Merging scientific theory with a practical clinical approach, Body of Awareness explores the formation of infant movement experience and its manifest influence upon the later adult. Most significantly, it shows how the organizing principles in early development are functionally equivalent to those of the adult and how movement plays a critical role in a developing self-awareness for the infant and in maintaining a healthy self throughout life. In addition, a variety of case studies illustrates how infant developmental movement patterns are part of the moment-to-moment proceses of the adult client and how to bring these patterns to awareness within therapy.

Body of Awareness is intended to help psychotherapists, new or advanced, to enhance their skills of attuning to their patients. They can do this by heightening their observations of subtle movement patterns as they emerge within the client/therapist relationship, and by respecting their own developing feelings within session as essential information to the therapy process. And as developmental patterns are central to psychological functioning, a background study of movement provides the therapist with critical insight into the unfolding psychodynamic field.

Ruella Frank, Ph.D., has been exploring infant movement patterns and their relationship to the adult since the mid-1970s. She is founder and director of the Center for Somatic Studies, faculty member of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, guest professor at Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy, and also teaches throughout the United States, Europe and Mexico. Ruella has authored chapters in various publications as well as the book Body of Awareness: A Somatic and Developmental Approach to Psychotherapy (GestaltPress, 2001), and co-authored the book The First Year and The Rest of Your Life: Movement, Development and Psychotherapeutic Change, Routledge Press, 2010. www.somaticstudies.com