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Why Is Movement Therapeutic?: Keynote Address, 44th American Dance

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DOI: 10.1007/s10465-009-9082-2

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Am J Dance Ther (2010) 32:2–15
DOI 10.1007/s10465-009-9082-2

Why Is Movement Therapeutic?

Keynote Address, 44th American Dance Therapy Association
Conference, October 9, 2009, Portland, OR

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

Published online: 17 February 2010

 American Dance Therapy Association 2010

The title of this keynote could be in the form of either a question or a claim—
Why is movement therapeutic? or Why movement is therapeutic—and its content
could thereby be either a reflective exploration of possible answers to the
question or a setting forth of reasons supporting the claim. I opted for the
question because the question is open to wider perspectives and deeper reflections
and is also the more intriguing. Among the topics I will be considering are a
sense of agency, the dynamic congruency between emotions and movement,
kinesthesia, feeling alive, how habits of speaking can occlude or impede
conceptual clarity about movement, cultural differences and basic pan-human
kinetic dispositions, attitudes, and possibilities. All of these topics will be
addressed from the point of view of actual human experience. In the context of
experience, I will propose five direct answers and two broader answers to the
question, Why is movement therapeutic?

I begin with the observation that movement is at the core of life. We come into the
world moving; we are precisely not stillborn. The chronological epistemological
development of all humans, their learning on all fronts, is first by movement, and
then by word of mouth. In other words, infants are not prelinguistic, as is commonly
declared; on the contrary, language is post-kinetic (Sheets-Johnstone, 2005, p. 50).
I’ve written at length about this developmental epistemological chronology in The
Primacy of Movement (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999a). I find it a seminally important

M. Sheets-Johnstone (&)
Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA
e-mail: msj@uoregon.edu

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point to emphasize in order to correct those who prominence language in ways that
overlook the significance of movement to life, indeed the significance of movement
to the well-being and evolution of all forms of animate life—of which more later.
Movement is not simply a sign of life, it is the preeminent sign of life. Breathing is
just such a kinetic sign. What is a sign of life in our assessment of others, however,
is experientially a feeling of aliveness for oneself, or at least potentially so. It
depends upon one’s attention to the actual experience of self-movement, which is to
say to the kinesthetic dynamics of movement and in forms as simple as breathing,
sneezing, yawning, and blinking. Each of these simple pan-human movement forms
has a unique dynamic, yet one that, like a theme with variations, has multiple
possible dynamics. A sneeze can erupt in a staccato manner, or be singularly abrupt
or singularly attenuated, and so on. Whatever the sneeze, its dynamics follow a
basic pattern, but in each instance, the pattern is qualitatively unique, having its own
particular intensity, shape, and projectional quality.
Attention to the kinesthetic dynamics of such involuntary movement can awaken
feelings of aliveness. Something is not just happening to you but moving you. You
don’t have to do anything. You just have to sit back, so to speak, and listen to its
dynamics. Attention to voluntary movement can also, of course, awaken feelings of
aliveness. People who jog or play tennis, for example, or who engage in any number
of other sport activities on a regular basis, commonly say that afterward they feel
energized by the movement. They feel ready to resume their everyday lives in a
galvanized, pepped-up manner. An awareness of this residual spin-off of movement
has the potential of awakening feelings of aliveness, aliveness in a personal and
existentially vibrant sense quite apart from an energized readiness to resume
everyday activities. Feeling energized can indeed spontaneously spill over into a
sheer feeling of aliveness the moment one turns attention to the experience of
feeling energized, stops to wonder about the source of that energized spirit, and
awakens to the lively kinetic dynamics of one’s tactile-kinesthetic body. Whether
voluntary or involuntary, one catches oneself in the life-proclaiming dynamic
experience of movement.
Why is movement therapeutic?
The first basic, foundational answer is that movement is indeed life-proclaiming.
That answer might explain the recalcitrance of some psychologically disturbed
individuals to move. Catching oneself in the life-proclaiming experience of
movement can be existentially threatening if not overwhelming, perhaps at times
even for those who consider themselves undisturbed and psychologically normal.

