Introduction
Hi, I am Cynthia Dorrestijn. I teach dance. I have experienced psychosis three times. So I thought it might be interesting to talk about dance and psychosis. During psychosis, the way I moved—and therefore also the way I danced—altered. It made me wonder: How does psychosis manifest itself in ways of moving? That is what I will explore.
I will first examine what thinking in terms of dancing might bring to understanding psychosis. Then I will try to apply this method to the context of madness. To do so, I will draw primarily on my own experience. First, I’ll focus on a moment leading up to the first episode of psychosis: a moving in unison in a ballroom dance class. Then I’ll describe how distrust affected my movements during a second episode of psychosis. I’ll continue this exploration through to the extreme condition of catatonia from the third episode.
In addition to the three episodes, I’d like to explain how I moved during labor and in the postpartum period, because everyone—myself included—was keeping a close eye on me back then to make sure my behavior didn’t spiral into psychosis. I again experienced movement in unison, but this time it didn’t escalate into psychosis.
Finally, I offer some reflections on how dance can play a role in interacting with someone with challenging (psychotic) behavior.
Philosophy of Dance and Aliveness
How can one communicate with someone experiencing challenging behavior present in psychosis? Phenomenologist Jaspers points out that there will always be some psychotic behavior that remains incomprehensible when approached from the body of science. But what if we choose a more dance-like approach to communication? The question ‘How does a psychotic person move?’ brings us back to a foundation from which comprehension might become more accessible in a dance-like manner.
To answer this question I want to focus on how a dancer experiences dance and movement herself. Therefore I started from a philosophy of dance by dancer Sheets Johnstone. I also made forays into other theories of embodiment, but in the end, I returned to her philosophy. That’s because during the process I realized that the conceptual framework associated with analyses such as those of the pre-reflective self and enactivism caused me to approach myself as an object as soon as I tried to map out my own passive bodily movements. It took the ‘aliveness’ out of the movements. It may seem like a linguistic quibble, but it makes an intuitive difference whether we’re talking about embodiment or a living body. Thinking about psychosis through an art form like dance gives me the opportunity to approach conscious and unconscious movement in a non-mechanical way.
“(…) when our point of departure in communicating, or in simply being with others, is anchored in movement, rather than in words, we are related to one other by way of a common heritage, a kinetic heritage, that is both phylogenetic and ontogenetic. In a word: movement is our mother tongue.” (source: youtube[1])
Through this analysis, I am seeking to translate my psychotic movements into language using dance as a native language. This presentation is my first step in that endeavor.
A Movement in Unison
It was through stories from dancer Gil the Grid that I first began to understand how moving and being moved can play a role in psychosis. He describes how, attending a party, he was struck by how bodies moved in such perfect sync with the flow of his thoughts that he felt as though he was controlling them. This led me to analyze a similar dance experience of my own. During a particular ballroom dance class at age 17 I was practicing steps. I could see out of the corner of my eye, even while I was practicing, how a lot of people were struggling with the steps and were watching me for guidance. I had never noticed that before. The responsibility suddenly felt very heavy. By concentrating so intensely on my own movements, they stuttered. At the same time, I also saw others stuttering more than usual. Apparently, I was guiding their bodies, and the boundaries of my own body were expanding to include bodies in the distance and also the walls and ceiling of the hall. The moment I thought this might be a mental short circuit, the hall lights flickered briefly. It seemed to react to my thought of a short circuit. The power I felt I could exert over everything around me was terrifying. A few days later, my parents called the psychiatrist while I was sitting naked in bed, mimicking the swaying trees outside. A month later, I was moving normally enough to go to school, and I managed to pass my final exams.
A Blocking Movement
Five years later, I experienced again that I was influencing the outer world with my thoughts. This time, it made me distrustful. I wanted to block the impressions. The distrust spread to physical sensations, making them feel increasingly strange. A bit like how “normal breathing” also feels artificial when you pay attention to it. The delusion from the first psychosis seemed to collapse inward. I viewed everything from within with such detachment that it felt strange, stilted and mechanical.
A Woody Movement
I experienced my body as mechanical and couldn’t move it fluidly. I struggled with this when I wanted to go cycling two weeks after the onset of my second psychosis. At one point, I was fully focused on the fluid movement of my feet on the pedals. Just like during the ballroom dance class, the movement then began to falter. The fluid movement stopped. It was as if I had to actively think along with the pedals to keep the movement going. To my horror, I realized I couldn’t keep up with that rotation. Literally. And I had to get off and walk the rest of the way with the bike in hand.
