Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2020) 19:47–58

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9602-y

The self and dance movement therapy – a narrative

approach

Christian Kronsted 1,2

Published online: 7 November 2018

# Springer Nature B.V. 2018

Abstract
Within the last fifty years as philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science have moved
towards increasingly more embodied theoretical frameworks, there has been growing
interest in Dance Movement Therapy (DMT). DMT has been shown to be effective in
mitigating negative symptoms in several psychopathologies including PTSD, autism,
and schizophrenia. Further, DMT generally helps participants gain a stronger sense of
agency and connection with their body. However, it has been argued that it is not
always clear what constitutes these changes in DMT participants. I argue that we can
better understand the empirical and phenomenological results of DMT across psycho-
pathologies if we adapt an enactive embodied approach to cognition. I use the
framework of embodied enactive cognition and narrative theories of the self to develop
an account of DMT as a form of narrative change. I claim that through the acquisition
of new bodily skill and bodily awareness, DMT can cause changes to the participant’s
narrative self-understanding.

Keywords Dance movement therapy . Dance therapy . Enactivism . Narrativity . Narrative

self . Philosophy of dance . Phenomenology of dance . Participatory sense-making . Social
cognition

Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) is effective in mitigating negative symptoms in

several psychopathologies including PTSD, autism, and schizophrenia. DMT has been
shown to be particularly effective when working with schizophrenic participants
(Martin et al. 2016; Röhricht and Priebe 2006; Röhricht et al. 2011). For example,
DMT is effective in reducing affect flatness, anxiety, and anger in schizophrenic
participants (Fuchs et al. 2016; Lee et al. 2015). Further, studies conclude that DMT
helps participants regain a sense of agency and connection with the body (Mills and

* Christian Kronsted
[email protected]

1
The University of Memphis, 3641 Central Ave, Memphis, TN 38152, USA
2
Memphis, USA
48 C. Kronsted

Daniluk 2002). Additionally, DMT is effective in alleviating stress and promoting self-
efficacy (Wiedenhofer and Koch 2017).
However, it has been argued that it is not always clear what constitutes these changes
in DMT participants (Patterson et al. 2011). I argue that we can better understand the
empirical and phenomenological results of DMT across psychopathologies if we adopt
an enactive embodied approach to cognition and unify that with a narrative theory of
the self. I here develop an account of DMT as a therapy that allows participants to
change their self-narrative. More simply put, I argue that gaining new bodily skills and
new bodily awareness changes the story we tell about ourselves.
It should be made clear from the outset that I am not making any comparative claims
between DMT and more conventional forms of talk therapy. Further, it is important to
understand that dancing is not a miracle therapy and should not replace other forms of
therapy, but rather complement them. The scope of this paper is to make a rather
modest claim; dance is good for human persons in that it can help with self-referencing,
synchrony, sociality, sense of agency, and unity with the body (amongst other things).
This acquisition of new bodily skills, bodily awareness, and habits can change how we
see ourselves and the story we tell about ourselves.
The story I am about to tell is of course complicated and has several moving parts,
and is therefore important to understand how the argument is going to unfold. I begin
by sketching out what I mean by the narrative self. As we will see, this is a theory that
posits that the human self is generated by an ever growing, largely implicit diachronic
narrative. From there I explain some of the basic components of Autopoietic
Enactivism, focusing on the enactive account of social cognition. Enactivism is a
non-representational account of cognition which posits that cognition happens in the
interplay between brain, body, and environment. Once we have the narrative self and
the enactivist account of social cognition under our belt, I show how meaning and
movement is connected. Through basic bodily interaction and enculturation, humans
learn to understand intentional action by narration. In short, culture, socialization, and
interaction with others teaches us that human movement is meaningful, and that the
way to explain intentional movements is through narratives. The way we move
and the way we interact with others also begin to shape our diachronic self-
understanding – our self-narrative. Hence, if we change our style of comportment and
develop new bodily habits and skills, those ways of moving will begin (in subtle ways)
to affect our-self narrative.

