by : Admin 04 August 2025
In psychedelic therapy, powerful images and insights often take center stage, but it is through the body that these insights are grounded, take root, and are made real. Today, many trauma-informed and somatic therapists echo this wisdom, arguing that insight alone is not enough. Transformation must reach into the body, where so much of our unconscious experience is held.
Depth psychology from the work of Carl Jung, offers a framework for understanding how mind and body, the psychic and somatic unconscious, ultimately form as one unified field. Though often associated with symbols and archetypes, Jung understood the importance of the body in shaping our psychic life. Images, he believed, arise out from the depths of the body and give form to our perceptions. The body is not separate from the psyche but its living foundation, the meeting ground where our conscious and unconscious are embedded. Somewhere the two ends meet and become interlocked, and that is the place where one cannot say whether it is matter (body), or what one calls “psyche.”
Jung described the unconscious as existing on a continuum between two poles:
1. The instinctual, somatic unconscious—a realm of impulse, emotion, and embodied memory
2. The archetypal, psychic unconscious—a realm of symbols, dreams, and images
Together, these form a complete psychic system. Jung even likened this spectrum to light: a subtle continuum where image and impulse, psyche and soma, interweave.
This view is strikingly relevant to psychedelic work. A powerful vision may emerge in ceremony or ketamine-assisted therapy, many individuals have even reported luminous light, but often it is the tremble in the chest, the breath that deepens, or the tears that release that mark the true turning point. The body becomes the vessel through which the unconscious speaks.
Reclaiming the Somatic Unconscious
In modern culture, we tend to privilege insight, cognition, and verbal expression—what Jung would place in the psychic domain—while often rejecting and suppressing instinctual emotion. Our cultural rejection of the body encourages us to split off the instinctual unconscious, and with it our more primitive impulses and feelings.
The psychic unconscious carries images, symbols, and dreams, and is much more accessible to us than the somatic, instinctual component of the image we have relegated to the underworld. But the body remembers what the conscious mind has long forgotten. Trauma, for instance, is often stored in the tissues, not just in memory. It may show up as chronic tension, dissociation, or visceral discomfort that talk therapy alone may not be able to resolve. Trauma stored in the tissues of the body, associated with images, require release through body-centered methods, such as body focus techniques, cathartic release, or breathwork
Body-work methods, including Rolfing, somatic inquiry, cathartic movement, and bioenergetics can access these layers and release these patterns helping reconnect with both instinct and image. Depth psychologists like Marion Woodman understood this well: she taught that lasting transformation and the key to inner change comes by bringing a spontaneously occurring image to a place of tension or discomfort in the body. Bringing image to the sensation and sensation to the image. In this way, the psychic releases the physical, and the physical liberates the psychic.
Integration Requires Both Poles
We now know that body-work alone can be as one-sided as talk therapy. While it often releases the somatic unconscious, it does so without regard to the corresponding psychic image. We are left open and energized, but lacking the understanding necessary to effect lasting change in our destructive inclinations. Transformation will remain incomplete. Just as insight without embodiment falls flat, so too can bodywork without symbolic meaning.
Body focus must accompany the insights gained through verbal therapy, spiritual disciplines, or creative work, to effect the healing of destructive, life limiting behaviors. Body therapies may help break down physical armoring while analysis may establish insight about our illusions and psychic defenses. But it is work on and through the body that most powerfully causes a shift in our fundamental sense of self and our way of being in the world.
The Return to Wholeness
This is where Jungian psychology, somatic therapy, and psychedelic frameworks meet. Body-work grounds us in the numinous, the sacred backdrop that underlies both mind and body. Nietzsche, too, so often included the body in his experience of the numinous. Through the body, we begin to perceive the larger realms of reality to which psyche and soma are a part and both belong: the realm of the imaginal, the mundus imaginalis. For this visionary landscape offers a unifying vision of the union of All: a meaningful framework that can ultimately contain the alienation, nihilism, and chaos of our post-modern times.
Conscious work with the body begins first by mending inner splits and dissolving defensive projections, opening the way out of alienation toward renewed connection with meaning—whether experienced as love, “God,” source, the Self, or cosmic consciousness. Call it what you will.
In psychedelic therapy, this often means guiding the client not just through symbolic visions but through the raw immediacy of felt experience. Psychedelics can amplify archetypal content, not only revealing through insight, but inviting us to bring it into full embodiment, especially when followed by intentional integration. When the body is no longer excluded from the healing process, it becomes the living ground of meaning itself.
References:
Dennis, S. L. (2001). Embrace of the Daimon: Sensuality and the Integration of Forbidden Imagery in Depth Psychology. York Beach, ME: Nicolas-Hays.