What is Body Psychotherapy ?

I was trained initially and have been working in the tradition of Body Psychotherapy - an approach developed originally by Wilhelm Reich, a student and later colleague of Freud. Since its inception in the 1930's, Body Psychotherapy has developed into a tradition which includes a variety of different schools (e.g. Bioenergetics, Biosynthesis, Biodynamic Psychology, Hakomi, Radix, etc). They all have in common the recogition that what goes on in the body reflects and influences what goes on in the mind and on an emotional level.

An accessible recent scientific investigation of the links between body and mind is presented in the very readable book: "Molecules of Emotion" by Candace Pert.

An introduction to Body Psychotherapy can be found by Nick Totton: Body Psychotherapy - an Introduction.

I will at some point write an accessible introduction, but for now leave you with a text which was written in the mid-1990's as an introduction to Chiron Body Psychotherapy - the centre where I trained initially and then became a trainer, supervisor and Training Director. I was instrumental in writing this text, but some allowance needs to be made for the fact that this text is more than 10 years old, and that my approach has evolved and changed quite drastically since then (on overview over the phases of this development can be found in my chapter "From humanistic holism via the 'integrative project' towards integral-relational Body Psychotherapy". There is also a text taken from a BACP presentation I gave on what a whole bodymind approach to psychotherapy might involve, called "Bodymind Process and Wholeness" - this may answer a few questions, too.