1 The narrative self

First, it is important to get clear on what I mean by the narrative self. Phenomenology,
philosophy of mind, and cognitive science have identified a plurality of features that
constitute the overall experience of self: the sense of agency, sense of ownership, body
image, body schema, and minimal self, just to mention a few. However, it is outside the
scope of this paper to unpack how dance affects each of these components of the self.
Rather, I will focus on our narrative capacities, trace how these are related to move-
ment, and finally explore how dance can help reorganize our established self-narratives.
One of the features that characterizes the self diachronically is the continuous
expansion of a mostly implicit autobiographical narrative (Schechtman 2014, p.100).
The self and dance movement therapy – a narrative approach 49

One of the reasons we experience the self as unified is because we have a sense that the
self is flowing from a past into the future in accordance with a narrative structure that is
always expanding. Rather than thinking of the self as being comprised of time-slices or
overlapping psychological experiences, a narrative has an underlying holism that
cannot be understood by looking at any one experience or memory. As Schechtman
says: BIn a narrative the parts exist in the form they do only as abstractions from the
whole, and so the whole is in an important sense prior to the parts^ (p.100). We see that
the self on this account has an underlying holistic unity because it is always adding
more to its own narrative.
Due to the unity of the narrative, selfhood is automatically and always diachronic.
For example, reading one paragraph from the novel the Kite Runner does not provide a
full understanding of the work. Only when the whole work is read can the reader
understand the novel. For Schechtman, this is also true of self-narratives: BA narrative
is not merely certain kinds of connections between one event and the next; it is a
structural whole that gives unity to the events within it in virtue of the fact that they
together instantiate that structure^ (p.103). Since individuals experience their life as an
unfolding whole, they can develop concerns for their future self as well as be held
accountable for their past actions. As we go through life, a mostly implicit narrative
structure develops so that we can make choices in accordance with Bwho we are^.
Most of a person’s self-narrative is a cohesive implicit structure that provides the
person with guidelines for how to understand and act in the world. If persons did not
have this form of self-narrative structure in place, they would have to actively and
deeply reflect upon the majority of their actions. For example, through my self-
narrative, I don’t have to actively think about going to the library to do research.
However, if my self-narrative goes missing, I would have to track myself through time
and renegotiate my identity as a philosopher every time I go to the library, read a book,
or try to save money at the grocery store. Without an implicit self-narrative, we would
simply find ourselves in situations seemingly without reason. Consequently, the back-
ground structure of self-narrative helps us live cohesive consistent lives.

2 Enactivism and dance therapy

Next, we need to explore just how the narrative component of the self is related to
movements so that we ultimately may understand how DMT can modulate our self-
narratives. To do so, we need a theory of cognition centered around action and
embodiment. Enactivism moves away from internalist and computational models of
the mind and focuses instead on brain-body-environment couplings in a holistic
dynamic fashion. While Enactivism has branched into multiple forms (sensory motor,
autopoietic, radical, and others), I will here draw on insights mainly from Autopoietic
Enactivism. For this strand of Enactivism, cognition happens in action through the
interplay between brain, body, and environment. Rather than the unit of analysis being
just the brain, Enactivism thinks of cognition as an embodied process coupled with the
environment (Gallagher 2017).
On the enactive account, the brain is only one part of a larger dynamic system that is
constantly attuning itself to the environment in which it is placed. Hence the brain-body
is a responding device which attunes itself to environments through action. On the
50 C. Kronsted