II

Animate forms are by definition animate. Moreover they move in ways unique to
the bodies they are. From this kinetic perspective they are aptly described as
morphologies-in-motion. Darwin (1872/1965) implicitly recognized animals—
humans and nonhumans—precisely as such; that is, he implicitly recognized the
centrality of movement throughout his observations of animate life. On the basis of
his observations of horses, for example, he notes that ‘‘when savage [they] draw

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their ears closely back, protrude their heads, and partially uncover their incisor
teeth, ready for biting…[and that their] [i]mpatience is expressed by pawing the
ground’’ (Darwin, 1872/1965, p. 128). With respect to animals generally, he states
that
[u]nder the transport of Joy or of vivid Pleasure there is a strong tendency to
various purposeless movements, and to the utterance of various sounds. We
see this in our young children, in their loud laughter, clapping of hands, and
jumping for joy; in the bounding and barking of a dog when going out to walk
with his master; and in the frisking of a horse when turned out into an open
field (Darwin, 1872/1965, p. 76).
In sharp contrast, he writes that
[w]ith all or almost all animals, even with birds, Terror causes the body to
tremble. The skin becomes pale, sweat breaks out, and the hair bristles. The
secretions of the alimentary canal and of the kidneys are increased, and they
are involuntarily voided, owing to the relaxation of the sphincter muscles, as is
known to be the case with man, and as I have seen with cattle, dogs, cats, and
monkeys. The breathing is hurried. The heart beats quickly, wildly, and
violently…. In a frightened horse I have felt through the saddle the beating of
the heart so plainly that I could have counted the beats…. A terrified canary-
bird has been seen not only to tremble and to turn white about the base of the
bill, but to faint; and I once caught a robin in a room, which fainted so
completely, that for a time I thought it dead (Darwin, 1872/1965, p. 77).
He goes onto observe that
[w]hen an animal is alarmed it almost always stands motionless for a moment,
in order to collect its senses and to ascertain the source of danger…[b]ut
headlong flight soon follows, with no husbanding of the strength as in
fighting…(Darwin, 1872/1965, p. 78).
Darwin’s writings consistently testify not only to the centrality of movement, but
to the intimate connection between movement and emotion. In so doing, they testify
to the need for careful observation and exact description of what phenomenological
philosopher Husserl (1983) spoke of as ‘‘the things themselves’’ (p. 35), thus, to the
importance not of giving meticulous attention to behavior or to what so many
present-day researchers call ‘‘embodied actions,’’ and some, in ignorance of their
tautology, call ‘‘embodied movement’’ (Gibbs, 2006; Varela & Depraz, 2005), but of
giving meticulous attention and precise descriptions of the actual movement of
living creatures, to morphologies-in-motion. What such attention and descriptions
point to are the manifold ways in which what I term synergies of meaningful
movement are part and parcel of the repertoire of all animate forms, synergies by
which one individual effectively communicates with another, for example, or
synergies by which one individual effectively responds to another, as in prey/
predator relations. Relationships between individuals of the same species and
between different species of animals are based precisely on synergies of meaningful
movement.

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Synergies of meaningful movement are significant at a further basic level.

