Datum
15. Januar 2025
Virtual Lecture
„The Body on Trial”
Janka Kormos, a PhD candidate in the Theoretical Psychoanalysis program at the University of Pécs in Hungary and a scholar of both psychology and dance, will be sharing her research into the extraordinary history of movement-based personality assessment and movement-behavior training in the Cold War, through the work of Judith Kestenberg. Gerardo Con Diaz will be moderating. Please join us on Zoom this Wednesday!
The talk will be held Wednesday, January 15, from 12:00–1:30 PST, on Zoom at:
https://tinyurl.com/Janka-Kormos
(https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/96513079687?pwd=igQ0HeD9Nnoci4quLTNdk2QIQ4IXkU.1)
The Body on Trial
The talk introduces the life and work of Judith S. Kestenberg’s (1910–1999) with particular focus on the somatic orientation that permeated her oeuvre. Her story is of a female inside/outsider, a Polish-Jewish emigree psychiatrist who arrived in New York at the outbreak of World War II. A nonconformist, innovative albeit eclectic thinker who gravitated towards the unknown and unspeakable; she studied the somatic precursors of psychic development and the kinaesthetic imprints of transgenerational trauma.
From an unorthodox integration of psychoanalytic thought and dance studies, Kestenberg developed a movement-based personality assessment technique between 1950–1965. Kestenberg proposed that psychic and mental processes are not only generated by somatic experience but that movement behaviour is an inherent part of the symbolic process. She studied the mind of (and in) movement. In 1981, Judith and her husband, Milton Kestenberg, launched the Jerome Riker International Study for the Organised Persecution of Children which became one of the largest international oral history projects on the transgenerational effects of the Holocaust. They collected approximately 1500 testimonies from child survivors, children of survivors and war-children. Kestenberg’s interview technique aimed to reconstruct narratives of child survivors by evoking early kinaesthetic memories to support reparation claims of child survivors for psychological damages in indemnification trials.
In the Cold-war discourse of psy-sciences in the USA, bodily movement came to be viewed as an indicator of disturbed personal and group dynamics. The observation, assessment and therapeutic ‘re-training’ of movement behaviour promised psycho-technological control of societal well-being which was demonstrated by the various methods of movement analysis developed during the second wave of the ‘Movement Movement’ in the 1960s.
Kestenberg’s view of the human body as a repository of early trauma that exerts influence on later personality and her approach to movement behaviour as a language that indicates dis-ease, situates her work in the dominant currents of postwar psy-sciences in the USA. Her psychoanalytically informed trauma studies reflect the influence of therapeutic culture on the growing Holocaust awareness in the 1980s contributing to the construction of second-generation identities in the United States.