enactivist account, we might be able to conceptually separate various aspects of

cognition from one another, but ultimately cognition involves a brain-body-
environment coupling that enacts attuned responses. Consequently, while we can think
of the visual system as one entity and proprioception as another, lived experience is a
holism that comes from our embodied kinesthetic nature embedded in environments
(Maiese 2016).
Importantly for Enactivism, the self and the world are brought forth through a
continuous cycle of movement and perception. Action leads to perception, which in
turn leads to more actions (Gallagher 2017, p.130). Rather than passively taking
in the world, the organism is always busy bringing forth a world for itself
through its continuous interaction with the environment (Maiese 2016, p.22).
The self and a meaningful world in which it can engage are generated through
moving and attuning with one’s environment. Hence, Enactivism posits an
action perception loop as the generating force behind cognition and the self.
Living organisms participate in self-making as they move towards parts of the
environment that are afforded to them as good and move away from things that
are dangerous.
While there is, of course, a lot more to say about Enactivism, this sketch will suffice
for our discussion. We must remember that our aim here is to see how movements of
the body can impact the narrative self. Consequently, the more important point is to
understand how Enactivism theorizes social cognition, since DMT and dance generally
are social endeavors.
The Enactivist account of intersubjectivity becomes especially relevant when trying
to understand how dance can therapeutically affect the narrative self. On the enactive
account of intersubjectivity, we ascribe intentionality to others by responding to their
directed skillful actions (Gallagher 2017, p.80). Enactivism posits that it is our inter-
actions with others that allow us to ascribe and understand intentionality. Gallagher
uses the example of slowing down a car when seeing a person peeking out from the
side of the road. When asked why one stopped the car, we can analyze our actions and
answer retrospectively that we thought the person looked like they were going to cross
the road. However, that explanation is given in the reflective retrospective mode of
introspection. In the moment, to understand that someone else wants to cross the road is
to respond by pushing on the brake. (Gallagher, p.79). Similarly, in dancing, to
understand the intentions of one’s partner is not to see a motion (left foot forward)
and then infer that the partner wants you to move (right foot backward). Rather, to
understand the intention is just to interact. In this example, the interaction happens by
moving one’s right foot backwards when the partner moves their left foot forward.
Hence, understanding of others is built into interaction.
To further understand this form of enactive interaction, we can look to De Jaegher
and Di Paolo’s notion of participatory sense making (2007). On this enactivist account
of social cognition, the other is not opaque to us and is not understood through a theory
or through simulation (as is proposed by the two most common accounts of social
cognition: Theory Theory and Simulation Theory). Rather, through our attuned inten-
tional synchrony, humans become dynamically coupled so that our joint interactions
create meaning (p.497). Human interaction is a dynamic system in which each
participant keeps the meaning-making process going through a loop of interac-
tion and coordination. In this mutually perpetuated process, each participant is attuned to
The self and dance movement therapy – a narrative approach 51

the autonomy of the other. De Jaegher and Di Paolo themselves use the example of
partner dancing:

Bcouple dancing involves moving each other, making each other move, and being
moved by each other. This goes for both leader and follower. Following is part of
an agreement and does not equate with being shifted into position by the other. If
the follower were to give up her autonomy, the couple dancing would end there,
and it would look more like a doll being carried around the dance floor. The same
goes for conversations: each partner must engage from an autonomous stand-
point. If conversational autonomy were given up, neither partner would be able to
influence the other^ (p.494).

