| Bioenergetics was created in the late 1950s by a psychiatrist
named Alexander Lowen, MD along
with two other colleagues.
Lowen had studied with Wilhelm
Reich most noted for his voluminous research on inter-relatedness
of the mind and the body and its emotional processes. Reich
was formerly one of Freud’s inner circle analysts and also
emigrated from Germany to the United States.
He later taught at the New School of Social Research
in New York, one of the places where Lowen had studied.
Reich theorized that the body has a natural biological
energy that if constricted over time, creates chronic tension,
or “armoring” in the
muscles. He also felt that this armoring served as a
psychological defense and when present, would cause neurosis. When the muscular contraction was released
through various therapeutic interventions, repressed emotions
emerged in a cathartic manner, followed by a feeling of relief,
aliveness and renewed vitality.
Reich however, was plagued with controversy and much
dissension among his followers.
Thus, Lowen along with William Waller and John Pierakos, all psychiatrists, formed a psychotherapy practice
of their own and called their work “Bioenergetics” after Reich’s
discovery of the life force he found in inanimate as well
as living objects that he named “bio energy.”
Through his work with clients, Reich discovered that
while a person’s psyche was experiencing life events and creating
defenses in response to how they were being perceived by that
person’s psyche, the body was also busy recording and storing
in memory, these same experiences. Thus, the body also contains a stored record
of a person’s life events—held within the muscles and tissue
of that body. These experiences are categorized and logged
as per their energetic quality and the body adjusts, withholds,
defends, opens or guards the body’s energies according to
how that environmental stimulus was perceived.
Either as positive, negative, intrusive, supportive
and so on.
In other words, the psyche is not the only conscious
entity within the human organism registering the positive
and negative effects of the events each of us encounters in
our individual and inter-relational lives.
Lowen
and his colleagues worked together in developing their own
contributions to the theory and practice of Bioenergetic
therapy and soon differed in significant ways from Reich’s
original work. In one of his numerous books,
Alexander Lowen, M.D., explains Bioenergetics as a “way of
understanding personality in terms of the body and its energetic
processes …Bioenergetics is also a form of therapy that combines
work with the body and the mind to help people resolve their
emotional problems and realize more of their potential for
pleasure and joy in living.”
(Lowen,1977)
Currently, Bioenergetics has evolved even further to
become a relational form of psychotherapy, utilizing the information
tensions and patterns of muscular contractions offer in treatment.
These bodily characteristics are usually directly related
to a person’s emotional history, lifestyle and early childhood
relationships. By exploring their relationship to movement,
breath, posture and emotional expression, a person is then
able to reclaim their vibrancy.
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@Copyright 2001,2003 by Tarra
Judson Stariell, MFT, CBT
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