The Embodied Self in a dis-Embodied Society

Ulfried Geuter
I suggest to focus on how we understand body psychotherapy as a psychotherapeutic approach. I suppose we have in common a body-mind practice including processes like body perception, bodily expression or body-to-body communication in interaction. I further think we have in common that we want to define our body-mind-approach in terms of theory. But we differ in how to do that: Some might see the energy concept as a common ground, others mindfulness. I favor a concept seeing body experience as the bedrock of self experience. This means, we work with the subjective or felt body of a person, and we can do this by including various techniques of talking, sensing, perceiving, moving, acting, exploring, touching, holding, activating, calming, playing, embodying…

Michel Heller
Each body psychotherapy school synthesizes a variety of existing psychotherapeutic models in function of their own creative process. However, given their interest in the integration of body dynamics, these syntheses share a certain number of common preoccupations. Here are some characteristics that, in my eyes, justify the classification of these heterogeneous schools in the body psychotherapy modality:

1. Body psychotherapy is a psychotherapy.
2. Body psychotherapy is a form of psychotherapy that uses body techniques in an integrated way.
3. Body psychotherapy is a form of psychotherapy that also uses body-mind approaches in an integrated way.
4. Body psychotherapists often work with vegetative (physiological) automatic reactions and the sensations this dimension activates into the mind. Learning to integrate these phenomena psychologically is a key feature of approaches such as Wilhelm Reich’s vegetotherapy.

“Integrated” means that the use of body and body-mind methods are justified at the level of psychotherapeutic theory, models and techniques.
If one should ask which of these dimensions characterizes body psychotherapy, I would answer all four, as they are rarely explicitly differentiated.
I will also explore the useful implications of using Pierre Janet’s vision as a basic reference for the definition of psychotherapy. He differentiates the body (or physical body), organic life (for soma or physiology), emotions and consciousness. Most of the time he avoids such broad categories and prefers to use more specific descriptive terms without specifying how he situates them. He rarely uses the term organism, but when he does, he refers to an individual entity, in which an immense number of facts of consciousness can be experienced.

Eleni Stavroulaki
“Common Ground: Integrating the Body of Body Psychotherapy”
Complexity of energies interconnected within the body is reflected in the multidimensional modalities of BP. Confronted with the experiential and experimental nature of bodywork, we have to anchor ourselves to indispensable qualities of therapy:

1. emergence of somatic consciousness of the client, not as bodymapping neurotic emotions but feeling Existence
2. developing our somatic resonance in therapeutic relationship and the somatic aspects of transference/countertransference
3. detect and process the movement and transformation of energy at various channels of bodymind.

Luisa Barbato
“The Common Ground: the body-psychotherapy, the affective neurosciences and the PNEI”
The recent discoveries and insights in affective neurosciences and psycho-neuro-endocrine-immunology (PNEI) clearly confirm and support all the body-oriented psychotherapy approaches establishing their common ground. Neuroscience research provides evidence of human beings as a “unitary embodied system” and highlights how the self and the main psychosomatic functions are regulated by seven “emotional systems” (Panksepp, 2012). The disequilibrium of these seven systems has a deep impact on consciousness and on the psychosomatic structure of the Self, providing scientific explanation of human personalities, of the origin of energetic blocks, character and muscular armour. Evidence suggests the need of a more scientific, body-oriented methodology in psychotherapy, expression of an integrated therapeutic approach based on an embodied awareness of Self.

Judyth Weaver
I think just coming to learn what is our “common ground” and how we each have come to our practices…as common and different as they are…will be very interesting.
I wonder how the new findings of the neurosciences are affecting and perhaps changing the ways people work and personally I wonder how, and if so, how much, the others bring the influence and knowledge of prenatal and perinatal experiences and psychology into their working with and teaching others.
Another possible common ground: how much awareness and utilization of movement is brought into their practice?

