Psychotherapist's Narrative of Coming Together Through the Holding of Rope
Josephine Carin Blomqvist Almbring's 2022 University of Edinburgh thesis, a psychoanalytic self-case study of how practicing shibari shaped her development as a psychotherapist.
This thesis by Josephine Carin Blomqvist Almbring was issued on 24 June 2022 in the Health in Social Science collection of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Health in Social Science (DOI 10.7488/era/2457). The repository record does not state the degree.
The study asks how the author’s personal practice of shibari supported her professional growth as a psychotherapist, especially her ability to hold clients’ distress and to be present in an embodied way in the therapy room. It also examines the limits of that capacity, which the author connects with her own early experience of being held, or not held.
The method is a case study in which the author is both researcher and subject. She uses reflective, anonymized examples from her clinical work and from her rope practice to draw out knowledge that is embodied, intuitive and practice-based, from a psychoanalytic and interpretivist standpoint. The theoretical center is Donald Winnicott’s concept of holding, and the thesis treats the therapist’s personal and professional selves as influencing each other.
The author describes a movement between fragmentation and integration of hidden, unsymbolized material, with holding, integration, defenses and embodiment as the main themes. She presents experience of bondage practice as one route to professional development and embodied knowledge for therapeutic work, and she extends Winnicott’s idea of holding to both rope practice and contemporary therapy, which she offers as a new conceptual and practical application.