3 December 2025
Before I had any training in therapy, while working in an embodied way with improvised movement, voice and witnessed “performance” in physical theatre workshops, I found myself momentarily stumbling into spaces of possibility, openings up of potentially different ways of being and relating.
I have sometimes wondered what is the point of exploring the past in therapy. It can feel so unknown and ultimately unknowable. Perhaps what matters more is coming upon different ways of being-with oneself and others, and being-in the world in which one finds oneself.
In the mountains, I once set out to follow a stream to its source. But I found it had many sources: run-off from rocks glinting in the sunlight, damp ground below a craggy summit, trickles and underground flows. Or maybe there was no source, just a continuous movement of water through the landscape in multiple forms.
Recently I read a contemporary California-based psychoanalyst and writer, Thomas Ogden’s reflections on “transitional objects” and “transitional phenomena”, an elaboration of ideas from the twentieth century British psychoanalyst and paediatrician, Donald Winnicott’s clinical work. These ideas have multiple iterations, in Winnicott’s work and beyond. But perhaps what matters most is that they have something to do with therapeutic relationships as a spaces of possibility and with the experience of feeling alive.
As a therapist, I am interested in this sort of relational space, where there is the possibility of something new emerging, the potential for new experiences of the self and other.
Improv is all about the present moment and the emergent, being in a place of uncertainty and that place coming to be a place not of fear, dread, numbness or stuckness but of aliveness to our experiences of ourselves and of the world.