Some Clinical Observations on Muscle Tension and Expressive Movement

Abstract

“Any defect of psyche or soma is the occasion of the greatest disproportion in the other.” I came to appreciate this Plato dictum early in my career when I worked as Aubrey Lewis’s research assistant at the Maudsley Hospital. As my first assignment was “ to consider nervous tics” I was not surprised to find these introductory passages to a WHO’s Report on Psychosomatic Disorders which he edited (WHO 1964), “In all ages and places men have expressed their feelings in bodily happenings and, through verbal and other symbols, in bodily as well as mental terms”, and he went on to quote from Tuke’s “Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind upon the Body in Health and Disease” published in 1872; “Mind or brain influences, excites, perverts or depresses the sensory functions, muscular contraction, nutrition and secretion.” I would add that the most conspicuous of these bodily accompaniments of psychological states are “muscular contractions.”