Indeed, they evolve from human infancy onward. They are the basis of a sense of
agency, what Husserl (1989) terms ‘‘I cans’’ (pp. 266–269). ‘‘I cans’’ are not simply
and only physical capabilities on the order of ‘‘I can hop, skip, and jump.’’ They
undergird subject-world capacities, such as my ability to calculate distances—for
example, the extent to which I must extend my arm in order to reach the glass at the
far side of the table—my ability to estimate the efficacy of a certain procedure—for
example, the benefits to be derived from following this regimen rather than
examining and following along other possibilities—my ability to judge that I must
do x before I do y—for example, the decision to consult a map before setting out in
my car to a place I’ve never been. Husserl (1980, pp. 106–109) and an associate of
his, Landgrebe (1977, pp. 107–109), pointedly emphasized how the ability ‘‘I
move’’ precedes the ability ‘‘I can.’’ In The Roots of Thinking (Sheets-Johnstone,
1990), I elaborated on this precedence, noting that
[t]he awareness of corporeal powers [that is, the awareness of ‘‘I cans’’] does
not (and could not) arise ex nihilo. It arises from [everyday] tactile-kinesthetic
activity: chewing, reaching, grasping, kicking, etc. The awareness of corporeal
powers is thus not the result of reflective musings, whether with or without
language…[and hence is] not a matter of wondering, ‘What can I do?’ On the
contrary, the sense of corporeal powers is the result either of moving or of
already having moved (p. 29).
A creature catches itself in the tactile-kinesthetic act of chewing, for example; that
is, it ‘‘catches itself in the act of grinding something to pieces’’ (Sheets-Johnstone,
1990, p. 29).
Now Husserl (1980) and Landgrebe (1977) did not emphasize the precedence of
movement explicitly in terms of infancy, but we can readily see the developmental
precedence of movement to a burgeoning sense of agency and the eventual
development of a repertoire of ‘‘I cans.’’ In The Primacy of Movement (Sheets-
Johnstone, 1999a), I described this developmental reality in terms of the fact that
movement forms the ‘‘I’’ that moves before the ‘‘I’’ that moves forms movement
(pp. 138, 233, 265–266, 270). Consider, for example, how in the beginning an infant
flails its arms toward something in its surrounding world. It makes inchoate reaching
movements toward the thing. Eventually, its movements develop into an effective
dynamic: it succeeds in reaching the object, perhaps clutching it at first, but then
developing a smooth reaching-grasping sequence of movements. In effect, over a
period of time, movement forms the ‘‘I’’ that moves; it constitutes the I as an
effective agent, a subject precisely capable of creating and moving in synergies of
meaningful movement. In short, our repertoire of ‘‘I can’s’’ is built up on the basis
of developing synergies of meaningful movement, which are the foundation of our
sense of agency.
Why is movement therapeutic?
My second answer is that movement validates and gives expression to an ‘‘I’’ not
in the sense of a self, a reified, conceptual entity, but in the sense of agency, of
capability, hence in the sense of a kinesthetic/kinetic reality. Movement is indeed
the basis of our experience of ourselves as capable and effective agents in the world:

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we can do things, accomplish things, make things happen—and correlatively, we

have the possibility of changing the way we do things, accomplish things, and make
things happen.

III

Synergies of meaningful movement are not simply semantic or cognitional, but

affective through and through. They are first of all motivated—by curiosity, by fear,
by yearnings, by distrust, by determination, by delight, by restiveness, and so on.
Moreover they are not just affectively motivated, they are affectively informed every
step of the way. In other words, the curiosity, the fear, the yearnings, and so on, are
not just here and gone motivating impulses that initiate synergies of meaningful
movement. The curiosity, fear, yearnings, and so on, are embodied—in the true, real,
and correct sense of the word embodied—in the meaningful movement itself. Their
affective dimension is evident socially as well as practically, that is, in our everyday
interchanges with others as well as in our accomplishment of everyday tasks. It
should perhaps be explicitly emphasized that just because the interchanges and
accomplishments are synergies does not mean they are affectively all sweetness and
light. We might feel apprehensive in shaking hands with someone, for example, just
as we might feel discouraged and weary that there are so many dishes to wash. In
effect, whether friendly or antagonistic in a social context, and whether uplifting or
dreary in a practical one, individuals involved in synergies of meaningful movement
are not simply moving through a form, going through the motions unmoved as it
were; on the contrary, the form is moving and moving affectively through them.
Indeed, as I showed in an article on trust, and in a chapter in The Roots of Morality,
fear moves the body and moves through the body in ways different from trust—just
as joy moves the body and moves through the body in ways different from grief
(Sheets-Johnstone, 2006a, 2008). I should perhaps note specifically with respect to
spoken language that synergies of meaningful movement may be strongly
antagonistic. Whatever the unfolding verbal interchanges in a heated argument, for
example, they feed into and decisively escalate a whole-body affective-kinesthetic/
kinetic dynamic. In other words, the dynamic is from the beginning moving through
living bodies, propelling, and even empowering or disempowering them every step
of the way, and in a whole-body manner that definitively includes not just the words
the individuals articulate but the whole-body dynamics of their so-called ‘‘articu-
latory gestures.’’ In this context, we might note that human tongues are waggable, not
in the same way that dogs’ tails are waggable—human tongues are waggable in far
more complex ways, including being mis-waggable—but their dynamic patternings,
their synergies of meaningful movement are as unmistakably affective as the
synergies of the whole-body dynamic of which they are a part.
All of this is to say that emotion and movement go hand in hand. As I showed at
length in an article that analyzed their empirical-phenomenological relationship
(Sheets-Johnstone, 1999b, 2009), they are dynamically congruent. Indeed, not only
why, but how would we otherwise be inclined to feign a smile or to restrain one?
Moreover, how would we otherwise know how to feign courage, for example, when

