Erica Lorentz, "Body As Shadow: Jung’s Method of Embodied Healing" (Karnac, 2026)

About this episode

Erica Lorentz discusses her book on Jung's method of embodied healing, emphasizing the integration of body and psyche in therapeutic practices.

Body as Shadow: Jung’s Method of Embodied Healing is Jungian analyst Erica Lorentz’s passionate, clinically grounded argument that Jung’s psychology was never meant to be “head-only.” It was always an embodied practice, one that asks us to meet psyche where it actually lives: in sensation, emotion, energy, imagination, and what Jung called the somatic unconscious or subtle body. At the heart of the book is Lorentz’s central method: embodied active imagination, a way of working in which inward attention to a symptom, sensation, or emotion becomes a portal into imaginal material and archetypal depths, without forcing interpretation or prematurely translating experience into words. This approach is shaped by her long apprenticeship in Authentic Movement (also known as Movement as Active Imagination), where the psyche is allowed to emerge through the body in a protected relational container and a non-directive witnessing stance. Lorentz argues that many modern approaches to trauma and psychotherapy remain constrained by a left-brain bias: we attempt to heal through insight, narrative, and cognitive explanation, while the original wound and the original healing energy often sits below…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Erica Lorentz

Topics covered

• Jungian psychology
• embodied healing
• active imagination
• trauma therapy
• somatic unconscious

Keywords

• Jungian analysis
• embodied practice
• psychotherapy
• active imagination
• trauma
• somatic experience

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Body As Shadow: Jung’s Method of Embodied Healing, Zarathustra Seminar

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