Dancing with schizophrenia Choreography as a resource for healing psychosis

This co-written paper discusses strategies for dealing with schizophre- nia. For Helene Cæcilie, an expert by experience, dance has served as an artistic outlet for schizophrenia, allowing her to work and exist in the world. Through the act of automatic writing while in psychosis, Helene Cæcilie has transformed the bewildering world of her mind into choreog- raphy. Choreographies have been a memory map tracing her mental state through the years. Her experience shows the dialectic of disintegration and reintegration that characterizes the existence of a schizophrenic per- son. In her existence, this dialectic transforms her experience of disinte- gration (a “very bleak place”) into something “life-affirming” through cho- reography. Delusional explanations, creation of art products, and dance are traced back in this paper to a process of Gestaltung – a German term that in English can be rendered as “form in formation” – the act of giving form to the experience of the formless. We find Gestaltung at work in the chiasm linking the moment of disintegration and that of reintegration in the course of schizophrenic existence. It has been argued that most of the schizophrenic person’s efforts are directed at compensating for this disintegration – putting together and reassembling what is scattered. To Helene Cæcilie’s otherwise disintegrated Self- and world-experience, dance operates an embodied Gestaltung which restores continuity and temporal coherence to the Self, individuality, and boundaries in space, unity, and structure in the body, attunement with other bodies in movement and at the same time delimitation with respect to them.