Joan Chodorow

Joan Chodorow (born May 29, 1937) is an American dance/movement therapist, Jungian psychoanalyst, international teacher, scholar and author. Chodorow is a doctor of philosophy (PhD) in psychology, a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT), and an American Dance Therapy Association board-certified dance/movement therapist (BC-DMT).

In her early career, she studied and collaborated with dance and movement therapists Trudi Schoop, a world-renowned dancer and mime, and Mary Starks Whitehouse, the founding pioneer of Authentic Movement. Chodorow also studied with Irmgard Bartenieff, a dancer, choreographer, and theorist who developed possibilities in movement training, and Alma Hawkins, a pioneer in dance education who founded the United States' first dance department at the University of California, Los Angeles. These early collaborations informed her clinical practice, and led to her ongoing research, teaching, and writing on the body-psyche relationship, especially the emotions and their multi-sensory expression and transformation.

As a leading pioneer of Active Imagination in movement (also known as Authentic Movement or Movement in Depth), she published widely. Her books include ''Dance'' ''therapy and depth psychology: the moving imagination'' and ''Jung on Active Imagination''. A selection of her articles appear in ''Authentic movement: essays by Mary Starks Whitehouse, Janet Adler and Joan Chodorow'' edited by Patrizia Pallaro. Her work has been translated into 20 languages, including Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.

She was the co-developer of the Archetypal Affect System, with her husband the Jungian psychoanalyst Louis H. Stewart and his brother, pediatrician and child psychiatrist Charles Stewart. Their work addresses human motivation and development, emotions, embodied consciousness, relationship styles, and creation myths. Building on Jung's model of the psyche and the relationship between affect and archetype, they integrated findings from Joseph Henderson, Charles Darwin, Silvan Tompkins, Paul Eckman, D.H. Winnicott, Mary Main, and others to demonstrate how play and imagination are crucial for psychological growth. In the 1980s, when the field of psychology was shifting from a focus on behavior to cognition, they developed their theory on how emotion was central to healing and development. Their research demonstrated that active imagination is as fundamental for adult individuation as imaginative play is for children.

In 1999, Chodorow was selected to present the Marian Chace Foundation Lecture for the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA). In 2009, she received the American Dance Therapy Association Lifetime Achievement Award. Provided by Wikipedia