Sheila Butler (moderator)
She works as a Clinical Researcher and Co-ordinator of Projects in Mental Health Psychological Therapies in the National Health Service (NHS) in UK. She is a practicing psychotherapist and also lectures at the Open University. Sheila’s interests lie in developing an interdisciplinary debate to provide the base for the next generation of practice and research, one which focuses on the interplay between biological, psychological, social and cultural factors. Current developments in this field have focused on working to develop and implement Practice/Practitioner Research Networks to provide a space for exploration and mutual learning across a community of practitioners. She is also a member of the Society of Psychotherapy Research (SPR). She has recently designed and co-produced the short film Body Psychotherapy in the Changing World for EABP.

Ulfried Geuter, body psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in his private office in Berlin, honorary professor for body psychotherapy at the University of Marburg, training psychotherapist and training psychoanalyst, teaches at various psychotherapeutic training institutes; author of books and numerous articles on the history of psychology and on body psychotherapy; in English: The Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany, Cambridge University Press, 1992; Body Psychotherapy: Experiencing the Body, Experiencing the Self, International Body Psychotherapy Journal, 2016; contributed to the Handbook of Body Psychotherapy & Somatic Psychology; last book: Body psychotherapy. Outline of a theory for clinical practice (in German), Springer, 2015.

Michael Heller
My name is Michael Coster Heller. I am born as a USA citizen in Paris (France) June 3 1949. I live in Switzerland since I am 11 year old, and have become a Swiss citizen. I was trained in Piagetian psychology and in Biodynamic Psychology in Geneva. As a researcher and a clinician, I focused on the relation between mind and body while several persons are interacting with each other. As a researcher, I have mostly studied the nonverbal behavior of suicidal and depressive patients in the Geneva University Psychiatric Institutions. As a clinician, I have participated in the development of body psychotherapy with my colleagues of the European Association of Body Psychotherapy (EABP). I have participated in the creation of several journals in the field of body psychotherapy, and have occupied key posts in the EABP (Vice-president in the board, chair of the Ethics Committee and Scientific Committee). I publish and teach regularly on clinical and research issues related to body and mind since the 1980s. I am now psychotherapist and supervisor in Lausanne (Switzerland), while continuing to teach and publish at an international level. I have edited a review of the state of body psychotherapy in the 1990s in a volume entitled The Flesh of the Soul; and attempted to define the field of body psychotherapies in a textbook published in French by De Boeck publishers: Les Psychothérapies Corporelles. A revised edition was translated into English by Marcel Duclos for W.W. Norton (Body Psychotherapy: History, Concepts, and Methods) and into German by Bernard Maul for Psychosozial-Verlag (Körperpsychotherapie: Geshichte – Konzepte – Methoden). I am now honorary member of the EABP.

Eleni Stavroulaki is a doctor (anaesthesiologist), graduate of the Kapodistrian University of Athens, and a research fellow at the Reich Centre of Athens since 1989. She is a private practitioner of Body Psychotherapy since 1994. She teaches Psychosomatic Medicine and Neurophysiology for Psychotherapists at the Reich Centre of Athens. She is a member of EABP and NOPG (National Organization for Psychotherapy of Greece) and an ECP holder. She is a member of the Scientific Content Congress Committee.

Luisa Barbato certified Reichian body psychotherapist, is a member of the Board as well as supervisor of SIAR (Italian Society of Reichian Analysis) and is the director of the Scientific Committee of AIPC (Italian Association of Body Psychotherapy. She was elected member of the Italian Board of Professional Association of Psychologists and was a member of the Executive Committee of the Forum of European accredited body-psychotherapy training institutes. She teaches body-psychotherapy in numerous Italian post-graduate schools of psychotherapy.

Judyth O. Weaver, Ph.D. n Reichian Psychology, is certified in Somatic Experiencing; Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy; Prenatal & Birth Therapy; as a Gestalt therapist and Rosen Method practitioner/teacher. She created the t’ai chi program at Naropa Institute. Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) for 25 years; co-founder Santa Barbara Graduate Institute and creator of its Somatic Psychology doctoral program. She maintains a private practice and teaches internationally. Whether working individually or in groups, the foundation of her work is the Gindler Work, also known as Sensory Awareness.