The Expressive Body in Life, Art, and Therapy: Working with Movement, Metaphor and Meaning

Daria Halprin

Nov 2002 · Jessica Kingsley Publishers

About this ebook

Drawing on her extensive experience in expressive arts therapy, Daria Halprin presents a unique approach to healing through movement and art. She describes the body as the container of one's entire life experience and movement as a language that expresses and reveals our deepest struggles and creative potentials. Interweaving artistic and psychological processes, she offers a philosophy and methodology that invites the reader to consider the transformational capacity of the arts. In this essential resource for anyone interested in the integration of psychotherapy and the arts, Halprin also presents case studies and a selection of exercises that she has evolved over her career and practised at the Tamalpa Institute for over twenty-five years.

About the author

Daria Halprin trained since early childhood as a dancer and performance artist and toured internationally in the Dancers' Workshop Company. She has appeared in several films, most noteably in Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. She studied with Fritz Perls, the originator of Gestalt therapy, which led to her interest in psychology. In 1978 she co-founded the Tamalpa Institute, the first training center for movement-based expressive arts therapy, where she developed and codified her approach. She holds a Masters degree in psychology, is a Gestalt therapist and a registered expressive arts therapist. She conducts trainings at the Tamalpa Institute, teaches internationally and has a private practice in Marin County, California.