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we are in fact trembling in our boots? How would we otherwise know how to restrain
an impulse to strike someone—or to hug someone for that matter? The fact that we can
feign and restrain the kinetic dynamics of our emotions readily validates the wholly
natural dynamic relationship of emotions and movement. Their natural dynamic
congruency is in fact readily apparent in the examples given earlier from Darwin’s
writings. A horse that paws the ground in impatience is not unlike an impatient human
who fidgets. Neither is the frolicking of dogs at play unlike the frolicking of children at
play. Their natural dynamic congruency is readily apparent as well in the research
findings of neuropsychiatrist Bull (1951) who asked subjects who were hypnotized to
feel a certain emotion to describe it. Of disgust, one subject, stated, ‘‘I tried to back
away—pushed back on the chair—straight back. All the muscles seemed to push
straight back. I could feel that rather strong’’ (p. 53). Bull (1951) later used her
subjects’ specific descriptions in a second series of experiments. She asked them to
feel a previously described emotion while being hypnotically locked in a different
one. Subjects reported, for example, ‘‘I reached for joy—but couldn’t get it—so
tense;’’ ‘‘I feel light—can’t feel depression’’ (pp. 84–85); and so on.
Why is movement therapeutic?
My third answer is that it brings to the fore the integral relationship between our
affective and tactile-kinesthetic bodies. It experientially concretizes the fact that the
dynamics of our affective feelings are of a dynamic piece with our kinesthetic
feelings. Feignings and restrainings aside, we move naturally in ways consonant
with our emotions.

IV

Kinesthesia is of singular moment in this context. At one time, we learned all these
movements of everyday life that now run off by themselves (Sheets-Johnstone,
1999a). We learned to tie a shoelace; we learned to brush our teeth. In the course of
such learning, we became familiar not simply with a certain pattern of movement—
now do this, now do this, now do this—but with an overall dynamic flow. What we
experienced then was not a sensation here and a sensation there, or even a sequence
of sensations here and there. We experienced a certain spatio-temporal-energic
dynamic, an all-in-one-word spacetimeforce dynamic.
The distinction between sensations and dynamics is critical to understandings of
kinesthesia. Just as there is a decisive experiential and in turn descriptive difference
between behavior and movement, so there is a decisive experiential and in turn
descriptive difference between sensations and dynamics. While many people, even in
dance, speak of kinesthetic sensations, they mislead us about the nature of movement
and the realities of kinesthetic experience. As I explained in a critical article on what
many present-day phenomenologists call ‘‘self-affection,’’ sensations are spatially
localized and temporally punctual (Sheets-Johnstone, 2006b). They are discrete
bodily-sensed events like an itch, a flash of light, a blast of hot air, a shove, a pin prick, a
peppery taste, a jolting halt, and so on. While the experience might be repeated, for
example, a second flash of light or jolting halt, its repetition does not change its
temporally punctual and spatially localized character.

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Sensations can certainly coalesce to form either a kinetic perception or an