A Looping Movement
In the run-up to the third psychotic episode, which involved a similar pattern of thinking, I once found myself stuck in a strange loop of incessant burping. I also noted in a journal that I had “stuttering thoughts.” Both experiences involved getting stuck in an unpleasant, self-repeating loop. Both involve staccato movements. There is research on how people who stutter think. It appears that an excess of self-judgment about one’s own speech distorts speech[2]. Perhaps the distrustful judgments about my own thoughts distorted my thinking. One particular night, I moved around the house for hours, preaching. As the living room filled with worried nurses and family, my gestures became even more theatrical. This came to an abrupt end when I was forcibly carried away on a stretcher to an isolation cell. Because of that solitary confinement, the distrustful gaze turned inward again and I became rigid. Very rigid. I developed catatonia. I barely moved, stopped eating, and stopped drinking. My visual hallucinations were sometimes extremely frightening, so at a certain point I kept my eyes closed.
An Attuned Movement
When my boyfriend came over, I found my first grip on a reality I could handle. Literally. For hours I lay on the bed with my eyes closed, clinging to him like a frightened animal. It wasn’t easy for him to even break free from my grip just to go to the bathroom. A day later, a nurse washed my hair. She got me moving by touching me in a loving, attuned, and patient way. This hair washing gently set me in motion. Afterward, I made a huge leap in making contact, my boyfriend told me later. The “no” in my thinking and the distrust gradually gave way to a “yes” and trust.
A Repetitive Breathing Movement
I’d like to explain how I moved during labor and in the postpartum period, because everyone, myself included, was keeping a close eye on me back then to make sure my behavior didn’t spiral into psychosis. Labor confronted me with ‘I can’s’ that were unknown to me before becoming a mother. Retrospectively I understand how labor can be a tricky terrain for people susceptible to psychosis; It’s the type of ‘I can’s’ that might be associated with the talent of manic people.
For some reasons I was able to find an intense focused breathing rhythm when the contractions started. It made the pain of the contractions bearable. A gynecologist briefly instructed me during the process to hold off the contractions for as long as I could. When I felt my contractions reaching their final stage (persweeën), I kept pushing them back for another quarter of an hour. Only when my son’s heartbeat dropped did they rush back into my room to deliver him with mild technical intervention. During a checkup six weeks later, I asked if I had been holding back ‘persweeën’ (final contractions). I was told that wasn’t possible. At such last stage, the body takes control, I was assured. It wasn’t until later, during my second delivery, when the medical staff noticed that I was breathing away pushing contractions and told me to move through them, that I knew for sure I had indeed been holding back pushing contractions in the lead-up to the birth of my firstborn. It’s not necessarily a good thing to be able to do such a thing. Apparently, I can overrule nature’s wise patterns of movement through the power of a strong suggestion like “hold off contractions for as long as you can”. The way of getting lost in a movement pattern resonates with what William Mc Neill calls trance in his book ‘Keeping together in time’. That’s a book in dance and drill. A psychiatrist ones told me that I have to be careful with endeavors to reach a trance state. After having become a mother I now bodily understand why.
A Movement in Unison (again)
In the run-up to the second and the third psychosis there were flashbacks and there was recognition of the movement patterns that unfolded, which aroused distrust. Intuitively I felt that I might resonate with those movements patterns again during the postpartum since people stressed the heightened chance of a psychosis. Indeed I experienced again that my movements were in unison with everything around me, as I also described in the ballroom dance class. But this time, it didn’t arouse distrust.
A Disoriented Movement
Not entirely surprisingly, as a mother I was deeply attuned to my little son’s movements. My body and the bodies of my husband and maternity nurse sometimes moved in strange synchrony, as if my son was making me and everyone around the maternity bed dance a choreography unknown to us. Since the source of the movement this time did not necessarily lie within myself, but in the baby, I remained spared from my thoughts turning inward. According to my husband, I sometimes moved as if drunk, relaxed, and disoriented. I think that, in addition to sleep deprivation, I think this was connected to how I felt being moved by my son.
Conclusion
In this essay, I have attempted to map out the movement qualities surrounding madness as I personally know them. Dancing in unison was discussed in relation to the delusion of controlling bodies. Stiff movement was associated with distrust. At the height of that distrust in the third psychosis, movement was maximally blocked, except when it came from a loving trusting touch. Finally, I describe how I dealt with nature’s movement called contractions by means of a trance inducing rhythm and I describe the disoriented movement that accompanied me during the postpartum period as maybe having its roots in an unknown choreography.
Then a few final reflections. Dance in its wide definition of Sheets Johnstone is ancient. Older than language. Thus, dance is not a detour to understanding how a person behaves; rather, language is sometimes an obstacle to making contact. In our society, many are often afraid to move in a dance-like manner. However, an interaction with someone exhibiting challenging behavior might just turn into one that feels appropriate if you dare to approach the person the way the caregiver did when she washed my hair. And if it feels appropriate, then maybe we can move away from the narrative of ‘onbegrepen gedrag’ (challenging behavior), since it might be understandable through speechless contact improvisation. I therefore invite researchers to further deepen their knowledge through dance. Approaching someone as if in a dance is the opposite of doing something mad, because communication without dance -mechanical communication- might just be the essence of certain types of madness.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhYAqejZdzI&t=430s
[2] Jackson et al, 2021, Journal of Fluency Disorders