“As part of this ceremony, women bake their heads in small ovens for about an hour.” This quote is from the article, “Body Ritual among the Nacirema,” published in The American Anthropologist in 1956. In the article, anthropologist Horace Miner describes the Nacirema, a people with a lifestyle centered on the obsessive belief that “the human body is ugly and…[the] natural tendency is to debility and disease.” Miner recounts the roles of medicine men, listening witchdoctors, herbalists, holy mouth-men, and vestal maidens. He details torturous rites for curing sickness at temples and describes in-home shrines for charms and magical potions, body secrecy practices, and sex as taboo behavior. The myriad descriptions are fascinating and disturbing.
The Existential Moment: E-H Informed Couples Therapy —The Relational Field
Earlier this year, The Existential Moment began exploring an E-H-informed approach to couples therapy. After sketching the framework (May) and considering distress and health (June), this month turns to a theory of relational organization: how two distinct “ways of being” meet to construct and sustain a shared “world.” This frame offers the clinician an orienting touchstone so that distress can be understood and change can be facilitated more intentionally.
Within E-H’s “Dimensions of the Therapeutic Encounter,” the interpersonal dimension provides a useful parallel. It directs attention toward the therapist-client relationship as it is being lived in the here-and-now. How do we affect one another? What’s the quality of the “between” us? What ways of being emerge within the relationship? In couples work, this relational process becomes the basis for understanding how two lived lives come together and begin to influence and organize one another.