affective feeling, as when, for example, in experiencing a throbbing sensation, we
attend not to each sensation by itself, but to the ongoing steady pulse of the
throbbing and perceive a recurrent rhythm, a temporal continuity, or when we pay
attention to the ongoing agony and distress of the throbbing and feel the relentless
and unremitting pain as a disturbing or even wrenching affective continuity. The
sensations themselves do not change, but our mode of awareness of them changes
(Sheets-Johnstone, 2006b).
Given the discrete experiential nature of sensations, the problem with ‘‘kines-
thetic sensations’’ becomes obvious. In walking down the street, opening our arms
to greet a friend, or sitting down in a chair, we have kinesthetic feelings of a
particular qualitative kinetic dynamic, a dynamic that is hurried, for example, or
brisk, or staccato-like, or smooth, and at the same time expansive or constricted,
circuitous or straightforward, and so on. We do not experience our movement as a
series of moment-by-moment, now-here, now-here happenings: we have neither
spatially pointillist and temporally punctual kinesthetic sensations nor coalescing
sensations as described above. We kinesthetically experience a qualitatively distinct
spacetimeforce dynamic that has a basic familiarity about it. It flows forth
spontaneously in immediately recognizable qualitative ways in terms of its spatial,
temporal, and energic character.
To bring this kinesthetic feeling of a particular qualitative kinetic dynamic to life,
imagine, for example, that you have picked up your toothbrush, opened your mouth,
and are about to brush your teeth. Imagine, however, that someone comes in, takes
your toothbrush from you and begins brushing your teeth. You would immediately
recognize that you yourself were not brushing your teeth, not because you felt
someone snatch your toothbrush from you, and now saw that someone standing
before you holding your toothbrush and moving it about in your mouth, but because
you would definitively feel a foreign dynamic inside your mouth.
Why is movement therapeutic?
The fourth answer might certainly be that it brings a long-overlooked dimension
of life to prominence, awakening attention to a sensory modality that has been
there—crucially and fully—from the beginning, but that has been neglected and
virtually smothered over in popular and scientific circles for years unending, most
especially by the sensory modality of vision.
In this very context, the fourth answer highlighting the significance of kinesthesia
might be extended. Movement is therapeutic in that, in awakening attention to
kinesthesia, it confronts us with the challenge of languaging experience in ways that
verbally capture and do justice to its dynamic structure and flow. I have long been
intrigued by the challenge of languaging experience and in fact, a chapter in The
Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader is devoted specifically to the challenge
of what I call languaging ‘‘insides’’ (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009, p. 364). The chapter is
based on a guest lecture I gave at the American-German Institute in Heidelberg a few
years back in conjunction with an all-day workshop with people at the Feldenkrais
training center in Heidelberg. I will give two abbreviated examples of the challenge of
‘‘languaging insides,’’ but first want to emphasize that language is not experience:
what language does—or tries to do—is language experience. As I wrote in the chapter:

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What is experientially felt in both an affective and kinesthetic sense clearly

poses a challenge to language not only because such experiences are dynamic,
but because language is not experience in the first place. Indeed, we
experience the world and ourselves in wordless ways before we come to
language experience, whether for our own benefit or communicatively for
others (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999a, p. 364).
I noted that infant psychiatrist Stern (1990) gives a sterling description of these
wordless ways of experience in his qualitatively rich description of an infant’s ‘‘hunger
storm.’’ On the basis of his observations, Stern could simply have recorded, ‘‘The
infant is hungry.’’ Instead he describes the lived-through dynamics of the experience
of hunger, a description that is grounded in both meticulous observations of infants in
the throes of hunger and in phenomenologically-informed observations of himself in
the felt dynamic throes of hunger. I noted too that Shakespeare, like Stern, puts us
inside suffering when he writes of Hamlet’s and Macbeth’s thoughts of death (Sheets-
Johnstone, 2009, pp. 367–368). Compare Hamlet’s ‘‘To be or not to be’’ soliloquy in
which he speaks of ‘‘shuffling off this mortal coil,’’ of ‘‘bearing the whips and scorns of
time,’’ and of ‘‘the dread of something after death’’ that might make us ‘‘rather bear
those ills we have’’ with such ready-made statements as, ‘‘Gee—I don’t know what to
do; I feel like possibly killing myself, but I dunno. Maybe what’ll happen to me after
death is worse than life.’’ Compare Macbeth’s ‘‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and
tomorrow’’ soliloquy which ends with his comparing life with ‘‘a tale/Told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing’’ with the ready-made statement, ‘‘Geez—I
feel down and like ending it all; life is a drag.’’ In Shakespeare’s plays, first-person
bodies are speaking; dire sufferings are articulated; insides are exposed; they are
languaged (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009, pp. 367–368).
I am certainly not advocating our becoming, or suggesting that we even have the
possibility of becoming, creatively fluent writers about the vicissitudes and trials of
life, but only that we consider a certain possibility. In everyday life, people often
describe a relationship as ‘‘bad.’’ Would a finer description of felt experience be
possible through a finer awareness of movement? My answer is: very possibly.
Consider, for example the difference between saying ‘‘my relationship with X is
bad’’ and ‘‘my relationship with X is jagged.’’ ‘‘Jagged’’ describes a particular kind
of line, a linear contour that has both a cutting sharpness and a quasi-arbitrary
directional form. It languages felt aspects of the relationship in a more penetrating
and exacting way than the word ‘‘bad.’’
An extension of the fourth answer might therefore be: when and if given its due,
kinesthetic experience introduces us to the possibility of languaging experience in
more nuanced and intricate ways, offering us the possibility of richer and finer
descriptions of the psychological challenges we face in the course of our lives, and this
by bringing the subtleties and complexities of both animation and dynamics to the fore.

