Neurophysiological Aspects of Dance Movement Therapy for Psychiatric Rehabilitation

Abstract

While in the beginning of the twentieth century psychiatrists’ therapeutic interventions mainly addressed one’s psyche, using verbal psychoanalysis based on psychological theories, towards the end of the twentieth century and with the advancement of neuroscience, the biological approach to mental health took over, and most psychiatric interventions became pharmacological in nature, addressing one’s neurophysiology and brain function. In recent years, an integrative approach of combining psychological with biological interventions is advocated for psychiatric rehabilitation. In their chapter, Wengrower and Bendel-Rozow address primarily the psychological approach to psychiatry and discuss how dance movement therapy (DMT) with psychiatric patients corresponds with this approach and approved to be effective. In my commentary, I propose an explanation and some examples for the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying DMT’s methods and therapeutic effects, illustrating the effectiveness of DMT based on the principles of the biological and the integrative approaches to psychiatric rehabilitation. These underlying neurophysiological mechanisms include brain networks and mechanisms responsible for emotional processing and for the associations in the brain between certain proprioceptive input from the moving body and specific emotions, the mirror neurons and their contribution to empathy and understanding others’ emotions, neurophysiological findings regarding therapist–patient interbrain coupling, and principles of the Polyvagal Theory as applied in DMT.