By Helen Edgar and David Gray-Hammond
David and I both use the word “bodymind” all the time in our writing, and it has become one of those words that feels so right that it is easy to forget it has a history of its own. For many of us in Autistic, neurodivergent and disability communities it names something we already know from the inside, that our thinking, feeling, sensing and moving are not separate things happening in separate places. We wanted to look back at where the word came from, because the more we read, the more we realised that it has lived in two quite different homes, and that both of them matter.
The word was first coined by the psychologist Ken Dychtwald in his book Bodymind, first published by Pantheon in 1977 (Dychtwald, 1977/1978). Dychtwald developed the book in his early twenties, through his time at the Esalen Institute in California, at the heart of the humanistic psychology and human potential movements of the 1970s. He drew together the work of Wilhelm Reich, Moshe Feldenkrais and Fritz Perls with Eastern traditions such as yoga, and with his own reading of the body, to argue that psychological and physical life cannot be pulled apart. For Dychtwald, the bodymind was something felt and lived, a single continuous experience rather than a mind housed in a body.
More than thirty years later, the disability studies scholar Margaret Price brought the word into a very different setting. She used it in her 2011 book Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life and developed it more fully in her 2015 article “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain” (Price, 2011, 2015). Price was pushing back against Cartesian dualism, the long Western habit of treating mind and body as separate substances, one rational and knowable and the other merely physical. She argued that because mental and physical processes shape and give rise to each other, acting as one even though we are taught to think of them as two, it makes more sense to name them together in a single word (Price, 2015). Writing from a feminist materialist disability studies perspective, she used the word to insist that mental disability be taken as seriously as physical disability in a field that had often treated the two unevenly.
Since then the word has travelled widely. Sami Schalk (2018) used it to explore how race, gender and disability are lived together in Black women’s speculative fiction, and Eli Clare (2017) has written about chronic illness and cure in ways that refuse to separate a diagnosis from a person’s felt, lived experience. In neurodivergent and neuroqueer writing, Nick Walker (2021) uses bodymind throughout Neuroqueer Heresies, insisting that neurodivergence is never only about a brain but about a whole person moving through the world, and the word has become part of everyday community language through spaces such as the Stimpunks Foundation glossary (Stimpunks Foundation, n.d.).
We think it matters to tell both parts of this story. In community spaces it is very easy to pick up a word because it feels true, without knowing where it came from or who did the careful thinking with it first, and over time the lineage can quietly fall away. Dychtwald gave us a somatic, felt sense of body and mind as one, and Price gave that sense a political and theoretical shape, insisting that disabled and Mad people be understood as whole and that this wholeness affects how we are treated, diagnosed and believed. When we cite Dychtwald as the person who coined the term, alongside Price and the disability scholars who built on it, the word keeps its whole history with it.
For us, as Autistic and neurodivergent people, bodymind describes something we live every day. Distress, joy, sensory experience, attention and thought move together, which is something we have both explored in our writing on Autistic burnout, including Autistic Burnout, Bodymind and Soul. Many of us know in our bodyminds what these writers argued in theirs, often while living in a world that keeps trying to split us in two.
References
Clare, E. (2017). Brilliant imperfection: Grappling with cure. Duke University Press.
Dychtwald, K. (1978). Bodymind. Jove/HBJ. (Original work published 1977)
Price, M. (2011). Mad at school: Rhetorics of mental disability and academic life. University of Michigan Press.
Price, M. (2015). The bodymind problem and the possibilities of pain. Hypatia, 30(1), 268–284. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12127
Schalk, S. (2018). Bodyminds reimagined: (Dis)ability, race, and gender in Black women’s speculative fiction. Duke University Press.
Stimpunks Foundation. (n.d.). Bodymind. Stimpunks Glossary. https://stimpunks.org/glossary/bodymind/
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.