Movement itself can be languaged, and in ways that elucidate its dynamic, kinetic
structure. My sense is that most if not all dance/movement therapists are fluent in

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Labananalysis, a combination of Laban notation and Effort/Shape. What I would like

to introduce as the basis of a fifth answer to the question is a phenomenological
perspective on movement that languages its dynamic kinetic structure. A phenom-
enological perspective was actually adumbrated earlier when I spoke of learning–
learning to tie a shoelace and brush our teeth, or in broader terms, learning our bodies
and learning to move ourselves, the epistemological process all humans engage in
from birth onwards. As pointed out earlier, what is experientially fundamental in all
such learnings are not kinesthetic sensations, but a kinesthetically experienced space-
time-energy dynamic, a spacetimeforce dynamic. A phenomenological analysis of
this kinesthetically-experienced dynamic discloses four basic qualities: tensional,
linear, areal, and projectional quality, none of which exists separately from the others
in the reality of movement itself, but each of which can be elucidated separately (for
a detailed description of these qualities, see Sheets-Johnstone, 1966, 1999a).
Tensional quality describes the felt intensity of a movement, its force, which of
course can grow or wane in the process of moving, as in sawing a piece of wood or
pulling a recalcitrant weed out of the ground. Linear quality describes both the
linear design of a moving body and the linear pattern of the movement itself, both of
which similarly can and/or do change in the process of moving. They thereby create
changing linear configurations. In the process of moving from standing to sitting, for
example, the linear design of the body changes from a general vertical alignment
into a series of angular lines, which may be modified by a rounded spine, a
downward cast head, and so on. The linear pattern of any movement may be, and
commonly is complex. In jogging, for example, feet describe an oblong circular
linear pattern; arms, flexed at the elbow, describe a horizontal linear pattern as they
move forward and back; and the body as a whole describes an angled vertical linear
pattern in the form of an inverted ‘‘V,’’ moving up and down as it moves forward.
Like linear quality, areal quality has two aspects. It describes the areal design of a
moving body and the areal pattern of the movement itself. The areal design of the
body may be anywhere from contractive to expansive, from crouched, inward-
turning contours to grandly outward-turning ones. To give a simple, brief example,
imagine someone first hiding and then leaping up and out in order to surprise others.
The areal pattern of movement may be intensive or extensive, as when one paces
narrowly up and down or runs wildly about in an open meadow. Areal quality, like
linear and tensional qualities, may vary in the course of a particular movement
sequence, precisely as when an ice skater circles the rink and then gradually draws
inward and circles tightly in one spot. Projectional quality describes the manner in
which force is released, basically, in an abrupt, sustained, ballistic, or collapsing
manner, and in any combination thereof, as in kicking a ball, for example.
A phenomenological analysis of movement calls attention to the fact that
fundamental human concepts derive from our experience of movement—near and
far, for example, from the areal quality of movement, weak and strong from tensional
quality, straight and curved from linear quality, sudden and attenuated from
projectional quality. As noted earlier, when we learn our bodies and learn to move
ourselves as infants and children (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999a), we make sense of our
core animacy, our capacity for movement and our capacity to move sensibly and
efficiently in the world generally, and in the world of other animate beings in

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particular. In the process, we forge fundamental corporeal-kinetic, nonlinguistic