For dancing (and social interaction in general) to be successful, each participant must
attune themselves to the give and take of the other as an autonomous agent. This
happens largely through pre-reflective, cognitively cheap mechanisms: gestures, pos-
ture, position, gait, breathing, and other bodily mechanisms that easily coordinate. In
fact, when surveying some of the literature across biology and cognitive science, De
Jaegher and Di Paolo find that BCoordination is typically easily achieved by simple
mechanical means and, when cognitive systems are involved, it does not generally
require any cognitively sophisticated skill. On the contrary, it is often hard to avoid^
(p.490). Rather than observing the other person like a math problem that needs solving,
humans are naturally skillful coordinators that dynamically couple with one another at
lower and higher levels of cognition.
From Enactivism and participatory sense-making, we learn that dance allows us to
understand others in an interactive immediate sense rather than through abstract
conceptual thinking. Human movement in interaction is a meaningful endeavor, and
this meaning becomes important for how we understand ourselves and others.
In the phenomenological approach to schizophrenia, the pathology is often defined
as a loss of the sense of self (Fuchs et al. 2016, p.2). Participants lose the sense that they
are Bhere now^ and lose the ability to synchronize in speech and motion (p.3). Further,
schizophrenic participants often lose the sense of agency (that they are the ones doing
the action). One symptom leading to the sensation of loss of self is the inability to get
the timing right on mirroring movements and synchronizing that happens pre-
reflectively in all human sociality (as we saw in the enactivist account of intersubjec-
tivity). Hence, subjects have difficulty keeping the participatory sense-making process
going and thereby enacting a meaningful world. Consequently, DMT is particularly
useful in cases of schizophrenia because the timing and syncing required to dance with
others trains the participant in the kind of timing and synchronizing required to function
in everyday interactions (Fuchs et al. 2016, p.3–4). Hence, if we stick with Enactivism,
DMT functions amongst other things as a tool to train intersubjectivity so that move-
ment and interaction can become meaningful.
Schizophrenic participants often report feeling fractured from themselves or feeling
disconnected from their bodies. Studies with schizophrenic participants found that not
only were negative symptoms (such as depression and affect flatness) improved (Chen
et al. 2016; Lee et al. 2015), but DMT exercises, including spontaneous dance, free
style dancing, and partner dance also helped participants reestablish the feeling of
connection with their bodies. DMT helped re-establish the normally pre-reflective
52 C. Kronsted

experience of the self being one with the body (Martin et al. 2016). This happens in part
because dance requires almost undivided attention to one’s body. Further, dance is an
ongoing form of bodily agency. Hence, metaphorically, we can say that dance forces
the self to reintegrate back into the body.
Enactivism can help us understand why dancing creates a sense of reintegration with
the body. We must remember that on the enactivist account, cognition happens in action
and interaction. The phenomenon of being fractured is mitigated by DMT because in
dance, one is thinking through movements of the body. In dance, there is no distinction
between the movement and the thought; the movement just is the thought (Merritt
2013; Sheets-Johnstone 2009). Hence in dancing, the body is a dynamic self-integrated
system. This in turn actively counters the experience of being fractured from oneself.
The quotidian ability to synchronize and the feeling of reintegration with the body
that is gained through DMT empowers the participant because it lets them restructure
their narrative self-understanding as people capable of functioning socially. The new
gained ability to move fluidly through everyday life and to generate meaning with
others allow participants to reinterpret themselves as capable social beings. Learning
new embodied skills and gaining new forms of self-awareness allow the participant to
understand themselves differently as they learn new ways to enact meaning. Gaining
new bodily awareness and skill, even when subtle, can impact how we think and feel
about ourselves because the world becomes laden with new meaning.
This same effect is also seen in non-pathological cases in which students taking
dance classes report understanding themselves and their past in a new way as they see
themselves master new dance moves in the mirror. Joseph Schloss reports similar
findings when interviewing professional breakdancers. Dancers often reported a new
sense of perspectival self-understanding as their fluency in movements progressed
(Schloss 2009). Schloss’ findings correspond with my own experience as a dance
teacher for over fifteen years. Students will often describe seeing their life in terms of
chapters: the pre-dance self and the post-dance self. It has always been striking to me
how often my students put their self-understanding in narrative terms in which learning
to dance marks an important change in their story. For example, one student told me: BI
used to be super awkward, but now that I break, it’s like I am a new me who can
actually talk to people.^ If Enactivism is correct and intersubjectivity happens through
embodied interaction, then learning how to dance with others is also learning how to
understand them. Hence, DMT re-socializes the participant. Being reconnected with the
social world is a powerful experience that can change how the participant understands
themselves diachronically. The point here is that in both pathological and non-
pathological cases, training synchrony and movement provides individuals with a
new sense of fluency towards the world that strongly lends itself to be incorporated
into one’s self-narrative.
We can deepen our understanding of the relationship between narrative and move-
ment if we look to the enactive account of how children first learn to understand
intentionality. For Enactivism, we learn to understand intentionality in encultured
environments through narrative practices. Research suggest that infants and children
learn to understand intentionality by coupling simplistic narratives with observations of
other agents (Garfield et al. 2001; Guajardo and Watson 2002; Lewis and Mitchell
1994). This literature shows that instead of developing an early theory of mind, children
learn to understand intentionality by observing patterns of directed movement
The self and dance movement therapy – a narrative approach 53

