Where ‘bodymind’ comes from: a new post on The Wider Existence traces the word’s two histories

NeuroHub’s own blog, The Wider Existence, has published a post called Our Bodyminds. It looks at the history of a word its authors use all the time in their writing.

For many autistic, neurodivergent and disabled people, “bodymind” names something already known from the inside. Thinking, feeling, sensing and moving are not separate things happening in separate places. The post sets out to show where the word came from. It argues that the word has lived in “two quite different homes” and that both matter.

The first home: 1970s psychology

The post explains that the psychologist Ken Dychtwald coined the word in his book Bodymind, first published in 1977. He developed it at the Esalen Institute in California, a centre of the humanistic psychology and human potential movements of that decade. Dychtwald drew on the work of Wilhelm Reich, Moshe Feldenkrais and Fritz Perls, and on Eastern traditions such as yoga. He argued that psychological and physical life cannot be pulled apart.

The second home: disability studies

More than thirty years later, the disability studies scholar Margaret Price took the word up. She used it in her 2011 book Mad at School and developed it further in a 2015 article. Price was challenging Cartesian dualism, the long Western habit of treating the mind and the body as separate substances. She also used the word to insist that mental disability be taken as seriously as physical disability.

The post goes on to trace how the word travelled further. It points to Sami Schalk’s work on race, gender and disability, Eli Clare’s writing on chronic illness and cure, and Nick Walker’s Neuroqueer Heresies. It also mentions community resources such as the Stimpunks Foundation glossary.

Why the history matters

The authors say it is easy to pick up a word because it feels true, and then lose track of who did the careful thinking with it first. In their account, Dychtwald gave a felt sense of body and mind as one. Price gave that sense a political and theoretical shape.

They close by linking the idea to their earlier writing on autistic burnout:

Distress, joy, sensory experience, attention and thought move together

The full post includes a reference list for anyone who wants to read the original works.

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