concepts such as those just mentioned, plus relational concepts, such as in, inside,
under, and so on. In essence, then, and precisely as synergies of meaningful movement
indicate, a semantic congruency obtains between movement and meaning.
It is no wonder, then, that we commonly think in movement. Indeed, our
developing synergies of meaningful movement are the product of sense-making in a
double sense. We make sense of the world—we make it intelligible in and through
movement, as when we bend over to inspect an underside, for example, or draw
closer to hear better to touch something; and we make sense ourselves—we make
ourselves intelligible in and through movement, as when we point to something we
want others to see, for example, or close our mouth and turn our head away to avoid
being fed a food we do not want. Human developmental life, and the lives of all
animate forms, are grounded in sense-makings that conjoin thinking and doing,
which is to say they are grounded in the qualitative dynamics of movement just
described. As I wrote in a chapter titled ‘‘Thinking in Movement’’ (Sheets-
Johnstone, 1999a; the chapter is an expanded version of an article originally
appearing in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism [Sheets-Johnstone, 1981]
and is also included in a later book [Sheets-Johnstone, 2009]):
A dynamically attuned body that knows the world and makes its way within it
kinetically is thoughtfully attuned to the variable qualia of both its own
movement and the movement of things in its surrounding world—to forceful,
swift, slow, straight, swerving, flaccid, tense, sudden, up, down, and much
more (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999a, pp. 516–517).
Such a dynamically attuned body is, in other words, aware of the tensional, linear,
areal, and projectional qualities of movement, not as piece-by-piece features, but as
a consummate qualitative whole.
A phenomenological analysis of movement can furthermore bring us to think
about movement and in so doing to realize there is more to movement than meets the
eye. Indeed there is kinesthesia. Consider, for example, that the qualitative spatio-
temporal-energic dynamics of our movement, the tensional, linear, areal, and
projectional qualities that constitute the how of our movement, its overall qualitative
character, eventuate in a style of moving, a style we commonly recognize less in
relation to ourselves than in relation to other persons. We recognize others in the way
they walk, for example, and in the way in which they grow pensive or angry, their
style of movement being dynamically fundamental to the person they are. As for
ourselves, the qualitative dynamics that constitute and shape our everyday synergies
of meaningful movement are so much a part of our experience of ourselves as
effective and competent ‘‘do-ers’’ that we commonly pay scant attention to the
personal style those qualitative dynamics reflect. We foreground the particular task,
conversation, or whatever in which we are engaged and background the dynamics. In
effect, the style our personal dynamics reflect is commonly not evident to us.
Why is movement therapeutic?
My fifth answer is that attention to our own self-movement, in prompting us to a
keener awareness of the complexities and subtleties of kinesthetic experience,
thereby prompts us to a keener awareness of the qualitative dynamics of movement.

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In so doing, it has the possibility of enlightening us about how thinking in

movement is at the core of our sense-making lives, and of turning our attention to
the particular kinetic style that defines our sense-makings, making us aware of the
typical qualitative dynamics of our own everyday synergies of meaningful
movement.

VI

Two additional answers I would give to the question broaden the conception of
therapy beyond its usual clinical context. Rather than beginning with particular
observations about movement itself, discussing their value, and on that basis
offering answers to the question of why movement is therapeutic, I begin with a
different kind of observation, namely, that movement is therapeutic as a
counterpoint in two particular domains: it is a much-needed counterpoint to
misleading scientific formulations on the one hand and to certain cultural
conceptions and related practices on the other.
Movement is a counterpoint to motorological thinking. Without in the least
devaluing neurophysiological studies of movement, I want to point out that the
terms ‘‘motor control,’’ ‘‘motor learning,’’ ‘‘motor skills,’’ and so on, reduce
movement to a motorology that completely occludes the experiential realities of
movement and its inherent qualitative dynamics. No more than any other forms of
animate life are humans mechanisms or motoric beings of one sort and another. A
motor does not forage for something to eat any more than it looks for a conspecific
with which to mate. A motor has neither friends nor enemies, neither appetite nor
feelings. It harbors no grudges or surges with delight. It is not challenged to learn; it
does not expect or remember. In effect, to reduce movement to a motorology is to
cut the living core out of humans. An example from a scientific textbook on
movement succinctly if inadvertently draws attention to the omission. Gowitzke and
Milner (1988) state, ‘‘The voluntary contribution to movement is almost entirely
limited to initiation, regulation of speed, force, range, and direction, and termination
of the movement’’ (p. 256). Granted, Gowitzke and Milner’s concern is with the
‘‘neural control of muscles,’’ which is indeed involuntary, what they define as the
‘‘limited contribution’’ of voluntary movement is indeed sizable, so sizable that not
only can the investigation of the rich and complex spatio-temporal-energic
structures inherent in the experience of movement hardly be ignored, but there
would be no movement to begin with if voluntary movement were ignored! The
ledger clearly needs both correction and balancing. We should be speaking not of
sensory and motor areas of the cerebral cortex, but of sensory and kinetic areas of
the cortex, of sensory/kinetic analyses of experience, of sensory/kinetic domains in
the sense that any particular repertoire of ‘‘I cans’’ in the animate world is the
differential expression of what I have described as ‘‘existential fit,’’ that is, of the
fact that physical and lived bodies, morphologies-in-motion, are all of a piece.
Correlatively, we should be speaking of the distinct sensory/kinetic worlds of living
creatures—sensory/kinetic worlds not unlike what von Uexküll (1928, 1934/1957)
described as Umwelts. (An Umwelt is usually defined as a subjective universe; in

