About Therapy – Beyond The Talking Therapies*

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 1930s, 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 (Simon & Schuster, 1997).

An introduction to Body Psychotherapy can be found the the book by Nick Totton: Body Psychotherapy: An Introduction (McGraw Hill, 2003).

I will at some point write an accessible introduction, but for now I leave you with a text which was written in the mid-1990s 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 is more than ten years old, and that my approach has evolved and changed quite drastically since then. An 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 body-mind approach to psychotherapy might involve, called ‘Bodymind Process and Wholeness‘- this may answer a few questions, too.

What is ‘integral-relational’ ?

The term ‘integral-relational’ incorporates to my mind all the preceding phases and principles of my development, as described in My integrative approach, especially the section The development of my therapeutic approach. It also provides something new, specifically the notion of the ‘fractal self’ and an extended notion of parallel process (as described in my chapter on embodied countertransference).

What does ‘integral’ mean in this context?

‘Integral’ is a term borrowed from philosopher Ken Wilber who has used it since the late 1990s (see his publications since then, especially relevant for my purposes here Integral Psychology, Shambhala Publications, 2000). It refers to a systemic and holistic model of evolution. It implies a multi-dimensional notion of development, essentially of human consciousness, and how more complex systems and structures evolve from and through prior ones. It is holistic in bringing together both subjective and objective and also individual and collective experience as well as body and mind. In simple terms, ‘integral’ denotes evolving wholeness, but without getting lost in focussing on the idealised outcome or the whole to the exclusion of the current state (even if fragmented and conflicted) or the relationship between the parts that constitute the whole. It therefore attempts to hold the tension between multiplicity/plurality/diversity on the one hand and unity, wholeness, oneness on the other.

Wilber has suggested (in his A Theory of Everything, Shambhala Publications, 2000) that every event in the universe can be considered from four essential perspectives (‘the four quadrants’) which are not reducible to each other and therefore must equally be taken into account: subjective individual, objective individual, inter-subjective collective and objective collective. Typically, most disciplines of human knowledge will absolutise and elevate one particular one of these four perspective to the exclusion or neglect of the others, thus providing only a partial ‘truth’. Wilber suggests that as long as we play off these perspectives against each other, polarise between them and insist on privileging one against the others, we can only perpetuate fragmented and self-serving knowledge and experience.

The resulting fragmentation can be seen clearly in the field of psychology and psychotherapy (which – in itself – needs to guard against privileging the perspective of subjective-interior reality). The field of psychotherapy has been fragmented for most of the last 100 years and only recently found a serious and substantial impulse towards integration. I have been interested and active within the ‘integrative project’ since its early days in this country in the late 1980s. Although there were, of course, some earlier manifestations, it’s only since the pre-cursors of UKCP in the Rugby Conference that this has had a significant impact on the field as a whole.

For further exploration of this theme, see my: The ‘integrative project’ within the development of Chiron Body Psychotherapy (2007).

What does ‘relational’ mean in this context ?

Over the last decades it has become clearer throughout the psychological professions that the quality of the ‘therapeutic relationship’ is crucial to the outcome of therapy. The title of the 2006 BACP conference, for example, was: ‘It’s the relationship that matters’. Many therapists will now agree on this principle, but what precisely constitutes ‘therapeutic relating’ – what it is and what it isn’t – has been much harder to agree upon. One main reason for this is that the various therapeutic approaches each emphasise certain aspects of relating to the exclusion or detriment of others.

Petruska Clarkson’s integrative model (see ‘The therapeutic relationship’) likened different modalities of client-therapist relationship to kinship bonds, thus opening out the idea that different relational stances might all be valid and have their uses in certain circumstances.

So most counsellors and therapists would claim that they pay special attention to the relational nature of the interaction with their clients and try to foster a good working relationship. However, in the tradition of relational psychoanalysis and in Body Psychotherapy and in the way it has expanded into the relational realm, the term ‘relational’ has deeper and wider meanings that go way beyond having a good relationship.

To me, the term ‘relational’ includes a recognition of the parallels between inner and outer relationships. It also implies a notion that patterns of relating are internalised and externalised. They originally evolve in relationship with significant others in early development, shaping our bodies, feelings and minds (or influencing what Reich called our ‘character’). Once internalised and established, these patterns then repeat and replicate themselves, along with any painful and traumatic background to them, in all our relationships, including our therapeutic relationships.

What Freud labelled ‘repetition compulsion’ we can see as driven by the need to find resolution for self-sabotaging, painful and destructive patterns. Today, we see these repetitions as co-created (rather than simply transferred from the client onto the therapist) and therefore use the term ‘enactment’ or ‘re-enactment’. Through enactment, wounding interactions from the past can become replicated and lead to increasing hurt and dissociation or also possibly transformation and re-organisation of the pattern into more satisfying, functional and embracing configurations.

A crucial question for relational therapists is how to perceive, understand and interact with the inevitable and necessary enactments which are part of every deep and meaningful relationship.

So, in summary, ‘relational’ to me has some deep and specific meanings, implying both humanistic notions of authentic relating as well as psychoanalytic perspective of the transference-countertransference dynamic.