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Other Organisations, Books etc. |
Origins of Body Psychotherapy The foundations of Body Psychotherapy were laid by Wilhelm Reich when, as a pupil of Freud, he discovered that repression of 'difficult' memories and emotions was accompanied by characteristic muscular tensions. He also observed the reverse - that breaking the patterns of muscular holding could evoke the repressed emotions and accompanying memories. Many more discoveries followed and his work in this area was taken further by a number of later workers, including Alexander Lowen, David Boadella, Jack Rosenburg, Gerda Boyesen, Chuck Kelly and others too numerous to mention. Modern integrative Body Psychotherapy has moved on from the original strong emphasis on total catharsis and contains understandings of the delicate self-protective balance we all strike between containment and expression and the internal conflicts this involves. It also acknowledges the centrality of the client-therapist relationship to successful work in this area. In recent years renewed interest in Body Psychotherapy has been sparked from within many different schools of psychotherapeutic practice, caused in part from recent developments in neuroscience which seem to be confirming many of the theoretical and practical aspects which have been developed over the years. As these new experimental scientific results emerge, a new bridge is gradually being constructed between theoretical understanding and therapeutic practice. If you are interested in this area of psychotherapeutic theory, some further reading is listed here. It is important to note, however, that the practice of body psychotherapy involves the availability of the whole being of the therapist to the client and cannot be performed only by intellectual knowledge of the theory, however thorough that may be! Intuition, warmth, human understanding and a solid presence are indeed at the core of the practice of body psychotherapy.
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