The Psychophysiology of Touch

Haptic Perception

Haptic perception is the perception through touch. Our hands are superbly fine-tuned perceptual instruments. They play a far more important role for art therapy than has been acknowledged so far. Touch is the most fundamental of human experiences. Infants rely on touch to feel safe and loved; to be rocked, held and soothed calms them and regulates their nervous system. We comfort each other through a hug, friends are ‘in touch’ with each other. We relax with a massage. Our body-rhythms synchronize through touch. Love, sexuality as well as violence are primarily communicated through touch. Our skin boundaries become invaded through inappropriate touching, through accidents and medical procedures and the vast majority of traumatic memories involve touch. When we deal with trauma, we almost always deal with a boundary breach that involves our skin; events that were experienced through unwanted touching.

 We live in a word and image dominated society. However, the creation and processing of imagery happens developmentally much later. Only from approximately four years onwards will children be able to tell stories, draw images and be able to process sequential storyline. When we deal with developmental and attachment we deal with a much younger pre-verbal age. When we deal with sexual trauma, medical trauma, or interpersonal violence, words and images are not enough to access the brainstem, where emergency responses can be resolved. These instances constitute touch trauma, and we need touch modalities to treat them. Contact with clay creates a feedback loop of motor impulses and sensory awareness that is non-verbal and not image based. It appeals to the sensorimotor needs of our earliest psychological development and the instinctual survival patterns in our brainstem.

 Deuser, the founder of Work at the Clay Field, has studied haptic perception for a number of decades. Similar to acupressure, acupuncture and reflexology he has linked certain parts of the hands to specific organs and regions of the body. However, he has added a psychological and perceptual dimension to hand movements:

 The fingers reflect our cognitive and subtle perceptual functions. Fingers can ‘see’ and ‘smell’. With a fingertip we can check out the clay in the field and assess if this environment is safe or not. In this context the thumb is not a finger, but executes impulses arising from the instinctual base of the hand.

 The base of the hand relates to the pelvis and the abdomen. You can try this out by applying pressure on a table with the base of your hands only. You will notice how the muscles in your pelvis and abdomen respond instantly. The base of the hand is instrumental in realizing and fulfilling vital needs. We need it to push the clay into place, push unwanted material out of the way and to create space for ourselves.

“If the sensory and motor basis remains fragmented due to biological or social circumstances, hand actions remain unstable and fragile. The lack of a haptic and bodily basis will then be substituted through the activation of fantasies and imaginations, which lack the vital intensity of the physical, needed to gain stability” Deuser.

This is the plight of most children who are diagnosed as being ‘on the spectrum’. It is diagnostically of importance to notice, if the base of the hand can be applied to fulfill vital needs, or if a client literally tiptoes through life.

 The centre of the hand is associated with full body contact and sensory awareness. Reflexology also relates the lungs and heart to the middle of the hands. Full touch gives us intense information about a person or an object. Again, you can test this by putting your hand flat on a surface. If this surface disgusts you, you will instantly try to make as little direct contact with it as possible. You can notice how your hands want to react and for example only touch with your fingertips, distancing yourself from direct contact. If we touch a baby, however, or someone we really like, touching with the full hand gives us a pleasurable body sensation ‘all over’. When we grab a handful of clay it ‘arrives’ inside our hand, it is a deeply fulfilling experience.

 Clients who have been traumatised by touch through physical abuse, through accidents and surgeries, will find it challenging to touch clay. The direct contact can easily trigger traumatic memories. Unlike any other body part our hands are extraordinary complex sense organs. Observing hands in the Clay Field allows diagnostic conclusions about clients’ embodiment or patterns of dissociation. Haptic object relations refer to the way we learn to handle the ‘world’, how we discovered as infants and children the environment around us.

 Touch is an underrepresented and little researched therapeutic tool. Art therapists tend to be widely unaware of its potential, even those therapists who work with clay. Art therapists focus mainly on symbolic image making; they offer an optical experience. At the end of a Clay Field therapy session, however, there will be no finished product, no artwork to show to friends, no sculpture to be fired in a kiln, instead,  intense body memories  will be taken home.

 Due to the texture, weight and resistance of the clay, the material demands physical effort.  Clients are not offered a handful of clay, but a ‘field’ a flat wooden box filled with clay. A bowl of water, a sponge are simply there.

Very quickly our cognitive conditioning has to make way for the more ‘ancient’ urges of our libido. Our body has to become engaged. Such kinesthetic motor action combined with sensory perception has the potential for lasting therapeutic benefits.

            “As I touch the clay the clay touches me” Deuser.

The Clay Field demands a relationship –

            “I cannot distance myself from it, from the moment I engage” Anonymous.

The Clay Field offers a neutral container to relearn life-experiences. Work at the Clay Field enables clients to encounter the constructive and destructive aspects of the self as processes of psychic change and identity formation.

Cornelia Elbrecht AThR

Institute for Sensorimotor Art Therapy

cornelia@sensorimotorarttherapy.com;   www.sensorimotorarttherapy.com