The Itineraries of the Body in Contemporary Therapeutic Culture

the experience of the Family Constellations and the Bodily Divination Experimental Group

Abstract

In the course of six years of research, in contact with fortune-tellers and cartomancers in Rio de Janeiro, the encounter with the practice of Family Constellations transformed the concern around the theme of ‘extrasensory perception’, or ‘mediumship’, understood here as bodily or emdodied perceptions, in our research question. The hypothesis the present work states is that the ‘extrasensory perception’, as it is known, is actually not beyond the bodily senses, integrating, however, a modulation of the body’s attention that requires specific listening to the body. With this aim, the Bodily Divination Experimental Group (GEOC) was founded in 2019, the result of the effort of six fortune-tellers from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This research process is leaded by the proprioception, conceived as the perception of the body as a modulation of relational relationships, which is activated in scenes constructed from the demands of the consultants. In this sense, the bodily oracle integrate the proprioception with synchronized scenes, when the most diverse sequences are made by the querents’ demands. 10 meetings were held with 6 permanent members of the GEOC, varying the number of consultants. I will explore, as a preliminary investigation, from the arque-writing of the encounters, drawing of the record traces that connect the body in the midst of these encounters. Our research question, before a hypothesis, builds a meta-question, about how can we register writings of events, which operate meanings that often escape from representations and symbolism?

Keywords: Fortune-telling; Body; Intuition; Future memory; Image.