapy.
Amazingly enough, he sees vitality in movement as ‘the primary manifestation
of being animate’ (p. 9), but does not see it in breathing. Breath, however, was
central for both of the two primary Body Psychotherapy traditions (and in
Gestalt). As Stern uses micro-gestures as a tool for opening up the vitality
110 dynamics of a person, others do this by tracking breathing patterns. In
different attempts at body awareness, breath is seen as a gateway to motility
and to experiencing the vital forces of the body.
Historically, in his outline on arts, Stern refers to the ‘Bauhaus’ as bringing
the different arts together with the idea of an artistic synthesis. But he does not
115 mention that the painting class in the Bauhaus, directed by Johannes Itten,
always started with breath exercises. Breath also played a central role in the
concept of a rhythm between tension and relaxation in the psychotherapeutic
systems of Johannes Heinrich Schultz (Geuter, 2000), founder of the relaxation
technique Autogenic Therapy, and of the Jungian psychotherapist, Gustav
120 Heyer (Geuter, 2000).
In Reichian Vegetotherapy, breath was referred to as freeing aliveness.
Reich (1942) put vitality within the context of libido theory: hence vitality was
regarded as life energy. This is different from what Stern means by vitality.
Stern’s theory is not linked in any way to the tradition of drive theory. But
125 Stern also talks of ‘aliveness’ without defining his terms properly.
Also the use of the concept of arousal remains somewhat unclear in the
context of Stern’s argumentation. He introduces a quantitative, as well as a
physiological, aspect into his theory, going beyond the clinical use of the local
micro-analysis of gestures. But arousal, for example, does not explain the forms
130 of vitality named by Stern as ‘holding still’, ‘drawn out’, ‘gentle’, or ‘fading’
(p. 7). Physiologically, forms of vitality result both from arousal as well as from
inhibition. In addition, they are not only coined by impulses coming from the
brain stem, as Stern writes.
As the polyvagal theory of Porges (1995, 2001) shows, they result from an
135 interplay of sympathetic and para-sympathetic autonomic nervous processes
with central nervous processes in connection with the physiological state of
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the body. Porges (2009) has explicitly criticised that the arousal concept does
not adequately discriminate between excitatory and inhibitory neuronal
pathways. Moreover, clinically, Stern seems not to be aware that working
140 with arousal in emotion regulation is a central feature of Body Psychotherapy
(Geuter, 2009). Although introducing arousal theory, he does not refer to any
discussions on arousal in psychotherapy.
This limitation of the scope of discussions makes Stern’s new book different
from his former ones, such as The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985) or
145 The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (2004). It seems as if
Stern, in his later years, would take the freedom to put the concept of the forms
of vitality on the agenda of psychotherapy, more in the form of an essay,
without attempting to be precise in defining his theory in contrast to others.
Nevertheless, the consequences that Stern draws for psychotherapy should
150 be taken into consideration. I fully agree with his belief that, working on the
level of microanalysis, in analyzing a single gesture of a patient, often reveals
psychological themes ‘in unsuspected details that would not have popped up
using other techniques’ (p. 132). Stern clearly states that the micro-level is ‘just
as deep in meaning’ as any other one (p. 136). A further general relevance for
155 psychotherapy lies in the importance of the forms of vitality for the
psychotherapeutic relationship. For this relation is similar to a mother’s
attunement to her infant: ‘The flesh of the therapeutic relationship is formed in
part from the interplay of vitality forms’ (p. 149). The way the therapist is vital
by himself co-determines what the patient is able to experience in the
160 therapy room.
All in all, Stern’s book makes it abundantly clear that the topic of vitality
and the forms of vitality is of great theoretical, as well as clinical, relevance to
movement and also to Body Psychotherapy. But Stern only opens the subject
matter up. Deeper theoretical questions still remain unanswered.

165
References

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170 Downing, G. (1996). Körper und Wort in der Psychotherapie [Body and word in
psychotherapy]. Munich: Kösel.
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nineteenth century] (pp. 269–349). Reinbek: Rowohlt.
175 Geuter, U. (1992). The professionalization of psychology in Nazi Germany. New York,
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Geuter, U. (2009). Emotionsregulation und Emotionserkundung in der

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Ulf Geuter
Private practice, Berlin, Germany
210 u.geuter@gmx.de
ß 2012, Ulf Geuter

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