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phenomenological literature, Umwelt describes a subject-world relationship, hence

commonly, a familiar world). In short, a motorological vocabulary and frame of
reference need correction and balancing by a straightforward kinetic/kinesthetic
vocabulary and frame of reference. Our concern and engagement, after all, is with
living bodies, not with experimental, wired-up or even electronically-scanned ones,
findings from which basically revolve not about the dynamics of life itself but about
a structure/function axis: ‘‘a place for everything and everything in its place.’’
Movement is similarly a counterpoint to typical present-day cultural conceptions
of humanness and related practices that tend not necessarily toward a denial, but
certainly toward an occlusion of our common evolutionary heritage as humans.
Globalization accentuates the occlusion by bringing to the fore more and more
people who are different from us and our way of living. Yet whatever our cultural
backgrounds, we are all human: we all walk; we all reach out for something to eat;
we all lie down to sleep; we all stop short, startled, at a sudden noise, and so on.
Movement is therapeutic precisely in calling attention to our common heritage in
movement. When I said earlier that ‘‘we move naturally in ways consonant with our
emotions,’’ I did not mean that cultures play no part in the kinetic form of our
emotions. Obviously, they do. My point is that, however differentially expressed, all
humans of whatever culture feel sadness; however differentially expressed, all feel
fear, and so on. No matter how differently cultures shape our emotions, specify how
close we are to stand in conversation with one another, and so on, and no matter
how much language culturally separates us, no matter, in other words, all the
various and multiple ways in which cultures shape our feelings and undergird our
social interactions, what is evolutionarily given is the ground floor. Cultures
precisely rework what is evolutionarily given. I exemplified this reworking at length
in The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies, showing in particular
how cultures elaborate, suppress, distort, or exaggerate what is evolutionarily given
in the form of power relations (Sheets-Johnstone, 1994). What is imperative to
recognize in what I went on to describe as a fractious and fractionating twentieth
century, and, with globalization, what I would describe as an ever more acute
fractious and fractionating twenty-first century, is our common evolutionary
heritage. Recognition of the ties that bind us in a common creaturehood and a
common humanity is indeed essential to our own well-being. Lawrence (1932)
wrote, ‘‘We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and
part of the living, incarnate cosmos’’ (p. 200). His words eloquently if implicitly
highlight the core of our aliveness in movement. They eloquently highlight as well
our human capacity to dance, a capacity not unique to humans as I have elsewhere
shown (Sheets-Johnstone, 2005), but shared by other members of the animal
kingdom, hence a capacity having evolutionary roots.
When I was studying for my master’s degree in dance, there was a commonly
expressed but unsubstantiated belief that ‘‘man has always danced’’ (Sheets-
Johnstone, 2005). Beyond a broad commitment to scholarship, substantiating that
belief means plumbing the depths of movement, recognizing the shared evolution-
ary heritage of humans that has its beginnings in the lively and life-proclaiming
dynamic realities of animation. Just such roots unite all humans across any and all
cultural differences. Beyond any doubt, we share a common creaturehood and

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humanity in which movement is and remains our mother tongue (Sheets-Johnstone,

1999a).
Moving together to celebrate our aliveness and our common evolutionary
heritage could be salutory not only to our survival, but to the survival of all forms of
life, flora as well as fauna, and possibly of the earth itself.

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Author Biography

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Ph.D. In her first life, Dr. Sheets-Johnstone was a dancer/choreographer,
professor of dance and dance scholar. In her second and ongoing life, she is a philosopher whose research
and writing remain grounded in the moving body. She is an independent, highly interdisciplinary scholar
affiliated with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon where she taught periodically in
the 1990s and where she now holds an ongoing Courtesy Professor appointment. She has published
numerous articles in humanities, science, and art journals, and lectured widely in Europe and the U.S. Her
book publications include The Phenomenology of Dance; Illuminating Dance: Philosophical Explora-
tions; the ‘‘roots’’ trilogy—The Roots of Thinking, The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered
Bodies, The Roots of Morality; Giving the Body Its Due; The Primacy of Movement; and The Corporeal
Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader. She was awarded a Distinguished Fellowship at the Institute of
Advanced Study at Durham University in the UK in Spring 2007.

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