accompanied by explicit narration from the adult caretaker (Hutto 2008; Gallagher and
Hutto 2008, p.30). For example, a child sees her brother ravenously reaching for
several meatballs and the father says, Byour brother sure is hungry today, what are
they doing to him at school?^ From this narration, the child begins to understand that
movements such as reaching for food in a particular way is connected to certain bodily
states (hunger), identities (student), and causal chains (being a student makes you extra
hungry). Another example could be a child and caretaker pretending to steer a car. As
the child pretends to steer the imaginary steering wheel, the caretaker will say things
such as: BYou are driving fast, you must be really busy^ or BWhere are we going today?
Can I come along?^. This kind of narrative explanation of action is ingrained in
humans through enculturation so that we learn to couple intentional movement with
simplistic narratives. As we grow older, those narratives compound and become
increasingly more advanced, but the basic mechanism remains the same; we are trained
to understand intentional actions through narratives and we piece those narratives
together through movement.
We have seen that through enculturation, humans learn that certain types of move-
ments generally have certain meanings put together in the form of a narrative. Hence
when DMT participants enter the dance studio, movements are already meaningful in a
way that lends itself to interpretation and analysis. Since movements are understood in
terms of narratives, the therapist and participants can begin to analyze the story that is
being expressed through the various dance exercises. This way, participants get to see
that there is a connection between how they understand themselves and how they
move. Because of the movement narrative connection, exploring the way we move can
reveal important aspects of our psychology to ourselves. The same way a piece of
music or a smell can vividly bring back memories, DMT has shown that dance can
evoke dormant feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and memories in the participants through
movements that the participants find meaningful (Payne et al. 2011). Additionally,
DMT shows that formative or traumatic experiences can affect our style of movement
and posture (Ataria 2016; Maiese 2016, p.251). Going through a traumatic experience
often changes the way we comport, move through space, and how we generally
experience our bodies. Hence, becoming aware of one’s own movement style can lead
the participant to self-realizations about a given experience or problem. Once such a
realization is made, the participant can begin to actively work with the realization
through other methods such as regular talk therapy.
For example, when working with sexual assault survivors, one study found that
when performing movements that participants perceived to be vulnerable, participants
would report having strong flashbacks to traumatic memories (Mills and Daniluk 2002,
p.81). Participants reported feeling fractured between body and mind but regained a
sense of wholeness and agency after participating in DMT (p.79–80). Using dance to
recollect sensitive memories and process them in a safe space allowed the participants
to see themselves and the memories in a new light. Hence, the same way that other
therapies aim to have participants reevaluate themselves by reconceptualizing past
events, DMT does so through dance (p.80–81). Participants doing DMT are being
encouraged to use their movements to explicitly re-experience and recast how they
understand themselves and their memories. In expressing memories and trauma
through movement, participants are capable of reexperiencing, analyzing, and
reintegrating those memories into their narrative self-understanding.
54 C. Kronsted

