What can a therapist’s body do? An exploration of mimetic events in systemic therapeutic practice

My inquiry departs from the philosophical provocations of Spinoza as discussed by Deleuze—specifically Deleuze’s oral Spinoza—and from the practice of systemic therapy, where my personal interest in the therapist’s body has found no fertile ground, remaining instead the “pink elephant in the therapy room.” Through the affective methodology of mapping my sensations, I traced a cartography of events in which the therapist most actively engaged the body within the therapy room. From this cartography of sensations, I came to “palpate” the concept of mimesis. I developed a rhizomatic review in which I explored heterogeneous fields related to the concept of mimesis, wandering from the carnivalesque figure of Harlequin to the empirical studies of mirror neurons. To analyze the material emerging from the cartography of sensations, I drew on two different qualitative methodologies: Multimodal Conversation Analysis (MCA) and ethnography. These methodologies created in me different orientations: through MCA I developed categories of mimetic gestures, which I deepened using the analytical frameworks of the Cartesian plane and Benjamin’s notion of immaterial similarity. I then shifted from a categorical to a more processual perspective by turning to the ethnography of specific mimetic events. From this ethnographic approach, attention emerged on what makes the mimetic process visible inside the therapy room. From here, a new type of knowledge became possible, allowing me to explore: asignifying attentionality, corresponding nature, and the doing–undergoing of mimetic gestures. In the discussion section, I consider how the concept of perturbation developed by the Centro Milanese di Terapia della Famiglia (CMTF) may have prevented the colonizing dimension of the mimetic process from being seen, and how instead the poietic dimension of mimesis can be highlighted. Reflectively, I also consider how my starting point as a white man may have hindered my ability to perceive the potentially colonizing aspect of mimesis. My inquiry concludes with the proposal of the conceptual figure of the mimetic therapist, which situates systemic therapy as a political practice of embodied participation in the relationship with the other.