A brand new open-access piece within the Journal of the Historical past of the Behavioral Sciences will curiosity AHP readers: “Dance turns into therapeutic within the mid to late twentieth century,” Janka Kormos. Summary:

The convergence of dance artwork and therapeutic tradition engendered the event of dance-movement remedy within the mid to late twentieth century internationally. This text traces the sociopolitical, institutional, and aesthetic influences that coalesced on this course of by contrasting histories of dance-movement remedy in Hungary and in the US. The professionalization dance-movement remedy, by way of which it established its personal concept, observe, and coaching establishments, occurred first in the US within the late Nineteen Forties. Trendy dancers in the US started to conceptualize their exercise as therapeutic, and the dancer as a (secular) healer, a therapist. The inflow of therapeutic ideas into the sphere of dance is considered for instance of therapeutic discourse permeating numerous areas of life within the twentieth century. The Hungarian case gives a contrasting historical past of therapeutic tradition, one which deviates from the predominant view of the phenomenon as a product of the worldwide unfold of Western modernization and the expansion of free-market capitalism. Hungarian motion and dance remedy certainly developed independently from its American predecessor. Its historical past is intimately tied to the sociopolitical context of state-socialist interval, notably to the institutionalization of psychotherapy in public hospitals, and to the difference of Western group psychotherapies throughout the casual setting of the “second public sphere.” The legacy of Michael Balint and the British object-relations faculty supplied its theoretical framework. Its methodology was rooted in postmodern dance. The methodological variations between American dance-movement remedy and the Hungarian methodology displays the shift in dance aesthetics that occurred internationally between 1940 and Nineteen Eighties.