These empirical findings are theoretically supported by the notion of body memories
and body narratives. Caldwell (2016) uses the notion of body memory to show how
repeated bodily engagement and interaction with the world bolsters the implicit
narrative of the self. For Caldwell, BA bodily experience becomes memorable
when it is repeated, when it is witnessed and acknowledged by ourselves and/or
others, when it is novel and interesting, when it is traumatic and when it is
effective in accessing resources (such as safety, affection, attention and approval)^
(p.227). Body memories are not stored in the brain in a traditional cognitivist fashion.
Rather, body memories are stored across body and brain as a form of attuned
response that is strengthened and augmented every time it is repeated in the same or a
similar situation.
As we saw from some of the empirical work on DMT, body memories can be re-
experienced by reenacting them. For example, my quick reaction to cover my ears
when hands are near my head comes with the affect and history of growing up with a
sibling that would continually try to pull my ears. The covering of my ears is a repeated
and attuned response to my history.
Through continual repetition and strengthening, body memories begin to impact the
implicit narrative structure of the self. Caldwell argues that our repeated reenactments
of body memories contribute to our basic minimal sense of self. We get a basic sense of
who we are from the way we physically comport and respond to the world, and this
sense of self is tied up with a particular history that we can trace in the way that we
move (p.227). As we go through the world, we develop a style of comportment through
our attuned responses that gives us a diachronic sense of who we are. This more basic
unarticulated sense of who we are integrates itself into our self-narrative as one piece of
the larger narrative. Metaphorically, fleshed out characters in fiction are not just
described through plot points; they are fleshed out by the way they move, think, and
feel. Similarly, our comportment style fleshes out our narrative understanding of who
we are by adding another layer of depth to our mostly implicit autobiography. The way
we move becomes part of how we understand ourselves and how we put ourselves into
perspective. Consequently, augmenting or gaining new body memories is going to
change a person’s self-narrative in subtle ways.
In a similar vein, I want to touch on the relationship between affect, movement and
narrative. Studies have shown that posture and movement can impact our underlying
mood and self-understanding. Dance training, including DMT, promotes better move-
ment control and improved posture which in turn impacts participants’ narrative self-
understanding. For example, Michalak et al. (2014) found that participants who
adopted depressed, slumped posture were far more likely to put a negative spin on
self-referential memory tasks. In a different study, Michalak et al. (2015) found similar
results with regard to walking styles. Participants who were prompted into walking
with a Bdepressed^ style were more likely to remember negative words than positive
words. Shwetha et al. (2015) further found that in a randomized trial, participants who
were made to sit upright (using athletic tape) were far more likely to respond to stress
tests with low threat perception and self-confidence. The participants in the upright
posture not only reported feeling more confident and less threatened than the slouched
participants, but measuring their heart rates and blood pressure confirmed these reports.
Similar studies regarding posture and attitude have replicated the conclusion that
posture affects how we perceive ourselves and retell narratives about ourselves
The self and dance movement therapy – a narrative approach 55

(Pepper et al. 2016; Veenstra et al. 2016). EEG scans of test subjects trying to
remember positive memories also found that:

Bit takes much more effort and time to evoke and maintain positive thoughts in a
collapsed position. This was also confirmed by the significant increase in reaction
time when attempting to recall positive events in the collapsed body position as
compared to the erect body position.^ (Tsai et al. 2016, p.26)

The EEG study further gives credence to the notion that posture and movement style is
important for our self-narrative since repeated upright or slouched posture can put a
positive or negative spin on people’s self-narratives. If the recent empirical literature on
posture and mood is correct, then repeatedly having negative posture will impact how
persons think of themselves. Put differently, posture can affect the background structure
of our self-narrative.
One aspect of teaching dance is to teach participants how to have Bgood^ posture. To
dance well, one must be aware of and control one’s posture. Even in dance styles that
require a slouch, the slouch is performed with power and control. Consequently, in
going through dance training or DMT, participants will learn to generally have more
controlled posture which in turn will generally affect their mood and self-referencing.
This changing of mood through posture and movement style in turn affects the
background structure of the participant’s self-narrative. Generally having a more
positive spin on one’s own memories means seeing those memories and how
they connect in a new light. In other words, the story we tell about ourselves is
going to change.

3 New affordances - changed narrative

We have seen that dance can, phenomenologically speaking, reintegrate the self with
the body. Further, we have seen that on the enactive account of intersubjectivity, dance
promotes understanding of others through interaction. We have also seen that dance can
change our mood and help put a positive spin on self-reference and memory. Now, we
can use the notion of affordances to further understand the connection between
acquiring new bodily expertise and self-narrative. Acquiring new skills, whether bodily,
social, or material, changes how the world affords itself to the self (Rietveld and
Kiverstein 2014, p.341). By gaining new forms of skill and bodily awareness,
we gain a new landscape of affordances. Put differently, the world presents
itself to the self with brand new potentials for action. This new blossoming of
affordances in turn changes how we see ourselves diachronically. More colloquially,
we can say that acquiring new bodily self-awareness and skills is going to change the
story we tell about what we are up to.
New affordances promote new action, which leads to new forms of perception,
which in turns creates more action and more affordances. If cognition is in and for
action, then various ways of moving can affect how we feel, think, remember, and
understand. If we take an enactive approach to dance and dance therapy, then dancing
leads to an action-perception-affordance feedback loop. When participants act on new
affordances, new perceptions are experienced, and these in turn lead to more new
56 C. Kronsted

actions and so on (Gallagher 2017, p.130). DMT takes the participant out of their daily
action-perception-affordance cycle and introduces them to a new one. As a
comparative example, we can think of writer’s block. Someone might be stuck
in the same old habits and can’t seem to get words on the page. Often what it
takes for the struggling writer to break the blockade is to go for a run, head to
the beach, go bowling, or do something else that breaks their current action-perception-
affordance cycle. In this same vein, dance and dance therapy break the partic-
ipant’s current action-perception-affordance cycle so that they can reconceptualize
themselves diachronically.
The change in affordances that is created by the positive effects of dance and DMT
make the participant see the environment and their own action potentials in a new way.
This in turn changes their bodily habits and therefore their implicit self-narra-
tive. As we saw with Caldwell’s notion of body memories and body narrative,
changes in our bodily habits change our implicit narrative since the way we
move is part of how we understand ourselves. Both for Caldwell and on the
enactivist account, the self is generated from action through the action-
perception-affordance cycle. Consequently, it should be no surprise that giving people
new movement activities and bodily habits will bring about changes to the self. Hence,
all the different effects of DMT that we have explored create changes in the participants’
bodily skill, awareness, comportment, and habits so that elements of their implicit self-
narrative begin to change.

4 Conclusion

We have explored how dance therapy utilizes the connection between movement and
the narrative self. Hence, in its most barebones form, the conclusion is this:
gaining new bodily skills and self-awareness changes (often in subtle ways) our
diachronic self-understanding, and much of that self-understanding is built up
from practices of movement and interaction. We have seen that phenomenolog-
ically speaking, dance reintegrates the self with the body, improves the sense of
agency, and improves mood and self-referencing. Further from the enactive
account of intersubjectivity, we saw that dancing with others is an exercise in
meaning making and understanding other people. These various ways of being
aware of oneself and others that are strengthened through DMT changes how
we understand ourselves as persons in the world. While we cannot dance our way to
complete mental health, an embodied enactive approach to psychopathology reveals the
importance of holistic approaches to therapy that take movement, environment, and
embodiment seriously.

Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Kerri Malone, Deb Tollefsen, Tailor Ransom,
Nick Brancazio, the two reviewers, and of course my family; Fumi, Mumbe, and Singularis.

Compliance with ethical standards

Conflict of interest The authors report no conflicts of interest. The author alone is responsible for the
content and writing of this article.
The self and dance movement therapy – a narrative approach 57

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